Microsoft Researching Anti-Spam Technique

Tim C writes "Microsoft's Research group are working on a technique to combat spam. Dubbed the 'Penny Black project', it involves making email senders perform a computation taking around 10 seconds, which their recipients can then check for. This delay would limit bulk emailing speeds to around 8000 a day, meaning that to spam all of those 'fresh, guaranteed 25 million addresses' would take approximately 8.5 years." We've reported on this before.

Re:Question...

[notque]

How do you "make" senders do anything?

With large pointy sticks....

Phew

[Lord_Dweomer]

From the article:
"The payment is not made in the currency of money, but in the memory and the computer power required to work out cryptographic puzzles. "

Phew!!! For a second there I thought I was going to have to do a math problem for each email I was going to send. I woulda been fucked!

No research involved

[psychoid]

This is just a fancy way of saying "Microsoft is trying to figure out how to turn off Hotmail"

Re:Oh yeah they invented this...

[mcpkaaos]

So while MSFT didn't invent the original HashCash concept MSFT did improve upon it. So before anyone gets the bright idea of flaming MSFT ignorantly.... know your facts!

That never stopped us before!

Stop the presses!

[kitzilla]

Stop the presses! Microsoft has found a way to slow down email! This is news? ;-)

Our heroes at Microsoft!!

[DrDebug]

If they can pull this off, maybe the world won't see them as the profit-mongering 800-pound gorilla monopoly corporation they are. They will be heroes to us working-class.

Unless, of course, they make it proprietary and charge huge license fees.

Oh, well. It was Christmas... we all can wish...

Re:Question... [OT]

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, for all intensive purposes their the same word anyways. The grandparent needs to loose the attitude.