Oh please, pull the other one

[dianeduane]

During a late-night session of the World Economic Forum in 2004, Bill Gates said the Internet spam problem would be solved within two years.

...The statement did cause a great deal of excitement at the time, and Hamlin - perhaps not surprisingly - argues that Gates was correct. "I won't say spam is dead, but we can say spam is contained," Hamlin said. "If you use the latest anti-spam technologies and educate yourself on how to use them, you should not have a problem."

Contained? Contained??? He hasn't seen my spam box lately, that's for sure... (mutter)

It's mostly investment and stock spam this week. but the usual p@n!s spam is there as well. Scads and scads of it. (eyeroll)

Comments

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Bill Gates has a remarkably low prediction rate. And especially when it comes to the Internet, something that, as a whole, he didn't believe would ever amount to anything.

I'd say that 'contained' is the wrong word. 'Reached saturation point' would be better. The same consequence is there in both — it's not going to grow much more — but there is a whole different emotional underpinning.

If you believe the hype...

[carpdeus.livejournal.com]

this article in the Guardian (http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/insideit/story/0,13270,1684044,00.html) says that SPAM is currently 60% of internet email, down from 80% a few years ago. Or you can check out this interview with Phil Smoot (http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=printer_friendly&pid=353&page=1), who is responsible for hotmail and says:

Spam has been an ongoing battle for years. The ongoing scaling problem was that as you brought on more and more mail servers to handle the incoming load, the ever-increasing number of mail servers could easily overwhelm the storage servers. This was amplified by the fact that more mail servers were also required to handle more filtering CPU cycles. The good news is that we have seen a leveling off over the last year or so. We also feel we are roughly 98 percent effective at identifying spam messages and sources.

And finally, this article (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/256579_software23.asp) which talks about an FTC report (http://www.ftc.gov/reports/canspam05/051220canspamrpt.pdf) that concluded that the overall volume of SPAM has begun to level off. The most telling quote in that last one is:

"If you are a consumer that's taking advantage of the technologies that exist ... then the spam problem for you is solved," Hamlin said. "Bill didn't say that there would be no spam. But he said the problem would be solved, and I think that is what we actually have accomplished."

---

Of course, the real proof is in the pudding and I know that while my filters and such do eliminate 95% of the SPAM that comes into my mailbox, I still have to run a scrub on my SPAM box to make sure they didn't catch any legitimate mail.

<shakes head> So, essentially, the problem is lessened greatly as long as you use subscription based software to filter out Unsolicted Commercial Email...wait, I wonder if they are sponsoring spammers as a marketing ploy?

[kengr]

I proposed a solution some time ago and got soundly vilified by people it would have caiused problems for (they ran anonymous remailers and didn't want to accept responsibility if spsm got voted thru them).

1. Anyone receiving what they consider spam can contact the system that *delivered* it to them (in most cases, their ISP). Unless they want to argue the point (and thinmgs such as the various filter defeating measures trumpo arguments automatically) the delivering system coughs up $5 to the recipient of the spam.

2. systems that find spam has been sent to their users can contact the system that sent it to them and recover the $5 (some reasonable amount), plus a reasonable fee for time involved in tracking down said system (if there were forged headers or the like).

3. This continues up the line until the sender is located or a system is reached that doesn't know how the mail got to their system.

If you've reached the sender, they're legally liable for the $5 *per spam* pluds the fees for the trouble it took to track them down.

If you've reached a system that doesn't know how the mail got to them, they are liable on the principle that they were negligient in setting up their mail servers.

If it's a compromised *personal* machine, they can sue the people responsible for the security holes *regardless of license argeements that say said company is not liable for damages, unless it can be shown that the user did something stupid like disable the security or click on unkonown attachments.

Though if the author of the virus/trojan/whatever can be found, then they can be gone after.

This would have a rather "interesting" effect on the way MS and other companies think about security holes in their software. And might educate some end users (painfully!). It'd also give ISPs one hell of an incentive to both secure their systyems *and* to track spam.

The one fly in the ointment would be spam that originated in a different country. But since most such traffic tends to go over a limited number of international links, the companies involved could require agreeing to be liable for spamming charges as a condition of connecting to them.

The key to all this is that it'd make it *profitab le* to do something about spam for many of the systems, and a major liability to not take security steps for most of the rest.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

An interesting idea. (Though the The one fly in the ointment would be spam that originated in a different country point is one that needs consideration - almost all spam that I receive originates from outside my country, mostly in the major spam centres of the US and Argentina.)

Unfortunately, point 1 would almost certainly lead to one of the following:

a) Your ISP refuses to deliver any email to you at all
b) Your ISP insists on a legally binding exclusion when you complain about (a)
c) Your ISP gets hit by people joining mailing lists and then claiming that every message from that list is a spam, just for the money
d) Your ISP ups its fees to impossible levels

I'd love to be able to charge back real spam against the senders — I could retire on the current levels — but though your system would probably work if it'd been there from the start, trying to get there from here would break the 'net. And that's a real problem, and I don't know how to solve it either.

(Though laws better than the US CAN-SPAM one would have helped. That one was way too lax, and way too late. Oh, and internationally based, though I can just see the howls about 'World Goverment' from the libertarians. )

Now, if I was to get UK-sourced spam, then there is precedent for a £300 charge-back against the spammers.

Oh please, pull the other one...

[(Anonymous)]

...it says "You've got mail" ?

Sorry couldn't resist. That was my first thought.

Re: Oh please, pull the other one...

[dduane.livejournal.com]

(chuckle)

[terani.livejournal.com]

*smiles serenely* What spam?

OK... I just had to say that. But I discovered a nice way not to get any spam. Or, so little... that it's barely noticable.

And get this... I had a computer for four years with absolutely no virus scanner OR firewall. And I never got infected.

I wonder if I should write a book on how to avoid Spam.

I'd call it.... "The No Spam Diet" or something of that ilk.

It's not a shock therapy of programs. It's like Weight Watchers for Spam.

It's a lifestyle change. *lafs*

[dduane.livejournal.com]

(heh) (laughs)

(Partly because the word "lifestyle" is in the air at the moment. Having just finished the design for the first Transcendent Pig mug -- "Got Pig?" (http://www.cafepress.com/youngwizards.45320181)-- there's another design working: a T-shirt with the TP and the words, "Linear time...is just another lifestyle choice." ...I so love Ursula's art for the Pig. He looks so cheerful...and insufferable.)

[terani.livejournal.com]

heh... speaking of pigs....

I have a t-shirt I got in Australia...

"Genetic Engineering: Will Pigs fly"

*ponders* That t-shirt for linear time... sounds like something I need to wear to work. All the Net Admins would get a hoot out of it. *grins* *raises hand* Can I be the first to order one?

[dduane.livejournal.com]

Sure, no probs. I have to take my time with it because the masking conventions for the new black T-shirts are a little complex. I'll put up a link to it when it's ready. Or mail you, or something.

[terani.livejournal.com]

Try a Worldgate? Those sound fun.

*pages through "Wizards at War"* I'm just at the part where Neets and Sker'ret are at the Crossings....

Oh, and I wanna put my money on Ronan... Gotta love those Irish boys...

Ever wonder what would happen if they got Spam in their Manuals?

[mneme]

But will the mug tell you the meaning of life if you put the right temperature of drink in it? :)

To be fair, on the spam front -- if it's in your spam box, it's a lot less of a problem -- I have been noticing, on a personal front, a lot fewer false positives showing in my spam box (largely, none), which is nice. And there are server->server technologies that you can't see which can make it much harder to send mail which advertises a false sender -- these can stop a whole host of different kinds of attacks (including some kinds of phishing attempts) before they even get near you.

To be fair, a full spam solution won't come until there's a sufficiently global government to be able to shut down spam producers entirely. But there are ways to beef up the technology, and those are happening.

Whether this says much about Gates' prediction...who knows? It depends on what he meant.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

(heh) Re temperatures: no guarantees.

Re false positives: I've noticed, too, that Gmail is *very* good about not giving false positives. Far better than Eudora, be it ever so Bayesian. (And I lose stuff a lot less in Gmail. My Eudora folders were getting ever so Byzantine.)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I'm the only person in the world with the opposite problem: I constantly have to check on my hulkster spam filter of DOOM to make sure it isn't trying to kill my friends. On the plus side, it pounds all "A BIGGER PE-N-IS CAN HELP YOU REFINANCE YOUR HOME!! PLUS GIRLS ON WEBCAM WITH AMAZON GIFT CARDS!!!!" into smoothies, which it then presumably forces the spambots to drink.

I dunno why I got that kinda filter, or even what kind it is. But it's cool.