Gates gives spam two more years
By Ken Moritsugu
Knight Ridder News Service
DAVOS, Switzerland — Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates yesterday predicted the death of spam in two years and said his company is working on a new software that would make it impractical and uneconomical for marketers to send the mass e-mails that annoy so many e-mail users.
Associated Press
Gates made the bold prediction to about 100 journalists in a question-and-answer session at the World Economic Forum, an annual gathering of business leaders in the Swiss skiing village of Davos.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says new software will soon make it impractical for marketers to send spam.
The new software would require that any incoming e-mail from an unfamiliar address — one not in a user's address book — prove that it isn't spam, Gates said.
He described three possible approaches.
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.
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.
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.
Gates wasn't as optimistic about another nemesis his industry faces: computer worms, such as Blaster, which shut down a slew of computer systems running Microsoft software last summer.
"The bad guys aren't standing still," he said.
"If the bad guys did the same stuff as they did last year, we'd have them cooked."
