The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by novalis:

A similar suit (although on different grounds) happened way back in the fourties. That suit appears in a fictionalized form in _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay_, a novel both interesting in itself and as a lightly fictionalized history of comics.

Hm, I wonder if they'll bring Michael Swanwick back for two more stories.

Graydon, I'm not sure that there are any unbroken CAPTCHAs.

E-mail addresses and IP addresses simply aren't a bottleneck. Spammers have cracked thousands of machines, and can have as many email addresses as they like (SPF is likely to improve the latter somewhat, but will probably not make a big dent until 2005).

Time delays aren't a bottleneck either -- there are enough blogs (1.8 million hits for mt-comments.cgi) that zombies can just wait it out *while posting to another hundred blogs*. Plus it penalizes people who type fast. And it only takes a short post to get googlejuice.

I agree with Brooks Moses's comments about LiveJournal.

And I agree with Graydon that there's an authority centralization problem with these systems. I actually can see away around it -- sell boxes which *are* registration and authentication servers, charge a fee to enter the network, and do DNS-style lookup of users. Kick registrars out for tolerating spamming. The problem with this, which is unsolvable as far as I can see, is that spammers will try to kill the registration servers by overloading them with fake credit cards. High (more than a few percent) rates of chargebacks get merchant accounts cancelled by credit card companies. I don't know if the same is true of 900 numbers, but AT&T got out of the 900 number business because of the high rate of chargebacks (or so said the rep I just spoke to).

OK, here's my next theory: LJ used to require you to have a friend who was a member to give you a code. You couldn't become a LJ member unless you knew one (or paid, but that bit's not important). Build a distributed version of that (basically identical technically to PGP's web of trust, but with different social semantics of key signing) Bottleneck: personal connections to other humans.

The difference between building an anti-spam system and building most other systems is that spammers are willing to destroy the whole system if they don't get their way.

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