One Answer To Spam: Sell Your Interruption Time

An anonymous reader writes "A recent article in the IBM Systems Journal describes an innovative solution to curb both spam email and telemarketing. In short, the potential recipient of a message/call advertises the potential cost of contacting him uninvited. If the sender agrees to pay that cost, it acquires a token that it includes in the message/call and the message/call is accepted. The recipient decides to collect the fee or not, while recipients in a white list are not required to carry a token. The author also provides for a more detailed description."

Comments

As if...

[Noryungi]

Let's face it: the only attraction of UCE for spammers is its cost: sending the same message to thousands, or even millions, of people costs them close to nothing.

Which is why spammers will never adopt a solution such as this one: it would reduce the pool of potential clients (read: complete idiots) willing to receive UCE and it would raise their costs in an unacceptable way.

I mean, I agree to receive all the spam you want to send me... as long as you are ready to pay one million dollars per email. How is that for a fair price?

This scheme is interesting, in a theoretical sort of way, but it has much of a chance of becoming a reality as, say, flying elephants.

Or, uh, a cold day in hell.

And, of course, my opinion is exactly worth what you paid to read it on Slashdot... ;)

Tragedy of the Commons Revisited

[4of12]

For most people, unsolicited bombardment by advertisements is regarded as "part of life".

It would be really great to change this mindset not only in terms of internet based advertising, but also for telephone direct marketing, bulk mail advertisers, and billboards.

At least with TV and radio there's a transaction of sorts going (not that I want to give credence to Jack Valenti's position that people fast forwarding through commercial messages are "thieves"; it still costs me the inconvenience of fast forwarding, but my cost is less): I get to watch some show I value and suffer some inconvenience of advertising that I suffer.

With billboards, the property owner gets money for placement of the advertisement, but the public gets the mental pollution without gaining any benefit. [I won't buy the argument that being informed of products and services is an inherent benefit: when I want to buy something, I'll research it and find out about it then.]

Sound economic theory can be applied to advertising. Explicitly crediting and charging consumers and producers of advertisements would be a positive step towards making this a reality .

The catch is that getting people to agree that their collective attentions are worth something is a political problem. And the same economic theories that could potentially be applied to advertising are already being applied at the overriding level of what I will call "government services", such as legislation controlling advertising. It is in the financial interest of advertisers to have the public place no value on their attention.

Thus, this good idea will have to wait until the public wakes up.

Can this work?

[Pedrito]

I just don't see how this could work. There appear to be too many technical issues involved, not least of which is implementation. First of all, you have to assume there will some "e-token standard." Next, you have to assume Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and all the other free-email services will support it. You can do a proxy server on the clients for other mail packages, but anything web-based will have to be adapted to it.

Next you need to somehow distribute the tokens to these different systems. This seems to require some sort of integration between the token provider(s) and the e-mail systems and web-based e-mail services.

I just don't see it happening to fix something that can be handled pretty well through filtering. The fact is, e-mail filtering software is making great headway these days. Baysian filters, collective filters like Cloudmark's SpamNet, and so forth.

One idea I had was for a white-list proxy. The first time someone sent you an e-mail, it would hold it in a queue. It would send them back a message asking them if they're sure they want to deliver the message (99% of spammers won't get past this point). As the recipient, you would would be notified of their intent to e-mail you and then validate whether or not you wanted to allow mail from this new sender in the future.

It has problems as well, but it's infinitely more implementable than the idea this paper proposes.

Re:Simple solution: Require PGP/GPG sig/encryption

[Sloppy]

Sometimes I think PGP is the answer to half the world's problems. It's just a rockin' way to authenticate. And once you have a verifiable identity attached to each message, you can assign reputations to identities and filter that way. There are sooo many applications for this stuff. We just have to start building that web.

But as usual, the catch is getting people to use it. Until your grandmother uses it, she's going to have the same rep as an anonymous spammer, so you can't rely on it.

I finally got my inner circle of friends to start using PGP/GPG, and it took some serious nagging over a long period, even though they are computer geeks. I've tried to suggest keysigning parties at local Slashdot Meetups (and even went to a 2600 meeting) and there is just no interest. If Slashdotters and 2600 people aren't interested in PGP, and my geeky friends won't do it w/out nagging, then forget Joe Schmoe, it's not happening. The tech is here, but society Just Says No. It's very sad to see so much wasted potential.