Hunting spam
I’ve written previously that my preference for dealing with annoyances like e-mail spam has been through technological rather than regulatory recourses. It’s not that I necessarily think legal options are wrong; they’re just not my first choice. We’ve been through this regarding phone solicitations, in which the regulatory outcome seemed to win. Intriguingly, the battle ...
I've written previously that my preference for dealing with annoyances like e-mail spam has been through technological rather than regulatory recourses. It's not that I necessarily think legal options are wrong; they're just not my first choice. We've been through this regarding phone solicitations, in which the regulatory outcome seemed to win. Intriguingly, the battle for Internet spam might be a case of technological solutions mattering more than regulatory ones. The New York Times reports that increasingly sophisticated filtering software is eroding the "quality" of spam:
I’ve written previously that my preference for dealing with annoyances like e-mail spam has been through technological rather than regulatory recourses. It’s not that I necessarily think legal options are wrong; they’re just not my first choice. We’ve been through this regarding phone solicitations, in which the regulatory outcome seemed to win. Intriguingly, the battle for Internet spam might be a case of technological solutions mattering more than regulatory ones. The New York Times reports that increasingly sophisticated filtering software is eroding the “quality” of spam:
Measured in bits and bytes, the sheer volume of spam may not have diminished. But advanced filtering software, which learns to recognize the mercurial traits of junk e-mail, is having an effect. The spammers’ messages are becoming harder and harder to decipher. Sense is inevitably degenerating into nonsense, like a pileup of random mutations in an endangered species gasping its last breaths. Earlier this month, when Internet experts met in Cambridge, Mass., for the 2004 Spam Conference (available as a Web broadcast at spamconference.org), they showed just how far the science of spam fighting has come. For all the recent talk of suing spammers and compiling a national do-not-spam list, most speakers were putting their hopes in technological, not legal solutions. The federal government’s new junk e-mail law, the Can Spam Act, barely rated a mention…. Many experts believe that solving the spam problem will require a combination of [legal and technological] approaches. But laws take forever to pass and amend. Technological fixes like sender authentication and electronic stamps would also take time to carry out, but filtering is already here – and it is reducing the spammers’ messages to feeble signals swamped by a roar of alphanumeric noise.
Meanwhile Bill Gates is now weighing in on the issue:
Microsoft chief Bill Gates has vowed to make spam emails obsolete in two years’ time, sources confirmed tonight. Mr Gates admitted spamming, which usually relates to pornography, pyramid schemes or financial scams, was innovative. But, he revealed that Microsoft was investigating three solutions to rid in-boxes from the clutter of unsolicited bulk emails…. Filters could be used to sift real mail from spam but would not be the “magic solution” as spammers used random words in subject headers and replaced text with pictures to go undetected. “Human challenges”, forcing the sender to solve a puzzle or the computer sending the email to do a simple computation, would be easy for a machine sending a few emails, but expensive and difficult when dealing with lots of spam.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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