Despite Gates' Prediction, Spam Far From a Thing of the Past 198
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.'"
I disagree... (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny thing is (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of this spam comes from bot-nets made of Windows computers that have been taken over.
Incentive (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Spam? (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam a thing of the past? Right... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Agree about GMail... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Naturally (Score:2, Insightful)
As I've said before, spam is an economic problem. It won't go away until you remove the economic incentive to send it. Spam is sent out because people can make money by sending it, plain and simple. If something meaningful was done to remove the incentive to send spam, then it would go away.
But never before then. And you can forget about filters. We have seen ever since the first bayesian filters that spammers will keep finding ways to outsmart filters; you are only starting a game of whack-a-mole with that strategy. On top of that, filtered spam still has real costs in internet traffic and server storage space.
Re:Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
If those people would simply find a decent email provider, the spammers' market would dry up and spam might become a "thing of the past" once and for all. But for now there's no reason you can't switch to a decent email provider and forget about spam today.
The only way for the spammers' market to dry up would be if THEY STOPPED GETTING REPLIES to the messages they send out now. They still get replies to some (single digit percent?) of the messages they send out, and that makes them money. So they keep fighting (successfully!) against the majority of the Internet population and sending out new spam messages and keep trying to defeat anti-spam measures.
The spammers aren't the problem, the people who reply to spam are the problem.
Re:I disagree... (Score:5, Insightful)
Folks who are saying "spam isn't a problem because I don't see it in my inbox" aren't exactly wrong, in the same sense that the OTHER Bill, Clinton, was not wrong when he said "I did not have sex with that woman".
Certainly spinmeisters could argue that this means Bill Gates was right -- for the average user, who doesn't know jack about computers, spam is largely a solved problem.
Anyone who runs a network or data center of course, would strongly disagree. The cost in technician and programmer time "solving" spam this way, and the cost of maintaining bandwidth that is 90% wasted needs to be quantified so people who have the money understand in concrete terms the value of actually making a major dent in the volume of spam sent.
To use a possibly-irrelevant comparison: Power transmission and distribution losses in the US hover around 7-8%. What do you think our national electric grid would look like if losses were 90%? Would we even have one?
Re:Agree about GMail... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Agree about GMail... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Getting rid of SPAM (Score:3, Insightful)
In addition to your suggestions,
a) Set up some honeypot addresses, like aardvark@yourdomain.com and zzyxyzark@yourdomain.com, that will not be used for any legitimate purposes.
b) if you have some old unused e-mail addresses (i.e. people no longer with a company), monitor them to make sure that they only receive spam and notify legitimate correspondents that they are obsolete and, once they've only received spam for 6 months or so, then start using them as honeypot addresses as well
c) seed the honeypot addresses into various locations where spammer automated address collectors will be likely to pick them up (web pages, news groups, replying to obvious address trollers, etc.) - try to get it into as many spammer lists as possible.
d) take any e-mails that come in to those addresses and feed them into the learning mode of
i) a hash signature-based recognizer if it's graphical spam
ii) a bayesian recognizer if it's text or HTML spam.
e) use the resulting trained recognizers to filter out the same spam messages from your legitimate mail addresses.
A bit the same idea as noise-cancelling headphones.
Re:Agree about GMail... (Score:1, Insightful)
The only problem is that the spammers are hijacking other people/companies systems, and who will end up paying?
Re:Agree about GMail... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Agree about GMail... (Score:2, Insightful)
...who will end up paying?
The people who refuse to secure their PCs. So far, I don't see a problem.