Telecoms, ISPs partner in spam fight

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how to end spam (things the FTC couldn't figure out)

I have just made proposal to Microsoft for my assistance in the development of a new kind of defence against spam. This would require resources that only Microsoft has, however, it can be done and I will prove it!
The rules regarding the internet are such that normal users and spammers will ALWAYS differentiate from each other. One major difference is that a spammer has to establish and maintain a constant stream of information in order to send the spam. It's not just a click of a button away, the spammer must establish a thread for sending the mail, this thread would connect to an smtp server and initiate a session with it, sending one piece of spam (or as email allows it, to several recipients at once). Messages are pre-composed and can be dynamic, they can even include links to pictures that actually hide scripts running on servers to track your every move. Such an invasion in privacy is unwanted and must be anhilated.

The average user sends mail by writing it manually, then pressing a send button. It goes out and they forget about it, meanwhile norton antivirus for some, intercepts the message and scans it for viruses. It then proceeds along it's way in much the same fashion as the spam was sent.

The difference is that the average user doesn't have that much overhead, whereas it takes massive computing power and network connections to pump out spam at the volume as some do. Time to introduce a solution to that problem. Induce a lag. Create a lag so huge that it would crush the entire industry.

Now it takes 5 seconds for our average user running a 2ghz computer to send, although that is just a transparent delay thanks to the same practices as norton anti-virus when scanning emails has. For others it may take longer, but the fact is, we want to add a horribly large amount of computing overhead to the system. A computing overhead is much easier to handle than a network crippling overhead. This emailing tax would be so high that it would reduce their capacity to just 17,280 emails a day per 2ghz of processing power. They would require huge and expensive computing networks to accomplish the same capacity as they used to, and since effectiveness isn't likely to change, they would have no market as the costs associated with this form of advertising wouldn't be competitive with even the most expensive forms of advertising today, rendering spam useless and completely ineffective. The added bonus would be that emails would now have protection, an encoding that prevents people from cheating and not devoting the cpu cycles it takes to get the job done, they would be working for nothing as the client would see only garbage, and garbage too has patterns that can make it easily identifyable and filterable (using Outlook express's own spelling dictionary and by setting a size limit for filtering; as spam will need lots of text in it in order to send a message. All legitimate emails would come through, and perhaps the odd piece of spam mutilated by the decoding process since the spammer decided to cheat). This of course doesn't stop someone from recieving spam, but this certainly does limit it, significantly. The goal isn't to eliminate spam by directly filtering it out, the goal IS to eliminate spam by making it a form of advertising that is certainly not cost effective.

Certainly there are legitimate emails that are from business, and one could subscribe to them. This subscription (and unsubscription) process could be automated by the email client. One would specifically block everything unless otherwise specified if the message is deemed to not be encoded (as there will be a header for indicating encoded messages). If the message IS encoded then it is allowed to proceed through.

Microsoft could even enhance this service by providing spam filtering software putting use a centralized database of information, mined when a user first recieves a message from an unknown address (or a new address), providing a button only a click away, for identifying what that message was. Of course some measures would have to be put in (a threshold of tolerance) to the system to ensure that normal people couldn't be put on a filter list for sending out a normal volume of mail (let's say 1000 a day).

Thus would end an era of spam. This technique could easily be adapted for instant messaging. Spam is obselete. We need only wait for Microsoft to respond, and put into action a system that will implement this, and maybe I can make a name for myself in the computer world for having been the person to eliminate SPAM. Remember I need only kill the market, not block all spam.

Ryan Elson

Posted by: stealthc   Posted on: 01/14/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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