Gates reveals his 'magic solution' to spam

The battle to rid the world's in-boxes of spam has got itself a heavyweight champion--Bill Gates--making an even more heavyweight promise: an end to the e-mail plague within two years. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Gates told a group of delegates that he could crack spam by 2006. The soon-to-be-knighted Microsoft chairman added that with the help of some canny tech measures, spammers would be hit where it hurts--in their fat wads of Viagra-inspired cash.

One of the suggestions on Gates' antispam checklist is setting those sending e-mails a simple brainteaser, or asking their PCs to do an easy computation. If you're sending an odd e-mail or two, the time and difficulty wouldn't pose much of a problem. For machines belching out huge amounts of spam day in and day out, however, the cost and computing power needed to send the e-mails off through the ether would be huge.

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