While Bill Gates makes the point that he has never had a virus on his computers “basically ever”, he has had to download spyware scanning software in order to clean up his home computers. Apparently, Bill wasn’t happy with this part of his computing experience and he has the ability to do something about it. Microsoft will now be spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the fight against spyware. In addition, Gates mentioned that phishing and identity theft are more serious problems. Also, email spam will be solved with the use of filtering combined with a new message authentication scheme which hasn’t been achieved to date. Finally, Gates claimed that biometrics (fingerprint, retina scanning, etc.) will largely replace passwords in the next five to six years. At least with respect to spyware, we can be sure that no one is immune – even if you are the richest man in the world or if you are the founder of the world’s most successful software company.
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