German ct magazine postulates death of pgp encryption

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Sunday 01 March 2015 23:43:25 Jonathan Schleifer wrote:
> Am 01.03.2015 um 23:25 schrieb Ingo Klöcker <kloecker at kde.org>:
> > And most spam is sent by bots. The spammers don't really care how much
> > energy the bots burn. Yes, the amount of spam might decrease because
> > the bots cannot hammer out that many bitmessages as SMTP messages per
> > second, but your hypothesis that BitMessage would get rid of spam is
> > unrealistic.
> 
> I don't really agree with that. The goal is that the proof of work for a
> single message takes 4 minutes.

On what kind of hardware? A high-end gamer PC? Or a low end mobile phone?


> At that rate, sending spam really is not
> profitable. In 4 minutes, spammers can currently send hundreds of
> thousands of mails. At that rate, they can afford to send it to every
> address they can find. With only one mail per machine every 4 minutes,
> they really need to be careful where to send it. Let's assume they have
> 10000 machines (which is unrealistic - most machines are behind a dialup
> connection from which no provider will accept mail).

There are much larger bot nets, e.g the ramnit bot net apparently controlled 
3.2 million (!) machines (see http://heise.de/-2559388, in German). And with 
regard to providers not accepting those mails you seem to be missing that the 
bots simply (ab)use the mail accounts of the bot owners.


> That's only 2500
> mails a minute. If global spam were just 2500 spam messages a minute,
> spam would hardly be a problem.

Of course, 800,000 spam messages per minute is still many magnitudes less than 
now.

I don't see BitMessage killing spam. But it will surely kill mailing lists.


Regards,
Ingo
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