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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.)
...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
So kindly get out of the way, and let the rest of us fix it.
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...
... 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".
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.
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...
...
More like a huge waste of resources. Rather than working with the great ideas that Google has rather worked out (like most IT companies) and maybe actually contributing something to the future of computers, they'll come up with their own proprietary clone with their own quirks and features and then try to compete with Google, and the cycle will continue with whatever new innovations are released. His statement about Google shows that Microsoft is really just out to compete with the world. Competition is of course a good thing, but that's with new things, not reinventing the wheel just so you can say your's is rounder.
I don't try to be right, I just try to make people think
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.
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.
No more:
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...
So all of the OSS projects that are attempting to replicate microsoft functionality should just pack it in and fold?
You know building a better mousetrap starts with the basics and if another company or project has the basics down pat you pretty much have to re-invent that wheel before you can innovate. It's why being able to read MS file formats has always been pretty high on the list of features that have to be working for all of the MS Office knock-offs (until they get the basics down pat and begin to really innovate).
"...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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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!").
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 $20 off something I actually want to buy, I'd even refund the five cents.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
SPAM-Solution FAQ v.01
Congratulations, you have an EMAIL SPAM Solution.
Now, before you release it to the world, why don't you consider these points:
(c) 2004 by Jesse Meyer ( dasunt [a] hotmail [.] guess ).
Permission to redistribute is freely granted as long as this disclaimer is included.
PS: Feel free to suggest other points, I'll add them to the list.
How can Bill Gates/M$ 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.