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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.)
For example, if you sent an e-mail, you'd be hit back with some alphanumeric code to put into a box in order to verify the ongoing mail.
It would work in theory, until the criminal spammers figure out how to read the incoming code and enter it automatically. I have a feeling that it works on Geocities because, short of link farms, there's little virtue in signing up for a hundred Geocities accounts. But if a code blocks the way between the spammers and the people they harass, they'll no doubt dedicate their efforts towards breaking it.
For reasons like this, Gates is right to assume that a "puzzle" alone would not be the sole solution. We'd still need intelligent spam filtering on the client end that learns to classify spam by example. We would also need significant and prompt fixes to any exploits in the dominant operating system so as to prevent this new wave of Sobig virus-spam hybrids from proliferating any more than they already have.
It is also mandatory for that above reason that we diversify how we use the Internet, e-mail, and the computer in general. This need not necessarily mean "switch from Windows to Linux." It could be as basic as "use Mozilla instead of IE." By introducing variety, it becomes more difficult for spammers to lock onto a single exploitation.
It is unfortunate that our "representatives" in the federal government, instead of fighting spam, have instead gone out and legalized it. The fight against it is something we have to do ourselves because we clearly cannot rely on the government to institute any meaningful legislation.
camram project has successfully used hashcash for stamp generation and message acceptance. We find that about 15 to 20 seconds computation is about the right amount to seriously bankrupt spammers. (paper on this coming soon)
zombies are a problem but the nice thing about proof of work puzzles such as hashcash is that they make the zombie machines get hot which is noticeable by normal users. They also run real slow. Again something to draw the users attention to a problem. in any case, the numbers are real close. There's still more spam than the number stamps generated by the number of known zombies. Since the upper bound for spam is set by the number of zombies, this is a serious incentive to kill zombies.
Mailing lists are problematic but if one uses a second type of stamp based on signatures, then the problem goes away. In the meantime, using hybrid system, you do not require anything special of mailing lists and you are no worse off than you are with typical content filters.
www.camram.org