Recently, some people have been proposing some really dopey solutions to the problem of spam. Probably the most prominent suggestion at the moment is Bill Gates’s postage stamp idea, floated at this year’s World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
When Bill Gates ’suggests’ something in a speech, it means he has had a crack team of 100 computer geniuses working on the problem for several months, and is ready to unleash the idea on an unsuspecting world, killing many, many people.
The idea is to have a sort of postage stamp for email, which, as a tax on something that is free, might sound like a waste of money. More likely, though, it would involve wasting the sender’s time. The recipient would give the sender’s computer some difficult math problem requiring several seconds to solve, thereby proving that the e-mail has been sent in good faith. This would not augur well for spammers, because e-mails would suddenly take a lot longer to send.
Spammers must be reading about this and laughing. The majority of spam is not sent from legitimate ‘direct marketing’ companies, otherwise it would be a relatively simple matter to block the addresses of those companies and have a pleasant afternoon.
Rather, the offending messages are most often bounced through the computers of people who have been infected by viruses and don’t know it. It is obvious that spammers and virus writers have a symbiotic relationship, as parasites often do; a German computing magazine recently uncovered one such relationship which involved cash. Someone has been arrested in Britain—that someone will be going to prison.
And let’s not forget those countries that, God bless ‘em, just don’t feel like doing anything about spam.
Therefore, the spammers can continue to operate scot-free, safe in the knowledge that your grandma’s computer is the one that will be doing all the number-crunching.
Microsoft can talk tough on spam all it likes, but the reality is that its own insecure operating systems are the biggest reason why spam is such a problem today. The only realistic solution to this scourge is through:
- Good computer security practices
- Education, so that people know a virulent e-mail when they see it
- Legislation (remember, politicians get spam too!)
- Getting the taco-benders to start pulling their weight.