Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Would you Warranty Your Email?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the depends-on-what-that-needs dept.

Kurt writes "A team from the University of Michigan is proposing an economic solution to spam. Instead of relying on technical solutions or government regulations, they use a sender warranty system. In some cases, they argue, it can even be superior to a perfect filter with zero cost, and no errors. Their working paper is available at SSRN. With the caveat that some infrastructure is necessary (isn't it always?), they also claim their approach restores control to the recipient, halts spam, and creates a marketplace for valuable information exchange."

14 of 395 comments (clear)

  1. Would you Warranty Your Slashdot Posts? by inertia187 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder how well this would work if everyone on Slashdot could warranty their posts. It could be implemented by adding a checkbox next to Post Anonymously, call it Post With Warranty. Your comment then gets bumped up to "+5, via Warranty." If people think it's not worthy of being +5, and they have mod points, they can moderate it down. If they mod it down, they take subscription points from the poster. If the metamoderator disagrees, the moderation is reversed as expected *and* the subscription points are returned to the poster.

    I think this could work. But it sounds like a pain to implement.

    (fp)

    --
    A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
    1. Re:Would you Warranty Your Slashdot Posts? by FileNotFound · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You would need to record the moderator and make him visible in such a case.

      This way any mod bombing would be obvious. Since you are taking a direct financial loss due to poor moderation, you need to know 'who' is causing it.

      Kinda like you can't sue people anonymously.

      --
      In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
    2. Re:Would you Warranty Your Slashdot Posts? by Josuah · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The problem is, there are a TON of moderators that will go and mod-bomb people because they don't like them, regardless of how well-reasoned their post is. Posts are supposed to be moderated, not individuals, but that's not how a lot of people do it.

      Then does starting at +5 and going down really make a difference from starting at +1 and going down, in that respect?

      Two problems I can think of: reading at +5-only becomes just as bad as reading at -1 until enough moderators run through the _entire_ thread culling out the stupid. The penalty for "voiding your warranty" (as proposed by the parent-parent) isn't worse than getting modded down regularly.

      Possible solutions? Warranty puts you up to +X where X is a preference setting. Maybe the default threshold you read at. People who have liked what you said in the past will see you at +X+1 (friend/foe system). The first mod-down removes the warranty completely and pushes the post to +Y where Y is what the poster would have posted at without warranty.

    3. Re:Would you Warranty Your Slashdot Posts? by milkman_matt · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think something you could add to this plan to fight abuse is -- If someone mods it down, they guarantee that that's what they want to do by agreeing that if the moderation is reversed, it takes THEIR subscription points to repay the person who's points were originally taken?

      -matt

  2. Could somebody please sum this up??? by serutan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    These guys must be going for their Advanced Circumlocution degree. After the usual introductory review of existing solutions that don't work, they dive directly into graphs proving how their system will increase everyone's well-being. I gave up halfway through. Could somebody briefly sum up the mechanics of their solution -- what exactly are they proposing that the sender and receiver (and the third party) do? Maybe it was so obvious that I just missed it.

  3. A Simple Solution to the spam epidemic? by norite · · Score: 5, Interesting
    100% of the spam I get comes from America - Maybe over there they should simply legislate against the sending of unsolicited commercial emails, like they have here in Europe.

    Then people who get this nonsense in their inboxes can get together and take the companies who use spammers (and the spammers themselves) to market their junk to court. Once the companies who use this service start getting served with class action court orders to stop or else, they should soon get the message.

    Of course, there's nothing to stop the spammers moving/subcontracting to e.g. India or some other place where sending unsolicited emails isn't illegal, but it's a start. Ultimately we can hopefully have a worldwide ban against the sending of unsolicited commercial emails.

    --
    -- Fuck Beta
  4. Get The Geeks Out Of It by Effugas · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm a geek. I'm a security engineer. I'm here to say -- the solution is not in the packets, but the dollars.

    Spammers have gotten to the point where they're breaking into people's machines to get them to illicitly send spam. Look at that carefully -- you can't even trust your friends not to spam you anymore. If you don't think Spyware is going to adapt to a spam transport, you're not paying attention. Ultimately, we need criminal prosecution for fraud that follows the money (because money transfers are really well traced). The money link needs to be broken.

    Nothing else has even a hope of working.

    --Dan

  5. Shorter List by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is there anyone who ISN'T proposing an economic solution to spam or email? Every day it seems like someone is proposing it and making it sound as though they are the first ones who are making the suggestion. Everyone making a proposal would a long, long way to show why all of the competing methodologies will fail or be compromised and why theirs will succeed (or have a greater chance of succeeding).

    Let us not forget what William Henry Gates III said [1], "I don't care what the information superhighway looks like as long as I've got a tollbooth on it." Everyone is making suggestions to charge for email not because the ideas are technically superior but because they want to be the tollbooth collecting a microcent for every piece of email running across the 'net. Unless|until there are certain issues taken care of online, micropostage will not solve the spam problem although it may still drop money in someone's open pocket (and they will likely not care about spam once that happens).

    [1]ca. 1995-96 just after he returned from his annual sojourn and realized Microsoft almost missed the Internet boat.

  6. "Children should be seen and not heard." by iota · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't think that free speech requires anonimity ... Basically, you add accountability.

    Which would lead to --
    "Children should be seen and not heard." (Because they cannot be held accountable for what they say.)
    "The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down." (Because you can't voice dissent without drawing attention to yourself and your family.)

    Effective free speech requires anonymity -- There's usually needed a period of underground "pot-stirring" in order to add momentum to a movement.
    For example: Let's say your boss regularly beats the shit out of you when you walk in the door in the morning. But it's your first job, so you don't know if it's normal or not. But your family depends on your income. You could post anonymously on some forum asking "Hey everyone! Do your bosses kick your asses in the morning like mine?" / or sign your name and likely get a bigger ass whopping along with being fired.

  7. expose the mod-bombers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The problem is, there are a TON of moderators that will go and mod-bomb people because they don't like them, regardless of how well-reasoned their post is

    Who are these mod-bombers? I mean, what does it take to earn the wrath of people on Slashdot? Who takes Slashdot that personally?

    Myself, if I've got mod points, I mod up when I find value to the post, I mod down if I feel it's overrated, and very rarely I'll mod down for other reasons.

    How do these mod-bombers get mod points? doesn't the meta moderation system let you put the screws to these mod-bombers? Can't we moderate their own posts down, so that the system deems them unworthy of mod points?

  8. Don't speak ill of moderators... by gosand · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The problem is, there are a TON of moderators that will go and mod-bomb people because they don't like them, regardless of how well-reasoned their post is. Posts are supposed to be moderated, not individuals, but that's not how a lot of people do it.

    And yet, there are moderators who will mod down anything that goes against the "geek norm", regardless of content. On some recent thread about movies, I posted what I thought were reasons why LOTR-ROTK was just a good movie and not fantastic. I was modded as a troll faster than you can download a picture of Natalie Portman. See for yourself Now granted, I didn't go on in great length about my points, but I still think that if you can let go of the fanboy fanaticism and look at it honestly, what I said holds. I was by no means trolling.

    The problem with moderators is that meta-moderating is just a little-too-late. And even if it did work well, it wouldn't be able to stop biased moderating. Or it would plunge it into the void of predictable moderating. Or are we already there? There is a mod of "Troll", but not of "Karma Whore".

    --

    My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.

    1. Re:Don't speak ill of moderators... by Vellmont · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I've noticed the same thing. If you attack peoples cherished beliefs (LOTR is the greatest movie EVAR!, Macintosh is Sup3r k00l) people will hate you.

      Personally I think there should be a special "controversial" tag to a post. It doesn't give points one way or another, but identifies posts where (gasp) you might not like what the person is saying! Those are often the posts I want to see, not the same old opinions rehashed over and over. You could then set up a +3 to posts marked "controversial", or if you're an establishment type and don't want to hear anything that challenges your views, you mark it down -3.

      --
      AccountKiller
    2. Re:Don't speak ill of moderators... by Reziac · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Are we so insecure that we need constant ego inflation that "we're right. we're good. we're valued."?

      Actually, yes -- that, in my observation, is the quintessential geek psychosis, for geek types who don't have a life outside of "traditional" geek pursuits.

      It's whence comes that ivory tower perspective we've all seen from [insert-OS-here] bigots. It's what fuels the idea that there are geeks and lusers -- that is, someone to feel superior to (meaning anyone who doesn't share the geek's understanding of the topic, or who might, gods forbid, disagree with the Approved geek opinions.)

      Not to pick on geeks, since the same mindset appears in other specialty fields as well, but most other fields don't so actively select for this narrow-minded bigotry by not only publicly roasting nonconformists, but also thinking it's perfectly good social behaviour to do so.

      IOW, kids who bully in meatspace can usually be made to feel embarrassed about it afterward. Hereabouts, the response to being called on such behaviour is "But he's a moron, and he deserved it!"

      As to "warrantying my posts" or my email or anything else that falls out of my brain -- as slashdot so amply demonstrates, ANY system that relies on anyone's opinion of what's worthwhile or not is going to apply unfair pressure against whatever is currently perceived as dislikeable, unworthy, or defective. Survey-taking outfits recognise that those who are willing to take surveys already have certain biases, and they allow for this bias when parsing survey results. That's a bit harder to do in an uncontrolled environment, where bias is applied by those deciding what's worthy or not.

      BTW, I never mod down -- that would be a waste of mod points.

      --
      ~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
  9. Trojans, Viruses, etc. by Alric · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I might be missing a critical idea. I feel that I must be. (In my defense, I was up all night playing Crimson Skies and then preparing for an 8:30AM project status meeting.)

    It seems that this warranty, escrow account system would not work well with hacked computers, viruses, et cetera. Here's a simple example; please tell me that I'm wrong. My grandma makes a reasonable attempt to secure her system but leaves some holes. Some hacker, working for a spammer, gets in her system and installs a nice little backdoor program. The spammer starts emailing people from her computer until the money in grandma's escrow account can no longer cover the warranties. The recipients are obviously angered by receiving this spam and collect the money on the warranty. How is she going to get her money back?

    I don't need to belabor this point, but does this plan assume that all email sent from a user's account was purposefully sent by that user? If so, I can't support that. Virus writers and hackers aren't going away. Computers may become more secure; users may become more experienced. But our increasingly interconnected world is simply too complex to eradicate every security hole.