Theory folks in the press

The NYT has an article about spamblocking in which the 1992 work of Dwork and Naor on junk email is cited:

In a paper titled "Pricing Via Processing, or Combating Junk Mail ," two computer scientists, Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor, came up with a way to force a sender to pay every time a message was sent - payment not in money, but in time, by applying the computer's resources to a computational puzzle, devised on the fly for that particular message.

[...snip...]

Ms. Dwork and her colleagues have named this the Penny Black Project.

This is remarkably prescient: in 1992 I was grateful to have access to email, let alone worry about junk mail. On an irrelevant note, I am impressed that the NYT has started providing real links in their articles.

Tags: spam, cryptography