| About | Legal | Contact | Resources | Home | mainsleazespam.com |
| Microsoft Corporation |
| Microsoft wants to control everything else. Why not include ramming spam down our inboxes? After all, if Microsoft can set the standard for darkness (an old geek joke), why not try to set the standard for defining spam? |
|
Microsoft to flag 'good' spam MICROSOFT has contracted for a service that lets email from legitimate companies more easily reach people's inboxes [Ed. Note: I am just all aflutter at the idea of Microsoft deciding what email heading into my inbox is spam or not spam. I am sure that gobs of money changing hands with Microsoft will having nothing to do with it, of course. |
|
Bill Gates Announces That Microsoft Will Stop Spam! Yeah, Right, Stop the Presses and All That. Bill Gates is reported on January 25, 2004 in the online media to have announced that Microsoft has come up with the solutions to stop spam email. The problem with Bill's ideas, however, is that they are all quite warmed-over and irrelevant, displaying once again how incredibly wrong Microsoft can get it sometimes, and now how wrong they can get it on the spam email issue. It's sort of like Bill Gates discovered the Internet 10 years ago and had to jump in feet first after first dismissing it as of no importance. Now he has discovered spam email. Unfortunately, he has not yet informed himself of the realities of the situation, as is clear from any serious critique of his proposals. A commentator at adtmag.com on January 26, 2004 had the following to say: "It's fairly obvious why Microsoft is interested in curbing spam, on several fronts. First, the whole company runs on e-mail; if you've ever been in touch with a Microsoftie when their e-mail wasn't working, you'll know that it's not a pretty sight. Second, between Hotmail and MSN, Microsoft hosts some zillions of e-mail accounts as a business. Finally (and they'd probably prefer you not remember this), Microsoft is responsible for a lot of the spam in your mailbox. That's because more and more spam is sent by proxy through hijacked computers on the Internet - hijacked thanks to some of the numerous security holes that Windows and other Microsoft applications have displayed in recent years." Jousting at Spam Windmills The following is the text of a post commenting on Gate's announcement, made to the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email by Steve Linford, creator and maintainer of what is probably the most widely used and respected repository of information on major spam operations on the Internet. The SBL and list of ROKSO spammers are used by email administrators worldwide to block unwanted spam email from known unrepentant spam sources. http://www.spamhaus.org > http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/7783496.htm > > DAVOS, Switzerland - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Friday predicted the > death of spam in two years and said his company is working on... ...funding the DMA. > One, which he called human interaction, would send a puzzle back to the > sender. The puzzle would be designed so that only a human could solve it. > The e-mail would be accepted only if the puzzle were solved. - Breaks E-commerce. E-commerce websites wouldn't be able to send me my order info, invoice, or let me know there's a delivery problem, since the automated mailing system isn't going to be able to "prove it's a human". - Breaks List Subscription. I wouldn't be able to subscribe to mailing lists because the Closed-Loop procedure wouldn't be able to reach me to ask me to confirm my subscrption. > The second, which Gates called computational, would require that the > sending computer carry out a calculation. Having to do the calculation > repetitively would prove costly to the sender, he said. - But not for spammers, who would simply do as they normally do and rotate IPs and domains, offloading the computation to thousands of hijaked computers. - Would require all of the world's computer users to upgrade their software to support the computation system. Won't reduce spam, but it will sure boost the profits of the software upgrade seller into orbit and beyond. I wonder what company's has 90% of the world's OS market. > The third approach, which is the one Gates predicted would become the > accepted method, is monetary. It would require senders to pay a fee to a > recipient. If the e-mail is legitimate, the recipient could choose to > reject the fee. - Would require a worldwide payment processing system to rival MasterCard, I wonder whose company Gates is proposing would do this and gets to charge a "small processing fee" on each of the world's 20 Billion daily emails... hmmm... yup, Microsoft of course. - Has to be pre-paid since spammers would never pay *after* they've sent, and so would require pre-payment into a 'central' system, each email user would have to pre-purchase {say} 10,000 email sends at {say} $50. The world has *** email users... each pre-paying $50... Very nice interest-earner for the central firm (I wonder who it'll be? Will the firm's name start with "Micro" and end with "soft"? Is the Pope a Catholic?). - The spammers of course will simply do as they always do and hijack their way around it, Bulker Clubs will simply add "stolen pre-paids" alongside "stolen proxies" and "stealth spamware". No doubt new viruses will scour people's machines for pre-paid email tokens/accounts as well as email addresses. > Oh well, nothing new to see. Move along, move along... Quite right. -- Steve Linford The Spamhaus Project http://www.spamhaus.org |
|
Micro$oft, Making the World Safe for THEIR Spam? SACRAMENTO - Urged on by Microsoft, the Assembly Business & Professions Committee today unceremoniously killed SB 12 (Bowen), a measure to create the country's toughest anti-spam law by requiring advertisers to get permission from computer users before sending them unsolicited ads, on a 5-2 vote (the bill needed 7 votes to pass out of committee). "Does anyone other than the eight members of this committee who either voted 'no' or took a walk on the bill really believe Microsoft has any interest in getting rid of spam?," wondered California State Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), the author of SB 12, following the bill's defeat: "Trusting Microsoft to protect computer users from spam is like putting telemarketers in charge of the do-not-call list. Microsoft uses a megaphone to tell everyone how much it hates spam at the same time it's working overtime to kill truly tough anti-spam laws. Why? Microsoft doesn't want to ban spam, it wants to decide what's 'legitimate' or 'acceptable' unsolicited commercial advertising so it can turn around and license those e-mail messages and charge those advertisers a fee to wheel their spam into your e-mail inbox without your permission." More Information: California Senate Committee Kills Tough Anti-Spam Bill Did MS, AOL, Yahoo block vote on California antispam bill? Spam Bill Roils California Lawmakers |