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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 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.
"...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?
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.
SMTP# you silly man.
Infuriate left and right
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
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.
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