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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.
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
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?
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.