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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."
Bill Gates suggested this in his book, "The Road Ahead"... Microsoft? Innovating? Why yes...
Score:-1, Funny
ok, you're right on the telephone one...but, if i restricted it to only recieving e-mail spam, then i'm sure i could have some sort of automated program or such that goes through my messages and automatically accepts the spammers token, etc...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
The article talks about using "Interrupt Tokens" that you can give out as a one-use token to interrupt (email spam, telemarketer call) you. If the person contacting you doesn't have an interrupt token, they can't contact you without paying your "Interrupt Fee", the fee that you set for contacting you.
I often get calls that I don't expect, and I need to take them. I can't have people unable to contact me about a business deal because they don't want to pay my "Interrupt Fee". They'll say, "Eh, to heck with it. I'll give the deal to the next guy down the line."
For telemarketers, I use the key phrase, "Place me on your do not call list." I get maybe one telemarketer call every other month, and normally those are recorded messages.
Chuck Firment
Are you assuming this would be a world wide law and fully enforcable? Or did you forget that there are hundreds of other countries that do not have to abide by any of our laws in the US. A good majority of spam already comes from outside the US.
I also heard that world peace is just around the corner!
I'm sorry, but this wouldn't work without totally restructuring the current "email system" and phone system
This would also destroy the ability of organizations that are truely good in nature to advertise. I make this bold statement because if something like this goes into place, then people will want to get paid for watching TV commercials and for looking at billboards. Hell, the average Joe wouldn't have to work since he/she could get paid just to look at their advertisements! This could truely stunt the growth of our economic system.
Besides, do you think this would actually work? The companies would claim this violates their freedom of speech rights, and since companies have money to pay off politicians and to pay off phone companies, do you REALLY think this would ever happen???
However, I do agree that SOMETHING needs to be done to stop this rediculous mass advertising that goes on, but I don't think that is the answer (or atleast not in its current form)
One of the hilarious solutions that I have come up with (well, I think it is funny) for phone spam is somehting like this:
Anyway you look at it, I win. I get entertained, my number removed from their calling list, and a laugh from the telemarketer sometimes.
However, (and most seriously), this type of system must be implimented in such a manner that the phone companies and ISPs don't make a dime off of it, otherwise the problem will grow
The only solution to this is simple
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
It's actually an idea that's been kicked around for years.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
OK, then who licenses these "secure mail servers"
The US post office can't do that cause email is world wide.
And do you think companies are going to want to be forced to retool their email systems? (ok, maybe this would get all the tech guys employed for 6 months)
And if people exchange keys
The other big problem is communicating with companies and people you don't know
I don't claim to have the answer, but that isn't it.
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
- You have a whitelist of domains and adresses.
- You also have a blacklist of domains and addresses.
- Every mail from a sender in the whitelist is accepted.
- Every PGP/GPG-signed or encrypted mail from a sender NOT in the blacklist is also accepted.
- Everyone else will get a mail back and have to click on an URL (or reply to the confirmation mail) confirming his/her message to me.
- Double bounced addresses land in the blacklist.
Bang, zero spam.Remember to put your business partners on the whitelist though. ;)
-- Jens
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I know talking about our supposedly-deregged local phone market is really a joke, but think if a company tried this approach: "Our service costs the same, and we WON'T sell your number to telelmarketers. We have ACTIVE telemarketer-proofing tools. We are anti-spam."
I think it's possible, and if the telemarketing problem were to explode like the spam problem, I think we would see it. Right now, though, I don't think it's quite annoying enough - don't know about you, but I'm not getting 15 telemarketing calls a day...yet. So there's not enough consumer outrage now to get a huge customer base.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Everything you're talking about is simple barrier to entry and therefore only half of the question. The other half is "Is there a sufficient profit potential to make it worth surmounting the barrier to entry?"
First of all, you have to assume there will some "e-token standard." The lack of an existing standard can actually help a first mover. Create a "standard" that makes your life easier, set up your code to isolate the implementation of that standard so you can replace it if necessary, and publish your "standard" if you want it to be widely adopted and become "the standard." As a first mover, you need to be aggressive but stay agile.
Next, you have to assume Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and all the other free-email services will support it. No you don't. Create a service of your own. Make it free to users if you want to compete with Yahoo, et. al., or charge users if you prefer. This is the crux of the matter. Your system provides them with a benefit. How much are they willing to pay to partake of that benefit and is that enough to cover your startup costs and operating costs and provide you with a decent ROI (note to open source proponents: ROI doesn't necessarily mean cash...it can be as basic as that great feeling you get by having contributed to something successful)? Alternatively, provide those email providers with an easy way to implement your system and charge them for the opportunity to provide that benefit to their users. There are plenty of potential revenue models available. Again, the main questions are ROI and acceptable risk.
Next you need to somehow distribute the tokens to these different systems. Yes, but developing a solution to this is just another startup cost. If this is the key enabling technology for the system, perhaps you base your revenue model on providing this and letting Yahoo, et. al, worry about the rest.
I just don't see it happening to fix something that can be handled pretty well through filtering. The author of the article covers the shortcomings of filtering. Of course, this system would have to be significantly better than a filtering system (or easier to implement for the end user...or more effectively marketed...) for it to be worth the premium or it will never generate a profit.
Most new technologies look impossible to implement at first. Focusing on the possibilities rather than the obstacles is what separates entrepreneurs from 9to5ers.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
The author cites at the start of his paper, my own article on this concept. Many people have come up with this idea independently, and while I was one of the earlier ones, proposing it at USENIX in 1996, it has earlier roots as well in places like AMIX and others.
In fact, I seem to get a mail every week from somebody who has just thought up this idea!
However, since being an early proponent, I have decided it's not so good an idea after all, though it can form one component of an anti-spam strategy, particularly for dealing with how to continue to allow anonymous mail in the anti-spam world.
At the heart of it, spam is the abuse of bulk mail, so solutions should attack the cause, not the symptoms. Undesired non-bulk mail is still undesired but it is not in any remote way a critical problem worthy of a complex solution, and we have decided as a socity you should not have any right not to be annoyed, though you can have a right to not have your mailbox overwhelmed. (Just as a ping is not on offence, but a ping-flood is.)
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
i'm just gonna change my address to i.unconditionially.agree.to.pay.one.dollar.per.kil obyte.received@cosand.org and just send invoices for email i didn't want. Looking through my inbox, there's a pretty clear size differential anyways: emails containing information from my friends and colleagues seems to run 1.5 to 3k, while spam and junk from the university buearacracy runs from 8k up to a few tens of ks. Depending on how bored i get, i could sue to collect on some of the more expensive ones. I'm not sure it would hold up in court, but one the other hand, it would be fun to stand in court and ask the defendant "which part of 'i unconditionally agree to pay' weren't you clear on?"