Fighting Spam

Economist (Feb 14, 2004) describes two approaches:

Charge for Every Email Message:

Goodmail Systems, a start-up in Silicon Valley, hopes to launch such a solution this summer. An example: Amazon, keen that its automatic order-confirmations not be filtered out as spam by mistake, would buy a million e-mail “stamps” for $0.01 each from Goodmail, which would share the $10,000 with participating internet service providers (ISPs). Goodmail fixes the stamps to Amazon's e-mails as encrypted e-mail headers, and sends the decryption key to the ISPs. The ISPs can then identify Amazon's e-mails as they arrive, and pass them on to the inboxes of consumers. Though even spammers are free to buy these ‘stamps’, Goodmail hopes that costs will keep them at bay.

Charge for Only Irritant Email Messages:

A different approach is not to charge senders for every message upfront, but only for those that lead to complaints from recipients, and in arrears. This is the route taken by IronPort Systems, another firm in Silicon Valley. For a bit over a year, it has been offering a service in which legitimate bulk e-mailers, such as newsletters, post a financial bond in return for assured delivery past spam filters into inboxes. Senders have to honour the bond and pay only if recipients complain. The idea, as with Goodmail, is that this whitelist eventually grows so large that spammers will in effect be quarantined, as though they were on a blacklist. About 18,000 ISPs have already joined the system, and over 200 senders, including Google, a search engine, have posted bonds.

Some people want to go even further. Balachander Krishnamurthy of AT&T Labs proposes a system in which ISPs would establish a consortium—similar to banks creating Visa—that would act as a clearing house. ISPs would then give all of their subscribers credit limits. From then on, every time a recipient declares an e-mail “unwanted” to the clearing house, the sender is charged, say, $1. Once his credit limit—$200, for instance—is reached, the ISP shuts down his account.

This neatly addresses another big problem. The most insidious way of spreading spam these days is by writing software viruses (e.g. MyDoom) that turn the computers of innocent consumers into spam machines. In Mr Krishnamurthy's system, however, the credit limits of infected users would max out within seconds of a new virus spreading, stopping it from travelling further. Presumably, ISPs will know enough to realise that grandma was the victim, not the hacker, and will eventually reconnect her.

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MIT Courses Online for Free
At MITOpenCourseWare. Shows the institution's confidence that its competitive advantage lies not in the courseware itself but in its faculty and environment.

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Nanotechnology

Economist (Jan 17, 04) offers explanation:

Think about the difference between cement and sea shells, and nanotechnology begins to make sense. They are made of roughly the same chemical elements, but the atoms are arranged differently. In short, they have different nanostructures, which is why cement crumbles when cut thin but delicate shells endure. Nanotech’s appeal is that it offers the potential to control nanostructures.

Low Birth Rate and Universities in Japan

From Economist (Jan 17, 04):

Universities in Japan face fierce competition in coming years as a falling birth rate produces too few applicants for far too many places. These institutions used to be ranked by their academic prowess, now there finances are being ranked as well. S&P, an international ratings agency, published its first ratings of the creditworthiness of universities in January. Good ratings should help to reassure applicants that the university they choose would be able to survive.

An interesting example of impact of supply-demand gap and competition on an institution.

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