Gates to End Spam
Give me a moment while I laugh until I puke….
I’m back. So Gates thinks he can end spam? Uh, Billy Boy, you can’t even fix the million or so security holes in Internet Explorer and you expect me to believe that you can do something about spam? He has proposed three methods to reduce spam:
Require the sender to solve a puzzle that only a flesh-and-blood person can handle.
Imagine replying to an email confirming a meeting and getting, “A train leaves New York at 3pm and is traveling at 60mph…“. Yeah, that will be fun.
A “computational puzzle” that a computer sending only a few messages could easily handle, but that would be prohibitively expensive for a mass-mailer.
Big offices and ISP’s handle tens of thousands of emails every day and you want to waste their CPU cycles on something that won’t make even the slightest dent in the spam? A large percentage of the spam is sent through personal computers that have been infected by worms. Do you think the spammer gives a rat’s ass if he’s wasting CPU cycles of these computers?
A level of monetary risk – low or high, depending on their own choice – for receiving e-mail from strangers.
The reason email is so popular is its convenience. This proposal would create a bookkeeping nightmare that completely destroys that convenience. I’m sure Billie Boy likes this idea the most because he wants a piece of the action in handling the transactions. Imagine getting 1% of every email penny. It’s not much, but multiply that a few billion times.
Billy’s proposals are not new. They’ve been floating around the email administration groups for the last few years and the inherent flaws in each one has been thoroughly discussed to death. I’m not surprised that Microsoft has come up with these long dead suggestions. They’ve never actually been a company that innovates. Microsoft is an acquisition company. Every single good idea they’ve introduced came from small companies they purchased. I think it’s time Microsoft bought another company with a good idea they can ruin.
Note: Pixy Misa has an excellent checklist (via slashdot) to consult when presented with yet another scheme to rid the world of spam.
January 25th, 2004 at 7:25 am
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Microsoft or Bill Gates does not innovate at all. The whole principle that Bill formed back when he first built a BASIC was that “you use my software, you pay for it.” He’s a bright guy, and has done some innovation, just like the escapees from the MIT Technical Model Railroad Club. (Gates was a Harvard drop-out.) Microsoft had built up their portfolio with cash instead of skull-sweat for the most part, but that doesn’t stop them from thinking up some neat things.
February 1st, 2004 at 12:05 pm
Was it Gates who was suggesting a system for charging spammers for the unsolicited mail that they send out? In which century Bill?
February 1st, 2004 at 12:16 pm
Not exactly. He suggested there be a fee for every single piece of email you send, paid to the receiver. The receiver has the opportunity to wave the fee. This is a great idea for the company that wants to manage the transaction. Guess which company Gates would want to manage the email fees (for a modest cut, of course)?
February 2nd, 2004 at 5:06 am
I liked the idea in a way – similar to the way we pay postage to send snail mail. You pay for a stamp and those costs go to the operation that handles the mail.
Of course it wouldn’t be feasible on the net except for larger organizations (or at least organizations that can handle payments)… ho hum…