More than likely, spammers will have their hijacking programs spread out the load so as to remain unnoticeable. I think that's important to maintain control over a large number of machines: the jig is up once a user notices far more lagtime than ever before. I also think that "make your operating system more secure" is a specious request. To reduce spam, something as simple as highlighting email from addresses that you've written before, or that belong to a web-of-trust involving chains of such authorship, or many other fairly simple schemes wuld assist to minimize spam. And is something only Microsoft is in a good position to wield upon us. Doug On Fri, 26 Dec 2003, Owen DeLong wrote:
It's an interesting concept... Now spammers will use a noticeable portion of the CPU on the boxes they've hijacked, instead of the currently virtually unnoticable portion of the resources, so, in that sense, it might help identify the owned boxes to their true owners.
However, I think Micr0$0ft could do much more to reduce SPAM if they simply made their OS less 0wn-able.
Owen
--On Friday, December 26, 2003 2:23 PM +0000 "Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve@telecomplete.co.uk> wrote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3324883.stm
Ok so in summary you have to use a bit of CPU to solve a puzzle before it lets you send email.
So either this doesn't work because spammers dont actually use their own PCs to send email or we are talking about a whole new mail protocol, either way I'm thinking this isnt going to work and its yet another publicity stunt.
Steve
-- If it wasn't crypto-signed, it probably didn't come from me.