Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Steps Up Anti-Spam Efforts
An anonymous reader writes "Bill Gates announces new focus at Microsoft to abolish spam. Read the announcement titled Toward a Spam-Free Future."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All, just remember that the definition of spam is fluid. One person's spam is another's direct marketing.
I don't think Microsoft will eb getting away from direct email marketing to those with whom they have an "established business relationship", but I think they will be working to put in place a process for dealing with UCE - unsolicited commercial email to use the FTC's term. Frankly, if you are using their free email service, I think you should be willing t receive their mailers (TANSTAFL.
Microsoft is taking legal measures because spammers cost them time and money with their Hotmail and MSN ventures. Microsoft would still consume your entire living toddler given the chance.
Could microsoft perhaps change their focus to "not changing focus" every 2 months? A few months ago, it was all about a new focus on service centric software development ... then, it was all about a new focus on security, and so on. Kinda reminds me of the "top priority" syndrome, where if every item in your to-do list is "top priority", the result is that none of it really is.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
umm how long has it taken ANYONE to step up and fight spam?
That they did. However, the difference is that the people who saw it via email purposely subscribed to a mailing list in order to get it. It was not sent out unsolicited.
Windows has obviously been trying for the last couple years to control every electronic medium it can get its hands on. And, everything it touches, turns to proprietary. And with the number of MS machines out there, and with the direction the government is running (allowing corporations to be police, ala *AA), I am fearful that MS will be able to dominate e-mail as a whole.
I can imagine MS trying to persuade the Gov't to mandate MS technology to protect against spam. I find this laughable at first, but given how well the US gov't understands technology, i find it quite plausible.
Gates is jumping on a bandwagon, where there is already public support. It's what he needs, public support. The tide has been turning against him, with poor xbox sales, Linux becoming better and better, OpenOffice closing the gap, and losing in the server market. He's deserate to gain some public recognition, and spam is an easy target. Be wary of the Vole, for he knows exactly what he's doing.
While i am forced to use MS for academic, work and extracurricular purposes, I am on a lookout soon for a point. This point is going to to be HUGE. Where useability and ease of use come together to create a Linux and OSS Office product that competes directly with MS's systems for the everyday user, millions will flock to the cheap alternative. It's coming, and Billy knows it. And he's doing everything in his power to prevent it.
Where's the proof? All I see is a statement about what they want to do -- currently total vaporware. Meanwhile open source has been the source for many of the ideas in Billy boys speech (statistical filtering, for one).
cswingle Fairbanks AK
We are building on advanced work at Microsoft Research in fields such as machine learning â" the design of systems that learn from data and grow smarter over time. This kind of technology is vital to the fight against spam because every defensive action causes spammers to change their attack. Technology, to be effective, must continuously adapt, without requiring a team of people to examine messages one by one. With machine learning, a "smart" spam filter can automatically adjust to spammers' shifting tactics.
Translation: We've noticed that other people are already incorporating these features into their products (Apple's Mail.app) and that you can get good Bayesian filters pretty much free, so we guess we'll embrace and maybe extend that.
To help, we have assembled a massive and still growing database of spam, collected from volunteers among our millions of MSN and Hotmail subscribers. This database will prove invaluable later this year when we release Outlook 2003, which will include a new, smart filter that will access the database to recognize and block spam more effectively. The filter in Outlook 2003 also will be updated frequently and easily, as with Windows Update today.
Translation: Hotmail is a honeypot for spam.
Our proposal is to create a regulatory "safe harbor" status for senders who comply with guidelines.
Translation: Maybe we can create the "trusted computing" equivalemt of electronic mail.
Tweet, tweet.
I think it's even better that he decried spam as being a vehicle for destructive viruses.
Quick, name a mass-mailing worm that *doesn't* use Outlook (/Express).
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I liked what he said, except for where he was touting the Hotmail spam blocking efforts.
It really doesn't matter how much spam they are blocking. If I continue to get 100+ spam a day, then their spam blocking is worthless. And I do, and it is.
Spam sucks, indeed, but a new threat looms, and that's spyware. Every non-technical person I come across has their machines crammed full of spyware crap. Machines creep along, popups appear all the time, and other strange things happen. Most users are clueless. They'll just end up buying a new machine because their "PC is too slow".
I believe Microsoft is largely to blame for this with Internet Explorer. Many users have default settings that do not prompt or reject downloads of unsigned ActiveX objects. So Gator slips right in. And they don't have prompt/reject set for running unsigned scripts.
This is one reason people need to switch to Mozilla. But I digress...
.sigs are for post^Hers.
What they're doing is subtly spinning their Trusted Computing initiative as a way to tackle the spam problem. This way, they get sympathy from quarters from which they would ordinarily receive none.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
a whole new mail system protocol based upon the Palladium security model
... you have heard of MSN, no?
Or it could be the countless gigabytes of traffic (hard drive space, admin time, spam filter programming, insert another cost due to spam here) their online service wastes on spam.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
That would be a good start.
The funny thing is that this is one of the oldest known management principles in the world, and yet so few STILL master it.
:-)
It was documented in "The Art of War" (Sun Tzu), worded something like "defense everywhere is defense nowhere", with the explanation that at every single time you need to focus, prioritize, and take calculated risks on what NOT to focus on. If you focus on defense everywhere, then you are not defending anywhere.
And people still haven't learned it. Makes you wonder why people write books.
Stop selling all those hotmail addresses to spammers, that might help reduce spam!
Seriously, it's like the phone company. They sell your phone number to a zillion telemarketing lists and then they charge you to buy a box that blocks telemarketers (as if they're doing you some huge favor by offering it). They are profiting on both sides here, it's disgusting.
No. The commonly-accepted definion of spam is (1) unsolicited (2) email that is (3) either commercial or bulk in nature. (1), (2), and (3) must all be present for something to be spam.
In my observation, only spammers try to define spam to anything else.
You know, it would be funny to replace the word "Spam" with "Linux" throughout the article. You'll know what he and Ballmer talk about behind closed doors.
microsoft could start by allowing the *option* of disabling the viewing of html email in outlook and outlook express. linked images are used by spammers to verify if an account is active and if an email is being viewed. not to mention the huge-font headlines found in your average spam message and/or images (sometimes not-so-safe for work).
but microsoft does not want to give users this option. why?
Well, I am not a spammer, but I am making an observation on what I have seen in terms of folks behavior.
For example, I have seen people that have signed-up for offers from a company (I saw them do it) turn around and start complaining that they are being spammed.
For most people, spam is any email that they don't want in their mailbox at that moment in time. If it is something I don't want - even if I set up a relationship and asked for it - then it is spam.
I detest Spam. I get tons of it and hate the resources I spend on my mailserver dealing with it. It should be dealt with somehow (I think a scheme with a 1/100 of a cent charge would deal with it effectively). But the reality is that people's definition of Spam really is that email that they don't want to see cluttering their mailbox at that point in time.
This coming from the company that sells your @hotmail.com e-mail address to spammers, only filters out about 1/2 of the spam sent to your Hotmail address, and only lets you have 256 addresses in your block list.
Sign up for a throwaway Hotmail address. Never give the address out to anyone. Never use it for registration. Just let it sit there for a month or so. Then log into it and see the mountains of spam it contains. Since you never gave this address to anyone, the only possible way the spammers got the address is because Microsoft sold it to them.
It's sort of like how the telephone companies sell your phone number to telemarketers, then sell you a Caller ID service so you can see if it's a telemarketer calling you or not, sell other people a service to block their number from showing up on Caller ID, sell the people with Caller ID an additional service that makes ALL numbers (even the blocked ones) show up, make you pay to have your phone number not show up in the phone book, etc.
And that email was sent to an opt in list, not to a bunch of harvested email addresses. So despite your claims of irony, it wasn't spam.
A business is not designed to make friends, engender feelings of goodwill towards puppies, or cure cancer. That, my friend, would be called a charity.
Or a Community. You know, these cooperative things people lived and took part together in, which when combined together created civilizations?
Let's face it, when the American people chose to embrace the radical right agenda that is in many ways epitomized by Ayn Randianism back in the 1980s, and exchanged their status of citizens for that of consumers, and their sense of business ethics went from a "let's find a win-win approach we can both benefit from" (positive sum game) to "let's make a fast buck, whatever the consiquences to others" (zero, or more commonly, a negative sum game), we lost our communities and became little more than faceless wage slaves serving our faceless corporate masters. Most of us are lucky enough not to live in the small southern towns our corporate masters chose to dump their toxic waste in (thanks, Monsanto), and those that are unfortunate enough are generally dead and so not a concern (thanks Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Baby Bush, for gutting the EPAs ability to be at all vigilant).
It should be no surprise that when one redefines humankind's humanity as "charity" (with all the negative baggage that implies) and humankind's inhumanity to itself as "nothing personal, it's just business, and businesses exist to make money, not friends", one loses one's own humanity in the process. What is surprising is how long American culture has managed to survive and even thrive, after having dehumanized itself and its people to such an appalling degree. One can only hope that the rest of the world retains a little more wisdom, and that emigration isn't a complete impossibility.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If domain administrators could also publish the addresses of their outgoing mail servers, then the receipt of a suspected forgery could trigger a relatively simple, automated verification process. Incoming servers would then be able to confirm whether senders are who they say they are.
So, does this mean all SMTP servers would need some sort of registration or domain name?
Although it would certainly be easy from a business standpoint to demand that all e-mail be sent from clearly acknowledged mail servers (like Hotmail or Yahoo) that can be contacted to enforce anti-spam laws, I don't want my friends' Outlook 2003 to destroy all the e-mail I send just because I run my own sendmail. Surely there are other methods of fighting spam than dominating the entire e-mail infrastructure...
Unless you're Microsoft.
"a smart filter can learn from a user's personal preferences to create a unique, anti-spam immune system"
If it's anti-spam immune then I assume this means microsoft will be pouring only _its_ spam into your inbox?
This is present in Outlook 2003. *By default* images aren't downloaded from html mail. You are presented with a dialog explaining how it can be bad, then allows you to make the decision...
Sure it sucks, but at least be accurate.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The anti-virus security patch for Outlook Express also makes it impossible to receive legitimate zip files.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I haven't used Popfile, but I'm generally quite sceptical about Bayesian filtering. I tried out the Bayesian filtering system of Mozilla, it needed an awful lot of mails for training until it had somehow acceptable results, and even then, it had quite a lot of false positives. Maybe, I expect too much. I expect that an e-mail in a language the filtering system has not seen before will not be misrecognized as spam, but invariably, some of the first mails in a language not seen before were labeled as spam.
I think there is a more fundamental problem with Bayesian filtering. Of course, you can get very high percentages with them, but that doesn't mean so much. Quantitatively, most e-mails we usually receive follow certain patterns (mails from mailing lists on a certain subjects, in general mails on subjects we often deal with), and it's quite easy for Bayesian filters to learn their characteristics. However, I think, as a rule, unusual messages are more important than those that are very similar to thousands of others (rare and unexpected events have more informational value), and it's just these unusual mails that are more likely to end up as false positives. So, the nice percentages can be quite misleading.
Maybe, I'm too radical here, for people who only rely on receiving mails in few languages for which the Bayesian system soon has enough samples, their performance isn't that bad. But I strongly dislike the principle underlying Bayesian filters: "What conforms to the rest is good, what is unusual is suspicious."
An example to illustrate what I mean (it's not very realistic, of course): Person A daily receives e-mails from people of the opposite sex wanting a date. So, every new mail of that category are safe. However, A does not have a job and always waits in vain for e-mail with job offers. When finally one such mail arrives, it goes into the spam folder and is overlooked because it doesn't have the characteristics of the legitimate mails A usually receives (and has some distant similarity with work-at-home and MMF spam).
B daily receives e-mails with great job offerings and makes an unusual career. So, every new mail of that category is safe. However, B is lonely in private life and waits in vain for a date proposal. When finally one such mail arrives, it's put into the spam folder and overlooked because it doesn't have the characteristics of the legitimate mails B usually receives (and has some distant similarity with spam advertising dating sites and telephone numbers).
Both A and B have very low rates of false positives, so the Bayesian filters are working well...
I prefer systems that check for typical spam characteristics and mail source (Spamassassin, Blacklists), in my experience, they aren't less efficient than these hyped Bayesian filters, but in contrast to them, they do not promote conformity against diversity. Maybe, Bayesian criteria are useful as an add-on, but I would never want to base the decision whether something is spam solely on them. What should I do when Bayesian filtering becomes popular, thresholds are set lower and lower because of the rising spam problem and I want to write someone a message? Should I try to guess which wordings conform better to the usual correspondence of the person I write to - otherwise there's the risk that the message won't be seen?
That would already be total capitulation, spam would have defeated e-mail.
How long was that name? The hotmail space is so overcrowded that not only dictionary attacks, but also brute force is used quite efficiently by spammers.
I love how Bill toots his own horn.
Like almost everyone, I receive a lot of spam every day, much of it offering to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It's ridiculous.
Hey Bill, pass me a billion and we can share the joke!