: Gates forecasts victory over spam

[Dave Farber <davefarber () tmo blackberry net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell () newcastle ac uk>
Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2004 18:48:02 
To:dave () farber net
Subject: Gates forecasts victory over spam

Dave:

There was a brief mention on several BBC news bulletins today that 
Bill Gates had claimed that spam would be defeated within two years. 
Their web site carries a more complete story, quoting a speech he has 
just made at Davos, which you might want for IP if you haven't any 
alternative coverage of it:

> Gates forecasts victory over spam
> By Tim Weber
> BBC correspondent in Davos
>
> Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time, Microsoft boss 
> Bill Gates has promised.
>
> Spammers - senders of bulk e-mail that mostly offers dubious 
> products or pornography - were innovative, he said.
>
> However, a three-pronged strategy would soon stamp out the problem, 
> he said in remarks at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.
>
> He hailed search technology firm Google as a "great company"; its 
> approach reminded him of Microsoft 20 years ago.
>
> But he also predicted that Microsoft search technology would soon 
> outpace that of its rival.
>
> Mr Gates, by now a fixture at the annual WEF's meeting of business 
> leaders and top politicians, said a lot of progress had been made 
> during the past year to stop spam e-mail.
>
> "Lots of mail you get is from people on your contact list. So what's 
> the problem? Strangers!"
>
> Filters could do a lot to sort spam from real mail, Mr Gates said: 
> "Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' - that might be spam."
>
> But by adding random words in subject lines and replacing text with 
> pictures, spammers were trickier to catch and in the long run 
> filters would "not be the magic solution".
>
> More promising were "human challenges" - forcing the sender to solve 
> a puzzle, or the computer sending the e-mail to do a simple 
> computation.
>
> "That's easy for a machine sending a few e-mails, but gets very 
> difficult and expensive for a computer sending lots of spam," Mr 
> Gates said.
>
> But ultimately, Mr Gates predicted, spam would be killed through the 
> electronic equivalent of a stamp, also known as "payment at risk".
>
> This would force the sender of an e-mail to pay up when an e-mail 
> was rejected as spam, but would not deter senders of real e-mail 
> because they could be confident that their mail would be accepted.
>
> "Microsoft is pursuing all three approaches, and spam will soon be a 
> thing of the past," Mr Gates asserted.

Full story (which goes on to talk about Google and X-boxes) at:

   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3426367.stm

A comment by a colleague of mine:

> Within a closed community it is feasible to crack the spam problem, and
> that closed community could be the Microsoft mail communuity.  I'd guess
> Microsoft see this is a first rate opportunity to expand and lock in
> users to their system.  If the rest of the world community doesn't fix
> the spam problem, fast, Microsoft probably will - for their users.

Cheers

Brian Randell

-- 
School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell () ncl ac uk   PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232  URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/

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