Despite Gates' Prediction, Spam Far From a Thing of the Past

Slatterz writes "Bill Gates declared in 2004 at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that spam would be 'a thing of the past' within five years. However, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, has written in a blog post that 'with the prophecy's five-year anniversary approaching, spam continues to cause a headache for companies and home users.'"

ATTRACT MORE WOMEN WITH YOUR OPINIOINS!!!!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

If you had a Verifiable College Degree from an Authentic University, then more women would listen to your opinions and you'd get MORE ACTION.
Why spend hours studying for a degree when you can call 1-800-IMAGRADUATE and get College, Masters or even DOCTORATE Degrees within One WEEK!!!

Well, to be fair to Mr. Gates

[93 Escort Wagon]

He made that prediction on January 24, 2004 - and it's only January 22nd now. So he's got two more days...

Obligatory

[dkleinsc]

Bill Gates advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. His idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to his particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, his plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to his are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust him and his servers?
(X) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about him:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and he's a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to burn his
house down!

Re:I disagree...

[ozbird]

Bill Gates should most likely not try to become the Nostradamus of the Internet because the problem is even more rampant.

I can't imagine why... "The Internet? We are not interested in it" -- Bill Gates, 1993

A technical solution

[shmlco]

Here's a technical solution. I receive email from a botnet touting v1a@ra. I tunnel back to the infected machine, slip in, and wipe the drive.

Pretty soon, no more botnet. And we also get a nice little econo-boost from all of those people replacing their antiquated virus-ridden computers, systems, and software.

Re:ATTRACT MORE WOMEN WITH YOUR OPINIOINS!!!!

[Dr. Hellno]

at least that one has some kind of logical thread to it. I'm honestly mystified by most of the subject lines in my spam folder. Just recently I received the cryptically titled "Is Your Boner A Loner When You Are With Her?"

What is that even supposed to mean? Is it for guys with anti-social dongs? Is there an epidemic of this sweeping the nation that I was previously unaware of?

Re:Agree about GMail...

[Synn]

I've gotten 2 spam mails since i switched to gmail a few years ago.
The summary is so negative, spam is pretty much gone, gates wasn't far off the mark at all.

If spam isn't an issue anymore, then you won't mind publicly posting your email address.

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