OT: buy stamps for email

[Colin]

Bill Gates notion that PC users buy stamps for email is NOT only unusually poor marketing by the worlds richest, and possibly, smartest man, but it also surprisingly short sighted thinking.

First, the CNN article published March 5, 2004 says Gates wants home computer users to Buy stamps to send e-mail. The stamps would help reduce obnoxious email spamming. Nobody wants to buy stamps for email. Instead, Gates should have described the notion as earning time to send free email. Plenty of people would let their PCs earn free email time for them.

By allowing their central processing units (CPU) to earn free time, when their PCs are NOT busy, users could enjoy free email services, without any noticeable change in the way they do things now. As this is penned, for example, my main Intel PC chip (Pentium 4) is working at only 2% capacity another 1 or 2% unseen micro-task, running in the background, would be NOT be noticed.

Second, the article explained that the users would earn free email by working on math puzzles. Wrong again. When NOT otherwise employed, the PC brains should be working together with other PCs. By using the World Wide Web, millions of idle PCs could focus on problems of global proportions: war, peace, hunger, pestilence, disease, economics, intolerance, oil reserves, weather mapping, earthquakes, medicines, language translation, structural design, astrophysics, etc.

Things like this already exist. SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses large scale distributed computing with 2.4 million Internet-connected personal computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Home computers on the SETI network run a free program in their spare time, which analyzes radio telescope data from space. We are still alone in the universe, but about ½ million PCs actively run the free search; the equivalent of 15.7 Teraflops, or one of the largest and most expensive super-computers.

Third, Bill Gates is just the man to do it. A simple set-up option in new releases of the ubiquitous Windows operating system could give home PC users a choice of the distributed computing program to run in the background. Want your PC to search for intelligence life in the galaxy when you are NOT busy on it? The click SETI@home. Rather search for medical cures? Then click on the Intel Philanthropic peer-to-peer site for programs researching folding proteins, cancer, anthrax and smallpox.

If only a tenth of the 152 million PCs shipped last year participated in such distributed computing groups, the awesome power of 15 million CPUs and a staggering 1.9 thousand gigabytes of RAM - could be harnessed for valuable, life-transforming research by institutions like The Scripps Research Institute, Oxford and Stanford Universities!

As if it is NOT enough, the worlds richest, and possibly, smartest man NOT only has a notion to reduce spam, while providing free email, but he is also in a unique position to harness global PC computing power in a way no one else could imagine!

A. Colin Flood

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/05/spam.charge.ap/index.html

[ccsakura]

IF that will be true...... email will be abondoned and they will invent another format for replacing the email......

some programs like AIM will be increasing incredible number of users

I wonder how can that be if I own my personal SMTP server(my friend does )

[Griffinator]

As great an idea as you lay out, Colin...

Bill Gates is also exactly the type of cutthroat to demand that he personally (or Microsoft corporately) profit from the venture in some way.

[TBrennan]

I think "stamps" for email is a good idea but with the money going to the Federal Government as opposed to some business.

[skeptic]

Im not sure exactly what the original poster is referencing, but the idea that mostly comes up with email "stamps" is solving small math problems. The issue I have with the poster however, is these problems are not like seti at home, in that they are not (or should not be) precalculated whenver your computer is doing nothing. For instance, with seti at home, (or other distributed computing programs) whenever your computer is ideal it can be chunking away at some numbers, these are later combined. With an email system it would work like this:

The user hits send

The server where the mail is being sent asks the computer in real time to compute something trivially small.

Your computer (the one that is sending the mail) uses a few clock cycles and sends a response.

The mail is accepted.

This way, the normal user sending out an email or two (or even 20) computes these is a quick, barely noticeable hesitation. Spammers on the otherhand, who want to send out a million messages, have to use real resources to do the work. In a lot of schemes, the problems get harder the more mail you want to send. This punishes spammers even more, by the time they are sending their 50,000 email for the day, it may be taking them 2-3 seconds per mail, slowing down their throughput.

The problem with ideas like these is that spammers are increasinly using other peoples systems as robots (or zombies) to send their spam. This is due to millions of users being infected with back doors.

[skeptic]

"I wonder how can that be if I own my personal SMTP server(my friend does )"

To answer that, *if* the SMTP protocol was changed to institute some sort of stamp or authentication method in anway, your friends SMTP would only be able to communicate with other folks running outdated (broken) SMTP servers. So basically, it would be useless since your mail would only go people who havent updated to a new standard.

[ccsakura]

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On 3/15/2004 10:20:42 PM skeptic wrote:

To answer that, *if* the SMTP protocol was changed to institute some sort of stamp or authentication method in anway, your friends SMTP would only be able to communicate with other folks running outdated (broken) SMTP servers. So basically, it would be useless since your mail would only go people who havent updated to a new standard.

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That'll be the same thing if everyone holds back to the past. Servers are too expensive for small-mid sized firms and most of them are still using many years old programs to keep them running. They don't put money to upgrade in order to "pay". And the mails across countries will be huge problem, who's gonna get the money if you send from US to Germany by the server is Asia somewhere?

Don't forget about there are anti-M$ all around (no matter how hard, they still try to crack thru )

Even though it's somewhat united by no national borders on internet...... it still has alot limitation in real world

[skeptic]

True. However, generally once something is an internet standard and there is an RFC on it, the major backbones will all move to it atleast. That means small people can keep their servers, but it's usually pointless, since the major providers will all move to the new standard. Who wants an email server that can't send to anyone on any of the large providers?

"And the mails across countries will be huge problem, who's gonna get the money if you send from US to Germany by the server is Asia somewhere"

If you look at what I was referencing, there is no actual money involved. This is strictly a "cost" of processing power to deter spammers from sending a million emails. So, no problem with mails across countries.

[Colin]

Thank you for the comments. Email wont be abandoned, especially if earning time stamps continues to keep it free and reduces obnoxious spam. Gates did not capitalize on the Internet when given the chance by the Clinton administration. Microsoft joined with other large corporations to form Internet oversight committees to set universal standards. This speeds the early adoption of new technology. This is quite unlike the first car manufacturers, who could NOT decide on a universal width for their wheels, so that early automobiles could run in the same wheel ruts as wagons.

There is no money involved although there are currency equivalents. The Gates idea equates to a tax on CPU processing power (quite an odd notion for a software giant). The user would NOT be involved (hitting send). The user would be unaware of the background calculations, just as your PC is running background services right now, without your direct knowledge. Spammers, who want to send out millions of emails, would have to devote PC power to the calculations in order to earn the time stamps to send their emails.

This is another reason why earning the time stamps should NOT be a useless mathematical calculation. If spammers have to buy hundreds of dozens of PCs in order to earn enough time for their spam, these machines should work on real, global problems.

CPU cycles are a universally transferable currency, like hours and minutes of time. The organizations running the distributed computing programs would have to track the earned time stamps and credit the email servers. Can it be broken? Certainly. Any software code resident on any PC can be found and altered. The file tracking time stamps earned could easily be corrupted. But ten million home PC users will NOT do that. Their PCs can form a giant super-computing cluster. The cluster can work on human problems of global proportions.