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."
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."
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 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
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
i dunno, i still get plenty of junk mail in my snail mail box...i'm guessing those companies don't pay the normal 37 cents an item mailing rate (i'm assuming they get some sort of bulk mailer rate? am i wrong?)...in any case, i don't think this would really be any different for e-mail spammers...they could probably absorb the cost of a few pennies an e-mail...
.01 * .025 = 2,500 people...if they're making a $20 profit on the item, they've broke even right there...
also, from this previous article we know that approxiately 1/4 of 1% of spam gets a response for a company (let's assume that means a product order)...
so, if a company send out 1 million spams, at 5 cents a spam (for nice round number), that's $50,000...they can expect a response of 1,000,000 *
that's probably not a realistic business model though, i didn't include the fact that most companies don't send their own spam, they pay others to do it, so that's additional overhead...5 cents an e-mail is also probably too much, it would probably be less...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
It's actually an idea that's been kicked around for years.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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
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.
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.
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
If you're wondering how something like this can be implemented, look at the email agreement on http://roblimo.com/
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
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
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.
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.