Does the Future Hold a Puzzling Solution to Email SPAM?
Greetings, NSDCAR Members! While remaining ever vigilant for the Lion Coming Over the Hill, I often notice some seemingly benign but impactful critters among the herd. One of these is an anti-spam technology initiative currently in the research and development phases, under the auspices of the large ISP companies such as Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and Earthlink. Microsoft terms this the Penny Black Project, after the 1830 reform of the British postal system, which shifted responsibility for mail delivery to the sender, and introduced the Penny Black postage stamp. The present research is examining methodologies for levying a toll on email senders, not in monetary exchange but rather in CPU (central processing unit) cycles, which, of course, have a cost attached. Methods being explored include puzzling, Turing tests, ticketing schemes, and memory-cycle loading. Currently, senders of UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email), commonly known as spam, can purchase fairly sophisticated hardware and so
