You've Got Stamps!?
A couple of months ago, I reported on Bill Gates' announcement that SPAM would be eliminated by 2006. Today, Gates has outlined more of this plan, and, you guessed it, it's all about stamps. The plan calls for the appendage of a small "stamp" to e-mail that is "paid" for by the sender. As noted:
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. Details came last week as part of Microsoft's anti-spam strategy. 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.
In essence, trust is established by completing a human task. The belief is that the cost to outwit these systems would be too great for the SPAM industry to endure, and, effectively stem or possibly eliminate SPAM as a whole. Somehow, I just don't get it.
There's many major problems I see with this scenario:
- Ubiquity - A system like this would require that everyone agree to a standard. In the beginning of the Internet, this was far less complicated since the legacy had not been established. Now, however, there are hundreds if not thousands of different mail server applications, millions of distinct mail servers, and millions more e-mail users. For this system to succeed, it would have to be put into effect everywhere to truly end the SPAM problem. I can't see that happening any time soon.
- Ownership - A system of this nature would be owned by whom? Would it be Microsoft? Would it be some centralized government (if so, which one)? Would it be owned by me, the owner of the account? If I have not previously paid for e-mail, and the assumption is that the costs of someone sending e-mail is nil, should I be expecting a check?
- Agility - Spammers are famous for devising clever and streamlined techniques for both cultivating and delivering SPAM to users regardless of the measures the White Wizards have conjured. Naturally, though, computing power continues to grow and the value associated with the perpetuation of SPAM will serve as more than enough motive to drive this cleverness. As they say, "No system is unbreakable".
- Trust - It is not clear how these systems deal with trust. Are my friends and associates required to now solve puzzles every time they wish to send me a message. What is one or both parties are compromised in one way or another? It seems that easing the process of generating Trust Certificates would go a long way in this regard. Any system that burdens our casual use will most likely reach great resistance and possible rejection.
- Accessibility - The puzzles that are to be used are of what form? Visual? Audio? Something else? Although this subject is often overlooked, accessibility is a definite concern and needs to be accounted for from start to finish. Additionally, the use of the puzzles may impose the transition from one medium to another (say from e-mail to web) which is not reasonable for any number of reasons.
The process of fighting SPAM is definitely a problem. The notion of "postage" is definitely interesting, but I'm not sure how a system of this nature scales either technologically or socially.