Re: Fwd: Re: [GNUnet-developers] Re: amortizable hashcash paper

[Tracy R Reed]

On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 04:10:12PM +0300, Igor Wronsky spake thusly:
> There has been some work towards this goal in the
> freenet community. They have some sort of nonspammable
> message board and development version of Frost also tries
> to achieve spam reduction. Again, I don't know if either has
> documentation or what kind of approaches they use,
> but its still probably cheaper to give those things a run
> and see why/if/how they suck, before reinventing the same
> mechanisms accidentally.

The frost boards work by creating boards with private keys which are
basically SSK's just like a freesite would use. If a person does not have
the private key they can not post messages into that keyspace. Some people
freely give out the private key to their board figuring the spammer won't
bother to modify his spamming software to deal with keys. It's really not
that sophisticated although it seems to have worked so far. Boards with
secret private keys tend to have rather one-sided conversations (for
obvious reasons) or no traffic at all. Boards with private keys that have
been released (no longer private) could still be spammed by a determined
person. Sometimes people will share the key among a small group but if
someone divulges it there is no way to tell who did it and the whole board
has to be done away with, new keys generated, and they try again. I do not
know of this ever happening though because frost has very little traffic.

-- 
Tracy Reed      http://www.ultraviolet.org