Read the text.
Make e-mail polluters pay
“Vice-president of ideas, idealab”: did any job title better catch the Zeitgeist of Silicon Valley at its bubbliest (энергчиный, искрящийся)? Surely the holder of that position is now cleaning tables in some Palo Alto diner? Actually, no. Scott Banister, the ideas-man in question, is proof that there is life after dotcom death.
After idealab, a pioneering Internet “incubator”, abandoned that was once expected to raise $10 billion or more, Mr Banister and a colleague, Scott Weiss, started IronPort, a firm dedicated to improving the efficiency of e-mail delivery. Despite a drought (засыхание, упадок) of venture capital, they have already raised $20m, and next week they roll out what they hope will be a killer app: a novel solution to spam, the dark side of e-mail.
Every user of the Internet knows the frustration of an inbox clogged (засоренный) with unwanted correspondence from vendors of porn, cheap loans and anatomical enlargements. More recently, there has been a new frustration: anti-spamming filters that rebuff (давать отпор) genuine (подлинный) correspondence. According to Mr Banister, “false positives” ¨ложные срабатывания¨ can account for up to 30% of the “spam” identified by some filters.
This can be more than annoying - valuable correspondence may never be delivered. The growing ingenuity of spam senders has made life hard for conventional filters. Obscenities (нежелательный контент) are easy to scan for – but as the acceptability threshold (граница) of a filter is raised, to include words frequently but not exclusively used in spam (cheap loan, or enlargement, perhaps?), legitimate e-mail is increasingly misidentified.
The IronPort entrepreneurs think they can solve the problem. Their track record suggests they know how to deliver a successful Internet product. Mr Weiss was a founder of the free Hotmail service, and made a fortune when it was sold to Microsoft. Mr Banister came up with an e-mail list-hosting service while in college (he is still only 26). It is now Microsoft’s listbuilder. He also claims some credit for Goto.com (now Overture), an Internet search engine that lists sites according to how much the site pays to appear when a specific keyword is entered.
Overture is one of the few using triumphs of web content, with a market capitalization of $1.7 billion – down form its $6 billion peak, but still significant. And it is profitable. Mr Banister reckons that the key to its success was that it took economics seriously: buyers will not pay for a high listing if searchers do not value it, and thus reward it, when they find it. Its new antispam system also uses economic intuition, by requiring senders of e-mail to state clearly whether they are sending spam, and to back that statement with their own money in the form of a bond that will be forfeited if it turns out they are lying. The idea, simply, is that, if the price of sending spam rises, less of it will be sent.
Servers fitted with IronPort’s spam-recognition system will be able to identify “bonded senders” by their web addresses, and can block senders that are not bonded. Next week, it expects to announce that many if the best-known senders of non-spam bulk e-mail have signed up, along with the big Internet service providers, to its bonded-sender programme. The size of the bond will change over time, but is likely to be around $100,000 initially. The number of complaints made by recipients of e-mail from the sender will determine whether the bond is forfeited (утраченный), in full or part. According to Mr Banister, “the first complaint will not cost you much, a 3-4 digit number will cause pain to the bonded sender and 10,000 or more will result in the most severe punishment.” Here’s hoping it works.
Consider the following points.
1) What is the function of the IronPort firm?: a novel solution to spam, the dark side of e-mail
2) What is the essence of the novel solution to spam? Its new antispam system also uses economic intuition, by requiring senders of e-mail to state clearly whether they are sending spam, and to back that statement with their own money in the form of a bond that will be forfeited if it turns out they are lying. The idea, simply, is that, if the price of sending spam rises, less of it will be sent.
3) Why are anti-spamming filters frustrating? anti-spamming filters that rebuff genuine correspondence
4) Why is legitimate e-mail often misidentified? Obscenities are easy to scan for – but as the acceptability threshold of a filter is raised, to include words frequently but not exclusively used in spam (cheap loan, or enlargement, perhaps?), legitimate e-mail is increasingly misidentified.
5) Why should the economic factor be taken into consideration? The money is allJ
6) What will servers fitted with IronPort’s spam-recognition system be able to do? Servers fitted with IronPort’s spam-recognition system will be able to identify “bonded senders” by their web addresses, and can block senders that are not bonded.
3. Speak on the problem “Is raising the price of sending spam an option?”
Stopping Spam
Active Vocabulary: soar, cascade (across), curb, account for, incur, scour, bounce, stem, opt in, unsavory, resign (oneself to)
1. Read the text.
The volume of unwanted e-mail, or “spam”, is soaring. But is there an acceptable way to block it?
Reading e-mails each morning used to be a relatively pleasant task for most people, at work or at home. Now it can be as delightful as sorting through the garbage. Offers of “prescription-free Viagra”, penis-enlargement treatments, pornography, cheap loans and get-rich-quick schemes are cascading across the Internet, pouring billions of unwanted messages - universally known as “spam” - into e-mail in-boxes. The volume of spam has soared recently, threatening to cripple e-mail, the “killer application” that helped to popularise the Internet and then became an essential tool for businesses everywhere.
Spam has suddenly become such a headache that pressure is growing for government action to stop it. Next week America’s Federal Trade Commission will hold a three-day meeting of regulators, business leaders and consumer activists to discuss ways to curb spam. America Online (AOL) and Microsoft have even joined forces to push forfederal legislation to combat it. Earlier this month AOL filed five lawsuits in Virginia, seeking $10m in damages against some of the biggest spammers.
Unwanted bulk e-mail jumped by about 4% in March and now accounts for45% of overall e-mail traffic, up from only 8%in September 2001, according to Brightmail, a firm that specialises in anti-spam filtering software. Brightmail has an obvious interest in highlighting the problem, but its estimates make sense. Most e-mail users can testify to spam’s growth. Using software filters and tips from its own customers, AOL is now blocking an average of 780m junk e-mails daily, or about 100m more e-mails than it actually delivers.
The cost of enlargement
Spam has become more than a nuisance. It is also costly. As well as the storage, transmission and computing costs imposed on Internet service providers (ISPS), there is the cost of the time which millions of people spend sifting through and deleting unwanted messages. Ferris Research, a consulting firm, estimates that spam will cost American organisations alone more than $10 billion this year in lost productivity and extra spending to combat it. World-wide costs are much larger.
So far every attempt to curb spam has also imposed costs, in terms of lost convenience or added expense, which most peop1e are not yet willing to pay. If spam contiues to grow at such a rapid pace, however, that could change.
Why has spam taken off? The answer seems to be a matter of simple economics. Sending an e-mail incurs no direct cost.Even the cost of sending bilk e-mails is so small that a response rate as low as one in 100,000 justifies many bulk mailings (senders of physical junk mail usually need a response rate of one in 100). E-mail addresses on CDs sell for about $5 per million, and spamming software can be downloaded free from the internet or purchased for just a few hundred dollars.
Spammers have used increasingly sophisticated techniques to get past software filters and to reach ever larger numbers of people. Some spam software scours the web, “scraping” anything that looks like an e-mail address from websites, news groups, chat rooms and subscriber lists. “Dictionary attacks” use software to generate huge lists of made-up e-mail addresses, mostly at big ISPS and web-based e-mail sites, and then spam them. Any message that does not bounce back as undeliverable has reached a real e-mail address.
Anti-spammers are pursuing both legal and technological remedies. So far, neither has done much to stem the rising tide. Anti-spam legislation of one sort or another has been enacted in 28 American states. Early in April two senators reintroduced anti-spam legislation that failed to pass Congress last year. The bill would impose criminal penalties on bulk e-mailers who disguise their identities or do not provide a genuine “unsubscribe” link to any message (many such links now merely invite more spam). The European Union has gone much further. Last July it passed a directive banning the sending of e-mail unless the recipient has specifically “opted in” to receive it. All EU countries have until October to pass national legislation implementing these severe new rules.
Despite all this legal effort, doubts remain about its effectiveness. Many spammers are difficult to locate and to prosecute. Many others run such small businesses that they are hardly worth suing. On the internet, they can easily operate across borders, making legal pursuit difficult or even impossible.
Moreover, the business community itself is divided about how restrictive laws should be. Large direct-marketing firms which also send unsolicited e-mails would like to see an end to mass mailings by pornographers and other unsavory types, but are nervous about how far any anti-spam crackdown will go. They are appalled at the EU’s “opt-in” scheme, fearing that it will destroy a promising new marketing and advertising medium. Legitimate businesses will be damaged, they say, while those pushing bogus products will simply flout the law.
Others are trying to fight spammers with more sophisticated anti-spam filters. So far, most such filters are based on “black lists” of senders’ addresses to be blocked. Many of these run on the computers of ISPS or the main servers of corporate networks. But they fail to block many spammers, who can change their own addresses frequently, and they produce too many “false positives”, blocking genuine messages that the recipient wants.
The most reliable, though extreme, filtering approach is that offered by Microsoft's Hotmail and other web-based e-mail services, which can be set to accept only e-mails from a specific “white list” of approved senders. But for most people this destroys one of the joys of e-mail - receiving unanticipated messages - and takes more time than they want to devote to managinf their e-mail. One start-up, Iron-Port, is offering a system which employs a white-list of firms, who post a financial bond guaranteeing good behaviour.
One new idea is “challenge and response” filters which bounce messages back to the sender, asking for a confirmation before accepting the message. Some spammers have already countered this ploy with auto-response software. Another new idea is software that statistically analyses the content of incoming e-mails to find spam, but this has yet to be widely tested and may also be vulnerable to counter-measures by spammers.
There probably is no single solution to spam. Both technology and new laws will be needed - although these might easily impose more costs than they remove. Or perhaps people will take a more active interest in managing their e-mail settings, orsimply resign themselves to spending more time using the delete button.
1. Answer the questions.
1) Why is sorting out messages no longer a pleasant task? Now it can be as delightful as sorting through the garbage. Offers of “prescription-free Viagra”, penis-enlargement treatments, pornography, cheap loans and get-rich-quick schemes are cascading across the Internet, pouring billions of unwanted messages - universally known as “spam” - into e-mail in-boxes.
2) What measures are taken by the government to stop spam? in April two senators reintroduced anti-spam legislation that failed to pass Congress last year. The bill would impose criminal penalties on bulk e-mailers who disguise their identities or do not provide a genuine “unsubscribe” link to any message (many such links now merely invite more spam). The European Union has gone much further. Last July it passed a directive banning the sending of e-mail unless the recipient has specifically “opted in” to receive it.
3) Why is spam costly? As well as the storage, transmission and computing costs imposed on Internet service providers (ISPS), there is the cost of the time which millions of people spend sifting through and deleting unwanted messages. Ferris Research, a consulting firm, estimates that spam will cost American organisations alone more than $10 billion this year in lost productivity and extra spending to combat it. World-wide costs are much larger.
4) How do spammers manage to reach ever larger numbers of people? Spammers have used increasingly sophisticated techniques to get past software filters and to reach ever larger numbers of people. Some spam software scours the web, “scraping” anything that looks like an e-mail address from websites, news groups, chat rooms and subscriber lists. “Dictionary attacks” use software to generate huge lists of made-up e-mail addresses, mostly at big ISPS and web-based e-mail sites, and then spam them. Any message that does not bounce back as undeliverable has reached a real e-mail address. On the internet, they can easily operate across borders, making legal pursuit difficult or even impossible.
5) Why does legal effort remain ineffective? Despite all this legal effort, doubts remain about its effectiveness. Many spammers are difficult to locate and to prosecute. Many others run such small businesses that they are hardly worth suing. On the internet, they can easily operate across borders, making legal pursuit difficult or even impossible.
6) Are anti-spam filters effective? Others are trying to fight spammers with more sophisticated anti-spam filters. So far, most such filters are based on “black lists” of senders’ addresses to be blocked. But they fail to block many spammers, who can change their own addresses frequently, and they produce too many “false positives”, blocking genuine messages that the recipient wants.
The most reliable, though extreme, filtering approach is that offered by Microsoft's Hotmail and other web-based e-mail services, which can be set to accept only e-mails from a specific “white list” of aproved senders. But for most people this destroys one of the joys of e-mail - receiving unanticipated messages - and takes more time than they want to devote to managinf their e-mail. One start-up, Iron-Port, is offering a system which employs a white-list of firms, who post a financial bond guaranteeing good behaviour.
One new idea is “challenge and response” filters which bounce messages back to the sender, asking for a confirmation before accepting the message. Some spammers have already countered this ploy with auto-response software. Another new idea is software that statistically analyses the content of incoming e-mails to find spam, but this has yet to be widely tested and may also be vulnerable to counte-measures by spammers.
7) Why does the “white list” approach discourage users? But for most people this destroys one of the joys of e-mail - receiving unanticipated messages - and takes more time than they want to devote to managinf their e-mail.
8) What other types of spam filters do you know?
2. Speak on the problem “You can’t fight spam only by managing your own e-mail settings.”