Monday, December 18, 2006
what's wrong with filtering?
Here's the most common reaction I get from my friends to my concerns about the spam crisis.
You may not have seen it, but you still PAID FOR IT. Every message your ISP received for filtering cost network bandwidth. Bandwidth costs money. Every message your ISP stored because there's too much volume to filter in real time cost storage space. Disk drives may be really cheap but managing them and backing them up and powering them and cooling them isn't. Filtering one 50 KB message for spam and attachment viruses takes several tenths of a second on a 2GHz CPU that burns 80 watts. That's as much energy as sending you a typical web page, and it happens many times more often. With billions of spam messages per day, spam is consuming significant amounts of fossil fuel. One ISP told me spam filtering consumes more electricity than everything else in his data center. Now that spam is 97% of email, and the average spam message size is over 10KB, the cost of receiving and storing and filtering all that junk that you "never see" is the biggest component of the cost of your Internet service. You don't see it in your inbox, you see it on your monthly bill and you'll see it in anthropogenic climate change.
But there's a bigger problem that filtering doesn't solve. The volume of spam has been doubling in less than a year. It could double ten more times. There are enough vulnerable Microsoft PCs for spammers to take over. Spam would be more than 99.9% of email. But you could not stand to pay two hundred times as much for Internet service. Filtering will hide the problem from consumers until most of the Internet email system has already collapsed. It will prevent us from doing anything effective to stop spam and save email.
That's the real harm filtering does. Hiding the problem prevents you from fixing it.
- I don't get much spam. Postini/Yahoo/Earthlink (etc) filters it into a spam box for me and I never even look at it.
You may not have seen it, but you still PAID FOR IT. Every message your ISP received for filtering cost network bandwidth. Bandwidth costs money. Every message your ISP stored because there's too much volume to filter in real time cost storage space. Disk drives may be really cheap but managing them and backing them up and powering them and cooling them isn't. Filtering one 50 KB message for spam and attachment viruses takes several tenths of a second on a 2GHz CPU that burns 80 watts. That's as much energy as sending you a typical web page, and it happens many times more often. With billions of spam messages per day, spam is consuming significant amounts of fossil fuel. One ISP told me spam filtering consumes more electricity than everything else in his data center. Now that spam is 97% of email, and the average spam message size is over 10KB, the cost of receiving and storing and filtering all that junk that you "never see" is the biggest component of the cost of your Internet service. You don't see it in your inbox, you see it on your monthly bill and you'll see it in anthropogenic climate change.
But there's a bigger problem that filtering doesn't solve. The volume of spam has been doubling in less than a year. It could double ten more times. There are enough vulnerable Microsoft PCs for spammers to take over. Spam would be more than 99.9% of email. But you could not stand to pay two hundred times as much for Internet service. Filtering will hide the problem from consumers until most of the Internet email system has already collapsed. It will prevent us from doing anything effective to stop spam and save email.
That's the real harm filtering does. Hiding the problem prevents you from fixing it.
