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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."
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they can stop sending me spam asking me to pay to increase the size of my inbox because of excess spam.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
I must remind everyone, the majority of people who orginally saw this got it from an email.
Mike
I happen to like the refined flavor of potted meat
Slashdot, the site where everything's made up and the points don't matter
His editorial on the same subject in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Microsoft has already done their part to reduce spam...if you can't get your OS to function, how can you get spammed?
I just have to chuckle, I wonder what really goes through his head (Bill Gates) when he gets Spam e-mails to help him "Get out of debt NOW!!!" Heh...
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
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.
Bill Gates
I think Bill just won the understatement of the year award.
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.
Are you sure it was ONLY your inbox they were asking you to increase?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
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
It looks like our spam problems are almost over. I mean, look at what happened when Microsoft decided to "focus on" getting rid of security holes in their products...
:(.
Oh yeah
Game... blouses.
Exactly how does Microsoft profit from eliminating spam? Unless of course you are planning to introduce a whole new mail system protocol based upon the Palladium security model...
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
U.S. Government:
1. War on Communism - ongoing
2. War on Drugs - ongoing
3. War on Poverty - ongoing
4. War on Terrorism - ongoing
Microsoft:
1. War on Crappy Security - ongoing
2. War on Linux - ongoing
3. War on Spam - ongoing
# of wars completed: 0
Newsflash:
In an effort to curb spam, Microsoft shut down it's web-based email service.
"75% of this planet's spam originates on our servers" Bill Gates was quoted as saying today. "By abolishing Hotmail, and moving to a commercial email solution, our users will be able to reduce their spam intake."
The leaders of the "free" world were skeptical as to the veracity of Gates' comments.
"Another free throw-away service is going down the toilet," said John Q. Public, the CEO of ILIKEFREESTUFF.COM. "Hotmail was the last way for people to assert themselves anonymously and freely on the internet. Granted that most of the assertions that people made were spam, but it's still an assertion."
Gates was not available for comment on his comments.
In other news, Skynet went on-line on Monday, June 30th, 2003 and becomes self aware at 2:14 a.m. June 31st, 2003....
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.
* = except their own spam and their VAR partners and other 3rd parties.
Yahoo!, AOL abolish spam and pop-ups**
** = except their own, of course.
This is another attempt of companies using reverse-issue support to get their way, to be seen as so-called do-gooders, but in reality they're making back-room deals to slip their exclusions in to rig the system in their favor. It's another day of lobbying as usual in Congress, w/ some nice "conference" vacations, comps and perks to get some ear-time. *wink-wink, nudge-nudge*
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
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 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.
After all of this, I'm not sure which is worse -- anti-virus companies, or anti-spam companies...
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
1983 "640K should be enough for everybody"
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
brought to you by the makers of Microsoft BOB...
10 MD
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.
Perhaps they saw my comment conveying the idea on the UK to hold public enquiry on spam story a few days ago ;)
No doubt it was really quite a common theory. I stand by what was said back there... Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express, whether or not the Slashdot or Linux community wish it, *are* for sure the most common email clients.
As one person on the thread quite rightly put it, it's normally the Microsoft users (granny, mom, joe sixpack et al) who are uninformed enough to respond to spam in the first place, making the business thrive. Helping them not to see it can only kill off the spam industry, surely. I hope so. Commonplace spam filtering "on every desktop" (as Gates would put it) can only be a good thing.
As such, I'd like to say a very rare "thanks Microsoft, good luck"
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.
..is the process of automatically updating...
Critical Update #S15896b: This update will prevent the software from automatically replying to many types of spam sent using the HTML format.
Critical Update #S15897: This update will prevent MS Anti-Spam from automatically deleting certain payment-due notices from certain online services, notably, AOL and your electric company.
Security Update #5498443676a: This update will prevent a malicious spammer from using javascript to turn your installation of MS Anti-Spam into an open SMTP gateway.
Please do not interrupt this automatic update process, which has been activated for your convenience and protection.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
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.
So let me see if I have the major companies' spam fighting techniques down:
Earthlink -- fighting spam with challenge/response
AOL -- fighting spam with lawsuits
MSN -- fighting spam with position papers (marketing materials)
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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
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.
Nonsense. Ever heard of "guessing"? -- Generate likely hotmail addresses by dictionary lookup (common words, common names and common integers). That and some concatenation and a sendmail script and you're off to the races without having to buy a single address.
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/
and spam will disappear. It is the BEST baysinian-thingy spam-mail-proxy stuff I've ever used. I'll stop being so technical and just say TRY IT. Setup your proxy, and watch it rip. In over 400 e-mails I've had ZERO false positives (setup the "magnets" when you get started.). And for Windoze users, yes it runs great on Windoze and is EASY to setup.
So do I still hate spam? Sure. Because it's there. Because it costs money and takes resources from the web. But it is NOT a problem in my life and should not be in yours. The last thing we need is POP3 and SMTP to become "Palladium Improved". Let the world know, starting with yourself, that baysani-something-like proxy's work great.
Oh, and if you use hotmail, never log into their crappy site again, while still getting your hotmail e-mail and spam free at that! Use Popfile, a pop3 proxy from www.boolean.ca. that knows how to speak Hotmail! Now you simply have this:
Hotmail -> Popfile -> PopMail -> Inbox.
Poof! Hotmail and every other account you have, all pulled down into one application spam free (yeah, Popfile supports unlimited accounts). Sweet.
Sure it sucks, but at least be accurate.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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 doesn't happen to be possible that spammers know there are a lot of hotmail users, and thus spammers use a dictionary attack to generate random usernames? No, that's silly. Much easier to blame MS which is suing spammers and trying to ease at least some of the spam problem, than it is to blame Alan Ralsky sitting in his basement sending you spam.
Now that Bill has solved the security problems in his products, he is moving on to spam. Way to go!
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.