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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.
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...
He expects to catch up with google? this looks more like a huge wish then a prediction
Jeff
... 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?
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...
...
I mean, I never get junk mail at home in my mailbox - I'm sure I would if the US post delivered for free.
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.
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...
"...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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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?
SMTP# you silly man.
Infuriate left and right
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.
640,000 spam emails is enough for anyone.
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?
"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
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/
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