What about cracked machines?

What about cracked machines?

Posted Dec 19, 2003 16:24 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: What about cracked machines? by NAR
Parent article: Spam-proofing the mail system

That's easy. Knowing how complex computers are, no one would tolerate a micropayment system where the computer can automatically spend away his entire bank account. The micropayment system would, therefore, have built in limits. I might tell it, for example, not to let me spend more than $5 a day on sending email unless I log in and type a password or something to raise the limit.

Back in the days when computer users were charged by the resource, the computers had such budgets for the same reason: I could say, "Don't let me use more than $5 worth of disk space."

This would eliminate the incentive for crackers to hijack computers, and also create incentive for people to harden and repair their computers.

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