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.

Source: CNN, “Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail”

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.

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An interesting study has been released that discusses the potential use of social networks as a SPAM fighting agent. The proposed solution can be readily assembled with existing technologies and leverages some basic features of most modern mail servers, including whitelists and blacklists.

As noted in the original article:

The e-mail clusters can be mapped out by inspecting the ‘from’, ‘to’ and ‘cc’ fields in a user’s inbox. An automated system can quickly build up a blacklist of spammers, as well as a ‘whitelist’ of approved sources.

Boykin and Roychowdhury found that by quantifying the clustering of incoming e-mails, they could eliminate about 54% of spam. E-mails above a certain ‘clustering threshold’ are always friendly, and those below a lower threshold are always spam. Messages that fall between these two clustering thresholds are ‘don’t knows’ - the system can’t be sure how to classify them. Typically, say the researchers, this applies to about 50% of the mail received.

The remaining half of the e-mail then has to be filtered in a more sophisticated way. But by then the scale of the problem has been cut in half.

Source: Nature via Many 2 Many

This study provides some statistical backup, however, I’m more curious why it was never reported on earlier. For some time, systems like AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo! have offered differing levels of security for your Inbox from Spam Filtering to White Lists. Seems that any of these providers could have not only provided similar statistics but also would have had a very broad sample to work with.

Additionally, while 50% isn’t bad, that still leaves a lot to desire. Naturally, some form of Bayesian or other natural filtering would be applied to the remaining 50% to handle that other annoying statistic.

The actual study can be found here.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting summary of the anti-spam measures being used by the leading ISPs. Most everyone that has worked with some SPAM fighting solution is aware of false-positives, messages which are caught as SPAM that in fact are legitimate. Interestingly enough, the article covers a more annoying aspect of SPAM filtering — outbound message blocking. As noted:

Marion Pattillo, the executive director of an interfaith group in Dallas, recently sent out an e-mail to about 35 people to drum up volunteers to help paint the homes of local sick and elderly residents. All were people who normally pitch in on such projects, but a week later Ms. Pattillo hadn’t heard back from a soul.

There was a good reason: None of the potential painters ever received her message. It had been blocked by a spam filter, forcing Ms. Pattillo to cancel the charity project.

Source: Wall Street Journal

It’s quite unfortunate, but our ability to write e-mail messages with any message we choose has been greatly reduced as a result of the new potential for them to be purged by anti-spam initiatives. The only salvation for our ability to have restriction-free mail again seems to be some more intelligent white-listing at the server level.

Technology is always changing our lives and shrinking the relative size of the planet. Forbes reports on the BBC’s deployment of video cell phones by staff reporters to get that extra edge:

“Typically in TV news we end up talking to people on the phone [on the air] about what they see while we wait for satellite trucks to arrive where the news is breaking,” says the BBC’s head of newsgathering Adrian Van Klaveren. Thanks to the new camera phones, the BBC has been able to broadcast the first images on several stories.

[…]

The BBC isn’t using the camera phones found at your local wireless shop. It has souped-up consumer handsets with picture resolution good enough to broadcast, and over an hour of recorded video, instead of the ten seconds to 15 seconds that’s standard for an off-the-shelf phone.

Source: Forbes via SmartMobs

How’s that for some Portable Internet?

Today’s New York Times has an article titled “E-Mailing a Cellphone by the Numbers” that discusses a new relay service created by frustrated entrepreneur Guy Botham. As the article states:

If you’re Guy Botham, you figure out a way to let your computer do the work for you. Mr. Botham created Teleflip (teleflip.com), an e-mail service that allows anyone to send an e-mail message to any text-equipped cellphone in North America without knowing that phone’s e-mail address. The sender simply uses the telephone number followed by@teleflip .com, and the message reaches the phone a few minutes later.

E-mail is always a favorite topic of mine, especially with my rather strict belief that e-mail is an application even more so than a communication tool. This certainly falls into the category of e-mail as application. Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure of the value created as a result of this new process. For anyone who has used SMS on their cell phone, its truly an interesting application of network technology. As the proud owner of a Treo 600, I’ve been very keen to find uses for SMS and have done random tests to friends.

The other day, for example, I sent an SMS message to a friend using the AT&T Wireless service. As we waited for the message to arrive, we sat wondering how the message knew how to locate my phone since I am on Sprint PCS. Our assumption was that there was a relay service somewhere behind the scenes, most likely that ties to a larger registry. I do recall, however, that I have attempted to send an SMS message that was not able to be sent, but I can’t confirm the reason for that.

Which leads to my question of the true value. Since SMS is a quasi-omnipresent, utilizes the well-fortified network infrastructue the mega communications corporations, and is simple-to-use, why would I opt to use a 3rd party for the same function? In addition, the revenue model associated with this process intends to place Short Code advertisements at the bottom of the message, much like Hotmail and Yahoo! brand their e-mail messages. Do we need more network pollution?

But that’s the business side, on the development side I thought I would also post an analysis of how this system might work. I can’t imagine it would be terribly complicated. It could happen like this:

1. User sends message to teleflip.com address

2. Teleflip located the appropriate cellular service provider. Teleflip would most likely build a short-lived cache of the previously matched phone numbers for efficieny reasons. If the number is not found in the cache:

   1. Teleflip starts at the top of its list of cellular service providers user mail domains. This list would naturally be ordered in terms of market penetration to ensure that the shortest search possible was performed.

   2. Teleflip sends a test “message” to verify that the account exists at the service provider’s mail domain. This technique is used commonly in anti-spam and other e-mail verification services to confirm that the address entered matches. I’ve even found companies that offer commercial-grade web services if anyone was that interested in doing this.

   3. Upon locating a match, Teleflip caches the service provider address for future messages

3. Teleflip forwards the message, appending the appropriate advertisement

And that’s about it. I guess we’ll have to wait for their patent application to make it into the USPTO online database to see how accurate my estimate is.

UPDATE: Apparently, I didn’t even search long enough to find this. A friend points out that you can locate the service provider using one of many specialized searches, like this one. I am going to guess that the area code and exchange are allocated very specifically and that’s what let’s us know who owns what. Thanks Pappoe.

HP is currently developing a new handheld device that will allow anyone to send a handwritten message as e-mail.

The portable device, which resembles a calculator, comes with a keyboard, a low-cost CPU and a “scribble” area for users to compose their messages. There’s also a small LCD screen for users to read their messages. Once a message is written—in any language—all of the content is captured as a jpeg image and, after it is sent, shows up as an attachment for the receiver. Users, however, will need to have an e-mail account for transmitting, or receiving, the messages through a standard telephone line. Messages could be sent to people who have either a similar device or a PC, Gopal said.

Source: HP World via Gizmodo

The major benefit of this system seems to be its ability to support any language instantly. Clearly, device makers are biased towards the Roman character set utilized by a large portion of the world, but issues arise when dealing with different character sets. The end result is that many segmens of the potentially connected world are prevented from fully entering the communication medium.

I’m not sure why this would possibly have taken so long. It’s really a shame considering the glut of technologies that are already in existence that do essentially the same thing ,if not more. The largest handheld platforms, PocketPC and PalmOS have supported one form of handwriting recognition or another for years now. Even Microsoft’s Tablet PC version of XP has the Journaler application that does exactly the same thing. I can’t imagine that a market this large was ignored for so long.

This really is not a surprise, but it’s pretty funny if you ask me. Seems that the entire time Bill Clinton was in office, he sent only 2 official e-mails, which barely compares to the almost 40 million his staff exchanged.

“The only two he sent,” Skip Rutherford, president of the Clinton Presidential Foundation, which is raising money for the library, said on Monday.

One of them may not actually qualify for electronic communication because it was a test to see if the commander in chief knew how to push the button on an e-mail.

Former Ohio Sen. John Glenn has the distinction of being the first American to orbit the Earth and the only person to receive an e-mail written by Clinton when he was in office.

Source: CNN

I guess old habits die hard. Let’s see what W is up to when that information is released.

SPAM is an intolerable pest that annoys every connected citizen. Bill Gates seems to think that Microsoft is on track to take down the demon once and for all. How long you ask? By 2006 (”Two years from now, spam will be solved” he said). The techniques laid out by Gates are, for the most part, both intuitive and known through the Anti-SPAM industry.

As noted in the report:

But the most promising, Gates said, was a method that would hit the sender of an e-mail in the pocketbook.

People would set a level of monetary risk - low or high, depending on their choice - for receiving e-mail from strangers. If the e-mail turns out to be from a long-lost relative, for example, the recipient would charge nothing. But if it is unwanted spam, the sender would have to fork over the cash.

“In the long run, the monetary (method) will be dominant,” Gates predicted.

Source: CBS News

It’s not clear exactly how one might exact this payment, but seemingly a worldwide registry would need to be established that provided legitimate means to trace the origins of a message to a responsible party. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a lot of coordination. It seems that once a problem has grown large enough, as the SPAM issue surely has, that a much larger force or movement, capable of stemming distribution at the most active hubs, is the only solution that can eradicate the problem as a whole. Microsoft is large, but are they influential enough to keep from falling down?

Spam will continue to be a problem for us throughout 2004 and most likely for the forseeable future, assuming we’re willing to broaden our definition of Spam

Today, at dinner, I was speaking with a friend about exactly where the terms Spam came from and why it was used. Anti-Spam activists (self-defined fighters for the greater good) also have paired the term Ham with those messages we wish to receive

Does that sounds stupid to anyone other than me? How about offensive As a Fisheterian and former Hindu with many Muslim friends, I just don’t dig on the swine ;).

Oh well, I assume it’s easier to have someone ascribe names to our world than think up our own. In the meantime, here are the Top SPAM words from last year:

1. Viagra.
2. Lowest mortgage rates.
3. Hot XXX action.
4. As seen on Oprah.

Source: CNET

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