[108279] in Cypherpunks
Re: CDR: Re: Idea to eliminate most spam on mailing lists [CP] (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Hohensee)
Wed Feb 10 18:06:00 1999
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 22:58:33 +0000
From: Michael Hohensee <michael@sparta.mainstream.net>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Reply-To: Michael Hohensee <michael@sparta.mainstream.net>
Jim Choate wrote:
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Tom Vogt -----
>
> Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 18:14:08 +0100
> From: Tom Vogt <tv@wlwonline.de>
> Subject: Re: CDR: Re: Idea to eliminate most spam on mailing lists [CP]
>
> how? how does a spammer earn money from knowing my public key?
They don't earn money from knowing your key, they do it by selling
spam-kits which generate/provide a set of keypairs to spam with.
>
> no passphrases. what you need is not the LISTSERVER's key, but a key for
> yourself. and because your key will get banned pretty quickly once you
> post spam with it, you'll have to generate a new key every spam. I agree
> that it's easy to have a cd full of keys ready, though.
Yah, and even worse, every listserv in existance would have to maintain
a record of these useless keys, lest the spammers re-use them. It's not
a good idea to force everyone to archive copies of useless data, and
would probably take up more space on disk than the spam to begin with.
It might be workable if there were a central (or set of central)
repository for spammers' keys, but that'd require some kind of human
verification that each key was associated with spam, to guard against
malicious submissions. It's expensive to put humans into the loop...
Michael Hohensee
