Slashdot Mirror
Despite Gates' Prediction, Spam Far From a Thing of the Past
Slatterz writes "Bill Gates declared in 2004 at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that spam would be 'a thing of the past' within five years. However, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, has written in a blog post that 'with the prophecy's five-year anniversary approaching, spam continues to cause a headache for companies and home users.'"
Call me again in a year. Unless you want to sell me something...
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
I would contend that for the average user, spam is essentially a non-issue nowadays. IT departments still have to do quite a bit of work, but all that work means that the average amount of spam a user sees is nearing zero.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
Most of this spam comes from bot-nets made of Windows computers that have been taken over.
What's that?
I have this one folder in GMail called spam... I don't go there much, the grammar is nonsensical and the products are out-competed by the text-based advertising.
crazy dynamite monkey
Most of it originates from Mr. Gates' creations... Some prediction...
Herbal v1agra!!! Voor seil!! Werry cheep!! Highest guality!!
If you had a Verifiable College Degree from an Authentic University, then more women would listen to your opinions and you'd get MORE ACTION.
Why spend hours studying for a degree when you can call 1-800-IMAGRADUATE and get College, Masters or even DOCTORATE Degrees within One WEEK!!!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Barracuda, anyone?
Yahoo by far gets more spam, and frankly, I don't think their filtering is nearly as good as GMail's.
At my previous work email, I saw about one spam per month get through the filter. In terms of "false positives", I had a two or three in a one year period.
At my current work email (here for six months), I have not received any spam nor have I had any false positives when I've checked the spam folder.
For my Yahoo account, I get about one spam message missing the filter per week and my spam folder is completely full. I get about one false positive a month.
For my Hotmail account, I get about one spam slipping through per month. However, I have to be more careful about false positives, as desirable email (even from people I've emailed back previously) sometimes winds up in the spam folder.
Bill Gates said this, I heard him say it. True story.
He made that prediction on January 24, 2004 - and it's only January 22nd now. So he's got two more days...
#DeleteChrome
There's a new kid on the block in Linux Land. It's called Dundle, and it's a new distro based on Debian. It's designed to run on everything from M68k to the latest dual core, from 32Mb of RAM right on up to 10Gb and up. It's especially designed for gamers. I mention it here because it has special developments in it to prevent, or at least curtail spamming, using a method that hasn't been tried before. Check it out!
I've slowly switched all my email accounts (business and personal) over to Gmail, and I almost never have to deal with spam anymore.
I still get a fair number of advertising emails from companies I've placed orders from, but they all provide the ability to unsubscribe.
The only people I know still drowning in spam are the ones who are clinging to some ancient ISP-provided address, or who have a poorly managed company mail server.
If those people would simply find a decent email provider, the spammers' market would dry up and spam might become a "thing of the past" once and for all. But for now there's no reason you can't switch to a decent email provider and forget about spam today.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Really. When I re-joined my old company I received a bunch of spam at first; however, within a week I'd weeded it out. Maybe they mean "spam for the layperson is still a serious issue if they fail to use a spam prevention method..." ;)
Loading...
Where there is an financial incentive to spam (there are those dumb people that click on the v1@9r@ ads, believe it or not), there will be spam.
Seriously, when has a technical prediction made by Bill Gates or any Microsoft "spokesman" ever come true? For real, please point to one - I'll be glad to be enlightened.
Financial predictions - that's another story. They can rig those. :)
You both are making me feel inadequate. I've never figured out how to stop receiving spam.
Best I can think of were:
But in practice, my users were still receiving junk mail, and I couldn't seem to do anything.
Any advice?
I get very little spam via my hosting provider with a personal domain name, but I also don't publish my e-mail address online. At my workplace? Not one yet. We're careful with our website.
I used to be the sysadmin for a high school, and despite a very well-functioning Barracuda spam appliance, LOTS of spam still got through. Worse, some users [in particular, two old women who had been working at the school too long anyway] took obscene spam personally and would forward individual messages to me saying they do not wish to receive such e-mail anymore.
Following the whole "don't put mailto links online" idea, I listed employees' usernames in the directory, with a line at top: "Add '@example.com' to these usernames to e-mail an employee." It was not long before the complaints started rolling in, including the principal telling me, in no uncertain terms, that parents should be able to click once on a mailto: link.
A little off on your prediction there...
Warning, the above comment may contain sarcasm. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Our Barracuda gateway, in about two years of use, processed about 10 million messages. Of which just under 3.8 percent are deemed real. This is for an office of about 50 active users at any point in time. Of the messages that funnel through the 'Cuda, I get about two dozen annually that are daft enough to fool the gateway's checks. Conversely, I get no false positives. So the 'Cuda does its job well, but end users have no idea what goes on to make their mail client less encumbered and full of their personal junk. Spam blows. As does any prediction Mr. Gates may ever front...
Wow.. Go Bill! Way to predict Gmail's success!
Bill Gates advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. His idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to his particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, his plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to his are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust him and his servers?
(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about him:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and he's a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to burn his
house down!
I am officially gone from
Previous slashdot entry dealing with Gates' predictions. It cites two years, not five years, with the spam thing.
I guess "5" looks like "2" and vice versa, but... :P
Ooh, Barracuda....
I've heard horror stories of Barracuda boxes falling over due to the overwhelming amounts of spam.
Not only is spam just as bad as ever, but the last few months my previous boss, a prominent scientist, has been trying to sell me fake rolexes. Lately though, i've apparently been sending myself ads for viagra and junk.
Time for some *new* ideas on the problem...
please respond
What has been done over the past 5 years to prevent spam from being sent? Nothing, really.
As I've said before, spam is an economic problem. It won't go away until you remove the economic incentive to send it. Spam is sent out because people can make money by sending it, plain and simple. If something meaningful was done to remove the incentive to send spam, then it would go away.
But never before then. And you can forget about filters. We have seen ever since the first bayesian filters that spammers will keep finding ways to outsmart filters; you are only starting a game of whack-a-mole with that strategy. On top of that, filtered spam still has real costs in internet traffic and server storage space.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I would contend that for the average user, spam is essentially a non-issue nowadays.
Just because they don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't cost them. The users have to pay (indirectly) for the cost of the spam traversing the internet, the CPU time for their spam filter to identify and dispose of it, the server space to store it, and the IT employees to refine the filters to acceptable levels of false positives and false negatives.
Just because the users don't see the spam in their inbox doesn't mean it has no impact on them.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Yeh, I wouldn't touch them with a 10' pole.
Even good old WatchGuard are pretty shit (and forget getting a support contract with them, they almost never deliver). SpamAssasin on a *nix box works a LOT better if you can figure out how to configure it. :D
Or you could just use Google services... cheaper to run and much less of a headache.
I use gmail and as soon as I put my resume online to find a job I started getting some spam.
Messages break through the spam filter once every couple of days, and usually 2 or 3 at a time. It's still much better than 5 or 10 years ago, but it's also still an annoyance.
Another great piece of non-news.
And the spammer quickly sets up his net to abort after a few seconds and move on to the next sucker who isn't using OpenBSD. And which, BTW, still only works IF you know from the IP or the first few bytes that the incoming email is spam.
And IP lists like Bob's can screw with mail systems because just one infected machine at a business or ISP can drop-kick any and all legitimate mail sent from the gateway IP address. One can obviously TKO all spam by TKO'ing ALL incoming email, spam or not. Unfortunately, that's not usually a viable option.
Moves and countermoves.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
He also said in the book _The_Road_Ahead_: "The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Yeah, we all know what he _meant_ to say, and I believe it was fixed in later editions, but I've still got a hardcover copy of the book with this quote in it.
From a technical standpoint, the SPAM problem is easy to solve: change the email protocol so that the originator of every message can be positively identified (e.g. assign every mail originator a public/private key pair). However, the same momentum/backwards compatibility issues that keep us from using IPV6 or IP multicast also keep us from changing the email protocol.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The "demise" of spam in the inboxen of the masses has nothing whatsoever to do with the (in)actions His Most High Irrelevancy Sir Billington of Gates, and everything to do with the actual, hard, fucking work of people like the SpamAssassin crew, Spam Cannibal and (gosh) the The Spamhaus Project. May they fuck forever.
There. I said it. It is done.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
The false positives generated by GMail's spam filtering don't piss you off in the least? Not even the fact that you have no direct personal control over the process at all? Nor the fact that, unlike other services like Yahoo, you can't effectively disable it by passing it through, allowing you to use your own more tuned and effective local spam filtering solution (i.e. PopFile)? Nor the fact that GMail gives you no control over the auto-deletion process, and you are forced to check the folder for false positives at least once every 30 days or lose those false positives forever? Nor the fact that, in doing so, Google is very deliberately forcing you to be exposed to advertising within their Web interface? (This can be sidestepped to some degree now with the IMAP service.)
GMail routinely snags my freecycle (freecycle.org) Yahoo group e-mail forwards as spam, and it continues to do so regardless of any whitelisting attempts; since the "From:" of each message is actually modified to appear to be from the person who originally posted it to the group, and GMail is clueless of this process, there is no effective way to whitelist those messages (unless I want to manually whitelist thousands of people). This is just the tip of the iceberg, as GMail randomly flags mail as spam for no reasons apparent to me.
I'd MUCH rather use PopFile locally again, since I once had it tuned to 99.97% effectiveness before I started using a GMail account. There's no point in trying, however, since GMail won't allow bypassing or disabling their remote filtering.
This may not be "doing evil", but it's definitely not nice.
Here's a technical solution. I receive email from a botnet touting v1a@ra. I tunnel back to the infected machine, slip in, and wipe the drive.
Pretty soon, no more botnet. And we also get a nice little econo-boost from all of those people replacing their antiquated virus-ridden computers, systems, and software.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
When there is no money to be made. As long as there are suckers, it will continue.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... sending in special forces trained hit squads once we identify the spammers!
When I still checked my mail on a BSD machine using pine, I had a complex scheme set up using custom IP filters + SpamAssassin. After all that work, I still had 5 or 6 slip through each day out of approximately 140. Since switching to gmail, maybe one slips through per week.
Ironically, thanks to google, Gates prediction is largely true. For me, at least. Spam is a complete afterthought.
It happened to me some days ago that my ISP refused to send a mail to a mailing list because it was using sender verification just like itself, and it was causing too many errors (because it's actually starting to send a mail before bailing out). It happened today to someone trying to send a mail to my someone on my ISP... It seems this thing doesn't really work both ways :D
640 spam emails a day ought to be enough for anybody.
but I get 0 spam. 0. Not even in my Spam folder.
Of course, the fact that I create a new Gmail account for every single person I correspond with, and make sure each e-mail address is about as strong as a good password, might have something to do with it...
He was off because we were at a bar a few years ago, I was pretty hammered and started talking about how I was a ninja and would kill all spammers within 4 years. I guess he took me seriously. I also suggested he make a new form of windows called vista. Again, I'm sorry. I've learned my lesson and will not go out drinking with that dude anymore.
Part of the problem is that we primates are masterful at gaming the system, getting an edge, grabbing a little more gravy for us and ours, at the expense of others. It's literally wired into the genome (if you doubt this, watch our closest primate relatives, and immediately see the unmistakable embryo of our behavior laid bare.)
Part of developing a civilization that lasts more than a century or two, is becoming clear about who and what we are, and engineering the social systems to responsibly manage the expression of our basest urges and proclivities. When the founding fathers of the United States created checks and balances, their intent was to hamstring the human proclivity for absolute power. The last few years demonstrate the inherent dangers of circumventing that wisdom.
Building technological systems that empower the best in being human, while limiting the worst, demand profound wisdom, and an innate sense of why we do, what we do. It requires understanding cultures, the underlying drives that motivate us as societies and individuals, and it certainly demands laying down some clear foundation of ethical and operational agreements between diverse populations. Behavior that we can all establish as acceptable, so that we can put limits where limits will serve. Just as we say it's not alright to go around murdering people, it's not alright to use public networks as your personal toilet, ATM, or weapon of mass destruction. Building the limits into the system such that those who transgress are instantly punished by loosing their access seems a completely appropriate management strategy.
In the end, it isn't about morality. We don't punish the greedy because they are bad. We mitigate the damage done by the self serving, because they put their own gratification ahead of the healthy function of society and life on the planet. A few years back, a group of folks figured out you could build a huge structure in the desert to extract gold from poor grade ore. Giant cyanide leach-beds, covering square miles were constructed. These sites yielded gold, that paid tens of millions of dollars to their owners. Sadly, any first grader could show using the simplest math, that these sites were economically unfeasible. Those very people abandoned their leach-beds, ran to the caribbean with their money, and left the tax payers to clean up the billion dollar environmental disasters they left behind. This is little more that greedy men stealing tax dollars and not even doing that efficiently.
Capitalism, is clearly a vital and necessary force in our world today. Few things transform what is possible for humanity as effectively or efficiently as capitalism. That said, you must design for the worst, and inspire the best. This is true for all engineering and it's especially true for social engineering. Build robust systems with wide latitude for self expression, diverse human endeavor, and enterprise. However, build those resilient systems resistant to cheats, abuses, and outright attacks against humanity and society. Allow for the full breadth of human expression both sublime and depraved.
Because in the end human beings are often sublime, and sadly sometimes depraved.
Just because you don't see the Spam in your mailbox because you've set up your Spam filters well doesn't mean you aren't a victim of some of the underlying issues. The millions and millions of Spam messages sent out every day to try and get that .01% return rate are still choking up processing power on DNS servers and taking up bandwidth.
Every one of those 96.2% junk emails that hit your 'Cuda gateway has one thing in common: A hyperlink to the spammers website. Every single one. Otherwise, how could anyone be able to buy their v1@9r@? What if your 'Cuda just send an opt-out email to the website for every spam. Imagine that. Slashdotted by their own botnets! Might change the economic equation somewhat.
Spammers wouldn't be able to take down your 'Cuda since there would be thousands of others doing the same thing. They could try to include legitimate sites in the spam to fool the gateway, but a white list of say, the top 10k websites would be pretty easy.
I guess they could have a 1-800 number instead of a link but once again, that changes the economic equation somewhat
The could also try to set up their payment processing on someone else's webserver, but that webserver would probably be slashdotted too as soon as it was pwned (I am assuming the 10k whitelist websites are pretty hard to pwn this way). Any pwned legitimate site would likely be fixed very fast.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
that "article" is dumb. i could count on one hand the number of spam messages that get into my inbox in a month--maybe even in a year. gmail has a great spam filter. ditto for other addresses i have that are run on conventional mail servers.
i have a yahoo account and a hotmail account that i never check. it used to be because they were too full of spam, but now it's just b/c i don't need them. i don't recall seeing any spam the last time i bothered to log in to those accounts, either, but it's been a while.
as for gates' other predictions, spam filters probably need more than 640K of memory to run.
Gates said so many things that were wrong, amongst of those a few follow:
* 640K ought to be enough
* Linux will not survive
* windows servers will outclass *NIX based
* many many more to many too mention
As for email, a sendmail/spamassasin/clamav/mimedfang setup does a fairly decent job, as many people already know.
And if it wouldn't be for ALL OTHER software providers creating software for windows including virus/utils/office/OS-utilities working with windows would be hell, that is the part gates created ... not sure why people even listen to him?
to code or not to code, that is the question.
I'm shocked!!!
He was never the tech-industry visionary he wanted everyone to think he was with those grand pronouncements about the future. He always waited to see where everyone else was going, changed course to follow them, and then steamrolled them. Remember, he's the same guy who initially blew off the internet because he thought everyone would flock to MSN. Miss Cleo's predictions carried more weight.
~Philly
We have been using Surgemail for our mail server since 2005 and in 2007 we tightened up some rules. As of January 1st, 2009, we enforced either SPF or DomainKeys authentication now. Our Mail server CPU usage dropped from 7% average to only 2-3% average now. We don't use any third party filtering systems as Surgemail blocks all the junk mail for us. It has stopped Mass Phishing emails for domains that have SPF/DK records.
If you really want to stop spam in your organization, I highly recommend trying Surgemail out.
Real time blacklists only stop about 93% of the spam coming into our networks, the remaining 7% is stopped by SPF/DK and Surgemail's Friends system,(which Beautifully works as folders in IMAP mode so you never need to access a web page to release legitimate mail).
Occasionally, clients do call to say that someone tried to reach them but got rejected by our server cause the sender's mail server/domain does not have an SPF/DK record. We simply ask them to email the sender and Surgemail automatically adds the client into the whitelist system allowing communications with the IMPROPERLY configured domain.
All in all, for the past 2 years, out of 15 email accounts I have on my system (one for Mail lists, another for personal, business, etc...) I could say that I have gotten a handful of SPAM that got through (with valid SPF/DK records), but nothing SPAMCOP could not clear up after reporting them.
I have not lost any time or money weeding through my emails to find legitimate messages, get viruses, or lost legitimate mail cause of SPAM.
I have tried Spamassasin and others like it in the past and just causes extra load for nothing. I have used other mail solutions in the past but NOTHING BEATS Surgemail for a unified mail server system with lots of added features to boot.
*Headline News* censorship shuts down the Internet! More at 6PM!
William B. Gates III is a college dropout.
Some would say, based on the circumstances of the "dropout" that Harvard should have persued legal charges against the lad.
But I digress, so to the point.
Since when, did a college dropout know something about anything; answer, never.
Find the Spam
For as long as there are people trying to scam people, and there are bots sending out spam, it won't be gone. But spam is still a thing of the past because of very effective spam filters. My gmail spam folder shows 873 mails in the last month of which none has gone through to my inbox.
Spam in a can on the other hand... yummmy!
"The Tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available wherever you want it, which is why I'm already using a Tablet as my everyday computer. It's a PC that is virtually without limits -- and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America."
Nov. 11, 2001
It's "contrary to" Gates' prediction.
How about a firewall program (on routers or on pc's) that spam-filters OUTGOING email? It would be a good warning to see if your pc was zombied, for one. For two it would free up the relevant bandwidth. Adding it to windowsupdate / a package manager would make it work its way into the general population eventually.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3426367.stm
No sig today...
The problem with Barracuda boxes is that they create backscatter.
I see tons of "Barracuda has rejected your message" bounces from them, and all of it is faked. Why they can't reject mail at SMTP time I don't know.
I just got an email about improving that sort of thing... let me forward it to you...
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love