Penny Black (research project)
Encyclopedia
The Penny Black Project is a Microsoft Research
project that tries to find effective and practical ways of fighting spam. Because deleting spams consumes a recipient's time, the idea is to make the sender of emails "pay" a certain amount for sending them. The currency or the mode of payment could be CPU cycles, Turing test
s or memory cycles. Such a payment would limit spammers' ability to send out large quantities of emails quickly.
The project's name is derived from the Penny Black
, the world's first adhesive stamp used for pre-paid postage.
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research is the research division of Microsoft created in 1991 for developing various computer science ideas and integrating them into Microsoft products. It currently employs Turing Award winners C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson, and Charles P...
project that tries to find effective and practical ways of fighting spam. Because deleting spams consumes a recipient's time, the idea is to make the sender of emails "pay" a certain amount for sending them. The currency or the mode of payment could be CPU cycles, Turing test
Turing test
The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing's original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All...
s or memory cycles. Such a payment would limit spammers' ability to send out large quantities of emails quickly.
The project's name is derived from the Penny Black
Penny Black
The Penny Black was the world's first adhesive postage stamp used in a public postal system. It was issued in Britain on 1 May 1840, for official use from 6 May of that year....
, the world's first adhesive stamp used for pre-paid postage.