inamerrata

One risk of solving spam (by doing cool ecash stuff, or by any other means) is that you might be attacked by people who don’t want it solved.

I underestimated both the enemy’s level of sophistication, and also the enemy’s level of brute malevolence. I always knew that spammers had no principals and no ethics, but up until recently, I had no idea that they could or would stoop this low, or that they would engage in quite this level of criminality.

Finding a provider that can cope with DoS attacks might be interesting. Avoiding DoS attacks that exploit the protocol properties might be challenging too. On the upside, perhaps serious DoS attacks are unlikely until there’s already enough money in running the service that it’s not a major issue. On the other hand:

If there are people on the net that can DDoS the likes of Yahoo and eBay out of existance (as happened in the year 2000), then little Ron Guilmette and Monkeys.Com hasn’t got a chance.

We’d need to (eventually) reach a level of reliability similar to that of the root DNS servers, rather than eBay or Yahoo. Challenging. Or just avoid being a monopoly. But where’d be the fun in that?