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.'"
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
Make that strongly disagree. Spam is even more of a problem. Bill Gates should most likely not try to become the Nostradamus of the Internet because the problem is even more rampant. The problem is, we are combatting spam in the wrong way. Legally, the CAN SPAM Act is pointless. We need to make spam an uneconomical way of marketing and advertising. Spam filtration does not fight back because it does nothing to address the inexpensive economics of spamming. The only really effective method for fighting back has been developed by The OpenBSD Project. They have a spam deferral daemon that literally takes the wind right out of the spammer's sails. If a spammer attempts to send mail to an OpenBSD Spamd enabled machine, they are only able to send at 1 byte per second. This causes no problem for the reciever but could potentially wreck havoc on the spammer causing large queue backups and potentially crashing the spammer's server. That is a fight!
Finally, Bob Beck of the project creates and maintains a list of IP addresses of any machine that has attempted to send spam in the past 24 hours to the University of Alberta. This list is freely available to all. If more people took advantage of OpenBSD's Spamd and Bob's list, it'll be a TKO for the spammers.