UN Takes Aim At Spam Epidemic 363
clester writes "CNN reports 'The United Nations is aiming to bring a "modern day epidemic" of junk e-mail under control within the next two years by standardizing legislation around the world to make it easier to prosecute spammers, a leading expert said Tuesday.' The full story reports that as much as 85 percent of all e-mail may be categorized as spam and that the problem is rapidly spreading to cell phones in the form of text messages..."
Re:Legislations Effect (Score:2, Informative)
People love e-mail because it's easy and cheap. People hate spam--junk e-mail--well, because it's easy and cheap. At roughly a hundredth of a cent per message, a spammer can blast a million e-mails promoting ways to make money for a mere $100 initial investment. With such an economical advertising medium, it's hard for spammers not to recover their money. Unless, of course, they have to pay more for their trouble--a concept now being pursued at Microsoft.
Tools aimed at stemming the tide of electronic junk mail have proliferated recently, and most approaches rely on various filtering techniques. One common method is to search the subject line for certain words and such phrases as "eliminate debt" or "work from home." But those filters can also screen out legitimate e-mail that happens to contain the trigger words and can send critical e-mail unread to the "junk" folder, costing businesses dearly. That's why programmers have been looking for spam-blocking techniques that don't depend on message content.
Microsoft's concept is simple: make the sender's computer devote processor cycles to solving a mathematical problem. Incoming e-mail from an unknown sender gets delivered only once the recipient's computer verifies that a specific problem has been solved. "Computer time is money," says Cynthia Dwork, a Microsoft researcher who helped originate the idea while she was working at IBM. This cost won't overload legitimate mailers, who send only a few messages at a time, but it could be daunting for a spammer.
Over the last year, Joshua Goodman at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, has been working on ways to implement Dwork's idea. The challenge assigned by the recipient's computer, says Goodman, might be to solve a mathematical function that uses inputs such as the sender's name, recipient's name, time, and the content of the message itself as variables. Such an operation would typically take 10 seconds of computer time, says Dwork. That would limit a computer to sending some 8,000 e-mails a day--plenty for an individual but not enough to make it worth a spammer's while. For legitimate mass e-mail such as newsletters, subscribers could create rosters of known senders whose messages would be allowed through without their having to punch the computational ticket.
A similar project called Camram is under way in the open-source software community, says coordinator Eric S. Johansson. Goodman says, "We want to drive up the cost of using e-mail--not for the ordinary user but for the spammer."
Re:10 bucks says ... (Score:1, Informative)
How much 'Israel propaganda' do you need before you think people realize what they're doing is WRONG? How many hundreds of UN resolutions does Israel have to defy before the US stops protecting their invasion of Palestine? People like you who further promote the ridiculous idea that the UN is useless, without calling attention to the fact that if the United States didn't stonewall and veto half the stuff at the UN, it would be a lot more capable!
If the UN has no balls, BLAME THE UNITED STATES! And then ironically, the US uses the UN as an excuse to invade Iraq. And to top it off you sprew ignorant generalizations about the UN. It's totally sick.
Re:The UN?!? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, there were French [idpproject.org] forces, too [google.com].
There might have been other countries, too. The no-fly zones were enforced under the authority of the UN resolutions that provided the legal basis for the invasion of Iraq in 1991 that forced Saddam to pull out of Kuwait.
Re:Thank goodness (Score:3, Informative)
Resisting the UN (Score:1, Informative)
Any country that broke UN Security Council resolutions for say the Korean Conflict (USSR) or Israel/Palestine (USSR, UAR, Israel, US, and so on), Iraq (France, Russia, Germany and so on), Serbia/Bosnia/Kosovo (the states in conflict, Russia, Albania and so on).
Iraq? Palestine? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Legislations Effect (Score:3, Informative)
No, a method has to both be found and recognized as such by enough of those who can effectively use the method to make it succeed. That could start by someone doing an actual analysis of the spam problem, not one of those fake analyses that SURPRISE! leads to the conclusion that whatever the person doing the analysis favors is the right solution. You know: filters, or blocklists, or sender verification - those things, the "analyses" that lead to them.
I look at the current spam problem, I see it is mostly abuse, I conclude methods that target the abuse (and that don't wait until the spam has reached the destination email server) have promise. Where do you see any authority even mention such an approach?
Spammers are anonymous? Then how is it I know the name (Dave Patton) of one who sent out open relay test messages - just from the test messages? I don't know the name but someone is sending open relay test messages to smtps1@transedge.com from dialups at preserv.net. Is that a hard lead to follow?
The sad truth is that most people, and that includes ASTA and the ASRG of the IETF, don't do adequate analysis before beginning to "design." ASTA, for crying out loud, is still pushing "secure your open relay" when RFC 2505 (which describes WHY open relays should be secured) says doing that is not a way to end spam. ASTA makes other "secure your system" recommendations and those, too, will not work to end spam nor to even cripple it. ASTA realizes that and puts its real hope in changing the email protocol. Meanwhile all the rest of us are supposed to busy ourselves with meaningless effort - while the world continues to lose $25 billion/year on spam.
At that cost wouldn't you think somebody would do a full analysis and come up with all the kinds of abuse used by the spammers and all the ways that the abuse can be countered? OK, how about just one way - who do you see showing that? (Securing systems does NOT counter abuse - don't waste my time by naming that one. It is good practice but it is not a way to end spam - and after the system is secure is a good time to begin thinking of ways to use that secure system to fight spam, not merely to move it out of the "abusable system" category.) Secure systems don't bother spammers, and most of them are good enough to tell the spammer they are secure so the spammer knows instantly to not waste any time on them and to instead look for another insecure system. Quit kidding yourself about "secure your systems."
(Heck, if you're doing an analysis, figure out how spammers could use blocklists to find the abusable systems not yet listed so that spam can be sent to through those abusable systems to the mailboxes protected by the block lists.)
Re:The UN?!? (Score:4, Informative)
UNESCO
UNHCR The Commission for Refugees
WHO (THe World Helath ORganization. Has Smallpos lately?
I could go on a bit, but the UN is much more about making people over the world work together than just the security council. Ok, its an inefficient organization, and probably wastes money like there is no tomorrow, but they do good work.