Journal heironymouscoward's Journal: More Damn Prior Art - 3 2
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Spam, spam, glorious spam. It's not getting any better, despite creative solutions of all kinds. And how can it? For every inventive and courageous spamfighter, there is an equally desperate and inventive spammer. Necessity breeds invention and what man makes, man can hack.
To me the end game is clear: all data transferring in through the firewall - email, HTTP, ICQ,
The days when the Internet was a global village happily exchanging high moral values by NNTP are dead and gone.
The trick will be to extract the legitimate data from the mass of corrupted garbage that will wash around the fibre optic oceans of the Net. Data mining? I already do this... over a thousand spams a week, and somewhere in there are several dozen vital business and personal emails. I miss a few each month, it's rarely tragic, but this is despite having the latest tools (SpamAssassin) to help.
A consumer PC is infected before it can download the Windows patches it needs to be "secure". 90% (99%?) of all new home PCs bought this year will be infected before their owners have time to click 'Windows Update'.
My solution is a system of data delivery via a global trust network. Six steps around the world. If I want to send data to someone, I send it to my data broker. This is a company that spends its whole time checking its client list: clients are vetted, must pay deposits, and generally treated with the same paranoia that a bank would treat a new client asking for a home loan.
You can't simply connect and start sending data. When your reputation is low, the price is high. As you build up a good karma, your price drops until it's very low or free.
The broker, in turn, speaks to other brokers and passes your data along in turn. Brokers pay for this, so your money is actually used to finance the trust network.
You can choose brokers: the most highly rated are also the most expensive, but you will be certain that your data will arrive, because no-one will refuse data from an AAA broker.
The system does not require micropayments or any other complex financials: you either pay upfront for a bulk traffic package, or pay an invoice as you would a credit card. As an unknown and untrusted client, you will have a tiny allocation that you can abuse with little risk to the broker. As your reputation (with that broker, mind you) improves, you get larger and larger allocations.
It's up to the broker to implement the necessary checks and balances so that a spammer cannot create an account and then cause havoc.
Now implementation. This has to happen at the packet level, cover all protocols. All data has to be encrypted between parties, so that it's impossible to someone else's identity and steal their reputation. And it has to happen in realtime, without slowing down interactive use of the web.
I think the parties best placed to make this happen are large web email providers, who can implement 'guaranteed email' delivery to and from their clients. This will be a paid service, spam free, and with delivery reciepts.
That's the idea for now.
Sounds interesting (Score:2)
It is important, I think, to avoid filtering based on the content of the message. Aside from the issues of "false positives," censorship and freedom of speech, content-based filtering not only creates a never-ending arms race but an arms race in which the filter maintainers are always playing catch-up. It's like improper use of antibiotics: you just breed stronger, more noxious, filter-resistant spam.
So I like ideas like this.
Unfortunately, I think the idea of the sender
Re:Sounds interesting (Score:2)