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.)

Comments

A bit hypocritical

[bangular]

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...

catch up with google?

[jeffskyrunner]

He expects to catch up with google? this looks more like a huge wish then a prediction

Re:catch up with google?

[Erratio]

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.

Re:catch up with google?

[mingot]

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).

no more spam?

[rivaldufus]

Are they shutting down hotmail in a couple of years, or what?

Not filters

[AndroidCat]

In the "filters, expensive computation for e-mail and the digital equivalent to stamps" bit, his first solution is actually a puzzle/challenge-response system rather than filters.

From this article:

One, which he called human interaction, would send a puzzle back to the sender. The puzzle would be designed so that only a human could solve it. The e-mail would be accepted only if the puzzle were solved.

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?

surely charging for email delivery will stop spam

[rivaldufus]

I mean, I never get junk mail at home in my mailbox - I'm sure I would if the US post delivered for free.

Re:Bill Gates forecasts victory over spam...

[aTMsA]

Bill Gates will find that that approach is infeasible even for him.

E-Mail has an enormous and heterogeneous install base, and while outlook has a strong grip on the client market, that's not the only place where it counts. There are a lot of servers which use non-microsoft software, and making even a sizable majority of them swap will be a daunting task.

That said, for one time i hope Bill is right.

Lots of filtering available for UNIX

[bigberk]

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.

Re:Bill Gates forecasts victory over spam...

[commander salamander]

"nice elegant Sendmail"?? The same one whose configuation syntax is only slightly distinguishable from line noise?

I want some of what you're smoking.

Re:Bill Gates forecasts victory over spam...

[kinsoa]

> ...by requiring all emails to use Microsoft's proprietary, heavily patented, closed-source "SMTP++" technology,

I've heard the name will be "VisualSMTP.NET".

Re:Out of the mouths of billionaires

[ottffssent]

Well, for starters, ol' Bill owns patents and copyrights and the source code to a lot of the world's most frequently-compromised software, and doesn't have a sterling history in the patching department himself. So not only is Microsoft enormously contributing to the problem, it's deliberately standing in the way of solutions.