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Gates on Spam
pvt_medic writes "Microsoft is proposing a new system that would require people to pay to send e-mails. Postage would be in the form of allowing others to use your computer to make calculations, similar to the SETi@home project. There are other systems being suggested that would include monetary stamps and people could decide on accepting an e-mail based off the value of the stamp. (story has great picture of Bill Gates as well)" Gates' proposed system will be Microsoft patent-encumbered, unsurprisingly.
story has great picture of Bill Gates as well
.02,
Is he praising Mel Gibson for Passion of Christ? Is he smoking one incredibly fat doober that would make even Tommy Chong jealous? Is he trying to convince the Pope that Longhorn isn't named after a pornstar? Or is he really just THAT great?
You decide.
Seriously:
Instead of paying a penny, the sender would "buy" postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender's good faith.
And how the fuck would this make a difference? So what? The computer that is supposed to do the work is going to be like Johnny Badass in 2nd grade math class... They are not going to do their homework and just try to bluff it through class. If they do end up having to hand it in to be graded they are just going to get around it some other way. We will end up blocking just as many hosts as before.
Gates' proposed system will be Microsoft patent-encumbered, unsurprisingly.
No kidding. Gates came up w/it why would you be surprised he wouldn't want to protect his idea? No conspiracy here... Was the comment necessary?
Just my worthless
According to the Info World article about Microsoft's Caller ID patents, Microsoft's license "... will encourage all parties involved to allow the Caller ID technology to develop and improve without being hindered by license restrictions or royalty schemes"; and "Microsoft wants to do more than merely give (Caller ID) away, they also want to make sure nobody else can profit from it."
:-)
Seems like a perfect application for the GPL to me.
Charging for email doesn't discourage spam. It discourages mass email. But there are many legitimate uses of mass email, like discussion lists, automated order confirmation emails, etc. - and increasing the costs of sending this type of mail will hurt open-source developers and small businesses the most.
.org? Yeah, right!
It's not surprising that Microsoft doesn't see the problem with this. They can afford to buy a few more mail servers to handle all of microsoft.com's outgoing mail, and they'd love it if people had to buy more servers (each running a copy of Windows, of course) just to handle all of the added computational costs of sending mail.
In the article, "Goodmail chief executive Richard Gingras said individuals might get to send a limited number for free, while mailing lists and nonprofit organizations might get price breaks." But how do you know who's a nonprofit? Someone with a
I believe that SPF currently has the potential to put the biggest dent in spam, since it directly addresses forged email addresses without needing to replace SMTP. It's not a complete solution, but it's a lot more realistic than Microsoft's idea.
Requiring people to let the sender or some third party execute instructions on the sending machine is so fraught with problems, it's hard to know where to start. Unless this software is Free, you simply can't expect everyone to install on their systems; of course MS wants them to, but hey let's be realistic here: they won't. If it's only available in binary, it would lock out anyone using an unsupported OS (or version thereof). It'd be a new security hole in the sender's machine just begging (with a big neon sign) to be exploited, and would complicate the use of firewalls, especially those using NAT. It'd have a regressive fee structure, because those with expensive, high-powered machines could afford to "spend" more CPU cycles (heck, build a beowulf cluster of discarded 486's to buy more spamming rights), while some poor sod using a Pentium/150 can hardly afford to give up any.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
How does this help in the case of spammers creating massive networks of compromised hosts which are then used to send spam in a distributed manner? Such a "pay-with-cycles" technique is useless in this case, since you can still send a *massive* amount of spam with a few million compromised computers, even if each one can only send, say, one email per hour.
Aren't most spams sent using hijacked PCs anyway?
Why wouldn't the spammer be willing to sell cycles on the zombie PCs?
I own a business and we get something like a fair amount of sales leads via email.
I wonder how many people would not bother contacting us to inquire about services if they had to pay for the priviledge?
Also, I exchange A LOT of emails with existing clients...working off-site makes email the prefered mechanism of communication. I already pay for Internet Access (which currently includes access to routes between mail servers); I'd sure hate to have to pay for using a particular service on the Internet that is now free.
IMO, Spam is best fought at the source. Filters like SA are great for the user end, but the demand on the wires is still there (the recipient server has to GET the spam for it to be dropped). Go after the spammers themselves. Hard. With both barrels.
(1) Make it financially unattractive to spam. This can be either by fines or by MORE user education to NOT RESPOND to the dang things.
(2) Go after them criminally. They put an arguably unethical demand on everyone's Internet; who knows how many hardware failures are accelerated by the traffic due to spam (disks, NIC's etc). I liken spammers to someone who blows up, or at least physically blocks, a bridge on a public highway.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
And how is it going to know the answer in advance?
Just a guess, but maybe the mail server would know the answer in advance because it used the answer to calculate the question? Couldn't the calculation to generate the question from the answer be orders of magnitude easier than the reverse?
No I am not going to pay to send e-mail. Sorry, but Bill's proposal is not acceptable.
It is one thing to donate idle CPU time to something charitable and worthwhile, like SETI, if you wish to do so. But to allow a private corporation to freely enjoy things that cost me considerable money for, like a full time DSL connection, and the electricity to operate a PC with a 450 watt power supply 24/7, makes no sense. To require me to submit to this just so I can send e-mail is nonsense.
Other questions come to mind. If this proposed system is burdened with Microsoft patents, then exactly how will open-source or third-pary e-mail clients and servers be licensed with the Microsoft IP. Exactly what is that going to cost?
The mail server knows the answer in advance, and if the client provides the correct answer, the message is relayed... if not, it's denied. That way, spammers HAVE to perform the expensive computation, which significantly slows their mass-mailing efforts.
Ok, I quickly read over the article, so I may have missed something... However I had to respond to this particular point that you make. If this is going to be 'expensive computation which significantly slows [spammers'] mass-mailing efforts', won't it do the same for legitimate mass-mailing efforts as well? Newsletters? Daily mailings? News updates? I can think of several legitimate mass-mailing systems that I myself subscribe to, and I like getting them, if this makes it expensive for mass-mailing, then I may just lose the stuff that I signed up for as well as the stuff that I didn't (spam). I don't think that's necessarily the best approach..
-matt
98% of people will read this as: "So the richest man in the world wants me to pay for something I have always done for free?"
I agree, this thing is dead before it ever gets out the conceptual door. Narrow-minded people look at it and think its rational, after all they think "it won't cost me much" ... but the whole concept of paying anything for email just destroys legitimate things such as mailing lists (think about kernel mailing lists, hobbiest lists, etc). It will never work across international boundaries, and if ever implemented people will simply revert to using the older free techniques. People are always looking for free or less costly methods of communication (such as VOIP), attaching a charge onto something that is free now is just stupid.
And I shudder to think of what might happen if politicians get a hold of a concept like this - "whoa, people paying money, and we are not getting our fair share of tax?!?"
I wish people would simply drop the paying for email concept. Bulk mail (bulk advertising) is not free, yet I still get way more of it stuffed into my physical mailbox than legitimate letters. Making it cost WILL NOT make it go away.
> Why would they want to pay for something (either monetarily, through CPU sharing, etc...) that they've gotten essentially for free
Well, for 94% of them, they'd 'want' whatever Bill Baby had pre-installed on their system when they bought it! If they will put up with and make excuses for a system that allows virus-of-the-week and crash-of-the-day, why not put up with paying for email (especially if free email involves a scary extra software installation). If this thing went live, five years from now most of that 94% would have happily convinced themselves that 'it was always like that.'
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.