Smiley man to end spam


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New protocol would intercept incoming calls and emails, allowing users to charge the sender a fee.

The man who invented the internet smiley has developed a protocol that charges spammers for wasting your time.

Scott Fahlman's protocol, which was published in IBM's Systems Journal, calls for new phones and email software that would require fees to accept incoming messages.

The charge could be waived for welcome email and calls at the touch of a button, but collected for unsolicited spam and intrusive telemarketing calls.

"This payment compensates me for suffering an unwanted interruption and, more importantly, it has cost you something to bother me," wrote Fahlman.

Friends, family and frequent known callers could be given 'interrupt tokens' that would allow them to bypass the system.

Fahlman claims that the program would all but eliminate spam and telemarketing, and that any messages that slipped through the net would be seen as "a windfall rather than a nuisance".

Source: Vnunet

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"O look, my friend ****ed me off and is now trying to call and apologize........zap!."

This could be misused so badly. Imagine having a company trick people into calling them and charging them from a regular phone number.

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This has to be one of THE most crappy ideas the internet has seen in a long time. How on earth would you implement this sort of system globally? How would you ensure it's not abused? And lastly, didn't they look at the legal aspects of it? You cannot charge anyone if they don't accept it as well, as I doubt many spammers would, so basically you're back to where you started in the first place ;)

Will never happen :rolleyes:

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I don't think this idea will work either.

A better solution might be the equivalent of Yahoo chat, etc where you reject everyone by default except those on your "buddy" list. Much harder to do of course since its e-mail.

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A better solution might be the equivalent of Yahoo chat, etc where you reject everyone by default except those on your "buddy" list. Much harder to do of course since its e-mail.

this solution already exist. it's called reverse opt-in.

it's good mostly for corporations.

you block every single unkown email address and when somebody send something to you that mail is automaticaly gets bounced back with instructions how to opt-in. sys admin then reviews that request and if proved that email gets added to accepted list..

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