Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Backing Off Spamming
David G wrote in to say that Microsoft plans to revise the spamming "Feature" that we mentioned yesterday on Slashdot after all the criticism. My favorite quote from this article is "We got a rude awakening today and we thought ... 'Let's make this clearer for the consumers'"
In IE5, clicking the Search button brings up a side panel where you can type in your entry. Notice, though, that below the entry field, it says "Brought to you by MSN Search." The first choice is ALWAYS MSN. Surprisingly, it DOES log the Slashdot pages; I did a search for "CmdrTaco" and it turned up a buttload of /. pages. Good to know that MS isn't too biased.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I'm just glad they don't make tires...
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They still didn't address the concern mentioned yesterday that users can't view or edit the message before sending it out. I think a feature that sends a message FROM you without allowing you to look at it first is evil no matter what the message says.
Kinda like all those mass mailing I get time and time again, or the multiple telemarketer calls I get every day?
They found a source of postage, paper, and phone service that costs nothing? Cool! Where do I sign up?
Yes, it's in the aisle right next to the free computer, phone line, and internet connection that the spammers use.
If you want to argue that the receiver pays for it, at least there is something to that (although at least in the US, the practice of paying for bandwidth usage is almost completely dead).
In that case, all you folks who are paying bills for a Net connection ought to find out who is really getting the money -- it's obviously isn't the ISP, since "the practice of paying for bandwidth usage is almost completely dead" -- and put a stop to it.
(The expected rejoinder "I meant that people don't typically pay 'per-minute'" is beside the point. When you get spam, the spammer has stolen some of your ISPs bandwidth, and the ISP will pass the cost of that along to you one way or another.)
No, ISPs generally pay for a pipe the same way a user does. A T3 is a T3, no matter what is going through it. They don't pay per byte, or per minute, they pay for a pipe, and anything that pipe can hold is fair game. As for them "stealing" the ISPs bandwidth, the telemarketers "steal" phone bandwidth from the telephone company and the mail ads "steal" bandwidth from the post office, both of which they end up charging back to me.
Some people advertise responsibly via email
Yes; the ones who operate strictly opt-in mailing lists. I haven't seen anybody here complaining about those (and, in fact, they are themselves victims of spammer scum because they have to carefully distinguish their legitimate e-mail advertisements from the spam).
Just like some people use advertising in the real world irresponsibly, and other don't. I get ads from some companies 3 or 4 times a week. Does that mean all ads are bad? No, spam can be used or abused just like any other form of advertising.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
I'd rather say that it was the /. + ZD-Net + C-Net + MS Beta testers effect. And let's not forget the recipients of those "informative" e-mails who complained to abuse@hotmail.com or whatever, just the way you do when you receive normal spam.
... but I wonder how these reactions can be so surprising to that "Microsoft representative". Come on, they were really expecting people to actually like that "feature" ? Are they stupid ? And how stupid do they think their customers are ?
...
All these crowds combined helped in giving MS a "rude awakening". Cool !
And they're only planning to change the language. I wonder if it's really going to make a difference.
Hint for MS people out there : adding a "this is no spam" disclaimer would NOT be enough
About 2 years ago, I heard anecdotical reference that 50% of the incoming mail load at AOL is spam, being filtered before it reaches the recipient. I used to think that was unrealistic. Of course, I cannot proof it, but now, being a postmaster of a small public server, I don't think it's unrealistic, anymore.
Think about it: E-Mail spam will rise. It will become much much much worse than it is now. Email spam is just too cheap and too easy to do. Anyone with a sub-500$ PC and a modem can do it. No printing of bulk paper mailings, no call center agents to hire for telemarketing, no expensive address lists (just harvest Usenet or discussion sites like Slashdot).
This is only the beginning of a networked age. Once every business man in the world has the power to send spam to millions of unwilling recipients, just imagine how it will be like to "just hit delete" on 90% of your daily incoming email.
But then again, you're probably American, where Telemarketing has become one of the accepted abuses of your private phone. (I'm glad that Telemarketing is not allowed over here in Germany.)
Imagine more than dozens of telemarketing calls per day, every day, every week, every year, with steady increase, more and more every month.
That's the right comparison for the email spam - not those junk mail paper ads you receive in your paper mail.
That's why spam has to be stopped.
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You may like my a cappella music
Do you have any facts/anecdotes to back this up? I've read (in Microsoft Secrets) and heard from people at MS that he expects people to literally yell back at him. He calls it "high bandwidth communication".
I seriously doubt that people like Steve Ballmer would have a hard time telling Gates that he is wrong. Similarly, I doubt this spam feature was even known to the top MS brass.
Coppit
P.S. Anyone else think that Ballmer would make a good olympic wrestler? ;)- ---------
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Notice the "Email to a friend" link at the end of that CNET story? Wouldn't it be great idea if you could email the story to everyone in your contacts list, huh? They could even add a bit at the end about what a great news source CNET is too.
(Hey, this is such a great idea someone should patent it!)
Regards, Ralph.
Hidden spambot feature in MSN Explorer and Tracking Bookmarks
IMHO this is the glorious new world M$ has promised us. You know, the one where they think for you, because you're certainly going to love whatever clever thing they come up with next. They just seem to have this awful habit of not telling us up front about these "features", which is the most disturbing part, but hardly new. When forced to use M$ products, I usually spend about an hour trying to turn off all the "neat" automatic features. I just wish I had a setting which would disable all the second guessing "Are you sure you want to delete that?", "Save your work before exiting?" and so on.
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Maybe someone pointed out to Microsoft that their home state, Washington, has made unsolicited business-related e-mail illegal and will fine the spammer on a per message basis. I can't remember whether it was $100 or $500 per message...
They took out the MSN plug because it made the spam "business related".
include $sig;
1;
- since it costs nothing it is sent in huge quantities and sometimes multiple times
Kinda like all those mass mailing I get time and time again, or the multiple telemarketer calls I get every day?
- spammers are in the majority anonymous because they realise that this form of advertising is unpopular
Kinda like the telemarketer calls from "unknown name, unknown number", or the mail ads I receive that don't have a return address?
- they will not respect your right to be removed from their mailing list even when asked
Kinda like all the mail ads I receive where I can't get off their list? Ever try to get of a junk mail list? Who do you contact? Where do you contact them? And if you do manage to contact them, they don't ever take you of the list. Hell, most places don't even have a real list, they just send it to "Resident" at every address known to man.
- it is not even marked as an advert to ease filtering
Kind of like the telemarketers who start off asking me how my day was and then 2 minutes later start their sales? Or the ads I get i the mail without anything on the outside of the envelope marking it as an ad?
These arguements don't make spam any different that any other form of advertising. If you want to argue that the receiver pays for it, at least there is something to that (although at least in the US, the practice of paying for bandwidth usage is almost completely dead). Some people advertise responsibly via email, and others don't, you can't condemn them all because some people refuse to follow the rules.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
My favorite BSOD is a strange one in Windows 2000 during startup: "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA". How is that possible? If a memory space is not paged yet, then how can it have a page fault? Shouldn't it then be a "non-page fault"?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Nope; spam is inherently abusive. Legitimate (i.e. purely opt-in) e-mail is either legitimate or abusive depending on how it is administered (for instance, dumping a bunch of messages unrelated to the advertised purpose of the mailing list is abusive).
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/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Much as I hate to even appear to defend Microsoft, I can see how this whole fiasco likely came about. The scenario goes something like this:
Product Designer thinks up "change of address notification" as a useful feature. It gets included as a requirement, and built into the product. But, as with so many features in commercial software products, Corporate Policy demands that Marketing write the actual text of the message. (Marketing writes the actual text of most messages in commercial software.) Marketing, of course, can't possibly resist turning any message into an advertisement, so what Designer intended as a useful change of address notification gets subverted for Spam.
This same kind of thing happens in commercial software the world over, and will continue for as long as Product Development has to answer to Marketing. Which is to say, as long as there is commerical software.
One more reason to use the Free stuff, I suppose... As if we needed another reason.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The man knows how he got there, and what keeps him there. So do the people who work for him. Don't expect any changes.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's not a "poor excuse", it's what happened. Do you think Bill Gates personally ordered this fiasco to happen?
Unless you're some mind-controlling supermutant a la "The Mule" from the Foundation books, you can not take personal responsibility for the actions of 30,000 people under you. What you can do is eliminate the shitheads to make sure it doesn't happen again.
MSN's responsibility is to find the people that did put this plan into motion and give them the boot. They should also apologize to their users. Trying to pin the fault for this on Bill Gates directly is just another example of ridiculous Slashdot hyperbole. Amazing how this crap always gets moderated up.
Regardless of who was actually responsible for creating the "feature", the fact remains that it is a Microsoft product, and Bill Gates is the Chairman of Microsoft. Therefore, the ultimate responsibility resides with him. I too doubt that he actually knew of the feature himself, and I doubt that he would have given a damn about it even if he did know. It doesn't really matter though. If he had any real convictions about such things, then his managers would know it and this wouldn't have happened. Apparently there wasn't much review done, or the feature was intentionally allowed to remain. The only reason anything is being done now is because it pissed off a lot of people. The potential damage outweighs the potential gains. Therefore it is more profitable to change the feature. It's also better to bullshit people about why it was changed to make it look like it was unintentional in the first place so that the average moron using the software will bear no ill will towards Chairman Bill.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I just thought of something, I don't know if this has been seen so if anyone saw something like what I will describe please tell me. I'm curious.
Imagine a cross breed between spam and the now infamous VBScript "virus" like the famed 'I Love you" virus. Each advertisement the user receive also has a small attachment with it. If the user opens the attachment (lets be realistic here... lots of clueless users would do it) it resends the spammed message (or even messages??) to everyone in his adress book...
Anyone heard of something like that??
"When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun...
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
bitchin' and moaning on /. does make a difference!! ;)
Wow.. Glad to see feedback actually helps. I've seen more of that lately really and it makes me happy.
Mozilla dropped the old renderer in favor of Raport (later NGLayout, later Gecko) and XPFE. Then they dropped Modern in favor of "Modern/2".. Then they made Classic the default skin.. All of these were based on public feedback and discussions.
I remember reading somewhere that Microsoft have had book authors come in and spend time with "next generation" versions of MS Word to give feedback about new features. That's absolutely excellent - I wish more companies would do stuff like that - and why not open source projects too.
Maybe there's some hope after all.
When you get in a position of power and success you lose contact with reality; the main part of what you are doing is working so well that you begin to believe that you have uncovered the 'secret to life' ( (C) Microsoft Inc. 1980 - 2000), and that therefore, everything you are doing is right. What is so dangerous for Gates is that he literally has billions of reasons to think he has everything figured out.
This is a common problem for successful people. Ego's spring from misunderstanding; if you are successful at something and you don't understand the reasons that you are successful, you are primed for developing an inflated ego. Your brain starts trying to understand why you are successful, and the only thing it can come up with is "Well, I must be hot shit!" Once the brain arrives at that conclusion it begins to act to protect that theory, and Ego problems ensue.
The only person I have ever heard of who had a good solution for success induced fat headedness was General Curtis LeMay - the creator of the Strategic Air Command in the United States. LeMay was a judo player, and he had strict orders for his training partner, an air force sergeant, to pound the General on the judo mat anytime LeMay started to get full of himself. This kept LeMay in touch with reality - and kept his from getting too crazy.
If Microsoft is to improve as a company, someone needs to hold Bill Gates nose to a CRT screen and show him reality; that Microsoft often produces really crappy products, and that their business practices seem to have sprung from a contract signed in blood with someone named B. Elzebub.
One of the most fundamental principles of a free market -- if not the most fundamental one -- is the one traditionally expressed as Thou Shalt Not Steal. Yea, verily, thou shalt not steal thy neighbor's ox, or thy neighbor's ass, nor shalt thou steal thy neighbor's bandwidth.
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/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
(See the spam glossary.)
Every sunday when I wake up I see hanging on my door knob a nifty plastic bag full of ads from the local grocery store, electronic shop and so much more. I take it and throw it right away.
Why am I saying this? It's not that I am for spam and that I like it. I just think that your comparison is a bit exagerated. Spam would be much more like those plastic bags me and countless other people receive on sunday. And deleting spam from your mailbox is probably as much of an effort as throwing that bag to the garbage. Unless it takes you countless hours of intense scrubbing to remove the spam from your inbox like it would to remove that Coke banner you're talking about. If so then I have a magic trick for you... hit the "delete" key. It's much easier.
"When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun...
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
As Chief of Microsoft and it's largest owner, Bill Gates is unconditionaly responsible for the actions of his company. He sets the tone, it is his environment. "Middle Management did it" is a poor excuse.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Each email sent costs something also. It costs for the computer it was sent on. It costs for the bandwidth to send it. Spam may be cheaper than normal advertising, but telemarketing was cheaper than mail ads. That doesn't mean it's not a legitamate form of advertising.
No, ISPs generally pay for a pipe the same way a user does. A T3 is a T3, no matter what is going through it. They don't pay per byte, or per minute, they pay for a pipe, and anything that pipe can hold is fair game.
This one tripped my BS meter. As far as I know, most ISPs charge their large-pipe customers for transfers over a certain amount. The same may apply to the ISPs themselves. Are you yourself an ISP with multiple backbone providers? Are you a backbone provider? Have you ever gotten a high-speed pipe for your home or business? Do you know anything about what you're talking about?
I myself don't work for an ISP, but I have many friends who do. They pay per pipe, just like we pay per dial-up (or whatever). The reason high-bandwidth connection are priced by bandwidth is usually that the ISP has to add additional pipes quickly when selling high-bandwidth pipes, and they can't oversell them nearly as much as dial-ups. Even with home/business high bandwidth connections, you usually don't pay per byte. You pay to have a set amount of bandwidth, with as much use of that set amount of bandwidth as you need.
The telemarketers pay the phone company for the phone bandwidth. The direct marketers pay bulk rate postage for every piece mailed. It is in fact the high volume of bulk mail and the massive amounts spent on it by direct marketers that keeps the price of a first-class stamp low in the US.
And the spammers pay their ISPs and phone bills. Everyone seems to forget that no one pays your ISP for you getting email. You pay for email when you send it (in the form of a phone line and ISP, or whoever you connect). If I send you an email, I don't have to your ISP to receive it, just like your ISP doesn't have to pay mine when you send me a message.
I don't like spam, but it is no worse than any other form of advertising. Coventional marketing has a lot of things that are far worse than spam.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
I don't wear clothes with logos all over them,
...
Personally, probably 85% of my wardrobe has some tech company or other's logo on it
because the logo doesn't add any value to the clothes
...because said articles of clothing were available to me for free. Free, to me, is a significant value, outweighing pretty much any other consideration attached to clothing oneself.
"The Redmond, Wash.-based software company said the address notification feature was only created as a helpful tool for consumers."
Silly me, I thought it was a helpful tool for Microsoft to lock in users and spam others! How could I be so clueless as to not realize it was solely a helpful tool for consumers?
I'm so grateful to Microsoft PR, for without them, I wouldn't know what to think!
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Private Essayist
In the new version, a window will come up saying: Do you love Microsoft? And there'll be one button, marked "Yes." It'll be system modal so you can put it away or close it. Ctrl-Alt-Del will be disabled. So you have to hit "Yes". Then another window comes up, "Do you want to tell all your friends how great MS is?" with only a "Yes." Microsoft will just say, "We gave it to them in clear language this time, and regarding the question about your first born, it's been removed. We made a mistake there."
Companies will pay attention particularly well if there is loud feedback in a public forum. Most companies love good publicity and will react very strongly to negative publicity. Companies are self interested organizations and avoiding negative publicity is very much of interest to them because it can impact their bottom line, as well as stock price, quite directly.
Au contraire, I think Microsoft saw their customer base coming - from a loooooong way off...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Kinda like all those mass mailing I get time and time again, or the multiple telemarketer calls I get every day?
They found a source of postage, paper, and phone service that costs nothing? Cool! Where do I sign up?
If you want to argue that the receiver pays for it, at least there is something to that (although at least in the US, the practice of paying for bandwidth usage is almost completely dead).
In that case, all you folks who are paying bills for a Net connection ought to find out who is really getting the money -- it's obviously isn't the ISP, since "the practice of paying for bandwidth usage is almost completely dead" -- and put a stop to it.
(The expected rejoinder "I meant that people don't typically pay 'per-minute'" is beside the point. When you get spam, the spammer has stolen some of your ISPs bandwidth, and the ISP will pass the cost of that along to you one way or another.)
Some people advertise responsibly via email
Yes; the ones who operate strictly opt-in mailing lists. I haven't seen anybody here complaining about those (and, in fact, they are themselves victims of spammer scum because they have to carefully distinguish their legitimate e-mail advertisements from the spam).
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/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Doesn't anyone else think this was planned?
I think it looked like this:
Step 1: Relase new code with annoying email brodcasting.
Step 2: Wait for public outrage to reach the right level, search the news sites to make sure it's listed on all of them.
Step 3: Tell the American Consumer (TM) how nice we are and that we care about them so much that we'll fix the problem.
Step 4: Place bigger ads for "new MSN" on primetime TV (while you're in the limelight).
Give me a break! Why does the media continue to fall for this? The companies that provide good services don't get the same airtime because the are careful to not piss of the American Consumer (TM).
In this case it's a double-edged sword, if people hadn't complained we'd get to read about it in our email every time Granny switched services.
A cult? You said a cult!?!?
Hi, you must be new here! Welcome to slashdot!
Make yourself comfortable, read articles, post, check the latest survey (it's about time it was changed).
Now find a clock with a second hand. Watch the second hand. Focus on it. Notice how it goes around and around. Very nice, isn't it? Repeat the phrase: "There is no such thing as a cult."
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Instead of constantly seeking "shitheads" to fire, you sould make sure you only hire talented people with reasonable attitudes. When people have problems and start acting strange, you need to find out why and help them out. If someone does not live up to their potential, you need to make the best use of them you can. Proper selection and loyalty to employees promotes loyalty to the company. Harrasing your employees before you fire them will ruin you.
No one can be responsible for all freak accidents, but Billy G. can do better. You can't help it if an individual goes insane and does something stupid, but this was not an unforseable or individual act. Every publication needs to be run through PR. PR should know better than to create a trap like this. Hell, every single programer should have better morals than that. They should all know that it's not OK to pain their users with code that's inconsistent, deceptive and buggy. They should not consider those users "morons". Morals come from the top down. No mind control is needed, you just don't do things the company does not approve of. Nor do employees do things that are not part of the company's mission. Billy G. embodies those morals and that mission. When he, or his top managers, email questions like "A. How does this make more money for Microsoft? B. How does this help kill Unix?" about interoperability, the wrong message is sent. There are countless other examples of wrongheaded behavior that go back to the foundation of MS, and it all eminates from one person and the people he chose.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think it's pretty pityfull that the author couldn't just cut and paste the stupid message instead of "summarizing" it. Would that be a violation of Microsoft's copyright or would it be ok since the email was generated by someone you know? Anyways news is better unfilterred by some journallist.
The other thing is why don't they just let the user write his/her own message.
I think this still counts as spam. It's just like posting "help wanted" advertisesments to the usenet. It isn't evil spam just, "I'm a retard" type spam.
And it's good to see that microsoft is finally going to try straighten out the fact that anyone with half a brain can write an outlook virus. Unfortunately they're going about this in totally the wrong way. There are tons of things a virus writer can do besides email everyone in your address book. This is just another case of Microsoft creating a bad product not because the programmers are dumb but because the ideas behind the product were dumb at a much more grander scale.
Email should be text. Email should not be code. One thing you have to learn early on is not to run other peoples code on your computer. Microsoft doesn't seem to realise this and it hurts customers and it hurt customers view of technolodgy. Microsoft is making the world hate computers.
Same thing is true with their text processor. Text processors should process text and not run arbitrary code. Microsoft makes me worried about why so many people with average to above average intelligence can be so fundamentally dumb.
Also they miss used the world "hacker" instead of virus writer.
erorr27[at]email.com
Microsoft today said it plans to revise a notification message , not the "feature" itself!!!
"'Let's make this clearer for the consumers,'" a Microsoft representative said.
The current email text lets friends and colleagues know about the person's new email address and then it pushes benefits of MSN Explorer.
"In the final text, it will let recipients know that you have a new email address and shares how they can use that to communicate with you,"
So what exactly they are going to change? Rename "bug" to "feature"? "We will not push anymore, we will share"
Feedback actually helps... MS PR got to write new paper. Software? Naah, they'll keep it as it is.
Sure spam can be considered another form of advertising, but the difference is that there are no ethics in this form. There are various examples of lack of ethics in spam:
- since it costs nothing it is sent in huge quantities and sometimes multiple times
- spammers are in the majority anonymous because they realise that this form of advertising is unpopular
- they will not respect your right to be removed from their mailing list even when asked
- it is not even marked as an advert to ease filtering
Advertisers of the solid world have a code of ethics, and will respect people's rights if enough people complain (they have the clients reputation to worry about) spammers don't and this is the major issue.
The only form of advertising that I will accept with my e-mails are those I have signed up to (opt-in) and those banners on the webpages of sites such as hotmail ( the owner isn't an issue).
My Netscape e-mail account has become unusable. I have probably share the e-mail address twice, though it doesn't stop 500k of e-mails being there when I check it once every two months.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
So why is spam any different? It isn't is the answer. In fact, spam is if anything superior to traditional advertising channels because it costs the originating company nothing...
Ok, there's a nice contradiction. Spam is different, because it costs the target of the ad, not the sender. "Just delete it" is often the answer, but I don't agree with that. I shouldn't have to put up with it.
How would you like it if someone snuck over to your house at night and used watercolors to paint a big 10' x 5' ad for Coke on the side of it? "Hey, it washes right of... and besides, that's what you like to drink, anyway, right?" - and that's OK?
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If I was a MSN customer I'd be pissed! As a consumer I'm just worried.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.