Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam...
Posted: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 10:32 AM
by
dave
Filed under: Just for Fun
I am sick and tired of Spam and I know I'm not alone on this. I don't just mean the email kind of spam. Spam comes in many forms. It's far from new, all that's happened is the spammer has new tools.
These are the Spams I hate (in order):
- email Spam
- Phone calls at dinner
- The crap you get inside every statement you receive
- Junk mail
- The stuff that falls out of magazines
Although 1 and 2 don't kill tress, I find them the most intrusive. I hate the others but not because of the intrusion, I just toss them aside without even looking at them. Which means valuable resources have been wasted. If anyone reading this sends me junk mail. STOP IT. You are wasting your time, money and our planets resources. I will never buy anything from you because of this, so just stop.
At least with the phone calls there is someone to take it out on. You can yell at the poor telemarketer and feel a bit better. Also there are two ways to get ride of the dinner time callers. Call privacy is one, unfortunately this costs money. You can also combat this yourself, by asking to be taken off their list. By law if you ask the telemarketer to remove you from their list they must comply. And it always stops their spiel when I say it.
So what about the worst kind of Spam. The tons of email we get in our email box each day. You can't even reply to these bastards to yell at them. The current thinking in the industry is, creating filters is just not worth it. There is just no way to weed it all out. The best defense would be to make it not worth while doing. If it's not cost effective the spammers will stop. One way to do this is to charge postage on email. If we each had to pay a penny to send an email. It wouldn't cost much and if it meant that the spammer sending millions would stop because it cost to much, I think it would be worth it.
Cynthia Dwork of Microsoft has another idea. Charge for sending email but not with money with Processing power.
What Dwork proposes is to slow down the process by having the sending computer solve a mathematical puzzle created from the details of the message itself. Messages sent at different times and to different recipients would generate a different puzzle. This way a message sent to many different people would have to solve a different puzzle for each one. Thereby slowing down the machine sending emails. She also tosses in a way to combat the fact that processing power doubles every 18 months, by tossing in a variable that ensures each message takes 10 seconds to send. And will increase this value as machines get faster. So for you and I to send a few messages, our machine works away on a problem as it sends each message, so what. For a spammer they would require more hardware and processing power to send out the same volume of emails they send now. Therefore it might not be worth the effort anymore.
I'm behind you on this one Cynthia. If there is anything I can do to help get this through you can count on my support.
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