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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.
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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...
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.
Are you sure it was ONLY your inbox they were asking you to increase?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
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
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.