Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: The Bill Gates Anti-Spam Plan

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Topic: The Bill Gates Anti-Spam Plan

Manny Knowles
"What are these things and WHY are they BLUE???"

Posts: 4247
From: Bloomington, IN, USA
Registered: Feb 2002

posted 03-09-2004 05:41 PM

Don't know if this has been discussed here already. I've been hearing that Bill Gates has a plan to solve the problem of spam.

Would you pay $.01 for each email you send if you thought it would end spam?

It's an intriguing idea but I don't think people are inclined to pay for something they get "for free." Of course, most of us are already paying for internet access, so it's not really free.

I would like to see "buddy lists" for email. If you're not on my buddy list, it's gonna cost you a penny to send an email to me. If I accept your email you get your penny back. Otherwise, I get to keep the penny.

If there are more than 5 email addresses that are not on my buddy list, then it will cost you more $ to send me that email.

That really could stop spam.

What do you think? What's your plan to stop spam?

Jail? Capital punishment?

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Daryl C. W. O'Shea
Film God

Posts: 3977
From: Midland Ontario Canada (where Panavision & IMAX lenses come from)
Registered: Jun 2002

posted 03-09-2004 05:48 PM

It's not actually his plan, just one that he seems to agree with at the moment. Although the CNN headline you probably saw doesn't really make that clear.

There are far better ways to deal with the problem. The penny an email method actually has quite a few flaws. Like who's going to pay to support this system. It would require a fairly centralized system, or at least a DNS like system (but on an extremely smaller scale) that would cost a considerable amount to run and manage. Something quite opposite of the current system and inherently more prone to widespread failure.

Simple adherence, and enforcement by mail administrators, to existing standards would eliminate an extremely large proportion of UCE.

Besides, in the 90's there were a few penny per email systems. They're all gone now... for a reason.

Thankfully, current spam filters are about 98% effective -- at least mine is.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 03-09-2004 05:51 PM

The "money" or "online postage" Bill Gates describes is something real, legit computers users could easily earn by solving a simple math puzzle or something like that. The idea is to require manual input of some type every time you send an e-mail note. Legal users of e-mail already do this. What's the difference between typing a couple more keystrokes?

Something certainly needs to be done. Either it has to be something akin to what Gates proposes or it has to be some ultimate caller ID type setup companies like Yahoo want with technologies they have developed.

Yahoo's idea sounds pretty good, but would only work if most of the world's ISPs jumped on board with it. For e-mail to go from one server to the next, it would have to carry some kind of identifying token. Any attempt to falsify headers or hide original sending IP address would result in the token being dropped and the mail being stopped dead.

The only people Yahoo's proposal would hurt are those wanting e-mail anonymity. I have no problem with people knowing it was me who sent them a note. From my point of view, the only people wanting to hide their identities are spammers and criminals. If someone needs some kind of anonymous forum, I'm sure they can find lots of outlets via web-browser based 'blogs. As far as my e-mail box goes, I want it all caller eye-deed, biatch!

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Daryl C. W. O'Shea
Film God

Posts: 3977
From: Midland Ontario Canada (where Panavision & IMAX lenses come from)
Registered: Jun 2002

posted 03-09-2004 06:02 PM

Puzzles solved by a human are useless. If a human can solve it in a few seconds, I can automate it and solve it in a few nanoseconds. The idea is to require the user's machine to solve a complex problem that would chew up CPU time (say a second) so that a spammer could only send one spam email per second.

From a software engineering standpoint (not computer science, real regulated software engineering, dammit!), this idea is majorly flawed in nearly every aspect. One of the biggest would probably be the challenge in automagically maintaining such a distributed system. The hassles of keeping up to date with protocols and problem solving methods would likely far outweigh the benefits.

From an economical standpoint it would _require_ users to update their computers regularly for the whole system to remain effective.

Again, utilizing methods already available via the current standards would take care of more than a large part of the problem.

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Phil Hill
I love my cootie bug

Posts: 7595
From: Hollywood, CA USA
Registered: Mar 2000

posted 03-09-2004 09:28 PM

Daryl: What a bunch of gobbly-gook...what ever the F*uck you said!

(Yeah, I know I'm a dumbass. You *DON'T* need to remind me!)

>>> Phil

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