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1997-12-14 - Re: profit from spammers (Re: hashcash spam prevention & firewalls)

Header Data

From: “Uhh…this is Joe [Randall Farmer]” <rfarmer@HiWAAY.net>
To: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
Message Hash: f08af712ae69453d84116032c4d9c8e30d34f9586a9eaa4cdb5c925ca3d69e9c
Message ID: <Pine.OSF.3.96.971213185600.21501B-100000@fly.HiWAAY.net>
Reply To: <199712132332.XAA03725@server.eternity.org>
UTC Datetime: 1997-12-14 04:01:11 UTC
Raw Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 12:01:11 +0800

Raw message

From: "Uhh...this is Joe [Randall Farmer]" <rfarmer@HiWAAY.net>
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 12:01:11 +0800
To: Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: profit from spammers (Re: hashcash spam prevention & firewalls)
In-Reply-To: <199712132332.XAA03725@server.eternity.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.OSF.3.96.971213185600.21501B-100000@fly.HiWAAY.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



[I see I overlooked a major feature of hashcash in my idea for exempting
remailers from it...sp'cifically, I didn't know you could prepackage hashcash. 
Needless to say, I don't send my good posts from this address :) ]

> Randall Farmer masquerading as Joe <rfarmer@HiWAAY.net> writes:

Yep, state-of-the-art MITM techniques in action. :)

...

> I think Phelix was probably viewing it from the point of view [o]f "what if
> all ISPs turned off non subscriber mail forwarding at their SMTP hubs"?

Nonetheless, it'd still hold that hashcash would be harder to get around than
simple filtering...also, like you said, it's in the interest of the ISPs to use
hashcash, whereas stopping outgoing spam doesn't do much for them.

...  
> (Ident is a dumb method of identifying who is on the other end of a socket on
> a unix box.  It opens up a socket to the ident port on the originating
> machine, and asks who is on socket x port y?  The machine can determine this
> from local OS tables, and sends the info back.  This works if the user does
> not have root on the machine.  Fortunately this snoopy bastardised protocol
> is not doing so well these days because there are more and more people who
> have root on their own machines, and because there are so many windows
> machines which don't know what a protected port number is. This is good
> because Ident sucks.)
          ^^^^^^^^^^^ 

Good description, but you only needed those last two words. Ident really is a
pain, especially for those of us who can't avoid it (It makes the case for
crypto that much stronger, though :). 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Randall Farmer
    rfarmer@hiwaay.net
    http://hiwaay.net/~rfarmer

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