Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Forecasts Victory Over Spam
nfk writes "BBC reports from the World Economic Forum at Davos, where Bill Gates said spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time, thanks to a three-pronged approach to the problem: filters, expensive computation for e-mail and the digital equivalent to stamps, paid if the receiver considers he is being spammed. He also expects to catch up with Google, although he praises the company and the IQ of its research team. Finally, he announces mind blowing developments for the next XBox generation and says that, in a decade from now, 'we will laugh at personal computing as we know it.' No need to wait, I do it every day." (We've mentioned Microsoft's sender's-option payment scheme before.)
KFilter and GFilter, cheap OSS knock-offs of whatever Bill implements to combat spam, repelete with a /. summary with an editors savage addendum bashing Bill Gates, the main inspiration for software for OSS hippies to rip off.
...by requiring all emails to use Microsoft's proprietary, heavily patented, closed-source "SMTP++" technology, which runs only under Windows... Thereby, of course, locking out all non-Windows users...
Don't laugh, it could happen!
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
And I don't think micropayments will stop spam - wouldn't the spammers just use servers that didn't require that? And would email be as useful if you could only get mail from someone who bought into a particular micropayment system?
Litigious bastards
Asked whether Microsoft missed the boat in the field of search technology, Mr Gates admitted that he had to take the blame for losing out to Google.
"We took an approach that I now realise was wrong," he said.
I may not like Bill Gates and the way his company acts, but I have to give credit to a man who can admit his mistakes. It's not an easy thing to do.
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
So kindly get out of the way, and let the rest of us fix it.
If Bill Gates says it's so... it must be!
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Next thing you know Bill will show the world Microsoft Cold Fusion Reactors, the Microsoft Space Agency, Microsoft Manual of Women and Microsoft Anti-Hangover Tablets! Go Bill!
Hate me!
seeing at Hotmail sends me spam. Altough I know they don't consider it spam seeing as it's Microsoft. They also don't consider their pop ups "pop ups" persay...
I've read in quite a few places that it seems he didn't really make that statement, and that it's just an urban legend.
The anti-spam technology, on the other hand, might be based on being able to factor primes
The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar
He expects to catch up with google? this looks more like a huge wish then a prediction
Jeff
Bill Gates also forecasted that 640KB should be "enough for anybody".
For the millionth time, no he did not. He denies it, and no one has ever dug up a source for this quote.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
For your info, that quote is an urban legend. See here
Let's say that a billion pieces of spam are sent every day. All MS needs to do is send a few duotrigintillion 'Try MSN 9.0 Today' E-Mail per day, and, boom, the spam is effectively nonexistent. After all, anything MS sends is legitimate and solicited, right?
... or merely free e-mail services?
But ultimately, Mr Gates predicted, spam would be killed through the electronic equivalent of a stamp, also known as "payment at risk".
This would force the sender of an e-mail to pay up when an e-mail was rejected as spam, but would not deter senders of real e-mail because they could be confident that their mail would be accepted.
"Microsoft is pursuing all three approaches, and spam will soon be a thing of the past," Mr Gates asserted.
I'm going to create several hotmail accounts, send hundreds of e-mails between them, and then reject them as "spam".
Rather than using a three pronged approach using filters, expensive computation and digital stamps to combat spammers, how about a simple tool that has three prongs?
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Are they shutting down hotmail in a couple of years, or what?
No, I wouldn't go back to play my Microsoft X-Box simply because I don't have one, much less more than one which satsifies the requirement for the use of "Boxen." I like the X-Box for it's "other" uses rather than as a game machine. It just feels too . . . Microsofty to be that entertaining.
But, I think Bill Gates has a plan, and whether you like it or not, he's got the clout, the inginuity, the credibility(?), and the money that people will listen.
Go nuts.
From this article:
None of his solutions are very new or stunning. All of these have been subjected to the Hash of Death on Slashdot before. I'd say step one should be to fix all those trojaned boxes acting as spammer proxies. Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Gates?One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
How the heck do you declare victory over something like spam?
And I'm sure we'll continue to laugh at Microsoft.
---------
George W. Bush in 2004!
1) Stop making shit software with Swiss-cheese security, and marketing it to n00bs by telling them it's secure and doesn't need maintenance.
2) ???
3) Profit!
so what linux tool are they planning to rip off already? surely microsfot wont be around in a decade..
Yeah we sure are gonna laugh at how stupid the world was! Can you believe we suffered from VB script worms! we could have fixed that in 5 minutes but no, it took 5 years! Some of us paid good money for software that was about as effective and usefull as a house with no doors! We even used software that told _US_ what _WE_ could do in our own homes!! There were really good, usefull standards that were proposed, they could have saved us so much time and made the computing world so easy, but they were all implemented so badly that there was just no point! every company and their dog thought they could do better by re-inventing the wheel until we had over 30000 of the damn things, all totally incompatable and adding nothing useful!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
You may have some latency issues on your connection to be worked out.
...the digital equivalent to stamps, paid if the receiver considers he is being spammed.
As much as Bill Gates and Microsoft get group-hated there are some good ideas and some possibilities for decent implementation here, such as this. It is the darker side of MS that holds them back; if they could make great software that was fully transparent (I'm sure most of the developers would be happy with this) they would be totally win-win, and Bill Gates seems pretty philantropic as an individual, I wonder what holds them back...
MS is not an average company in the pocket of suits, it is run by an intelligent guy (by far the best programmer, but a very intelligent all-rounder) who has some kind of vision. I see, not too far from now, a bright future with Gates and Torvalds hand-in-hand. [No, my name is not Morpheus].
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
If microsoft managed to find a way to make money off of spammers then "geeks" who don't currently spam now, may start doing so just to mess with them.
Sort of like trying to thwart the microsoft security initiative.
I am not saying it is right, but that it would happen.
However, spam is a problem. It is almost impossible to have a "permanent" address anymore and that sucks.
I would like to hear about solutions that don't involve paying microsoft anything.
--ken
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
"force the sender of an e-mail to pay up when an e-mail was rejected as spam"
That would be a good idea for phone calls from people trying to sell you stuff.
I don't really care if he says it. Many other professionals are saying it as well, I trust them. I could care less how much somebody predicts something, unless they have research to back it up and/or are some kind of spamologist. Bill obviously has no more legitimacy over anyone else. Yet this comes from a big figure and so it *must* be true. I say give credit where credit is due and respect the people who have been fighting against spam, instead of one person with a lot of money. If I had billions of dollars for screwing people over, would that make my opinion count any more than someone else's? No... Wait... corporate america...
...
I mean, I never get junk mail at home in my mailbox - I'm sure I would if the US post delivered for free.
With all that RAM, we'll have no more SPAM!
Longhorn in (maybe) two years...coincidence?
So he'll take some bayesian filtering software, integrate it into the next MS Outbreak or if he's wiser than not, slap it straight into his Virus Exchange Server and the world shall rejoice. Ok, rejoice more than usual at a MS product.
As for laughing at the way we do personal computing, I believe there will be tears shed as well, as people realize they'll need to upgrade their hardware in two years to accomodate whatever behemoth they've unleashed with all these new features. Maybe each OS will ship with a copy of ISA (sans the security vulns, of course) and require at least a Gig of RAM.
Between the firewall, anti-virus, and spam filtering...and their history of bloat and memory leaks, you'll need top-of-the-line hardware to run their next generation OS. A very good way to incorporate DRM, if you ask me.
I've never seen a 3 pronged pitchfork, except in optical illusions, but a 4 prong one is common. However they are mostly good if you are a farmer storming the local castle, and then only because you have one.
For a real multi-prong approach try a fish spear. 4-7 prongs, each very sharp, and designed to hook into flesh and not let go. No simple puncture wounds, once you catch someone with a fish spear they don't come off unless they are dead. (very handy if you plan on eating the target, though personally I can't imanging eating a spammer)
correction: (by far the best programmer, but a very intelligent all-rounder) should read (by far from the best programmer, but a very intelligent all-rounder).
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
He hailed search technology firm Google as a "great company"; its approach reminded him of Microsoft 20 years ago.
I could say something witty right now but, really, there is no point. Bill Gates has done it for me.
~Tirinal
Slashdotters don't play X-box, and the plural of "box" is not "boxen", but "boxes".
not to serve as an inviation for any, but I don't get spam in my primary email address, and maybe just a few in my free web-based email that go to the "bulk folder" ...which is far from what the media and everyone proclaims how bad spam is. If you're haphazardly posting your email address in public forums, websites, contests, etc etc then you probably get spammed a lot. Just be careful who/where you give out your email address, and if you do get any spam, don't load the images (or any HTML content for that matter), and certainly don't click on the "remove from list" link.
$cat
That quote is in context about the first 8088 or 8086 chip. The manufactures we debating how much of the 1MB addressable memory should be allocated for what.
*at the time* 640K should have been enough for anybody so they went with that and dedicated the other 384KB for other things.
And this has been addressed on Slashdot before. But the existance of facts has never stopped anybody from perpetuating myths if they think it proves a point they'd like to make.
The WHOLE story
A whole two second search on Google cleared that up.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
...there must be some hidden agenda here. My theory is that Microsoft patented certain penis enlargement techniques and want to get rid of the competition.
Although, compared to other consoles it is quite powerful, its still fairly weak. It lacks the possibility for upgrades (such as the processor or memory) and by today's standards 800mhz is hardly anything (i think thats what the clock speed is off the top of my head).
Eh? Ps2 uses a 300Mhz CPU, and the Gamecube uses a ~500Mhz CPU. Neither of those platforms have upgradeable RAM or CPUs either.
So tell me again how the hardware is weak compared to the others?
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
So in a couple of years I'll get to spend half my day solving puzzles?
Doesn't sound so bad.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
why pay for M$-mail? it isn't going to be cheap, you know. People are used to send e-mail for free. it must be a killer-app 101% efficient to people start thinking about changing...
Another matter is: how is it going to interact with legacy e-mails. solve a puzzle every time you send a mail is annoying.
i'd rather buy every penis enlargement kit. at least, i won't need a belt anymore.
There's lots of great filtering technologies available out there, and the best ones are non-commercial in nature. Microsoft or Yahoo have not helped my spam situation; but spamprobe, bogofilter, spamassassin, and spambayes definitely have helped me, in very real terms: > 99% accuracy, with (generally) zero false positives depending on the quality of configuration.
Now an appeal to you folks out there who use these filters I've mentioned with similar good results (w.r.t. accuracy): we no longer see spam thanks to our filters. How about taking it one step further? Join the WPBL project and help us centrally collect IP addresses of spammers. It's an automated system to determine real-time spam sources using reliable, trusted data contributors. We are currently tracking over 15,000 IPs.
That is why Microsoft is only PC and Mac compatible.
Who should we be laughing at in a decade?
First I wanted to be a chef. Then I wanted to be Napoleon. My ambitions have continued to grow ever since.
"I see, not too far from now, a bright future with Gates and Torvalds hand-in-hand."
This is a nightmare.... I am sorry.
Reminds me of what Torvalds said about SCO.
Something about "smoking crack".
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
Let me prefix all of this by saying that I'm a GameCube fanboi and have no particular love for the XBox...
Although, compared to other consoles it is quite powerful, its still fairly weak.
When it comes to hardware specs it is not weak. It's marginally better than both the GC and PS2. It lacks the possibility for upgrades (such as the processor or memory) and by today's standards 800mhz is hardly anything (i think thats what the clock speed is off the top of my head).
You make two point here and I'll address them both. As for being upgradable, that's true, and a GOOD thing. By having a locked specification game companines can QA a game on a single system and never have to worry about this driver or that driver for some new piece of hardware causing trouble for them. The second a user can upgrade a game console is the second they become useless to a large majority of the people who own them. Mom and Pop with a 10 year old son to no want to install patches, see blue screens of death (or kernel panics), or any of the other nonsense that comes along a full blown PC. They want an appliance, a black box if you will, that has a hole to put media in and "just works."
As for the processor speed... The GC and PS2 both have processors running at lower speeds. Not that it makes much of an argument for anything as the GC has a PowerPC and the PS2 has an "Emotion Engine." Not sure what that is, but as long as it plays the games it's not really a concern.
Another thing i think is 'less noble' about the xbox, is the fact that most of the important components in the machine aren't even made by microsoft (nvidia i believe).
This is fairly common now and will be the norm in the future. ATI and NVidia invest millions (billions?) into GPU design. Why should MS/Sony/Nintendo do the same when they can buy off the shelf parts that will likely do a better job and pass the savings on to the consumer so they can buy more games?
I don't believe console gaming will catch up to pc gaming any time soon.
I don't believe PC gaming will catch up to console gaming any time soon.
And isn't Windows a big part of today's personal computing?
They sell you a low-quality chainsaw, and once you take your arm off with it, they're right there to try to sell you something to reattach it.
Easily 9/10 of the spam I get is coming from zombied Windows machines sitting on consumer broadband networks. In light of that, I think Microsoft ought to put a little more thought into their initial product, instead of trying to look like our saviors when they think of a second product to try to fix the havoc the first one has wrought.
we certainly will laugh at computing as we know it. Specifically, we will laugh at the fact that people used windows. I see a rosy future for computing- but not for microsoft. It will adopt an open-source model within five years, or it will die.
General Wesley Clark wants to be the President of USA, brands SPAM as terrorism, outlines a plan to use 1% of US military budget (~$4 billion) to combat this disease. In cooperation with military, expert groups and Spamhaus project individuals who send most of the spam are identified, tracked down, prisoned, put to trial and executed. All that with full online video feed coverage. Those spammers that are not USA residents will have mysterious "accidents", breaks malfunctioning, poisonous food etc.
Spammers don't understand that what they are doing is wrong, so just punish them with extreme prejudice - that being death.
Too extreme? Yeah, like you've got a better plan...
Yea right, what are they gonna do, buy out Hormel or something?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
No more:
Troll? I thought it pretty funny myself.
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
Bill gates cures cancer by injecting patients with HIV. Since the program launched no patient has died of cancer.
It's tragic that Gate's inadequate solutions will be taken seriously by the movers and shakers at Davos, who will never hear about the other solutions (and original sources of Microsoft's solutions) to spam, just because Gates is so rich and Microsoft is so powerful. There is no meritocracy in these influences, and so little merit to their policies.
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make install -not war
One, which he called human interaction, would send a puzzle back to the sender. The puzzle would be designed so that only a human could solve it. The e-mail would be accepted only if the puzzle were solved.
Only one possible outcome: spammers will create the first complete AI.
Making it possible to change the CPU, the RAM, etc. will give gamers the same problems the PC's have: the companies will just go and code and not make sure it runs on the most basic system, so you have to change your CPU and stuff to play.
Leave the consoles as they are: unchangeable black boxes. I don't upgrade my Athlon 1GHz because I buy console games. I don't want to worry about console upgrading too.
He did make that statement (I remember the 80s...shudder...), but he's got enough goons employed to rewrite history to an extent...
You make some interesting points. I agree with a lot of what you say, but my comment was focussed more towards the uber gamer like myself. Maybe you can give me a little more credit for that.
Hi there
I don't know who modded this up and what they were smoking, but...
//rant
Trying to say that an 800mhz processor in a console is going to hold it back is totally asinine. So far we've seen just the first generation of games, developers have not yet come close to utilizing all that the xbox has to offer in terms of hardware. This year you'll see the new games that just start to unleash the potential this system has to offer (HALO 2 and Fable among others...).
Now if you wanted to bash the xbox, you mention:
- it weighs about a metric ton
- doesn't fit in my stero rack nicely
- is the loudest piece of equipment i own
- doesn't do progressive scan dvd playback
- last product to market
However, having the fastest processor in a console, and the only integrated hard drive and ethernet card give it great potential and make it somewhat of an innovation. It may be handy to note that the gamecube runs at (?) 400mhz, and the PS2 runs at 200mhz(?), but it has little to do with the quality of the games 3rd party developers can produce.
fact that most of the important components in the machine aren't even made by microsoft (nvidia i believe)
Yea its a real shame they outsourced the gpu to one of the premier graphics chips companies in the world...
oh, i wasn't aware of that. I thought there were soundclips of him saying it in an interview floating around, but I guess those aren't very trustworthy.
Thanks for the URL.
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.htm l
- You have discovered the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP).
- You plan to make money by licensing the FUSSP.
- You don't plan to make a fortune from the FUSSP, but you do expect fame as its generous and public spirited netizen inventor.
- The FUSSP requires that anyone wanting to send mail obtain a certificate that will be checked by all SMTP servers.
- The FUSSP involves certificates, but there is no barrier to spammers buying many independent certificates.
(even more at the link)
Why do these kind of bullshit comment always get moderated up? Does anyone find it "interesting" or "insightful"?
"...stamps, paid if the receiver considers he is being spammed"
What if I accidently type in "joe@yahoo.com" instead of "joel@yahoo.com" and joe decides I am spamming him? Should I be required to pay up becuase of a mistake? Who's going to enforce payment (really)?
I fear that if we make email more difficult to use then it begins to lose its appeal (think instand messaging alternatives).
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
So with this payment at risk system, you basically have to reject all unpaid emails as the receiver to be guaranteed not to receive spam (or much of it). What happens if, as the sender, you don't have a credit card? I used email a lot when I was younger.
That said, this system does seem to be pretty good.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Most times that I've heard the fee mentioned, it's been a fee that's levied on every e-mail, not conditionally. The conditional model is a little more acceptable to me, if implemented nicely. Though I still prefer non-monetary methods.
What would be really nice is if some percentage of the spammer's fee went to the spammee. So, for those spammer's not dissuaded by it, we at least get something in return for having to deal with the junkmail. There would of course need to be a lot of extras to guard against malicious use, but there are a lot of smart people out there that can probably make it work.
Probably the largest problem for such things is who do we trust enough to manage the system in the first place. Run all the transactions through paypal or something? Maybe just get Slashdot to manage it :P
Effective countermeasures to spam include better spam filters (like Popfile, as you mentioned), and ensuring that all routers drop invalid packets: packets with impossible (from a subnet stance) source or destination addresses. The latter will prevent most forged headers.
Micropayments cannot work unless SMTP is redefined. Switching over the installed base (it has to be all-or-nothing, or it doesn't work because you can't have a micropay server talk to one that is not, or the whole scenario breaks down) will be problematic at best.
Yeah, right.
Posts criticizing Slashdot readers very often get moderated up, especially if they mention Microsoft hatred. I wonder if this is an attempt to appear unbiased or just another example of nerd self-loathing.
I'll tell you why this would never work - or actually maybe why it *will*. Because big business can afford a penny per message and little guys can not.
For instance, I run a popular auction site and on your average day my system sends out about 1,500 auction-won notices, 1,500 auction closed notices, 2,000 auction closed without a winner notices, 200 account related notices (new accout, lost password, etc) and about 500 misc emails for other various reasons.
This comes out to almost 6,000 messages per day from my system (which is 100% free by the way). This doesn't even count personal correspondance.
Now there are a few questions. First, I run my own mail server for the auction site. Do I pay myself $60/day to send email? Or do I pay my ISP even though it isn't their server? Or do I pay microsoft for the right to send email from myself through my own server to my own users who are expecting to get these messages?
Problem with those 'stamps' is that they could be abused. Someone makes you mad, you report all their e-mails as spam, even if they aren't
Obviously an ulterior motive...Dead people don't upgrade.
"Brian, what's the plural for ox?" "Oxes...." "Oxen!" "What's the plural for box...?" "Boxen...?"
who said 640k oughta be enough for anybody.
Gamecube runs @ iirc 497mhz, and ps2 runs @ 294 or 296. xbox runs @ 733mhz... just fyi..
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
"Bill Gates AND spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time"
And... Microsoft have an unimaginably large stash of money.
Want to see the limitations of Google? Here's a challenge: OK. I wanted to find out what the stunt woman in Sheena looked like. Just curiosity.
Google, sod all.
Various other search engines returned photographs, agents numbers, phone, beeper numbers etc So for stalk^H^H^H^Hearching ability Google isn't necessarily the best or most comprehensive.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Does this mean you would need to provide a valid credit card number to set up an email account? That's done already if you go through an ISP, but what about all those free, web-based email servers? Or what about people who have set up their own email server on a PC? How would you go about tracking down these people and billing them?
There is one thing we have all learned from the spammers and that is that they are smart. They have just as many smart programmers working for them as we have fighting against them. They know how to avoid detection. Spam and identity theft go hand and hand. So if they were financially responsible, whose to say they wouldn't just fork over a stolen credit card number and have Joe Sixpack pick up the tab?
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
If he wants to compete fairly and on the strengths of his company's work, I say, great.
force the sender of an e-mail to pay up when an e-mail was rejected as spam I mean, if the mail is rejected, and they are charged a penny for each email sent, when we talk about millions of spam emails, thats a good chunk of change. So will Microsoft be getting this money, or will the consumer getting it for all the trouble they have been through. I doubt we will get anything.
If that's innovation, what isn't? ...
What REALLY pisses me off is that the *real*, legitimate penis enlargement comapanies are being painted with this broad brush.
Don't bomb me - the above is a joke.
So far we've seen just the first generation of games, developers have not yet come close to utilizing all that the xbox has to offer in terms of hardware. This year you'll see the new games that just start to unleash the potential this system has to offer (HALO 2 and Fable among others...).
Y'know, people have been saying that for the past two years. I think we're long past the "first generation" of XBox games by now, and if we're not seeing the potential that XBox has to offer, it's because of one of two things...
1) The developers just aren't talented or clever enough to unleash all of this awesome potential
or
2) The potential everyone keeps dreaming of does not, in fact, exist, and XBox fans waiting for that ultimate game just need to come to grips.
Of course, feel free to prove me wrong...
Isn't this the same guy that said "Nobody should need more than 640K", "nothing will come of the Internet", and "what we need is a breakthrough in factoring large primes"? The same guy that though Microsoft Bob and Clippy were neat ideas? The same guy that hired Steve "Developers! Developers!" Ballmer? Just 'cause the guy has $50 billion doesn't make him an expert on predicting the future!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Sender's-option email stamps are an interesting idea, but the last thing I want is to open an account with an MS "stamp" server, which would probably require a Passport account. The last thing I want to see is for Passport to become a de facto standard for login and authentication.
I would rather be charged by my ISP (who would in turn be charged by one of several trusted providers of digital stamps). This way I am not required to give my credit card info to anybody else in order to send emails to friends and contacts.
Of course, it's important for such a system that the recepient be the one to decide whether stamps are required. Mail relays shouldn't block unstamped emails, and ISPs shouldn't block them without the user's explicit consent. Instead, I should be able to set up my mail client and/or mail account to either accept or reject "unstamped" email messasges.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
If it takes some massive computation to generate a key to send an e-mail, spammers will just have their captured zombies do it. All on Windows home machines, of course, where most users won't notice.
For the "legal" spammers (as legalized by the CAN-SPAM act), there's another alternative - unloading the task onto customers. Sharman Networks could make all tke Kazaa clients do it. Legally - read the Kazaa EULA.
Spam will be reduced as part of..., MS will make such improvement that in a decade they wil look back and laff at their own stupidity.
For the last few weekends I have been batteling Windows98 on my system (I will not upgrade/send any more money to MS - nor will I sacrifice my investments in third party software).
What I have found out is that MS doesn't know what the fuck they are doing, they cause tons more bandwidth to be taken up on the internet then they need to and while creating temporary internet files in the hidden content.ie5 directory which they obviously don't need to do given the bandwidth they use up on teh internet.... etc...
and this is only just the tip of the iceburg of the crap I have been becomming aware of in regards to consumer deception by MS....
So yeah... Linux is forcing MS to clean up their act and in such ways that MS will stop generating so damn much bandwidth and resulting contribution to spam while laffing about how damn stupid they made the general users who were stupid enough to believe MS.
In other words: The problems MS talks about solving only exist because they created the problems or greatly helpped to, in teh first place.
NO WAY IN HELL should they be given honorable credit for cleaning their act up.
Instead they should be charged by teh open source community for detoxing them (MS) as well as charged for consumer deception in their intent on making people need them via deception.
No, its "boxen".
One thing that concerns me about the "payment at risk" approach is that people could sign up for mailing lists just so they could collect spam payments. You do enough of these & automat the process. Bam. The good guys get nailed by the scam artists again.
After he teams up with George W. To stop the wepons of mass spaming,"we must stop the evil doers, we will win this the war on spam".
Until it is illegal to send someone email i cant really fathom how you could stop spam? If sending email becomes hard or expensive some bozo will reinvent email and people will flock there instead.
A ban against email while regular IRL spam is allowed is also pretty inconsistent. Maybe if we put some pressure on the companies SENDING the spam we could get some results. Just plain boycott any company that sends spam and the problem will stop pretty fast. Why not start a list with the worst offenders (companies, not the spammers).
Without companies giving the spammers money the problem wouldnt exist.
Cure the illness not the symptoms!
HTTP/1.1 400
Much spam now originates from thousands of infected Windows machines. The CPU cost per email won't deter Distributed spam networks one bit. They have the CPU cycles and bandwidth to spare. When will MSFT address the innate vulnerability in their OS? Granted, automatic and unattended Windows update is a huge step in the right direction, but like a bilge pump, it does nothing to address the leaks in the hull.
The alternative cash (or credit?) cost per email sent requires some sort of central banking authority to track the payments and authorize each sender or piece of email sent. Suddenly email is no longer a loose network of peer servers, it's a MSFT controlled central authority... I'm sure they'd be happy to provide that service for "free" along with your $50 annual Windows license renewal.
Your Windows "client" will undoubtably offer you the option to "Refuse uncertified email?" as an anti-spam solution. Corporations running sendmail or other *nix alternatives will gladly pay the $2500+ annual contract to be able to authenticate with and send email through the MSFT email servers. But small-time non-Windows operations will be forced to abandon *nix based systems for their email gateways or give up using email to communicate with their friends and customers with Windows OS.
This is not a solution and certainly not a smart one, it's MSFT holding their userbase hostage. I for one do not welcome our new OS overlords.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
...not feel entirely confident of the predictions of a man who has not exactly had a stellar record of prescience to date?
Here is a repost of the email on news.admin.net-abuse.sightings.
" >http://www.fdic.gov/idverify/cgi-bin/index.htm</a >
The link text:
<a href="http://www.fdic.gov@202.63.206.88/index.htm
There's no point in a slashdotting/DDoS since the U.S. connectivity provider has already choked off the flow of packets to this server in Pakistan. Pinging 202.63.206.88 times out.
Spam prevention is going to take more than 640K. Which do you want?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That would kill the problem at its source.
More seriously, you could probably remove a good portion of the spam short of this draconian step, but it would probably require:
1. Verification of the return address given in e-mail.
2. E-mail being held on the originator's side until requested by the recipient.
For example, you send an e-mail. The recipient's server then sends a one-time key back to the return address on the email. The originating server then includes this key and a link to the body of the message in the e-mail header and sends it back. The link sits on the recipient's mail server until that person either reads the message by clicking on the link to download it, or deletes the link thus removing the key.
The nice thing about leaving the message on the originating server is that spammers would have to give valid return information, and they have to store the spam on their server until someone requests it. There would be higher up-front bandwidth and data storage costs from the verification process, especially for the more prolific spammers, but it would probably lower the overall bandwidth required since header info is usually much smaller than the message itself, and deleting it prevents the larger message from being transmitted. It would also probably slow the spread of many e-mail viruses (and make them far easier to track), because a really prolific one would fill up the originating server with a bunch of garbage while waiting for a response, and they wouldn't be able to mask the return address by giving a phony one.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
The uses of grid computing are many, varied and have been around for decades.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
You do understand that people have to log-in to slashell to "Not be a coward" according to you.
Fucking Logic..
My idea for reducing spam by at least getting rid of a whole load of joe-jobbing would be to let people announce how to verify emails from them (I've received something like 50,000 bounces as a result of some spammer sending mails from hijacked machines claiming to be from [random-word]@schmerg.com).
I own all email sent from schmerg.com, so I add a (new type of) DNS record of my public key, and then every email that I send I add a header "X-WonderSchemeEncyrptedChecksum" with the value of the SHA-1 checksum of that message's body as sent, encrypted with my corresponding private key.
If your mail system doesn't know about this, nothing changes, but if you DO know about the scheme, then whenever you receive an email you do a DNS lookup on the sender's domain. If that domain has no key listed, then you're none the wiser, but if they DO have a key listed (and here my domain schmerg.com does) then you can safely reject any emails that don't have the new header, or where decrypting the checksum fails to match the body.
This way an organisation can still add their crappy sigs or whatever, and then sign all their email, and spammers will learn not to use that domain in their From address.
Big ISPs and people like HotMail can sign all the email their users send thru their system, and we start to reduce the ability of spammers to have false From addresses. If you want to send email claiming to be from a domain protecting itself in this way, you have to send it thru that domain at some point (or know the private key yourself).
It's nowhere near a complete solution to spam, but it makes life harder for spammers (and phishers and the rest), and it rewards those willing to make the effort without punishing those who don't.
To get round various implementation issues you'd probably want to add multiple keys to your DNS record and then describe which one you were using for each email (so you can rotate keys, or use different keys for different locations, and phase out old keys regularly if you're Hotmail.com or similar), but DNS propagation, caching and lookup is a given on today's internet.
If you can't be bothered checking the identity of the sender you don't have to, but if you want to (and you can afford the DNS lookup and the cycles to checksum the message etc.), then you can.
--
Tim
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
I forecast my cock in your ass within two minutes.
The real and only solution is email sending authorization. If you are going to get your pop mail you must send USER and PASS commands. These need to be part of the SMTP somehow. Then they need to be adopted by ISP's across the GLOBE. Then they need to be required and any email that does not meet this does not get sent. Yes people will have to upgrade email programs, but it is a small price to pay!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Aren't most spammers criminals? In future, if legislation continues as it has recently, won't all spammers be criminals? Therefore, doesn't it make sense that these criminals will find a way to avoid paying the fines?
On the other hand, with an up-front payment scheme, costing say a tenth of one pence per e-mail, that at least removes the option for criminal spammers to simply not pay. Of course they may pay using stolen credit cards or some other form of fraud, but that exposes them to an even greater wrath of the law and may lead to them being stopped a lot sooner than if all they had done was refuse to pay an ISP's e-mail fine.
Don't go after the hard-to-trace far east based spammers, instead go after the people that buy stuff from spam, the people that click the links. They are the ones that keep spammers in buisness. Why send 1,000,000 emails unless a couple of them respond? Make it a felony (5 years for first offence) to buy from a spam, and you're sorted.
SMTP# you silly man.
Infuriate left and right
The I2, Internet2, bigger better and now with less spam...
[blue] - The Ministry of Information approved this message...
Gee, and it only took how long for this to be taken seriously as an idea? How long ago did I read about this idea of recipient determined email "toll" charge? Almost 8 years?
Made sense then. See "Release: 2.0" (since updated to 2.something, I believe) for details.
Nice idea but considering he gives the example that you can filter on the word enlargement shows he doesn't have a clue. Yes Bill thanks for showing us the way. Why haven't we thought of this before.
Laugh at computing as it is now. Oh boy. Since you are the person behind personal computing you are saying that we will laugh at you? Anyway it is old news. Plenty of people already laught. They are the apple or linux or bsd or "anything as long as it not bloody ms" users. Oh well at least he admits that XP is laughable.
The X-box2 is going to be great and take over the market. What like the x-box did? If you are in a three horse race and you finish last (nintendo tied in sales? Check nintendo's real console the GBA in sales. Games for it are full price so they make the same kinda profit on it. More considering the development costs are a whole lot less) then of course you are going to say that the next one is going to be better. It is a famous MS tactic. Don't switch now. Our next one will be really great in fact it will have all the stuff we promised for this one.
Google vs MS. Don't even get me started. Not that I don't think MS can't beat google. Netscape was once the browser. Were are they now? Still it will be a sad day when google goes down the drain. This is the only area that has me worried. All the other is the usual Gates non-sense that makes for a good laugh but google has got an enemy and so far even giants like IBM have been able to win a round against MS.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Sure! And don't forget to fit spam filtering code into 640K of RAM, which is enough for everyone. :)
-- grmbl woz heer
Hey, Mr. ADD, read the post that YOU QUOTED. He never said it is weak compared to the other consoles. By the way there's no such thing as ADD.
Microsoft will end spam in 3 years! They will "investigate" a spam company, use this information to start their own spam initiative and force out all other spam companies. Then they will screw up spam so bad that it will be laughably easy to block for everyone not running Windows and or Outlook.
I have forseen it.
The camram project is very close to releasing 0.2 which will make available a hybrid sender pays system which will work for systems handling a single user through a few hundred users. With this release will also come the information of how to convert any content filtering antispam defense into a hybrid sender-pays system like camram.
As of today, 3 systems support sender-pays using hashcash: gnus, spamassassin, and camram. it's important for more systems to support an open standard for sender-pays. So if you are deeply involved in an antispam content filter, please consider adding hashcash as part of the system.
check out http://www.camram.org http://www.hashcash.org
You still get junk because the companies that sent you that used marketing data to determine that your chances of following up on their ads are reasonable enough to offset the cost of the stamp.
It's 1000 times more reasonable then your chances of following up on spam, that much is certain. It's just costs vs. benefits, as are most economic decisions.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
How about every redhat install up to about 6.0 that had every service running and smtp relaying enabled by default? Don't even get me started with solaris boxes...
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
For mentioning Bill Gates and vision in the same breath, I am dropping the mod bomb. It wipes out your karma and tattoos a "-5 Ballwashing Dunce" on your pale sunken chest.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
'we will laugh at personal computing as we know it.'
I already laugh at windows as we know it...
Mr Gates claimed that Microsoft was better on the 80% of common queries, although Google was "pretty good" as well. "But that's not what counts. It's the remaining 20% that counts... because that's where the quality perception is."
In other words, Microsoft's search engine has 1000+ hand picked high-quality results for 'sex,' and all other queries are essentially handled by a sloppy spider thrown together on a slow day by an underworked summer intern.
I pluged it into my router and opened ports 25 & 110 for it.
Then I added Fetchmail .
And then the neatest thing since sliced bread; TMDA.
4 months now - zero spam, zero lost valid emails.
I didn't have to give up any existing (POP3) accounts, and gained as many as I want to create, because I now have my own email server.
This is easy and cures spam, period.
I'm on DSL, with dynamicly assigned IP, so I use a free DNS service no-ip.com.
This really is simple to do, all were RPM's and I mostly just took whatever default was offered.
I really am New To Nix, so if I could do this, then anyone can.
And it was free.
I am so happy - 40 - 50 spam emails a day, went to ZERO spam. And I still have and use my same email address! Plus some special occasion ones I create as needed (timed experation for usenet, etc.).
And the disclaimer - I have nothing to do with any program mentioned in this post, other then being a happy user of same.
NewToNix (668737)
I don't get it. Gates says he can end spam in three years with an electronic Stamp Act (read your U.S. history). I ended spam a couple of weeks ago by putting "RCVD_IN_SPAMCOP_NET 1" in a Eudora filter. And U of Wisconsin gets messages from 2 or 3 other such networks in case I start losing trust in spamcop.net.
I wish Gates were merely a useless parasite.
Granted, you do get some spam in your snail-mailbox. But basically, it's seems like a given right now that the amount of spam that an email-box is recieving will double every year or two. There's no reason for spammers to not keep spraying more and more shit onto the internet, since it's free. I have a couple spam emails that are very likely from the same spam author (SpamAssassin hits the same thing in them every time) that get sent to me EVERY SINGLE DAY. If companies had to pay for stamps for online messages, they'd simply decide it wasn't worth it to spend that much money on advertising (or they'd at least choose a more effective / less annoying way to blow their money, eg "sign up for a bank account, get a free shotgun!").
By the way there's no such thing as ADD.
It's ignorance like that that gives ADD a bad rap. I have it and have had it for years and I can certainly attest that it does indeed exist. The way I viewed life before and after treatment is night and day. Research things before you come to such a brash generalization.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
it's called M4
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Problem: email is cheap, almost free, so a 0.00001% response rate on spam is still enough to make money.
Solution: make email cost something.
How?
Government? No no no no no. We want full control over our own email. Government should only be used to solve problems that only government can solve, and email doesn't rise to that level.
So, the solution:
A new protocol to replace SMTP. Someone sends you an email, and your server replies with the amount of the micropayment required for the email to go through. Then they can pay or decline. Most people would leve this set to a low amount (five cents sounds good to me), but famous people might set the bar higher to reduce the amount of email they get. The server has a "white list" of people you won't charge for email; this will use digital signatures, not an easily-forged header field.
Your email client has three toolbar buttons: refund the fee for this message and add the sender to the white list, refund the fee for this message, and delete message without refunding the fee.
We would have to run this in parallel with SMTP for a while, but it will be hugely popular. People using this will find no penis enlargement (excuse me, "pen1s en.la.rg.em.en.t") emails in their new inbox, even as their SMTP inbox gets worse and worse with spam. The word-of-mouth on this would be incredible: "I only check my spambox every other day or so, if you want to get in touch with me quickly you will need to use the new email format."
Quick numbers:
Let's assume some wild numbers (I have done no research, I just made these up). Suppose a typical spam run sends out 100,000 pieces of spam, and 30 people are dumb enough to bite (sounds high, but let's assume it) and each of those people sends $30 (hoping to "get bigger now"). That's $900, which is a clear profit if you are simply blasting emails over SMTP. But if the average person charges five cents to receive an email, it would cost 5,000 dollars to send out that spam run, for a net loss of $4,100. This is why spam would no longer work.
Note that you might receive ads in your inbox, but they would be ads where the sender is confident that the ad is worth five cents. If someone sent me a coupon good for $20 off something I actually want to buy, I'd even refund the five cents.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
SPAM-Solution FAQ v.01
Congratulations, you have an EMAIL SPAM Solution.
Now, before you release it to the world, why don't you consider these points:
(c) 2004 by Jesse Meyer ( dasunt [a] hotmail [.] guess ).
Permission to redistribute is freely granted as long as this disclaimer is included.
PS: Feel free to suggest other points, I'll add them to the list.
Why do we give attention to someone as obviously ignorant as Gates? It's embarressing. A quick scan of the more sensible comments here on /. makes it clear his grand vision for stopping spam has more implementation holes in it than Swiss cheese stored in a particle accelerator.
None of his solutions are very new or stunning. All of these have been subjected to the Hash of Death on Slashdot before. I'd say step one should be to fix all those trojaned boxes acting as spammer proxies. Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Gates?
...to a Babylon 5 scene where Londo Mollari is asking pretty much the same question. "Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?" And I'm sure Bill can find a way to reduce SPAM, if that is the only measure of success. But I think I'm with Vir on this one, "Some favors come at too high a price." This is one of them. I don't want Microsoft to fix the problem. Not any way they're likely to solve it.
P.S. If you don't know the B5 storyline, you won't understand this post at all. Then a) go see it and b) read this post again. You won't regret either.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If he plans to fight spam with no more than 640k of RAM.
'we will laugh at personal computing as we know it.' No need to wait, I do it every day."
/. types would be doing manual labor or handling paper files for a living.
I don't find much hilarity in the way we do personal computing these days. Just look at how far we've come in 20 years.
I might as well get used to this ungrateful Generation-W (as I call it, Generation Whine) attitude towards science and computing, regarding the rate of advancement.
Fact is, if it weren't for the efforts of millions, the majority of
When I started in the professional world, computers were already common, but had not fully penetrated my office. We still had a huge file room and was in there several hours a day. It really sucked compared to having everything on a file server, a 20" LCD display, comfy mac keyboard, P4 3gig, and USB lights strategically placed on my desk and monitor, and Aero HM chair.
Anyway, satisfaction is relative. If you are laughing now, you were laughing in the 90's and will continue to think the same in 2015.
What do people here think about RMX as a step in the right direction? Filtering seems to me to be a bizarre solution because you still receive all the crap you don't want before you deal with it.
"I am a die-hard capitalist....but unethical, lying, bastard capitalism is really no better than socialism" - unknown
What you do is you have your script take the splotchy image and show it to some freaking moron who signed up to make $$$$ with their computer and they tell you what it says and your script relays the information back to the service you're requesting from. In fact, why not do the whole thing from the moron's computer? Sure, the moron doesn't get payed a lot for this, but that's OK, because they know the real money comes from building their downline!
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Remember last year, when they had that ditzy bitch write up a reasonably complete wtf of the Davos Forum and emailed it to someone else, only it got leaked to everyone? Do they have anyone doing that this year? Is Cheney still spreading lies that have been thoroughly and repeatedly refuted and is anyone calling him out on it?
[o]_O
There's a difference between truly eradicating SPAM and merely providing a means for some people to buy their way out of it. It's like the difference between making airlines secure and giving some passengers fast-track security passes.
When i first read the subject I was thinking, "Bill Gates' victory over spam? So does this mean MS is the only spammer left now?"
Believe me I did plenty of research on it, and have family members who believe they have ADD and I was on medication for having it. Sorry, take anyone and put them on speed and they're going to perform better or at least with more "attention". But the cost of this is a dulling of the mind and of creativity. In the 1800's they thought that slaves that ran away had a disease called "Drapetomania". After all, if slavery is a natural normal thing, then any slave who runs away must have a disease. Same thing with ADD. Boring work and boring school is natural, so anyone who is bored with it has a disease.
Sure, some people can handle boredom and boring work better than others, but that doesn't mean the people who can't have a medical problem. There is no standard test for ADD, no standard criteria. There is no single indicator that all ADDers have. There's nothing medical about it, it's just a way of pathologizing people who don't like doing boring work.
640,000 spam emails is enough for anyone.
How can Bill Gates/M$ forecast the death of spam, when they can't even predict when their products will be 'secure', much less their product launch dates...
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Linux users forecast victory over Bill Gates.
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
Slashjerk trollbot with nothing original or interesting to say.
They seem to do a pretty effective job of chopping out spam, and they don't require you to submit to Trey's patented (soon if not now) technology and centralised-at-Microsoft you-must-join-Passport "stamps" idea.
When I loaded the story the banner was Microsoft bragging on a "completely rewritten" MS-FrontPage and one of the feature points was XML. No doubt that this is or will soon be XML with quirks in it patented by Microsoft, meaning that in effect they own your websites, every page of them. RTFEULA.
The other thing about stamps is that we don't control their price - and what inevitably happens if stamps are only available through a single provider, let alone one that happens to make 95% of the email clients which potentially use said stamps? The rimshot to that particular joke is that said provider is already a huge convicted monopolist and actively (and generally successfully) working to both extend their monopolies and frustrate any attempt to remedy the situation.
The only thing which seems to slow them down is decentralised distributed-intelligence passive-resistance social phonomena like Open Source.
I don't have an XboX but our local Linux User Group's web pages are served from one, running Linux of course.
I don't have a copy of MS-Windows to my name, and we use no Microsoft software in this house (but can run (e.g.) PhotoShop if we want to, hurrah for the WINE team). This kind of invalidates your main point, which is that "we all depend on Microsoft". You also need to face and eventualy accept that the only reason "we all depend on" Microsoft is because their product tying, bribery, back-room kick-back/extortion deals and other unfair (sometimes criminal) practices have succeeded.
It's important to realise that these practices are not a thing of the past, Microsoft continues to do them. Witness them patenting an MS-Office file format which they sold to everyone as open and portable (and it wasn't portable anyway, since they put binary data within a text file), all of this while they've been directed by a court to open their Ofice formats up as a consequence of being convicted as a corporate criminal.
You don't have to "find" a hundred reasons to whine about Microsoft, that's already been done by Microsoft themselves. What you do have to do to avoid being sad about Microsoft is stick your head in the sand.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"Bill Gates said spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time,"
Bill Gates says allot of things, and he's always right; He knows what's best for us..
"640Kb RAM ought to be enough for everybody" - Bill Gates, 1981.
(searched "bill gates quote 640kb RAM" in google and found several versions of the quote tied with dates ranging from 1977 to 1984.. fyi)
Have the payment go to the reciever, not some central cash sucking thing. Then if I do get spam, at least I'll get the compensation automatically. And you can give authourized people a special, limited time, code/key that they can use to avoid paying you, then friends/businesses you trust, etc, would avoid costs.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
And more specifically, even if a workaround for mailing lists can be created so that they can send legitimately to each of their users, what would stop a spammer from using this same workaround?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The problem comes down to this: Who do you trust?
The thing about the current email system is that it's open - anyone can send email. This is nice for personal communication between users, bad when spammers come along and abuse the system.
The bad thing about your proposal is that the sender has to in some way be "trusted" and traceable. Nobody can "just send messages" - some sort of cryptography has to authenticate them with the mail server. And requiring authentication opens up all sorts of other types of abuse. Not least of which: what if somebody uses your account to send email and you get charged?
The bigger worry for me is that Microsoft might be trying to use Digital Restrictions Management "trusted computing" initiative to anchor spam senders and make them tracable. Which is a big problem because that's going to rely on their proprietary technology. Then you'll need to buy a new copy of Windows XP 2006 - complete with a unique activation code for each and every email address before you can send any email. Then they try to get Linux outlawed because only spammers and terrorists who have something to hide try to use it.
Then there's a question of "who keeps the money?" Writers of the software aren't going to want the users to keep it. Neither are ISPs - I can already imagine the ad copy of the ISPs charging customers more for this: "Spam Free email accounts, only an extra $10 a month."
Microsoft has always been good on promises. The fact is that spam is getting worse and worse. Microsoft at the moment does absolutely nothing about it. I had to let go of my hotmail address because I got so much spam in it that the mailbox would overflow twice a day. I have tried several freemail providers and hotmail is absolutely the worst in every respect, certainly regarding spam.
But Gates flashes a big smile and says Microsoft solves the spam problem! Yes, it will be gone Real Soon Now. Don't worry but trust Microsoft! Have we ever let you down?
She isn't the stuntwoman on last or even (m)any of the episodes of Sheena. A Denise Loden did the last one but the lady I was actually looking for a picture of was Vicki Phillips who did most of the stunt doubling in the series.
Now, if you can find Vicki Phillips page which lists her tv credit list for the Sheena show you'll see how far off Google can lead, but I think you'll have to use something other than Google to find it. She's actually quite an attractive lady under the makeup so you've got a further incentive.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I'm sure she (Gloria Fontenot) was in at least one episode and has lots of links to her page, hence coming at the top of the list but she was not the main stunt double on the show. The person you should have found was "Vicki Phillips".
On you go then. 2nd time lucky.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
There is already a program that does this actually, a little bit of a nuisance, but you can try it out: www.vanquish.com
-ashot
Oh shit, I feel much better now, that I know The Beast is protecting us....
Campaign finance reform is national security.
-What's the plural of "ax"? Axes or Axen?
-What's the plural of "fox"? Foxes or Foxen?
-What's the plural of "tux"? Tuxes or Tuxen?
The biggest problem that they all break the simple model that makes email work. Users can pass an "email address" by any means (inband or out of band) they want, and then they can exchange messages. Any kind of payment system will require a security relationship between the email-exchanging parties. Security realationships are expensive, and tend to scale as O(N^2).
Increasing the cost (CPU or money) would still let "rich" spammers spam, but would shut down mailing lists, and make a big extra barrier for people to freely email each other. (And no, whitelisting the mailing lists won't work -- because the spammers would just forge mail from those mailing lists.) Getting rid of the "poor" spammers would be nice (no more herbal viagra...) but would encorage big companies to spam (and they would claim that this is legitimate.) Consider this, as well: much spam these days is delivered by zombies -- is it really costing the spammer anything if his network of zombies has to do a little more CPU intensive work?
If you require a micropayment with each email, that means you either have an extra step to take with each email (insert smartcard, type pin, or whatever) or your MUA does that for you. The previous is enough difficulty to kick many non-technical users off the 'net. The later would imply that malmalware or a social engineer can steal all your email money.
There are lots of ways to help reduce spam (currenly more than 50% of email is spam.) Filters help a lot, and the ASRG is working on new barriers to spammers. If CAN-SPAM were enforced, it would make a large dent in the amount of spam (and make the rest easier to filter.) I think that has to be the magic bullet for spam, if there is going to be one. Filters and other barriers may slow spammers down, but if there is no penalty for trying, they'll keep coming until they find a way to circumvent the filters, the payment schemes, etc. The magic bullet canot be filtering alone -- I'm pretty sure that well-written spam would require a turing test to distinguish from ordinary email.
Halo 2 is going to be The Ultimate Game (TM).
I used to live in a frat house full of jocks, and video games / consoles were soley for the purpose of playing Madden 200X. On a whim I brought back Halo after reading all the good reviews..For the next 48 hours a crowd of about 12 different people played through the game, and a week later 16 player capture the flag was The Thing to Do.
While nothing was truly revoultinary for geek culture here, Halo did manage to infiltrate it's self as a cool game to play, just like madden.
I predict Halo will be the game that gets everyone to sign up for Live, and launch xbox as a solid #2 console behind PS2.
I'm not really saying anything new here, but Halo 2 will be awesome...
Sorry, almost forgot...
The money Bill donates mostly comes back to him through his own pharma companies (which have a headlock on the AIDS vaccine in question) leaving him with cheap publicity - and if other groups are chipping in dollar-for-dollar or somesuch he might actually take out more than he puts in, too.
Meanwhile, his strong support for TRIPS legislation has prevented at least one other country from making and shipping cheap and effective AIDS vaccine to Africa. This not only multiplies the cost but also delays the introduction of a cure (and, BTW, condoms won't have a serious impact on the AIDS problem(s)).
So yes, since though his profit-maximising actions thousands of people continue to die every day (roughly one Detroit or one Sydney per year - that we account for) through the same taint of greed which has ploughed up the software industry, buggered many IT standards and seen virus writing become a popular sport for the last twenty or so years, I'd feel somewhat obliged to "wine and cry" about it.
Come out and post, Coward! I'll shred your arguments and invade your browser, you... you... Internet Exploder user. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
filters, expensive computation for e-mail and the digital equivalent to stamps, paid if the receiver considers he is being spammed
Uhm, I like this. So even if Gates himself writes the spec I would stongly encourage every MTA developer to implement these ideas even if it means loosing market share to Exchange. We need this.
In another story on the issue, Gates plans an end to spam in two years, is an interesting sentence:
Maybe I missed this earlier, maybe not. This is the first I heard about it.
The GNU foundation could score big points for "Freedom" if they beat him to the punch - I should think theye'd want to at least do some proof of concept thing so they can claim prior art when the patent claims for MSMPT start forcing people to re-migrate...
email a bunch of non-existant accounts(possibly on microsoft's network). when the MAILER-DEAMON (or whatever it is called these-days) sends messages back to you saying basically 'i can't find this domain' mark THOSE as spam. after all, these messages are from microsoft. and voila! send enough of these messages, through enough free hotmail accounts and you could screw microsoft out of a few thousand stamps at least before they figure out what is going on.
summarry
1. Send mail to non existant name in microsoft.com
2. Recieve MAILER-DEAMON messages in response
3. moderate MAILER-DEAMON as SPAM
4. microsoft, being the sender, and you being the recipient of spam, sends you money.
5. Profit!
6. less capital power for microsoft(better than profit!)
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
This is something that Microsoft has asserted a commitment to on at least a yearly basis, for at least the last two years.
Unfortunately, it is also something that Microsoft appears unlikely to deliver any time soon - even two years from now.
"We believe that OS/2 is the platform for the 90's" - Bill Gates.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
----- Liberals are someone who will give you the shirt off SOMEBODY ELSE'S back.
:)
And idiots are someone who wouldn't know grammar if it sat on them!
What a rotten party, have we run out of beer or something?
Seeing as how Bill Gates is notorious for predicting things which don't come true, I think I'm going to have to learn to live with spam....
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
by introducing its all-new Secure Proprietary Advanced Mail protocol. Oh, wait...
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Did Bill means his team is going to *invent* Baysian spam filtering? I am used to this in Mozilla for a long time.
http://www.ieaa.org/~adrian/
This seems exceedingly stupid, even for Microsoft. I'm surprised no one has brought up these two important points here:
1) A hash cash scheme (paying cycles for e-mail) doesn't stop any spammers. They don't spam directly, they use any of the plenty unpatched drones, open proxies or open relays out there.
2) A hash cash scheme kills all legitimate mailing lists dead on the spot. So then what? Back to Usenet? That'll get rid of spam forever!!
Yeah, right.
What about us that have a solution that works? I use a ISP provided POP address with no filters, never sign up for anything free with my personal e-mail address, and never get a single spam message. Why the heck should I be made to suffer for other people's stupidity? I don't want the hassle of entering a code or computation, nor do I want to risk being charged for an e-mail, even if it was only five cents. It's ludicrous. I'm all for giving people options, but don't ruin e-mail for those of us who don't suffer from spam.
We are going to get rid of spam in 2 years by replacing it with something much much worse. I'm so anxious for whatever comes after spam I'm wetting myself. As long as there are things to sell, there is going to be ads. Sad sad world. -A in Chi
The problem with your idea, and Yahoo's Domainkeys, are as follows:
I think a far better better proposal for what you want to do is Sender Permitted From (SPF). It has been mentioned quite a few times on /. and elsewhere.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
no government decisions on what is or isn't spam, and
individual accountability (and sense of satisfaction!).
I've previously advocated this idea here, but was informed that SMTP isn't able to handle it. True, but...the alternatives are pretty much write a new transfer protocol, or else wait for the government to step in with heavy hand. I prefer the former.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Bill's statements are all marketing. Suggesting more intelligent filtering and micropayments sounds cool and future-proof, but as solutions they're complex, error-prone, and likely to introduce more problems than they solve.
FILTERING just doesn't work as spammers just make their emails look like legitimate email. It's easy to see that happening already. Besides it only works on text, which spammers realized and started using images that contained the message. Are we going to have OCR in anti-spam software too? Content filtering is a losing battle.
Spam mails now also often include legitimate words that will train your spam software to block real messages. Since you constantly live in fear that the spam blocking software blocked real messages, you still have to check your spam inbox, somewhat beating the purpose of the software in the first place. It's never a 100% solution.
MICROPAYMENTS and EXPENSIVE COMPUTATION are basically ways of assigning cost to the sender. We've strived hard to reduce the cost of communication, and now we're seeking to add it back? I can see a ton of problems in getting the right amount of computation/dollar cost assigned to sendouts. The world is too diverse. It's also a needlessly complex, and will hit legitimate mass-email services.
What's needed is improved RBL (realtime blackhole lists). RBLs are great because they assign responsibility where it belongs: with the badly managed servers.
Machines that have been hacked can be used for other illegitimate uses besides spam, e.g., distributed denial of service attacks, and so there should be a system for recording and dealing with these machines in any case. So, it's a problem worth solving by itself, and even better that by solving it we can also solve the spam problem!
Current RBLs failed when spammers increased the number of machines they could use to send spam dramatically because, I guess, their hacking software got more effective, they got better software to utilize machines that are distributed, and there were more poorly managed machines on the net.
RBLs countered by starting to block entire net segments, also victimizing many legitimate servers (I'm living in China, which means any of our servers is blocked by 4-6 RBLs without means to get off the lists).
RBLs that played nice and blocked only machines that were known to be spammers, were suffering from a lack of funding, not enough people reporting spams to them, and were thus unable to keep up with the big increase in spamming sources.
We need fewer and better RBLs so that:
To help track down spammers, though, ISPs also need to prevent source spoofing. This is something they should be doing anyways. If this is seen as a good way to solve spam, an anti-spam initiative would also include increasing awarness among ISPs about this problem.
I don't use Evolution, but I'm glad someone wrote it. Now gazillions of Outlook users have a platform which can look and feel very much like what they "drive" now, but fundamentally different internally, and from a manufacturer who puts less draconian conditions on the use of their product. And random street kids can't reprogram a remote control to stop or blow up your car as you pass. (-:
One of the problems I have with just cloning existing apps, as well as limiting your horizons plus all of the (IMESHO) silly look-and-feel, branding and "intellectual property" (the term makes me think of racks and racks of brains with price tags) risks, is very similar to your beef, and can be exemplified by car engines.
If you lift the engine out of a modern Toyota Corolla (I'm sure there are corresponding car models all over the world) there are still vestiges of the engines they started with nearly thirty years ago. They're not so obvious up front, but if you took a 1975 Corolla motor (I think it was called something like a "2Y" motor), and a 1978 Corolla motor, and compared them side by side, you'd be hard pressed to pick many differences once you'd torn the embryonic emission gear off. However, inside the motor the pistons are a slightly different shape (the newer motor has longer travel and lighter pistons), the little push-rods that drive the cams are a different length, and because the piston skirts are a different shape they had to redesign a lot of the stuff around the crankshaft just a little bit and everything is very slightly different and almost totally incompatible. The situation is the same between that model and the next, and so on.
There is no way you can take a 1988 Corolla piston and hope to repair a 1975 Corolla motor with it. But this need not have been so. If Toyota had sighted along the lines of progress before 1975, they could have kept most of the parts compatible through to at least 1988. You could take a 1988 Corolla piston, bolt (well, pin and circlip) it into a 1975 Corolla motor, maybe drill out the counterweight on the camshaft a bit to cater for the lighter piston, and crank 'er up.
With modern and particularly Open Source software, this is much less true. You can quite often recompile a 2000 GUI application to take advantage of a 2004 HTML widget with very little hammering and sawing, and if your ancient non-network-aware app happened to be using the right library, recompiling it against newer libraries would automatically gain the ability to fetch from and dump to URLs instead of boring old local files.
This is valuable from your perspective, because it allows you to "replace the number-plate separator", albeit a chunk at a time, but risky from your perspective because doing it a chunk at a time instead of en-bloc might limit the scope of changes you can make.
I still contend that the minimum-disruption approach is extremely valuable, even if some of the chunks have to be redone several times in order to get the revolution you seek, because you carry your userbase along with you. Many developers regard a userbase as a support problem, but they're also a valuable testing resource and unless you're writing an app purely for your own pleasure you will be playing to an audience of some kind anyway.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There aint nothing wrong with that sentence grammatically, you fucktard.
does this mean when i send an email my pc is going to grind to a halt for 10 seconds?
no thanks...
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Is that every one of Bill's solutions have been done FIRST in the Open Source community. The BBC mentioned two concepts that I remember:
1: Filters (Since when does Outlook or OE have Bayesian filtering capabilities?)
2: Causing spammers to pay a certain price. This is also being done for example, by requiring every subsequent attempt to send an email to a non-existant address forceing a cumulative delay in responding to the next attempt from the same host (this has been discussed on the Qmail lists quite a bit).
MS EXchange, IIRC, doesn't even check to see if there is an MX record for the originating domain! Sendmail even does that. How many hotmail messages do we get from xdtty@weftre.wdt (obviously nonexistant domains). Obviously Hotmail doesn't check either (when I pointed this out to them, I also pointed out that Sendmail DOES check these things)
Bill should mean "We want to be the first proprietary vendor to copy the methods of the Open Source solutions to the Spam Problem." It would have been more accurate.
Note that the above solutions are SMTP compatible and require no protocol extensions. They would have the effect of rendering SPAM less effective, and harvesting email addresses more costly.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Slashbots are drooling idiots. They bitch about microsoft then spend all their free time trying to get Linux to boot on their brand new X-Box.
"Lots of mail you get is from people on your contact list. So what's the problem? Strangers!"
Sounds like Mr Rogers.
"Filters could do a lot to sort spam from real mail, Mr Gates said: "Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' - that might be spam."
Hello, did Mr Gates just come out of the cryofreeze? He's just now learning about spam filters?
"Microsoft is pursuing all three approaches, and spam will soon be a thing of the past," Mr Gates asserted."
Yeah. Ahuh. You bet, Mr Innovator.
---
SCO is weenies
Gator is Spyware
Microsoft is thugs
"640K 'ought to be enough for anyone."
me first
I haven't seen this idea thrown around here that I remember. I think that most of us will agree on the following points:
A) Spammers are too poor to afford the large network of computers needed to send their trash fast enough.
B) Because of this, they steal resources in the form of "zombie networks"
C) The "zombie networks" are composed of unpatched Windows computers that were 0wn3d 5 minutes after they were connected to the internet.
I think you can see that the weak point is the zombie network, without which spammers are left unable to pollute the internet with enough of thier trash to generate money. No zombies, No spam.
So, now we need to think of something that can replicate itself through a vast network of vunerable hosts before spammers can respond. A virus.
Fight fire with fire! Write a "virus" that will use one of the dizzying array of Windows remote security holes to install itself, and then (instead of doing something malicious) either
1) Inform the Luser to "Please get and run an up-to-date virus checker.", "Please have one of your tech-savvy friends examine your computer.", etc.
2) Automatically download, install, and run a variety of anti -spyware, -adware, -spamware applications.
The former assumes users with mental abilities excedding those of a cabbage (Eh...), the latter would be a bit more involved to implement.
However, this would effectively kick the spammer's feet out from under them by removing one of the means to spam effectively, no? It's not as if any of these bastards could actually afford to replace a zombie network with a server farm. And since they'd pretty much be forced to put it on THEIR internet connection, it'd be trivial to block (As opposed to hundreds, if not thousands of machines on hundreds, if not thousands of different IP blocks).
The obvious drawbacks are that the courts are unlikely to recognise white hat vs black hat hacking if the writer(s) get caught, and that the virus itself (regardless of the fact that it is NOT malicious) would probably not recieve a very warm welcoming. This can't be a silver bullet; nothing will be. Not all spammers rely on zombie networks. But I do think it could make a measureable dent in the amount of spam that clogs our inboxes. It will hopefully be one of the thousand paper cuts that bleed spammers to death. And if nothing else, it would eliminate a great deal of malware!
Who will get the money I pay when one of my mails is rejected? I think this is a rather important question.
So it will be OK for people to send spam as long as Microsoft (or whoever I didn't RTFA) gets their share of the profit from the stamps.
---
imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie...
Gates is doing what he's tremendously good at: Rehashing old stuff 5-10 years after it's been invented by someone else, talk about it in a way that journalists understand, and end up in their articles as a visionary.
I don't yet know whether abusing spam as an opportunity to force your own proprietary SMTP replacement on everyone pisses me off even more, or not.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Well, I never get snail mail at home in my mailbox - I am sure if using e-mail would be as difficult, expensive and time consuming as using snail mail, I would not receive much legitimate e-mail either...
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The Basic programmer and Chief Architect of the Convicted Monopoly is completely out of his depth where anything to do with networks is concerned, and his company has a solid track record to prove it.
If spam is beaten it will be by a combination of puntive legislation, and the isolation from the internet of all countries which do not comply.
As to catching Google, he will have to offer a better and unbiased service. If he runs it on IIS it will go the way of Hotmail, and I doubt that he is psychologicaolly capable of using BSD.
I last needed to upgrade SpamAssassin due to Microsoft.
- >A<--!a jsfgjs!-> G<--!ajsfgjs!->R<--!ajsfgjs!->A<--!ajsfgjs!-> ;.
It seems IE will handle broken HTML comments. Something like
<--! foo !->
(or something similarly incorrect).
Since so many people use mailers that hook the IE renderer, spammers started sending mail about
<--!ajsfgjs!->V<--!ajsfgjs!->I<--!ajsfgjs!
SpamAssasin didn't anticipate this and so I got a mailbox full of illegible spam. Yay, Microsoft.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You'll notice my web site is listed, that has my email in plain text. I haven't made any real attempt to hide my email since I got it in 1992. (smanley@nyx.net)
This puts me an interesting spot: I get about 1300-2000 spam mails per week that spam assasin has no problems with. When viruses are running amok, this can get up to 1000 messages/day. I never see these. Of that, there are approximately 200 mails per week that my low threshold doesn't pick up. These get downloaded into my OSX mail program; It gets almost all of these, with maybe 2-3 per week getting through with a 1 message/mo or thereabouts false positive, largely due to mistakes I may have made in training.
Bandwith issues aside, I'd say the problem has largely already been beaten if I can use this email reliably still. Perhaps it has been overblown - I don't think that the bandwidth issue is trivial though as you could say it amounts to theft.
Gates isn't exactly making earthshattering news.
..don't panic
.... you just don't see it.
You paid for it and come here to proudly show to us the miserable failure that filtering is.
Filtering is not the solution, it is a stop gap measure at best.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
a) Look at innovations done by others
b) Wait some to time to gather enough topics
c) Start predicting the future by reading the past
We have researched this concept from the perpective of the economics of information, and the results might be of interest to the readers of this thread. Our work was recently described Jan 15th in the WSJ, and was presented at the MIT spam conference on the 16th of Jan. Results are publically available on SSRN (Social Science Research Network).
We really think that this is the right way to do it; it restores control to the individual recipient, halts spam, and creates a market for information exchange. (We'd advocate using an open standard and multiple competitive bond underwriters).
I guess that makes me the silly man ...
Infuriate left and right
Fscking big surprise. Have to upgrade to outlook 2003 for such commonplace improvements (by todays standards). Not to mention what other enhancements (read lock-ins), baggage (read: other required product upgrades), and bullshit that come with it. Given their DLL bullshit architecture, you'de think they could just post a feature update. Maybe people wouldn't think so lowly of them if they had a slightly different business model. "It wasn't totally broken, we just added features to make it work right - that'll be 129.99 please" --- NO THANK YOU! :)
Go MOZILLA