If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and supermarket fliers. That’s why we get so much junk e-mail: It’s essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying “stamps” for e-mail (paid in cpu cycles that we rent to others).
Gates: Buy Stamps to Send E-mail
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Keep it free, this is not the solution. Grrrrrr….
This wouldn’t put an end to spam, my physical mailbox is jammed with bullshit that I don’t want all the damn time. It might put a dent in it, but the really large spammers would not cease.
Bandwidth doesn’t come for free. Sending emails all over the place (especially the spammers) does cost money, so Gates does have a point here.
However, I don’t like the idea of having to run third party uknown code to my PC so I can be “eligible” to send email or to browse the web, but theoretically Gates’ idea could work. Essentially, if we pay our way to bandwidth by renting our cpu cycles, we won’t have to pay ISPs anymore (at least not as much). In fact, it can drive costs down for internet usage.
But still, I don’t like the idea of having to run uknown code on my PC just to do things that I do today for $45 bucks.
Isn’t the Microsoft tax we pay per machine enough? Now we have to pay an email tax too? Since when did Microsoft become their own government?
Ok, I run Arch Linux. Which is Crux based. So to translate:
I don’t want anything using processes without my EXPRESS permission. NO BACKGROUND IDLE PROCESSES!
Besides that, if he did it the only right way he can is to support EVERY OS out there. This means not just Linux and BSD, but Solaris and SCO Unix. Along with all the phone OS’s. Palm OS. Even Sun who actually wanted to do this likely has some struggly, M$ will never do it.
There was a report here earlier of a spam filter that is about 99.985% of spam removed. I think that’s good enough for me!
a money making avenue for Microsoft. I don’t think I will be participating.
… it may be a very good idea. If we put a price like 1/2 penny per emails, it doesn’t hurt the average user very much (send 200 emails for 1 dollars). But for the massive spammers who bombs 10 millions addresses at a time, having to pay 50K$ everytime would make me smile from hear to hear 🙂
For sure, it’s only a vague concept, and needs a LOT of study and details to be worked on. But I think it’s unfair to thrash the overall concept right at the beginning, without even seriously looking at it, just because the “big bad evil baby torturer and worst human being than Hitler“, Bill Gates, raised the idea.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99459&cid=8479197
I find it a bad idea, because the sending of the data costs less than the “stamp”. Who pays for this data? Who pays for the MTA and the other services the e-mail service provides? The people already do. Now they’ll have to pay even more; this will definitely kill off e-mail, making it only available for the wealthy while others will use a new, free protocol. Other problems include current systems which are based on e-mail like auto-reply, mailing lists, etc. It is far more better to include a technique which “drops all, accepts some” like a firewall or DRM. DJB has programmed such a tool, mailing lists use it to negate spam. It’s just a bit unfriendly to new people, but that’s what you get when old procotols are made aware to and abused abused by commercial marketing hippies.
This idea can be refined further. I am all in support for registration of email servers. If you do not want to register your email server, then you pay in cycles then. This way, legitimate mass mailers need not suffer. Or even better, before mail is delivered, it could ‘ask’ for something from the sender, which the sender must be able to provide. This request could be an email right back to the sender, which the sender must reply or else the mail will not be delivered. This is probably the same as the challenge-response system. The crucial difference is that registered mail servers will not have to be subject to this. An ID could be given to each registered mail server, and this list could be updated by an rsync like method to minimise bandwidth useage, where only the new bits would have to be downloaded.
A lot of ideas in that post, but spammers must be hit where it matters. They get away because people they incur very little cost to do this.
another brilliant idea wold be to give each person a number of emails allowed to be sent, and above that, registration would be required. So maybe on would get 1000 emails from their ISP subject to certain conditions, and they would need authorisation to send more. Or just register their damn server. I am sure it is a case of 1% of internet users generating 99% of email traffic now, so things may have to become drastic.
1. Free competitor encroaches marketshare, threatening profits
2. Institute tax on email
3. PROFIT!
One question I have though is who would collect this email tax/fee? Many people surely would pay to cut their spam by 70-80% if it only cost a $1-2 a month, but they would like to think that there money wasn’t going to a corporation like MS. Another problem is compatibilty. Unless we updated every email client and updated every mail server mail this new mail protocol based email would bounce from mail servers or confuse mail clients.
Actually gunpowder was _invented_ for fireworks many centuries before the british (the ‘americans’ of the time) and germans (first major users of gunpowder for weaponry, and biggest supplier during the british/franco/american war until the british discovered you could make it one of the key ingredients from horse dung) got hold of it.
Can’t someone just reinvent the email? Problem solved?
I was not giving a lecture in history i was making an example of what certain people can do with certain power when its in their hands. It was about who and when invented gunpowder but why and how it got used finally..
A new system for sending and recieving text would easily be written. Hell a simple one could be writtten by anyone with basic knowledge of programming and sockets. I doubt this will ever work unless they make laws that state what email is and then restrict all forms of it, making it illegal to write your own. And i know if something like that happened I’d be leaving the country in no time.
The real wacko isn’t Michael….
In fact, gunpowder was invented by the chinese who used it primarily in entertainment (e.g. fireworks)
>son of a bitch!
>burn in hell billy
I do not think is really Evil he is just having some stange thouhts about freedom and computing.
This kind a staemanet do not really help..
I must admit i am not MS fan but that is mostly because of their product not of their people, they have some fine skilled coders but somehow they get completly overtrown by the Marketing/PR section.
So please skilled MS coder come join us and forget your Ferrari’s a Toyato is much better and much cheaper .
NO
That would suck. THe great thing about e-mail is that it does not cost anything extra and it is simple. This is adding the bloat to e-mail.
Furthermore, I ALREADY DO PAY FOR MY e-mail I NEED TO PAY FOR MT INTERNET CONNECTION! AND $50 a month is a lot more than stamps, I do not want to pay more.
It would be horrible if this ever happened and I curse whoever is trying to make this happen.
The article implies that sending e-mail is free. It’s not. I’m paying $50/month for a DSL service that includes e-mail. It works as insurance payments do. Everybody pays and a few get to collect. In this case the spammers.
Ergo my monthly bill should go down if e-mail instead is charged by use. Charges for e-mail is like telephone calls. Huge amount of transactions each costing very little. The telephone companies already have software to deal with that.
The suggestion was NOT to charge money, but to get your computer to solve a small problem, much like SETI@home or find cures for diseases. Nobody would be out of pocket as anyone sending a mail or two can spare some CPU time. ALL home PCs are capable of simple processing. The system can be open source, no need for windows to be there, just like POP3 only with a bit extra. HOWEVER people sending mass email would require server farms to process the extra info, costing actual money since without that much power the computer can only send for instance one mail per second. Normal mail use would not be impeded you wouldn’t even notice it so STOP BITCHING Bill has come up with a top idea again, and judging by his success he’s clearly better at thinking things through than you moaning so and so’s.
Most sad part of it his his is even got some admirerers
who think he has got great ideas (again) before we no
it, it would be not possible to send any from a non Windows computer.
<quote>
The open-source software Hashcash, available since about 1997, takes a similar approach and has been incorporated into other spam-fighting tools including Camram and Spam Assassin.
</quote>
Like always another M$ invention. I’m sure that their solution will not be compatible with any nonM$ operating system. So it can be another FUD against competitors – they does not support our briliant technology to stop spam.
The simplest form of punishment of spammers is not to waste my precious cpu cycles but to send a mob after spammers 😉 Maybe some pitchforks, fires… lol j/k However, no I dont believe I should devote my precious cpu cycles to MS’s cause. Spam Filters to the job generally, and it helps to have you own domain instead of those free ones where spammers cause just guess the username part and bound to get a hit 😉
I’ve got no problem paying a small amount for my several hundred emails a month if it will stop spam. I don’t care if it is Gate’s idea if it is the only way to stop spam then lets do it. Remember, Gates is a GREAT business man even if he is on the wrong side of the Linux/Windows argument.
Just suppose the plan to pay with CPU cycles comes to be, how would this affect dial-up users? Yes, there are a few people still using dial-up to get their internet.
Would these users have to wait several minutes while the calculations data was being uploaded to the mothership?
What about people who turn their computer off when they are not using the computer? Would the user need to leave his/her computer on?
This idea may sound good but there are questions concerning changing the existing email protocols, changing user’s habits, and privacy issues.
how would this help pay for bandwidth? this would only increase bandwidth. my pc which doesn’t send or recieve much information in a day now all of a sudden has to start sending and recieving distributed computations?
and who’s going to pay to have their computations spread out to joe user’s 200MHz windows 95 box? would you let SETI, FOLDING, or GRID run on your computer if you didn’t want to? then add that my electrical bill just skyrocketted because my distributed computations i need to run to pay for my emails.
and what does he mean who’s paying for all this bandwidth? i’m paying $50 a month for it and there’s no way i’m maxing out or even coming close to using my theoretically possible bandwidth!
and what’s stopping spammers from running these services too? i’m pretty sure they have more then a few boxes lying around that can run distributed computations to pay for their emails habbits.
bits is bits, and i’ll send and recieve the ones i want. if they want to start charging for supposedly using so much bandwidth i’ll stick to my old method of email. what’s expensive is user time dealing with spam, so invest in some good spam blockers and call it a day!
All of you nay-sayers should propose a feasible alternative or your just making noise. Gate’s idea would work.
I heard about those worms that nest into outlook for example and go through your contact list to send copies of itself to others.
Imagine that spammers can exploit that on a large scale.
Who’s going to pay?
Spammers almost never use their own account or own pc, so they never pay.
The article mentiones feasible alternatives, but Gate’s idea obviously isn’t one of them, so it’s logical socalled “naysayers” protest.
Imagine a tie in with projects like Folding@Home. The way it would work is that there would be two email systems. The non-spam version which is protected by the stamp system and the unprotected one. It would be voluntary but there would be absolutely no government regulation of the spam on the one outside of the stamp system.
The client would work like this.
Step I: Complete a work unit with F@H, S@H or something else
Step II: The project’s unit server then contacts your mail server telling it to authorize say…. 10-15 emails.
Most modern computers could easily rack up a good 100-150 allowed emails a week. The postage would be able to be accumulated and transfered between mail servers when you switch services.
My Powerbook which has a 1.0Ghz G4 can usually complete 1 work unit a day. A family with 2 or 3 computers could easily get thousands of emails allowed each year. They’d never be inconvienced by it. However the spammers would be. The new mail servers would not recognize mail from outside of their system.
For once Gates actually has an idea that could be used for good. Of course with who we’re talking about, the odds that it would be are next to nothing.
Anybody has anything to say about the objections from a social point of view that are mentioned in the article as well ?
Of course I don’t expect Gates to (be able to) torture his brains into that direction….nor some of the yay-sayers here.
Howdy
Jees it seems bill is clutching at straws these days which is sad considering the size and clout of his company.
Why not put a few million into some research for requiring auuthorisation to send email and make a new mail protocol out of it, this way you would know exactly who/where/when an email was sent.
Also if this could be made a reality then you could start finding the con artists (nigerian scam anyone?) and finaly shut them down whilst discouraging others from taking it up.
Seems a little bit of common sense would go a long way to clean up this great big mess
Please read the article, there is no physical payment in actual dollars. The payment is in the form of cpu cycles which could involve multiplying some numbers, not exactly a great effort for a modern client machine. Slashdot has a far better discussion of this going on and they realise that actual payment is not occuring.
“… it may be a very good idea. If we put a price like 1/2 penny per emails, it doesn’t hurt the average user very much (send 200 emails for 1 dollars). But for the massive spammers who bombs 10 millions addresses at a time, having to pay 50K$ everytime would make me smile from hear to hear 🙂
For sure, it’s only a vague concept, and needs a LOT of study and details to be worked on. But I think it’s unfair to thrash the overall concept right at the beginning, without even seriously looking at it, just because the “big bad evil baby torturer and worst human being than Hitler”, Bill Gates, raised the idea”
Do you actually know that those email spammers do NOT use their own email to spam? They use trojan or simple script to spread the emails. If emails will be charged on those who send the emails, and as you have said, 0.5 penny per email, the spammer only pays 0.5 penny, and those innocents who have to pay a million dollars. Mr. Gates, stop thinking too much, please concentrate on your security issues of windows first, as someone started the reply in this post, he’s right, Gates should be silent and concentrate on his NOT even secure email client. lol
Stamps for email. Hahaha! Dumb idea.
And if it happens, may the peer-to-peer clients flourish 😉
[i]A family with 2 or 3 computers could easily get thousands of emails allowed each year. [i]
meanwhile they can’t feed the kids because their power bill is through the roof.
-or-
so could spammers!
don’t buy their crap (yeah, you in the back who ordered the male growth supplement), and they’ll stop sending the spam. and if you know someone who’s ever bought anything from a spam email, hit them and tell them not to reproduce, they are ruining it for the rest of us.
I think there’s also the physicality of the aforementioned postal mail; it possesses a great deal more mass and bulk than electronic mail and so is fundamentally more difficult to transfer, regardless of cost.
What this plan overlooks is that more and more spam is being sent by machines that have been taken over by spammers for that purpose with the latest bug of the month. This will do nothing to stop spam, and everything to make people pay money/cpu cycles for something they used to get for free.
Also, how long would it be before someone figured out how to feed bogus data back to the server immediately so they could send massive ammounts of mail without any problems? And how would that bogus data being fed back affect the project that would be running?
Before this plan is put into affect, wouldn’t Microsoft need to improve Windows to prevent zombies using your computer to send spam?
Just imagine being billed for all the spam sent from your machine that you were unaware of.
There have been some good points brought up. Here is my take on it.
First, they did mention charging cash. That will not fly as has been brought up we already pay for the email we send in the form of payment to the ISP.
Second, the CPU cycles. That is an interesting consideration. Not unheard of either as anyone who uses the “Free” Juno internet service has already agreed to let thier computer be used for computations as long as they are a member of the Juno service. Read the agreement from Juno, it is very interesting. This used to be it anyway, I have not read it in awhile.
Now, the differences between Software and Hardware is I own my hardware, where the software is rented. The only thing I own there is the media it came on, and that theoretically should be destroyed if I ever change my mind. The hardware though, the CPU, is 100% mine. I can do with it as I want, and what I don’t want it to do is work for someone for free. This is only feasible if I get my internet connection for free, and then I will be happy to barter and allow them to use my facilities (CPU) for thier work. If my connection is NOT free, as I am already paying to send emails by paying my ISP, then they should pay me to use my property.
How would this affect the rest of the world who is on dialup perhaps?
it will kill email if nothing else. Think countries like India and China. No one is going to pay for Email there. People in United States may if forced upon. But reason for email being so popular it’s free and any move by MS to have monopoly will be severely affect the Email Itself!
“[i]Another moron suggesting something without considering consequences!
Which computer will pay for spammer’s usage?
Right! Spam relay one.
Whose computer will pay for yours?
Exactly: Yours.
See the difference?
Oh well….[i]”
And here’s an other moron who wants to kill an *IDEA* only because he found A risk.
[NASA] Hey that’d be cool to send a human landing on the Moon !
[Moron] Duuhh ! How can you send a human in space if there’s no air to breath ? duuh !!!
Thank god not everybody on this planet is .. like you …
Hey, I’m already paying my cable company each month for my internet access. IT IS NOT FREE. ISPs should do more to secure their mail servers, and block incoming mass mailings.
“Do you actually know that those email spammers do NOT use their own email to spam? They use trojan or simple script to spread the emails. If emails will be charged on those who send the emails, and as you have said, 0.5 penny per email, the spammer only pays 0.5 penny, and those innocents who have to pay a million dollars.”
That’s exactly what I’m saying : it’s just a VAGUE CONCEPT. If they want to put a mechanism to charge for email, for sure we’ll need a copmpletely new email architecture/design. Why not a PKI based email system ? And *THEN* you add the fees on top of that.
Or whatever else. I don’t understand why people just stop on the very first “problem” they see in a concept, and thrash it without any more regards …
M$ should pay some fines for each security bug they have in their software first…
And what about third world countries? Should they pay for their emails?
Gates has too much money!
This is the problem. Bill Gates doesn’t like anything Free…
For the people that beLIEve that this is somewhat a good idea do really think it will remain cheap if implimented- No!
If this were to happen it would be the same situation seen with gas. Prices will gradually increase over time, until too many people bitch, and complain. Then the price will drop slightly (to the price *they* really wanted to charge) so people will be relieved somewhat. Just for the cycle to happen again. Look at gas — it happens ALL the time!
What happens when your computer gets hacked by some virus, and keeps spitting out emails? Can we expense those ‘small’ costs straight to Bill?
Seriously you guys talk about thousands of peices of spam per year for joe user.
I have a hotmail account and have recived only 10 peices of spam in the last 5months.
OH wait, does worms/virii count? Well in that case it would proably be about 30-50 in the last 5months, geez stupid windoze comps.
Well, can I suggest another idea? Imagine to make an organization to certify legal and authorized e-mail company in every country (I have to pay for it? Well, like domain registration? It can worth the money!). With standard e-mail certificates (which means control over service subscription, rules to respect, sureness of identity), dedicated servers and a mechanism to implement it on the client side.
So, if I WANT, I CAN have a clean e-mail address. But only if I CHOOSE to have it, and only if I PAY for it. Leave other addresses free for all. But the true important e-mail address is clean, and the spammers cannot survive to that, they’re business doesn’t hit where money really is. No real interest – much money at no costs -, low interest in spamming… The time and the lowering price for the service, just like the trend of all internet prices, can do the rest, making it the only type of mail service available.
Oh yes, it costs. And is hard to implement. But, as a side effect, leave Mr. Bill Gates free to commit himself to another business… like QUALITY for MONEY, for example, and not science-fiction…
Leave spammer dying alone in the dark…
Sorry, my english is horrible… 🙁
Again, this is Microsoft “Innovation”.
Gates is clueless when it comes to tech.
But, you can see where his head is at 100% of the time.
Nickle and Dime those Windows users, his own installed base.
I think this is the division line between Microsoft Fanatics and the rest of the computer industry. The fanatics that love Microsoft think that somehow they will someday become as rich as Gates, just be conning people out of their money.
Whereas the rest of the programming wold is interested in True Computer Science type innovation, and we despise these Hair-Brained, Get-Rich-Quick Off the Other Guy’s Nickle Schemes.
make emails free up to a certain number per hour–like 10 free emails per hour.
OK – so you pay your ISP for an internet connection. Your e-mail isn’t exactly free. Does your ISP have to provide enough bandwidth for all e-mail (spam and non) coming through their system? Of course. If more than 50% of current e-mail is spam (as most studies indicate), then they are spending half of their e-mail bandwidth on spam. If they have 10 e-mail servers, they really could do the job with 5, without spam. Do you think you aren’t also paying for that? Why should the spammers ride our backs (and our ISPs) to try and make money? What other business can people do for so little money? Bill Gates is right – changing the economic equation will change behavior. It is a question of getting the details right.
Filters help solve the problem for the end-user, but they don’t help the overall bandwidth problem. This is a difficult problem. More spam *will* change things. It could kill the ‘net – companies moving to private networks. Or kill e-mail – users switch to private e-mail. Or – ???
This is another way for Microsoft to try to make the net Windows Only and charge for it under the guise of more security.. Look at this in the light of the trusted computing initiative.
I do not receive any spam. Why ? I keep my mail address known only to ones that need to know. Here are some rules.
1. Do not use disclose email in newsgroups and public forums. If you have to, get another address specially for that purpose.
2. If you have to put your address on the web, write it in a GIF, JPEG or PNG image.
3. Use web forms for getting feedbacks from customers and partners.
4. There is a Javascript trick that enables display of a mail address on the web page, without writing it in a HTML code.
5. Restrict subscribing with your email address as much as you can, or even completely, if possible.
DG
This guy is amazing. He’s just looking for another way to make more money. Anyone noticed that in the last couple of years more and more things started to cost more an more? How about starting to pay for air, walking in the park and speaking. 0.01 cents for every word you speak. Would be cool, amazing. Let’s pay now for emails… I don’t care about spamers because there are several filters out there, and this idea wouldn’t put an end to it. Gates has enough money, and he’s only human. None of us takes anything to the other world when we die, most certainly Gates won’t take his billions with him, so why try to extort the last dime out of the pockets of ordinary people? Or shouldn’t Gates put his money where his mouth is?
Let’s face it. Spam is the most intrusive and effective form of solicitation. You are caught. You have no choice. You have to at least briefly glance at each email to ensure that it is not legitimate before deleting it. With TV you know when the next 2 min is ad time. The sound volume goes up. But you don’t have to look. Ads in papers, web pages, billboards and cereal boxes – you don’t have to look. Regular mailed ads – there isn’t that much because the advertisers have to pay – and it is easily recognizable. With telephone, you can put yourself on the do-not-call-list. Visiting solicitors – that’s now illegal.
Some dismiss stopping spam. They say it is technically too difficult. I don’t believe it. Don’t tell me that man has become a slave of the machine. Where there is a will there is a way.
But there is no will.
It comes down to standards versus money. Not ISO standards. Or IEEE standards. But civilization standards. The ISP’s should weed it out. Just like that. Just like garbage is picked up from the roadside. Because that just something you do in a civilized society.
The other day the inquirer had a report that showed that 40% of spam comes from the US. Some asian countries are even more about money. But hardly any spam comes from there. I guess it is just something you don’t do there. It’s uncivilized. It’s a taboo.
There is alot of posts, so sorry if it has posted already. I didn’t read them all.
I already pay my ISP a monthly fee to surf the web AND for email, what makes them think I will pay again. Some how I think Silly Billy has a hand in this.
This won’t work in a global world. There are too many hosts and no way to tax all of them. And what is to stop a spammer from using a worm from taking over my computer and sending spam. It would be me who pays the tax, not the spammer, the problem still exists.
Maybe the better approach would be to develop a certified mail system. The idea would be to send certified mail to a third party such as Verisign who would attach a digitial signature and send it on to the recipient. The recipient’s mail host would receive the message, verify the certified mail certificate, and by-pass the spam filters, ensuring delivery of the message.
Email could be kept free, and users could set the spam filter to block everything except certified mail.
Then again, this won’t work if a spammer takes over my computer with a worm and send spam from my account. Back to square one.
How would anyone be able to afford having a mailinglist with that kind of system? Or auto responing?
What’s considered e-mails and what’s not? Should it affect instant messaging too? IRC?
There’s more places to spam people you know. If e-mail becomes to expensive there’s always other systems to exploit.
Btw. I don’t get one single spam ever. Why? Because I keep my e-mail adress as private as possible.
If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and supermarket fliers. That’s why we get so much junk e-mail: It’s essentially free to send.
We get so much junk email because there’s a 7+% return (over 7% of the people receiving bulk email request information or buy something) on it, not because it’s free to send (in fact, most bulk mailers find that it’s more expensive to legitimately send bulk email than bulk mail, because most ISPs are going to charge you for the traffic on their mail server). The US Postal Service uses the cost of first class postage to reduce costs on bulk mail postage, because, in the long run, without bulk mail they would have no reason to come to your house to deliver. Think of your personal and business mail as compared to your bulk mail. If it’s anything like mine, you get probably 7x as much bulk mail as you do personal and business mail combined (business mail including bills). I get most of my bills online, I pay most of my bills online or in person. If I have to send a piece of physical mail out, I go to the post office, because I stopped buying stamps after they increased the rates for the second time while I had one book of stamps on my desk (in other words, I had to have 3 stamps on every piece of mail going out, or 2 old stamps just to get rid of them and cover the increase).
I’ve actually taken to leaving the junk mail in the mailbox, and I’m considering just putting a trash can next to the box so the postal carriers can see what they’re bringing me over time (though I’m sure they’re quite aware since they have to lug the crap around all the time).
The reality is that the USPS is a business, and they operate, for the most part, just like any other (mail delivery is not subsidized by taxes). If they delivered it for free, they’d either be increasing the cost to bulk mailers (so we’d get less mail, because the bulk mail people do run statistical analysis for cost vs. return), or asking the government to subsidize mail delivery, which means that most of us would pay more, through taxes, and we’d either get the same amount of mail or more, depending on whether they’d subsidize bulk mail as well as personal mail. One thing you wouldn’t see a lot of if they didn’t subsidize bulk email, though, is bulk mail sent as personal mail, because it would take too much time on the part of the individual sending the mail.
The last part, the time it takes for the individual sending the mail, is the real issue between email and physical mail. Almost anyone can figure out how to send email to hundreds, thousands, even millions of people. Anyone can buy one of those CDs with thousands of email addresses on them. It’s not necessarily inexpensive in terms of cost per email to send junk email, but it is inexpensive in terms of the time required to do it. Material costs are also lower, meaning that it’s more likely an individual, rather than a business, can do it.
Personally, I’ve had more viruses hit my inbox in the last week than spam, but I still got more junk mail in my physical mailbox than I did viruses in my email. At least my email app filtered most of the spam and all the viruses; I still have to do that manually in my physical mailbox.
Additional security in these email clients would do the trick…
Can I charge Bill Gates for all of these zombie machines sending me virii 20-50 times per day?
What’s bad is that people like Eugenia (who commented earlier that Gates has a point) will quickly liken to the idea and falsely believe that they are being better protected because the big bad gates man takes more of their money or cpu cycles or whatever. Besides, what if MS gets hacked and those CPU cycles are used by a massive terrorist organization to plan and plot large scale attacks against the world? It’s quite possible, and with the number of years it takes to secure a MS product (20 years and still counting) why does Bill not see this happening?
He basically just wants a money maker as Windows development is not moving fast enough for him to get a release out anytime soon, thus limiting his incoming profits. So even when you’re still the richest man in the world, greed succumbs you and you apparently feel the need to shorthand everyone else to simply further your cash flow. What a sick sad world this truly is…..I hope someone stops him before he lets any more diarrhea come out of his mouth.
Howdy
In japan i think it is they have a system where both the sender and receiver pays (in currency) for emails sent to a mobile phone.
Now if an idea as outlined by good `ol billy gates worked it would work here to no?
Well guess what … you guessed it, there are spamers and bulk emailers over there too so there is already evididence that it just won`t work.
What we really need is something as simple as what chat clients use, ask for authorisation and block any emails untill it is given (once received though allow emails from that person).
Yes i know it could be abused (mass auth requests) but honestly it would only takes a few bytes of data AND also the receiver would have to give a true return IP so as they can receive the ack.
Ok before i get flamed .. maybe when you say yes to auth you generate a random number and then send it back, the first party simply includes this number in a header of some desription.
See not to hard to start getting ideas that don`t involve yet more $$$ eh
…and i use a bayesian anti-spam filter. It’s not magic, this is simply a true good idea.
There is a much simpler solution, GO AFTER THE SPAMMERS! You have to go and track them down, I mean REALLY go after them. You have to eliminate the problem at the source. It sounds like SCO going after every Linux user when they should only be going after IBM.
Yet another example of how bill gates is more of a bussinessman than a computer person.
This is the most stupid bullshit idea I’ve heard in a while… this guy is loosing it. I mean how is that? I pay for my connection and I can do whatever I want with it. I don’t have to pay nobody EXTRA to keep it clean. This is mafia (protection for a fee) tactics in a “business” dress! Don’t fall for this.
Email is not the problem here. It’s the network! The guys that run the network will not fix it because they have huge profits by keeping the status quo.
They’ll just include this ‘feature’ with the next version of Windows and it’ll become a ‘standard’, and they’ll win every court hearing, well blah blah blah. Of course Gates won’t provide this loverly service for every OS on the planet, he’s only interested in Windows!
Crap. This guy’s CRAZY. Why does he need MORE and MORE money?
white list for a change… and see how that holds for a while… only large spammers will survive and then we’ll know who’s behind…
A one way cost won’t solve the problem. Instead charge the spammer 2 cents, 1 cent to send and the second to pay the receiver for accepting junk. Accumulate funds until it reaches +- $50.00 and send the recepient a check.
All mail can be funneled through a central distribution system (hub)… Must be registered to send junk (pay), must be registered to receive junk (get paid)…
Going after spammers to arrest them is very difficult.
The internet is a global “thing”, while each country has it’s own laws.
You can’t just invade another country to play police.
What must happen is improving security of software and protocols. I don’t think that the people who came up with the email protocols, or even the ip protocol, forsee those spam activities.
if I want to send you an unsollicited cake, i will first have to pay it
To all the lamers who just dived in feet first without reading the article….
THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MONEY OR PROFIT!
“To all the lamers who just dived in feet first without reading the article….
THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MONEY OR PROFIT!”
I hear you on this one… Only problem is that since Bill Gates came up with this idea, people are going to bitch about it. I suppose if this was the idea of Linus Torvalds, for example, many would embrace it and think it was the greatest idea ever to battle spam.
Fine the companies whose products are being promoted via SPAM! If companies like the manufacturers of VICODIN for example stopped paying people to market their product this way then we wouldn’t have a problem! For every email reported there could be a small fine which would then be presented in bulk to the company. The proceeds of which could go into something useful like…education. What a thought.
It would be up to the company itself to prove its innocence or they have the responsibility of tracking down the spammers that are doing this in their name and pass on the fines to them. Pretty simple idea but it would inevitably kill the market for this type of advertising.
Just my 2 seconds of CPU time
Fine the companies whose products are being promoted via SPAM! If companies like the manufacturers of VICODIN for example stopped paying people to market their product this way then we wouldn’t have a problem! For every email reported there could be a small fine which would then be presented in bulk to the company. The proceeds of which could go into something useful like…education. What a thought.
It would be up to the company itself to prove its innocence or they have the responsibility of tracking down the spammers that are doing this in their name and pass on the fines to them. Pretty simple idea but it would inevitably kill the market for this type of advertising.
Just my 2 seconds of CPU time
..sorry for the double post. My finger had a spasm and I clicked “Submit” twice
🙁
I pay Earthlink 20 bucks a month for the privelege of doing Email,and as my father put it when he gave that 3com Audrey I bought him for Xmas back “I can buy one hell of a lot of postage stamps for 20 bucks a month!”Now to me the 20 bucks is money well spent because I use the net for much more than email.On the other hand,I know plenty of other folks that dont use it for much more than email.And really I don’t see where I am overwhelmed by spam,although I do get some,perhaps my penchant for usiung non-M$ OS’s and email clients has something to do with this.There maybe should be a limit on how much Email one can send before the price goes up,Or a commercial rate for big spammers,but leave the little guy alone they already pay their dues.
I hope you guys are seeing this for the example that it is. This is our problem with the Rich in America, they are constantly greedy.
As far as I am concerned gentlemen, the Rich can take this idea and sti… Ah, ahem, I was saying that it’s basically another scheme… As long as you can make it so you have to pay for something, the Rich will get ahold of your money later.
PLEASE DON’T FALL FOR THESE KINDS OF SCAMS. Our government is doing good enough!!!
No More Freaking Bush In 2004!
Is it so hard to keep a black list of unwanted senders, so that your e-mail client automatically deletes any messages coming from them? After some time filling that list, most of the spam wouldn’t reach your inbox.
Well… just my € 0,02.
Quote:
“It would be up to the company itself to prove its innocence or they have the responsibility of tracking down the spammers that are doing this in their name and pass on the fines to them. Pretty simple idea but it would inevitably kill the market for this type of advertising. ”
Personally, I don’t think that is a good idea.
It would be very easy this way to get rid of competitors.
I’m for the idea of “Not guilty until proven guilty”, the quote above is of the idea “guilty until proven not guilty”.
Good point, but when you’ve got hundreds of emails espousing the virtues of a product then yeah…they pretty much are guilty until proven innocent.
The same concept goes with speed cameras. You’re fined for the ‘crime’ and it’s up to you to either accept responsibility for it or nominate who it was that was driving at the time.
As for a company using spam to advertise a competitor’s product….now that’s an interesting slant. Who in their right mind would do that? Sure, they’d be pushing a fine onto their competition but they’re also promoting their product for them against their own….and committing fraud in the process.
If an accused company is innocent…then yeah, they’ll have to show how their marketing is conducted and be accountable for it to prove it is being done lawfully. Either SPAM is illegal and it’s worth going after the bad guys or it’s not. I think it’s time this issue was sorted out once and for all before we really are charged for something that I believe MUST remain free.
> Step I: Complete a work unit with F@H, S@H or something else
> Step II: The project’s unit server then contacts your mail server telling it to authorize say…. 10-15 emails.
10-15 emails per wu?
Are you kinda mad? A f@h wu usually takes a couple of days on a moderate machine. For that I should be able to send 1000 emails.
I think that there is a way we can stop spam without “charging” in CPU cycles as the article suggests, or currency as some of the commenters have…
If every e-mail we send has a time delay attached to it, I think that mass-mailing would stop. Say if the mail was delayed by 3 seconds (and you were prevented from sending more than one mail per SMTP session) then to mail 1,000 people at once would require 3,000 seconds.
Perhaps this could be made smarter by increasing the time delay geometrically for all SMTP connections from the same IP within a given timeout period. This would mean that the first mail could be delyaed by 3 seconds but the next could be delayed by 2*3 seconds and so on. I am not sure how do-able that is under the current system.
I am sure this idea would stop spam and would not adversly affect legitimate e-mail users.
Yes, there are problems with the e-mail system and I do think that it needs to be redesigned to reflect the fact that people who don’t respect the open-ness of the Internet and wish to take advantage of it are now using it. However, that will take years and this, I believe, is a good and relatively quick fix.
BTW, I think projects such as SETI@home et al are great — they keep your system busy and help people out. However I think that forcing them on anyone is a bad idea. That’s why I use Free software — the choice.
To me, time is valuable and unlike money and CPU time everyone has it. I am sure people would be willing to wait 3 seconds to send an e-mail to friends/family but I bet the spammers would be hit hard by this.
Well, that’s my rant over with :-)!
The point you need to consider is that like it or not SPAM is a business and as long as the spammers can make it profitable it will continue.
Paying via CPU cycles? Will this really stop them given how cheap computing power is these days? It’s fairly trivial to set up a cluster these days which in some cases can complete with some supercomputers.
Even if we were talking about monetary payment, if it is still profitable then it will still occur. In fact you could argue that it may increase so spammers can increase their profit margin.
I don’t believe paying for email is the answer. I the way to combat it is to put the effort in to being able reliably identify the senders.
Personally I have two regular email addresses, one through my ISP with I only give out personally and another which I use to sign up to sites that require registration. My ISP email remains 100% spam-free!
That should be ‘compete’ not ‘complete’
>You can’t just invade another country to play police.
and still i see it happening.
Is Microsoft going to make “compatible” stamps for email, or will their stamps only be compatible with their operating system ?
Will I have to pay more to send email from a non-windows OS to Bill’s OS ? Is there an upgrade scheme for stamps ?? Or even a security patch for email stamps ?
Oh, Bill, my opinion: you can’t get your security in your operating system right today, so please, don’t touch anything with money directly involved yet. I would take hackers maybe one month before they find a hole in Windows so that they can create their own stamps and send mail for free again …
Spend your bucks on a real solution, like a world wide central of PGP servers. Anyone could register there. The first time an email comes in from someone unknown, you simple authenticate him/her and the data is kept on the central server. Anyone using addresses for spamming: lock them on the central servers. It would take me max. one month before every one I know is authenticated, since I use mail frequently. After one month, my addresses are known and it’ll take me one minute a day to clean out the unknown and to filter the spam, for everybody on the server. For instance, when a mail address is used for 1000 mails throught the system, and 10% marks it as spam, you can delete it for the others and block the address for the future. Or, if the same mail goes to 1000 people, authenticate it first by an agency ….
Bill Gates is trying to make Internet his own thing.
Did Microsoft design e-mails ? Did they design Internet ?
“Sorry Bill, Internet is not for sale”
I get tons of junk mail and there’s no way to stop it. By the way, receiving mail is always “free” even from the postal service. It’s the sending that costs something. The sender always pays. With email, the sender AND the receiver BOTH pay. This is why spam is bad. They force you to pay for part of their crap being sent (unless you don’t pay for an ISP!). Making analogies between email and postal service mail does not help the spam situation because the systems do NOT match up. Try again Mr. Gates.
On Bill G’s suggestion – what prevents an ISP from not giving a well paying spammer an easy time through the maze of authentications,blockages,delays,puzzle solving and what not?
It comes down to this. If subject A will give money to have something sent to subject B then it is going to get there. It’s the same scenario in drug trafficking.
How much are the spammers paying the ISP’s to allow spamming of me? $1/month? I’m willing to pay the ISP’s that amount to block it. But pretty surreal. I’d be competing with the spammers. Like protection money. With the ISP being the auctioneer.
That would kill legit mailing lists and newsletters.
Blame Joe Iamdumb, the one that actually buy the bottles of penis enlargement pills. Spammers wouldn’t bother to send e-mails to millions of addresses if nobody was replying. They’re doing it because they’re making money. A boatload of money.
A friend of mine once worked for a spammer about 5 years ago. He told me that they could make up to 25000$ CDN for every batch of message sent. The amount of money made per batch probably dropped dramatically since that time but you don’t have to wonder why some people are attracted to spam: they can make a living from it.
Do you really think computation puzzles would stop them? They will simply buy clusters of computers. The investment will worth it. Most of them are probably subscribing to the motto “You have to spend money to make money”.
If people weren’t interested in bulk mail, spammers would stop as it wouldn’t make them any money. Mail viruses would be the only issue/threat for free e-mail. Eliminate Outlook and Outlook Express and everything would be fine… Sad but true. Okay, we would still have stupid chainletters sent by clueless people but at least they wouldn’t clog the whole e-mail network.
Let Gates demonstrate for the world a working example–even make that example a subscription/pay service. Let him tout it as spam-free, and we’ll see. Just leave the rest of the world choice, because I doubt they will be falling for another wild scheme.
So, to Gates: Demo it! Prove it! Show us! And when you work the bugs..er, features…out of it, email us. ;-P
–EyeAm
Right, stamps to send email why? If you don’t want spam just get a webmail account so when you register for stuff, you can put that in. That is what I do.
This is just another Gates monopoly idea he is trying to make people believe is a good thing. For a company that secretly funded SCO approx $86 million to attack Linux users this type of behaviour doesn’t suprise me. Why would anyone want to pay an added fee to use email? I already pay my ISP for net access to surf, send/receive mail. This is as stupid as the USA charging toll fees to cross into another state which is something Canada has never needed to do. If I want to filter spam then I’ll either purchase a spam filter program or use the ones included with many Office email applications. At least then I’m not paying daily fees to curb spam. Most ISPs and Web Host services include spam filtering protection at the mail server level so you don’t receive unwanted mail. It’s better for ISPs to deal with spammers than for the consumer to pay the price. This is similar to some ISPs that charge monthly fees for using security and spam software. It’s cheaper to purchase the retail version directly from the supplier for one fee than to pay monthly rental charges. Gates is obviously looking for ways to have either a back door into other OS’s or find a solution for giving millions to SCO who is sure to lose their court cases.
I think it’s quite clear that Microsoft knows whats best for Microsoft’s customers.
I for one, don’t use Windows, and won’t be paying an email tax, but if thats what ‘Microsoft customers want’ then go right ahead.
>Bill Gates is trying to make Internet his own thing.
>Did Microsoft design e-mails ? Did they design Internet ?
>”Sorry Bill, Internet is not for sale”
I remember Bill said the Internet would not become a big thing when they launched the MSN network. Great visions…from a great visionair.