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.)
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.
Damn straight. I use Mail.app on my Macs. After a few weeks of training, these days I essentially receive no spam. About one message every two weeks will get through. Usually when that happens it reminds me to empty the 700 spam messages out of my junk folder. A quick scan assures me that, once again, no false positives.
For Mac users, spam is already a thing of the past.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
That's an interesting comment, but at the risk of getting modded down, I have to ask:
In what ways do Bill and/or Microsoft impede yours (or anyone's) ability to improve software?
I'm not trolling here, I'm seriously cusious. Thanks in advance for your reply.
everything in moderation
I applaud any effort that will reduce spam and send the spammers to jail. Perhaps some day, we can have spam-free email again like in the good old days...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
And I don't think micropayments will stop spam - wouldn't the spammers just use servers that didn't require that?
It's your server at mailinator.that counts. It can refuse to accept email except from people (or other mail servers) who pay.
And would email be as useful if you could only get mail from someone who bought into a particular micropayment system?
The payments Microsoft is proposing aren't necessarily monetary. Sometimes it can be a hard computational problem, which takes you a few seconds to compute. Spam depends on the very low cost of email. If you have to buy 10 computers to send your spam, instead of just one, it's suddenly far less profitable. Whereas you yourself can easily afford a few seconds added to each of the few dozen emails you send each day, since almost every personal computer has free cycles.
Of course, that depends on spammers to use their own computers. If they're using yours, a problem which plagues Microsoft-based computers, you're still stuck.
I don't think that would bother most people. By "most people" I don't of course mean "most slashdotters." I mean all those who are already locked into Windows and don't mind, to whom the vast majority of spam is directed, and which most likely contains all the people who are actually dumb enough to respond to spam. Make spam infeasible for that group of people, and you make spam infeasible full stop.
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