Slashdot Mirror
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."
This will about as well as asking spammers to remove you from their lists.
This however will never work... spammers only spam because for the majority of them its free/very cheap
Bill Gates suggested this in his book, "The Road Ahead"... Microsoft? Innovating? Why yes...
Score:-1, Funny
actually, not a half bad idea...i figure if i accepted 5,000 spams/calls a day, at 5 cents a call, i could make it my full-time job...what the heck would i list as occupation on my income taxes though...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Your head. On a plate.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If they're spammers good luck collecting since most of the time the headers are all forged anyway or they're coming from some asian country.
Free Mac Mini
You FINALLY found a girl who think enough of you to use the phone number you gave her. She's hot, sweet and intelligent with a great sense of humour.
"You must agree to pay this geek 5 cents a minute while talking to him," a nasally voice greets her after she dials your number.
"FUCK THAT!"
There goes the love of your life...
"But however much the phone companies may profit from the current situation, it is generally bad business to continue a practice that infuriates the vast majority of your customers."
:
-Yeah, right. Bwahahaha
Tell that to anyone who flies on a regular basis.
Or has cable TV, etc, etc.
(an aside-
do any other geezers here remember Lily Tomlin's routine way back when
"No, maam, we don't care. We're the phone company, we don't have to.")
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
I've seen various permutations of this idea thrown around on slashdot before.
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
I signed up for my state's (Indiana) no-call list. I have since then received 3 e-mails from the state's Attorney General office letting me know about potential federal legislation that could restrict my no-call list rights.
Not 3 different e-mail, the same e-mail sent three times... I got rid of telemarketers just to get more spam...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
What are you talking about? Since when is innovation limited to producing software code that carries out a theory or concept?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
The problem has always been that there simply is no feasible payment mechanism to support it. If we ever get micropayments in some form, then people can implement this.
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...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
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
The recipient decides to collect the fee or not, while recipients in a white list are not required to carry a token.
Ok so how long until spammers/telemarketers figure out how to spoof themselves (like they do with my email address) to send to things via people's whitelists? Or write a virus or spyware to silently add themselves to the whitelist?
I think it's a good idea but I doubt it'll actually work in practice. Anything that can reduce the spam I get (my college email account has finally been infested) it a plus. And if it makes me a little scratch on the side, all the better!
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
It would probably be easiest if all SMTP connect requests would be delayed for 1 second by each Internet core router. That means individual mails get delayed by about 30 seconds max before delivery starts. Even with large companies this shouldn't become a problem.
However, a mass spammer would simply see his/her mails queue up at his end, which takes away the effect of reaching millions with the click of a button.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
A distributed system like SETI@Home, or maybe your own grid, can hand out cryptographic tokens for work units (say, a CPU minute), and the sender can then use those tokens to reach recipients.
In essence, the tokens act as digital postage stamps, but the payment is in useful CPU cycles, not useless cryptographic computations or money.
The point isn't to enact some kind of law or regulation forcing spammers to pay $0.05, it's to setup a way for reputable spammers (oxymoron I know) to pay for their advertisement space to you personally. In theory it would be a good idea, but so many things are good ideas in theory and no in practice..
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
A better solution to spammers has recently been dealt with on the online comic, Userfriendly.Org
0 7
0 9
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=200212
followed by
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=200212
Cthulhu knows how to deal with spammers.
Chuck Firment
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.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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
Home Page
The first time you get e-mail signed by a new CA, you will see it's policy and decide weather to accept messages signed by it. A typical ISP might state that any messages are allowed as long as it doesn't break local laws and is not an uninvited commerical contact. Another CA might support spam-free anonymous e-mail by signing each message directly instead of signing a user's key and charging a fee for each e-mail to make sure it's important communications and not just mass marketing. You can even have a "Disney CA" which only allows family-friendly messages for those so inclined.
Either way, if you accept a CA and then get a message that violates it's policy, you will forward it back to CA. If they agree, they automatically charge a fine to the violator - let's say $100 - and send you (most of) the money. Or for more serious violations than spam, actually send you real-world contact info for that person and/or notify the autorities.
If the CA fails to respond, you can block it. Pretty soon there will be web sites to rate various CAs and filter out spam-friendly ones.
This scheme doesn't have to be implemented all at once. Some ISP - say AOL - can release an e-mail program that puts signed messages in a separate group in INBOX. The idea is that you will encourage your friends to sign up for AOL because this way their messages will not get lost in spam. Then as the system becomes more popular, people will require all their messages to be signed and stop checking the second group.
No, they say you'll get paid at first, then they get a bunch of members and then just drop out. Way too many internet scams to trust some jerks like this... and besides, reading spam is worth more than that :-)
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Vanquish is a startup
that does try to sell a system like this. The idea is similar: You get some kind of certificate from them to sign your email. Other vanquish users will accept only 'signed' email. If you receive a signed email that turns out to be spam, you can get reimbursed for your time by the sender.
---- join dshield.org Distributed Intrusion Detec
In a few weeks bayesian spam filtering will be in Mozilla 1.3 and all this will be moot
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.
I worked for a company Javien that implemented this solution for email last year. The product was called Bouncer and would sit in between your email client and POP3 server. When it received a message from someone that wasn't on your accept list, it would bounce it back with a contract that could optionally include a request for payment. This was hooked into Javien's micropayment system, so if the sender accepted the terms of the contract they could attach a digitally signed proof of payment with the email when they send it again.
You mean you read spam? I haven't seen many which I can't spot just from the subject. Although I do like to keep up with current events in Nigeria.
Pffft! I'd just automate my email to say that I'd read it. (Actually it was my friend Dave Null.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
like snailmail, you pay in advance for sending the mail and the receiver can choose to refund that money.
use something like paypal or whatever to do and validate the payment. the sender will receive a ontime key that allows them to send the mail. all of this will be automated by pressing the 'send' button.
people on the whitelist will receive a permanent key.
Privacy is terrorism.
In R.A. Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls Hazel Stone (posing as Gwen something) uses a similar system to protect her messaging system: Spend some money to record an urgent message to her and she decides on whether to pay you back or not.
Give that the book was published in 1985, I would say the idea is pretty old.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
Telemarketers find any way they can to get around the do not call lists. "No sir this is not an unsolicited call. You sneezed while visiting our website so this gives us the right to call you back with other offers as given in the agreement on the website."
If telemarketers can get around do not call lists in order to avoid being fined $500 (and some don't really care if they are fined or not), do you actually expect them to pay 5 cents to some guy who said it costs that much to call me with a solicitation?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Obviously we could all switch to just allowing accepted-only people to contact us, or requiring confirmation from a person before accepting a message, but this doesnt solve the problem of registration forms which require you input your e-mail address. You know, for things like Forums, Online Purchases, Your slashdot account, they require a valid e-mail address to have confirmation sent to the user. Are these forms going to respond well to such a system? Are they going to respond at all?
Best case: You never recieve your confirmation because your mailer drops the message and the system you are signing up for doesnt respond to replies
Worst case: Your mailer replies to the message asking for confirmation, this is taken to be the confirmation the system was waiting for, you are signed up for something you didnt mean to sign up for.
Even worse: Two of these bounce off eachother, you are sent a bill for 200 million dollars, and your ISP drops you because you were DoSing their mail server.
Uh-huh. Everything I said is 100% true. Really.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I love the description "a family of ham-like products". Spam doesn't even get to be a foodstuff anymore.
If you're wondering how something like this can be implemented, look at the email agreement on http://roblimo.com/
Anybody can be the certifying authority for such a network. All the certificate would basically say is "Really Important Mail Group says that these people run a good server." So long as that group reliably decertifies spammers, their e-signature will be worth something.
Get an answering machine. Take control back.
My dating research shows you should get HER phone number, not give her yours. You get a couple big advantages out of going this route:
- If she won't give it to you, you know you're barking up the wrong tree and can move on.
- If she says yes you're in a stronger position than you were "waiting for her to call you." I mean, how often does that work out?
- Plus you get to appear strong and self-confident in her eyes when you ask for the number.
Hey, asking for her phone number isn't a marriage proposal, it's nothing to be afraid of or nervous about. If you feel comfortable asking, chances are you should. After a while, you'll get better at it, develop your own technique, and find yourself surprised at the number of numbers you get.
Who did what now?
My price is hereby set at $12million (USD) per minute. Please, please call me. Call me day and night; call me at 3am; call me during dinner. For $12million, you can call me during sex. Not only will I cheerfully listen to your entire pre-determined message, but I will ask questions - oh so many questions, and not necessarily about the product you're selling.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
You didn't read the article very carefully. The caller has to agree to pay the fee IF YOU WISH TO COLLECT. If a long lost friend calls he has to agree to pay the fee, but you don't have to collect the fee and he doesn't get charged.
Consider that the most profitable business strategy in the current business environment is 1. monopolize market for a given product or service, 2. screw customers who now cannot turn to competitor, 3. profit (no joke). Now apply that strategy to the "pay-me-to-spam-me" service and what emerges IMHO is an opportunity for someone to make money on a service that is currently free. I, for one, will not be paying a monthly fee to the token seller for "service", nor will I be arguing with their nearly nonexistant customer support when someone either circumvents them, hacks them, corrupts^Wpartners with them, or buys them out. Besides, I've already set my asking price for "spam time" - effectively infinity. If I had ever received a spam that wasn't an obvious ripoff then I might feel differently. I'll keep filtering spam myself for *free*, thank you.
Many elected officials have "access charges" now. Lunch with Pres. Clinton was about $100,000, and Pres. Bush charges about $250,000.
This is already happening in the UK (and most of Europe) for phone calls. It's called making the person who makes the call pay for it.
Yes, I know there are 101 issues about why this couldn't really happen in the US however it means that this sort of thing is rare and if I ever get called by a telemarketeer they pay for the whole call. Which is nice.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
> Anyway you look at it, I win. I get entertained, my number removed from their calling list,
> and a laugh from the telemarketer sometimes.
You only win if your time and what your were doing at the time means nothing to you. That's what bothers me the most about telemarketers, they never ask whether they are disturbing or not.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
um, ok.
while i'm at it, why don't i license the right to rob my house?
this whole platform presupposes that companies should have the ability to interrupt some people. what if we don't take that for granted? what if we presuppose that nobody should be interrupted at all?
Just raise the taxes on crack.
If they ever come out with this, and you want to show your gratitude, remember, I accept donations of beer.
Wow, more than 100 posts already and still 90% of posters obviously did not grasp the (rather) simple concept. I've seen a number of completely irrelevant objections:
: That's one of the best feature in this idea. No need for a new law. The recipient already has the right to block incoming messages. You know, when your phone rings, you won't go to jail if you don't take the call.
: Of course not, but nobody asks them! Using this kind of solution is YOUR decision; you don't have to ask anybody's permission, especially spammers.
: So what? This system will work for me even if I'm the only user. It's not one of those things that require a critical mass of users to be useful.
: Frankly, I don't care. If it prevents spam sent to me, it's good enough.
: You're missing the point. This is not about making money, it's about discouraging spammers. No spammer will ever send you an email if it costs him 5 cents. And the price is not for making you actually read the spam, it's only for allowing it to reach your inbox. In the very unlikely case a spammer actually pays, just delete the message as usual.
The law would never pass
Spammers will never accept this
Widespread adoption will never occur
This will not completely eradicate spam
5 cents to read spam is not worth it
So please, read the article. The idea may not be completely new (email stamp) but the details address most obvious objections.
One problem I can think of is still pending : what happens if the sender is also equiped with a similar system? Will we see payment notices bouncing back and forth between both ends without ever reaching an inbox? I guess a solution would be to automatically whitelist any address you've sent an email to, if only for 1 hour.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
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
One point made in "Release 2.0" is that the cost of sending spam would vary depending on the importaince of an individual. I might only be able to charge a penny to a spammer for sending me an e-mail but Bill Gates might command $100 or more per spam.
I don't really like the idea myself. Basicaly, if I tell someone to stop sending me junk I should expect that they will be compelled to stop, otherwise I should be able to sue for harrasment.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
The electronic stamp - a pattern of bits attached to the message - costs the sender some amount of money. The recipient (or the recipient's mail software) can examine the value of the stamp and, based on that, decide whether to read the message.
Super. Look folks, I still get hoards of snail mail spam every day that I have to sift through, the printing fees of some of which far exceeds the 30 for postage. Will we get as many spams about pleasing pudenda under this scheme? Probably not, but we'll still get spam.
And what's more, if and when this becomes the standard, we'll have to start paying to send all these quick emails to our friends and relatives. Yet another marketing scheme conquers what was once a free (and Free) Internet. I suppose it's time to start implementing POP4 based on Gnutella.
Spam filters are getting more and more intelligent every day. If they aren't good enough for you and you don't want spam, don't give out your private email address. But please oh please don't give away the last remnant of the free Internet. I see Microsoft and AOL warming up to getting thrown into the briar patch again.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Some people will never get tokens due to privacy issues, just the same way some people will not subscribe to the free subscription required New York Times.
Many view any of these blockers as having their hand out or a huge No Tresspassing Violators will be Shot sign on the front lawn. A do not call sign like this will keep me from calling.
Weeks later if and when I see you, I may let you know you forgot to include me on your white list, and it may have been an oversight. But if you don't wish me to call, I'll respect your wishes.
Now if you want to enable it only for blocked calls or toll free (telemarketing) calls, I have no problem with that. Anonymous Coward marketers should be blocked.
The truth shall set you free!
Just want to point out something ...
Your cost isn't the inconvenience of fast forwarding, it's the extra you pay when you buy products at (say) the supermarket, where a significant portion of the price goes to support the advertising costs of the manufacturers.The net effect of the current system is that we pretty much all pay for TV advertising, regardless of how much or little television we individually watch. If you value watching TV programs, but don't buy much, then you're coming out ahead. If you never watch TV but regularly buy things at the supermarket and department stores, then you're subsidising advertising agencies and indirectly, the producers of television content.
Given that in all likelihood you are paying for TV shows every day, you might as well watch them if you care to do so, without any twinge of guilt for skipping over the adverts.
The tokens would be single-use only; generated on-the-fly. You could checksum the entire message, and then hash it against the current date/time using a suitably long key. Checking the token's authenticity does not involve a list of pre-stored tokens; it is the ability to decrypt the received token that matters. If the token is successful, it gets appended to the "obsolete token" list -- never to be accepted again.
Granted, the encryption key is what the crackers would go after, but that would not be readily available to the average spammer. Given the miniscule success rate of spam, the spammers cannot dedicate much time to cracking anyone's token scheme.
Unfortunately, impersonating the "white list" senders would be much more feasible. As it is, we have spammers guessing the e-mail addresses to receive the spam. Once they guess and verify a valid e-mail address at xyz.com, it wouldn't be hard to use that as a fake sender for all the other successful guesses at xyz.com.
Of course, there is always the "spam yourself" scam, where the spammer guesses your address, and then uses it as a bogus sender. You become the sender of your own spam. Anyone who whitelists their own address is as vulnerable as they were before.
Either way, it looks like the whitelist is more vulnerable than the tokens.
Everyone you care about is on a whitelist, everything else requires a monetary fee before you'll view it. If you're feeling like you don't want to talk to someone, you go and raise your non-listed communication fee to $10 or so. Otherwise you keep it at 50 cents or so, letting people who you don't otherwise know call you for a low amount (this also happens to raise the cost of telemarketting and spam to the point where you don't have to bear the burden of its cost).
:)
I can't remember if it was Peter F. Hamilton or Greg Egan who had this in a story of theirs, but it's as old as the hills
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If this happens, I'm blasting an email address all over China and Hong Kong so all the chinese language emails display as scrambled symbols on my iMac.
You're right. They get a break because they're presorting the pieces of mail and bundling together the pieces that go to the same ZIP code, which saves the Post Office a lot of work. On the other hand, they have some restrictions on what kinds of mail can be sent at this discount. It all has to be the same (in a given mailing), if not enough pieces are going to a 5 digit zip, then a higher rate applies (for 3 digit zip, and then if not enough there, they have to pay full rate), and so on.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
You give me sendmail with the capability to do this and I will install it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
This dovetails nicely with the article yesterday regarding big political donors demanding access to politicians.
So - I guess money really *IS* speech.
- -
A few years ago, I saw a mathematical proof based on the concept of;
time=money
and the physics definition of "work" which proved that the more money you make, the less you work.
I guess the speech=money corellary built upon that is; the less you work, the more you talk?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
would be to simply overwhelm the spammer with false positives.
Spam generates at the very most 0.01% orders for the advertised product. What if 10% of recipients replied to the spam asking for more information, a borchure, or a sales representitive to visit a (false) address?
This would make it unconomic for the company theat the spam is being sent on befalf of to trawl the repies for the one real enquiry per thousand.
Implementing this would require a bit of effort, but running it for a year or so could prove very effective.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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
Pardon me, but I thought it was rather interesting how all the proposed solutions in this white paper, while innovative, neato, and rather cool, still involve my spending more money to get rid of a problem I shouldn't have in the first place.
I absolutely love how there's a whole section involving means for businesses to make money from implementing the scheme, but the part where he notes that all of us poor schmucks who actually get bombarded with spam and telemarketing calls will have to "upgrade" to newer phone sets and e-mail programs (no doubt with a cost) is just glossed over. Isn't most of the problem with spam and telemarketers that they cost us money already? How is paying more supposed to make us feel better about making them (we hope) go away?
Surely there's got to be some way of dealing with this problem without spending more money, without enriching the telco robber barons (at minimum), or at least by using money we're already going to spend anyway (coughcough where's the CRTC when you need 'em?)...
I'm reminded of possible "forced" upgrades by other entities -- regarding Microsoft software, HDTV, DVDs, CDs, and I can only stop to wonder if IBM might, were this scheme implemented, be conveniently right there with a plug-in for your phone or something... (Always look for the ulterior motive, sez I.)
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Your cost isn't the inconvenience of fast forwarding, it's the extra you pay when you buy products at (say) the supermarket, where a significant portion of the price goes to support the advertising costs of the manufacturers.
When you need to buy something, specifically avoid anything you've seen advertised. If companies begin to see a negative correlation between advertising and revenue, they'll be forced to rethink their marketing model or risk going out of business.
(place obligatory "when pigs fly" comment here)
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
The author of the article addresses this issue. He points out that online forums or vendors will need to provide a way for you to give them a token along with your request (could be as simple as typing it into a form).
If you didn't want to deal with that, you could just place the domain of the forum or vendor on your whitelist.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
This system is pure fantasy.
One question: in what way could this system possibly prevent somebody from creating a bot that would read SPAM all day long and get paid for it? If this goes into place, I'm sure to make zillions as my computer gladly signs up for SPAM, opens it, and deletes it for me.
If an elected official and sets the fee at $10k or $100k per call, they've just come clean about being coin-operated. But are these fees campaign contributions? Or are they earned income?
Isn't this basically the same micro payment idea that gets suggested by about 100 people pretending to just come up with it on the fly everytime a story about spam prevention comes up on /. ? It is nice that IBM is behind it though, that might add some legitimacy to the plan and perhaps see it enacted instead of just mentioned weekly in the /. comments.
We don't need any kind of payment mechanism to stop spam. If we could just make wholesale changes to the protocol such as he is suggesting, fixing the spam problem would be a snap. Why? Because spammers never ever ever use their real email address to spam with. They would get too many bounces, angry replies, and so on.
Back in the early early days of the net, there was no commercial presence, and no world wide web, and no usenet email harvesters, and the net was a much more trusting place. The mail RFC did not contain an authentication protocol, because it was obvious that the vast majority of admins could be trusted to use email appropriately.
That trust has now been violated. If we are going to change the way email works, all we have to do is add an authentication protocol, and a few other basic security protections. Spam would disappear overnight. However, changing the protocol will be a very major effort, hence the current band-aid solutions which exist.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
I get maybe one telemarketer call every other month, and normally those are recorded messages.
Which are illegal. Have you been collecting your $500 from the companies doing this?
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
No you won't. Read the article.
This is like 900 numbers for email. If the system had a widespread implementation, I can see two negative effects that would probably make it as bad as the current system if they weren't dealt with in some way.
Probably the easiest way to counter both of these would be to have a trust system so that people could rate each other's treatment of unsolicited mail. The reverse spammers would still try to counter this, probably by creating false accounts and rating themselves and so on, so a meta rating system would probably also need to be built in. And it'd likely have to be built around a cryptographic system, making the governments of the world all nervous and being an automatic reason why 90% of people probably won't bother to use it.
In other words, charging for unwanted email isn't an easy fix, it's getting really complicated and is it worth bothering with?
Hey, I'll do it! I'll just send everyone an email to send me a dollar, and I'll deal with their spammers and .. oh wait, D'OH!
Obligatory Simpsons quote:
"Greetings, friends. Do you wish to look as happy as me? Well, you've got the power inside you right now. So use it and send one dollar to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. Don't delay. Eternal happiness is just a dollar away."
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
DNS has the solution to the "key" issue. There is already in the standard a "key" type of record; this is widely used for opportunistic encryption between IPSEC devices. Simply set a key for the MX record on a domain (or a key:value list set for all valid users on a given MX or something like that, though that sounds very non-scalable) and away you go.
DNS is the most scalable directory the world has yet seen, eclipsing Novell's NDS by a good margin for sheer volume of records. Using TXT or KEY record types, heretofore largely unused, could be the key (no pun intended) to making a scheme like this work for email.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
Sorta offtopic, but I thought I'd post here to let anyone who cares about the subject know. My company was approached by a notorious spammer who wanted to buy our mailing list and was offering a reasonable sum for it. Of course, being the spam hater I am, I couldn't allow this, so I took a list of common american names and appended random dates and @hotmail.com to them. So we sold them our "mailing list" and went on with our business. Later on they called and started bitching and threatining to sue, but they never did and our lawyer said we were ok. So I screwed a spammer out of a couple of grand! Go me!
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
There are several thousand telemarketing companies. If each calls once a year, and you ask to be on the no call list... you get the point.
Alos, there is usually no way to know which company is calling, so you can't really check compliance anyway.
There's a simpler answer that doesn't require micropayment accounting. Just bounce every un-authorized sender a message back, with a password that can only be read by a human, and optionally a request to be taken off of any automated mailings. (You can pre-authorize any mailing lists you want to get.) Once someone has a password, they can send email from the same account.
That immediately kills spam that doesn't have valid return addresses. It requires a human in the loop for those with valid addresses, which increases costs. If you included a request to be taken off of any automated mailing lists, having a human read it should clear up any question of whether the sender has been legally notified.
Are you trying to say that Stamps are not a "complicated trust-checking initiative and process"?
Seems to me that when you look at the infrastructure in place to deal with Stamps, you'll realize that they are just as complicated and trust-checking (they must be certified and for businesses must be in connection with a valid return address) as anything this guy has come up with.
Seriously, how many millions of dollars go each year to the production and processing of various types of postage?
If you could just put a piece of paper with a number value on it and get your stuff mailed, well that would be kinda like e-mail.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I put up a sign like this a few months back in my front yard. Along the lines of "$100 FEE" in large print, and then lots of small print stating that if you drop a newspaper or advertisement in my front yard, you are implicitly agreeing to engaging me in a consultatory role. My fees are on the order of $100/page, with a 1 page minimum. I did send several bills out to the local newspapers and vendors who dropped stuff in my yard, to no avail.
While I didn't get any "consulting" money, I did receive a decrease in the stuff showing up in my yard.
--
wwjd? jwrtfm!
It's a federal law. See the applicable FCC regulations on this page -- "[No person may] Initiate any telephone call to any residential telephone line using an artificial or prerecorded voice to deliver a message without the prior express consent of the called party, unless the call is initiated for emergency purposes or is [not made for a commercial purpose, made for a commercial purpose but does not include the transmission of any unsolicited advertisement, made to any person with whom the caller has an established business relationship at the time the call is made, or is made by a tax-exempt nonprofit organization.]"
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I thought my worst case scenarios had been perfectly tailored to be understandable to even the stupidest of individuals, but I seem to have been mistaken: I'm talking about sites that DONT support this hack, moron. Ones which do probably wouldnt ignore the reply or accept it as a confirmation. Don't be so eager to spout "RTFA" without READING THE FUCKING POST. bitch.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Hence my comment about using a whitelist as an supplementary method.
But it seems you were too busy spewing spittle all over your screen to consider that.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
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?"
I like the current method to cut down spam:
:)
1. Get an online publication to write an article in which a spammer brags about his expensive home
2. Tell thousands of geeksabout it and present a thinly veiled challenge to find the guy's address
3. ?????
4.Profit!!!!
Sorry, once I got to number three I couldn't resist
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
I read an article with what I'd call an identical idea in some magazine like New Scientist or sth...
IN 1994 or 95!
Nobody's implemented it in these years, I'm not holding my breath for IBM.
... one will be occupied all the time giving and revoking permissions to send mail or phone.
n-e
I didnt bother with that one for a couple reasons.
The most obvious being, you can't know the hostname that is sending out the mail.
The second, more subtle, yet I think much more important, is that having to whitelist a server [or group of servers] every time you need to get a mail from an unknown source makes this whole thing no better than any other system. The point of sending along a token is to get messages through without having to deal with a whitelist. Whitelists are pretty much against the entire purpose of using E-Mail instead of IM, It takes away the entire purpose of this 'token' method, and as I mentioned, You can't always know what server to expect the message from.
So see, it wasnt that I merely didnt consider it, but it was so utterly stupid as to not warrant a responce.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Spam? What spam? POPFile kicks ass.
The solution isn't any law or regulation, but better filters.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey