Dodd Harris passes on a report of an interesting technological measure to slow down the spammers:
The idea, currently being developed by none other than Microsoft, is that unkown senders will be required to expend 10-20 seconds of computer time to get a message through. Recipients wouldn’t be affected. Legitimate senders would scarcely notice the extra time involved but “if there are 80,000 seconds in a day, a computational ‘price’ of a 10-second levy would mean spammers would only be able to send about 8,000 messages a day, at most.”
As with campaign finance reform, I’m sure that there are smart people who will find ways around obstacles put into their path. Still, this sounds promising and, as Dodd suggests, more likely to work than simple legislation.
