What's stopping me from combining a email client and a simple gnutella client. Stick with me on this one. Most really good email filters are based on people actually voting on what is spam and what is not. You pay a service and it matches fingerprints of your mail with fingerprints of agreed upon spam. Take it one step further. Eliminate the service and instead use a gnutella link to other people. Each piece of mail is tokenized or fingerprinted and identified with a unique ID number then if you think its spam you give it a vote. It floats around the system and other people mark it as spam as well. When a threshold is met, the spam is automatically marked as junk in other email clients when they first receive it.
NOW FOR THE ILLEGAL PART
This is where the devious part is. (And i have to tell all law enforcement officials that i have not done this so go arrest some killer or child molester.) Link the same gnutella client to a simple listing of urls that are currently targeted for DOS. Everybody votes on these ones too. If you think a piece of SPAM is so bad that it deserves retribution you vote for a combined DOS. If a much higher threshold is met, then the system sends that URL to all clients and asks for the volunteered bandwidth to fire off the DOS.
Its a simple idea, and i think its actually the people's right to defend their own mailboxes.
Now is this is a good idea? I've been thinking about it and know that the bandwidth itself would not be too huge for the checking and voting. This could be done and eliminate pay systems for filtering. In most cases it might be able to be built into existing email clients as a plug-in. So could it be abused? Well as long as you have a larger number of trustworthy users than "evilbad" users, then the voting system itself should work. Now is the DOS attack system a good idea? This one i don't know. I know little about being on the SENDING end of a DOS, so i really know nothing about the bandwidth considerations in order to make them a true threat.
anyway.... i'm opening this one to the floor for suggestions.
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