Microsoft which has declared war on spam and those responsible for floods of unsolicited electronic mail, is aiming to raise the cost of spam for spammers with a new technology targeting the low barrier to sending mass messages. Currently, it costs virtually the same amount to send one message as it does one million. In a research project called "Penny Black" the world's largest software maker is looking at ways to make it difficult for spammers to spread offers for get-rich-quick schemes, porn and penis enlargement products. "The general idea is to force the sender of an e-mail to incur some kind of cost," said Cynthia Dwork, a senior researcher based at Microsoft's Silicon Valley facility.
The codename Penny Black is derived from an 1830s stamp used in Britain that reversed the cost of postage to the sender, rather than the original method of charging the letter recipient. Similarly, an e-mail sender's computer would be required to spend about 10 seconds solving a complex math problem and attaching proof of the effort to a message, Dwork said. For most users sending anywhere from a few to several dozen e-mails daily, that doesn't amount to too much computation time. Spammers who send millions of messages, however, would have to buy racks of computers. "The currency in this case is computational," Dwork said.
News source: Reuters
