The Penny Black Project is a Microsoft Research project that tries to find effective and practical ways of fighting spam. Because identifying 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 tests 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.
Famous quotes containing the words penny and/or black:
“With one hand he put
A penny in the urn of poverty,
And with the other took a shilling out.”
—Robert Pollok (1798–1827)
“It was common practice for me to take my children with me whenever I went shopping, out for a walk in a white neighborhood, or just felt like going about in a white world. The reason was simple enough: if a black man is alone or with other black men, he is a threat to whites. But if he is with children, then he is harmless, adorable.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)