Re: namedroppers, continued

[Vernon Schryver <vjs at calcite.rhyolite.com>]

> From: Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu

> ...
> The bootstrap problem will exist no matter what scheme we decide on.

There are many spam solutions that do not have the bootstrapping
problem.  Examples include effective laws and honest intent and action
by ISPs.  Before saying those are hopeless, please note that the many
bootstrap-limited proposals don't have proven prospects.

> The point I was addressing was that there's been two major classes of
> scheme proposed ...

> However, the partitions created by each scheme are quite complementary,
> ...

Your observation of how those two solutions fit together is
interesting...or would be if they did not suffer from other problems.


> ...
> > Moore's law causes a bunch of problems for the computing idea. ...

> It may not be as big of a problem as we think.  Rough back-of-envelope
> calculations now:  Let's say we assume a function X designed to take 10
> seconds of CPU on my laptop (which has a 1.6Gz P-4 in it) to limit it to 8K
> messages/day.

http://www.intel.com/home/desktop/pentium4/ suggests state of the commodity
art is about twice that, which lets a spammer send 16K msgs/day. 
Moore's law is still a treadmill that you don't want to fight.

>               Now, this same function will take around 2 minutes on a 133mz
> processor and be restricted to 800 mails/day. ...

I would put the lower limit at around 48 MHz on 80486s, or ~8 times
slower than a 133 MHz Pentium.  Such machines go back less than 10 years. 
Would you expect your conservative correspondents to spend 15 minutes
to send you a message, or would you just white-list them? 
Once you start white-listing, it's hard to have much enthusiasm for
more fancier solutions.


> Now how many people are still using a 133 system to do that much outbound mail
> themselves (and *NOT* just relaying all outbound mail to a smarthost)?

I think recent FreeBSD and sendmail would still work fine at 48 MHz,
although you probably want to stuff the thing to the gills with 64 MByte
of RAM, or more if it can take it.  There are many computing tasks that 
don't need 3 GHZ and 3 GByte.

Aren't busy smarthosts significantly busier than 80K msgs/day?