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| -Short Attention Span Theater- | |
| Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail | |
| 2004-03-05 | |
| Proposed alternate title: Bill Gates proposal has same effect as e-Viagra for bureaucracies around the world 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. Isn’t that what happens now? My ratio of actual mail to unsolicited junk mail is about 25 to 1. 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. ....and free to delete as well. Its called a ’filter’ Bill, give a call to your Microsoft Outlook developers, they can tell you all about it. You’ll probably get voicemail as they are busy fixing a host of bugs that allow viruses in to take over my desktop, but that’s ok. Many Internet analysts worry, though, that turning e-mail into an economic commodity would undermine its value in democratizing communication. But let’s start with the math: At perhaps a penny or less per item, e-mail postage wouldn’t significantly dent the pocketbooks of people who send only a few messages a day. ...its a penny today, by the time my kids go to college in 10 years, anyone want to guess what it will cost then? why, "its only a penny...." the mating cry of do gooders everywhere Not so for spammers who mail millions at a time. Though postage proposals have been in limited discussion for years -- a team at Microsoft Research has been at it since 2001 -- Gates gave the idea a lift in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. black helicopter followers , bildeburger theorists, jump on this one fast you guys. David Icke, call your office! Details came last week as part of Microsoft’s anti-spam strategy. apparently, Microsofts strategy doesnt say "fix the freaking OS in the first place" Instead of paying a penny, the sender would "buy" postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender’s good faith. ooohhhhhh suuuuuuure it will.... Time is money, and spammers would presumably have to buy many more machines to solve enough puzzles. 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. Meanwhile, Goodmail Systems Inc. has been in touch with Yahoo! Inc. and other e-mail providers about using cash. Goodmail envisions charging bulk mailers a penny a message to bypass spam filters and avoid being incorrectly tossed as junk. That all sounds good for curbing spam, but what if it kills the e-mail you want as well? oh well, what was that Lenin said about making omlettes? I forget.... Consider how simple and inexpensive it is today to e-mail a friend, relative, or even a city-hall bureaucrat. uh, yeah, thats why WE LIKE IT It’s nice not to have to calculate whether greeting grandma is worth a cent. its also nice not waiting a fortnight to send a piece of paper down the street! And what of the communities now tied together through e-mail -- hundreds of cancer survivors sharing tips on coping; dozens of parents coordinating soccer schedules? Those pennies add up. and gosh if we make it a dime, well hell thats starts being real money. think of the good we could do with that. and heck, its only a dime, think of the children.... "It detracts from your ability to speak and to state your opinions to large groups of people," said David Farber, a veteran technologist who runs a mailing list with more than 20,000 subscribers. "It changes the whole complexion of the net." He says that like its a bad thing doesnt he? who does he think he is? Goodmail chief executive Richard Gingras said individuals might get to send a limited number for free, while mailing lists and nonprofit organizations might get price breaks. as long as you bow down before the proper entity, you will be taken care of, I’m sure of it. But at what threshold would e-mail cease to be free? At what point might a mailing list be big or commercial enough to pay full rates? Goodmail has no price list yet, so Gingras couldn’t say. Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s founding fathers, said spammers are bound to exploit any free allotments. He Heap Big Smart Mammal. Me Like Him. "The spammers will probably just keep changing their mailbox names," Cerf said. "I continue to be impressed by the agility of spammers." And who gets the payments? How do you build and pay for a system to track all this? How do you keep such a system from becoming a target for hacking and scams? The proposals are also largely U.S.-centric, and even with seamless currency conversion, paying even a token amount would be burdensome for the developing world, said John Patrick, former vice president of Internet technology at IBM Corp. My solution? S&H green stamps. "We have to think of not only, let’s say, the relatively well-off half billion people using e-mail today, but the 5 or 6 billion who aren’t using it yet but who soon will be," Patrick said. A surprisingly high number of them will also appear to have relatives in jail in Nigeria. Some proposals even allow recipients to set their own rates. I do that already, its called ZERO. A college student might accept e-mail with a one-cent stamp; a busy chief executive might demand a dollar. Ok, now this is nonsense. Information is a two way street. Imagine how effective your cellphone would be if you charged your caller for every call they made to you. "In the regular marketplace, when you have something so fast and efficient that everyone wants it, the price goes up," said Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute, a think tank that favors market-based approaches. To think the Internet can shatter class distinctions that exist offline is "living in Fantasyland," Arrison said. Nonetheless, it will be tough to persuade people to pay -- in cash or computing time that delays mail -- for something they are used to getting for free. Critics of postage see more promise in other approaches, including technology to better verify e-mail senders and lawsuits to drive the big spammers out of business. "Back in the early ’90s, there were e-mail systems that charged you 10 cents a message," said John Levine, an anti-spam advocate. "And they are all dead." Please tell that to the aforementioned Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute.
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| Posted by:Frank Martin |
| #14 Boy oh boy do I understand! Been there / done that myownself - more times than I wanna admit to. IMHO, what this means, of course, is a nice slow modularization process so that nothing is changed except that 75% + of every script is included code. Then, I'll wager, it will be a shitload easier to make such changes and avoid the corners! I know, I know, you've been there / done that too, I'm sure! I have an app I wrote for Aramco in ASP with 230 main-dir scripts and 134 include files! - I had to stop after about 5 months into it and do exactly what I'm suggesting! Heh! I'll still hit the tip jar regularly - whether you find the time or not. RB is awesome and feels like home. Thanx for letting me visit! |
| Posted by: .com 2004-3-6 12:27:53 AM |
| #13 Grrr... I programmed myself into a corner on the article/comment sort thing. I haven't added it because of the amount of code I'll have to tear out and rebuild... Lemme see what I can do. |
| Posted by: Fred 2004-3-6 12:06:07 AM |
| #12 Brave, Anonymous. So let's summarize your post in rounder terms... 1) Your time and effort are worth less than the evil M$ code. 2) You don't make mistakes. 3) You have a team of people constantly upgrading and maintaining your custom kernal. Cool! Knock yourself out. Don't let M$ ever get another penney - that's how you vote in the Capitalist Maketplace. Can everyone here send you their kernal mods wish list? Will you charge them for the work? Just wondering... |
| Posted by: .com 2004-3-5 11:29:14 PM |
| #11 source: CNN Americas One stop shopping center for Urban legends http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/05/spam.charge.ap/index.html While I dont care myself for microsoft, I can understand why many people like other alternatives, like one little feature that I really like in Linux OS distros - THEY GIVE ME THE SOURCE CODE SO I CAN FIX IT MYSELF, IF NEED BE. and they dont hit me for 200 bucks for each and every desktop in my house every 2 years. |
| Posted by: Anonymous 2004-3-5 10:53:09 PM |
| #10 BTW, along the lines of my post, when was the last time you folks hit the RB tip jar? Hard enough to make it sing? Fred has written the best blogging software on the Internet, hands down, and lets us all use it on the Honor System - bearing the shortfall himself... Fred - Lol! I'll toss in another $50 for some custom article sorts, such as articles with most recent comments first, etc. Whaddya say? True personalization... I'll leave cookies on and my IP addy is, oh - nevermind - you already know, heh heh... $75? *snicker* ;-> |
| Posted by: .com 2004-3-5 10:24:53 PM |
| #9 So what's the source of this missive? It just links back to Rantburg. Especially since it lacks a defined source, this smacks of urban legend to me. I think I've heard this somewhere before. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2004-3-5 10:09:43 PM |
| #8 Dump the problem on Al Gore. It's his fault. He invented the Internet. Make him fix it. Chainey had nothing to do with it. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2004-3-5 9:54:23 PM |
| #7 It's called a ’filter’ Bill, give a call to your Microsoft Outlook developers, they can tell you all about it. I wouldn't bet on that. The solution to spam is simple: the death penalty. I'm only half kidding; I emptied my junk folder Wednesday morning, and again this evening. In the day and a half in between, SpamAssassin had caught over 1,000 pieces of junk. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-3-5 9:27:09 PM |
| #6 Hmmm... Arrison strikes me as a classic marketeer. Hey, it can work - if you peddle it right... Who'd a thunk it? If, 25 yrs ago, someone had told you they were gonna make a huge friggin' fortune selling bottled water - what would you have said? [rant] We have (at least) 2 issues at play here: 1) Paying for email. This is the true killer app that made the Internet - it is the jugular. I suggest to Gates, et al, that they are spitting in the wind to advocate charging for something that has been free (ignoring, at this point, all of the costs of being connected; machine, ISP, etc.) since its inception. The answer isn't to punish regular users - it's to punish the abusers. Now bringing the costs back into the point, just as with tele-marketing BS - we pay for our connection and should NOT have to put up with assholes abusing it, much less pay extra to keep them at bay or keep them from slowing the entire system down by flooding it with total fucking crap. "Abuse" your legislators about their failure to stomp the shit out of Internet abusers, if you want to stop the BS effectively. Hang judges that can't grasp this simple concept: it's OUR connection. spammers and tele-marketers have no "right" to use it. Period. 2) What OS developers fail to provide, in the opinions of some people... a) I find it amusing to read criticisms of MS* regards the innumerable functions some users believe, for reasons that I can't quite wrap my mind around, their OS should do that it doesn't do now. There is a concept (Actually it's a misconception, IMHO.) at work here that I strenuously object to: do everything for me - for a pittance. Yes, a pittance - your OS didn't cost you much, relative to the rest of the s/w and h/w and fees required to be connected. This reminds me of the view of Gov't in the minds of the LLL crowd... Same flawed absurd presumptions at work. b) What you believe is an obvious need / missing function is, if you think about it rationally and a significant number of other users agree with you, an obvious business opportunity - a niche market that the evil M$ must've missed. Duh. I'm glad that they're not the omniscient evil-doers (Can you say chainney? I knew you could.) they are portrayed to be... I predict the RMFM** OS is some way off. c) No program is perfect. Period. Ever. Every program has bugs. No program can do everything. Infinte Functionality = Infinite Code = Infinite Cost. Doh! Windows is well over a million (last I heard was 1.45M+) lines of code. Can you even program your VCR? If so, you just may be the exception - a semi-Geek, congratulations. But does anyone anywhere actually believe that they could write a million lines (or less... how about just 1000 lines?) of perfect never-fail does-everything code? Rhetorical Summary: Do any of us really appreciate just how many levels of shoulders we all stand upon just to read RB? I sure do. How about you? When's the last time you actually thought to appreciate all of the technical largesse at your fingertips - and the pittance it actually costs you to employ it? To fail to do so is actually the hallmark of Arabs... "Yeah, so what? What have you done for me lately? Okay, what about today? Okay, what about the last 5 minutes?" F**kin Duh, people. A little perspective can go a long way: that subscription to DDGirls costs more. * Of course all Non-Microsoft OS's are perfect and provide all of the desired functions and never, ever, have problems or fail to anticipate and please all users. Where, pray tell, can I get a copy of the Wet Dream OS? It should be free, of course. Uh, um, yeah, right... wotta load. You write it, I'm bizzy. ** RMFM: Read My Fucking Mind [/rant] |
| Posted by: .com 2004-3-5 9:17:23 PM |
| #5 If I could bill Microsoft a buck for every junk email I find in my in-box, I guarantee the ladies and gents would find a way to stop spam YESTERDAY. |
| Posted by: Garrison 2004-3-5 8:07:47 PM |
| #4 One problem with the proposal is that the latest internet worms set up the infected PC as a zombie spam server. Would like it if you became infected by one of these beasties and it sent out several thousand emails on your account before you could cleanse yourself of it? That could get rather expensive -- and that is just the current state in the spam wars. |
| Posted by: Bill 2004-3-5 7:56:33 PM |
| #3 Instead of paying a penny, the sender would "buy" postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. that is the stupider thing i ever herd and will cost very valuble time. i see chainey all over this. i agree with you half and bong should be free to. |
| Posted by: muck4doo 2004-3-5 7:42:10 PM |
| #2 fone shude be free to |
| Posted by: HalfEmpty 2004-3-5 7:29:09 PM |
| #1 How do you keep such a system from becoming a target for hacking and scams? Don't ask Bill Gates. He hasn't yet figured out how to protect the present systems. |
| Posted by: GK 2004-3-5 7:15:19 PM |