Kill all spammers! (?)
I attended the New Scientist salon on spam on Monday (also attended by Gregor. It was actually hosted by Simson Garfinkle and Paul Graham. Simson's claimed that only about 200 people accounted for the world's supply of spam. His (yes, facetious) theory was that only extrajuditial means would solve the spam problem -- meaning hunting down and killing a number of spammers sufficient to deter the remainder (30, maybe 40), like John Travolta at the end of Operation Swordfish.
The reason this is the only method likely to succeed is the spammer-cracker axis that has developed. Spammers have provided a profit motive to previously harmless crackers, and as a result we now have armies of compromised machines which will make future attempts at implementing end-user counter-measures like micro-payments and digital signatures pointless due to impersonation. In other words, what good is requiring postage for email if the spammers can simply use their network of zombies to bill joe end-user?
I don't see why micropayments as a technology are futile and inevitable vulnerable to joe-jobs/impersonation. Why can't we use the mechanisms for dealing with micropayment fraud that the credit card companies have today? We could go more granular than the set $$$ limits we have for credit cards. We could set limits on outbound emails that would need some confirmation to exceed. Why is this hard to imagine?
Simson also brought up the problem with mailing lists i.e. Do you want people signing themselves up for mailing lists so they can receive the micropayments (assuming the transfer goes from sender to recipient?) Again, why not just make waiving postage a part of signing up for mailing lists? You already have to confirm your email address ... why not just tack on a fee waiver step to that? For the general problem of intermixing payed-for and for-free correspondence, I think the Bayesian tools will continue to do a good job of distinguishing what you want from what you don't want.
I'm not an advocate of micropayments, because it's not clear it can be implemented without a central authority (bad), and I think getting it to critical mass is unlikely (we'll see how bellwether BonderSender does). My point is just that some of the arguments against them don't seem too compelling.
9:36:32 AM 
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