If you were running the world's largest security conference, who would you invite to deliver the keynote address? If you answered "Bill Gates," then you'd be right. Whether or not it was the correct choice, Gates did kick off last Week's RSA Conference in San Francisco with a little ditty he called "Raising the Security Bar." Because this bar has been set so low, there are many who feel he wouldn't need much more than one pinky to raise it; at least as far as Microsoft computing is concerned.

He did talk about Microsoft's recent acquisition of anti-virus and anti-spam vendor Sybari, quite a bit. He said Microsoft uses the Sybari product internally as an engine for scanning e-mail and informed the audience that: "The e-mail vector continues to be the primary means of virus threat, 88% of virus incidents in corporations are coming through e-mail." (He didn't mention that most of those came through his own company's Exchange Server and Outlook client.)

Bill told us about what he most admired in the Sybari product: "We looked at what they'd done with the multiple engines, the different layers of scanning, and really specializing in infrastructure and drawing on others for the virus engines." But building an engine to which others could add - is that really the Microsoft way? As I said last week, it's not what most anti-virus vendors think.

Conspicuous by its absence from Gates speech, as it has been from most Microsoft security announcements over the past couple of years, was any mention of the products, services and technologies acquired from GeCAD. This pretty much cements the idea that the only reason Redmond acquired the company was to kill GeCAD's very successful Linux anti-virus products.

After that, Bill went into a very short discussion (and a short demo by Josue Fontanez, a senior product manager in Microsoft's security business unit) of authentication, authorization, rights management, identity federation and related security issues. After glossing over what everyone else was spending lots of time talking about, Bill got down to spam.

He's been talking a lot about spam this year - about how much he gets, what he'd like to do to the spammers, and how Microsoft is helping you prevent spam from reaching the inboxes of the world. He noted that Hotmail blocks 90% of the spam coming in "using the IP address blocking and the content filtering approaches" - methods that most sophisticated spammers have been able to work around for the last year or two. (Don't take my word for it - turn off everything except IP address blocking for spam prevention and watch as your inbox fills with 99% of the spam that's targeted at you.)