Distributed Spam Detection

A reader writes "There's an interesting project at SourceForge, called, "Vipul's Razor", that uses a gnutella like system to let users exchange spam "signatures" to filter spam. I work at an ISP in Ottawa, we have been using it for last two weeks to stop bulk of spam coming to our POP3 accounts. More impressively, it hasn't tagged any valid mail as spam yet. Here's the scoop from its webpage: "Vipul's Razor is a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network. Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalogue of spam in propagation. This catalogue is used by clients to filter out known spam. On receiving a spam, a Razor Reporting Agent (run by an end-user or a troll box) calculates and submits a 20-character unique identification of the spam (a SHA Digest) to its closest Razor Catalogue Server. The Catalogue Server echos this signature to other trusted servers after storing it in its database. Prior to manual processing or transport-level reception, Razor Filtering Agents (end-users and MTAs) check their incoming mail against a Catalogue Server and filter out or deny transport in case of a signature match."" Cool idea. I'm up around 80% spam a day on my main mail account. Might be worth a try.

Comments

mail

[alanak]

if only there were a service like this for junk snail mail.

Hey Taco, reduce your percentage of spam!

[Nagash]

Subscribe to the kernel mailing list.

Woz

Philanthropic P2P

[UM_Maverick]

Don't forget about Intel's cancer-research P2P system - www.intel.com/cure

They also have info there about Stanford's protein-folding project (http://folding.stanford.edu)

Re:Not necessarily such a Fabulous Idea!

[marxmarv]

There's no such thing as a "world without scarcity".

Information isn't scarce except for laws that decree it so. Sunlight isn't scarce because we have more of it than we can use.

The concept of "scarce" applied to an open-ended future is meaningless. Webster's definition of "scarce" (emphasis mine):

1 : deficient in quantity or number compared with the demand : not plentiful or abundant

Loosely translated, there exists "enough" of a good when demand exceeds supply. You have no need for oil in 500 years as there's a better-than-even chance you'll be dead by then. The only thing that could inspire demand for oil in 500 years is the progenitor of scarcity, and that is greed (loosely translated, "the drive to acquire more than what one can make legitimate use of").

Given the enabling technology, it certainly is possible for the average person to have the needs of life and significant creature comforts met with only a modicum of effort (say, 10 hours a month of easy labor).

Resources can become less scarce thanks to technology, but there will never be an infinite amount of crude oil.

Thank you, Mr. Cheney. By the time the oil supply runs out, there will be sufficient carbon on the surface to construct "enough" of whatever carbon-based foo we can possibly make use of.

The argument that eventually technology will go beyong the use of oil, and use fuel cells or solar power or some such doesn't work either. There is a finite amount of hydrogen and oxygen in the universe, and just because it is a huge amount technically doesn't make it not "scarce".

Sorry, smart guy. Not only are you using a flawed definition of "scarce", but there exists an abundance of hydrogen and oxygen because we can't destroy hydrogen and oxygen without working very hard at it. Furthermore, none of either is lost in the cycle since it essentially returns itself to the source from whence it came:

Environmental H2O electrolysed to produce H2 and O2: energy + H2O -> 2H2 + O2
H2 and O2 reacted in fuel cell or turbine to produce H2O, vented to environment: 2H2 + O2 -> H2O + energy

For further study, I recommend a web search on "conservation of matter".

If the Sun will beam enough energy down over a fixed time period (say, a day) to meet the demand of that period (say, a day), with capacity to spare, then there is an abundant energy supply, and therefore any scarcity of energy is due to the human social order imposing scarcity somewhere between the supply point and the demand point.

Einstein said there's plenty of hydrogen and stupidity in the universe. I leave the conclusions to the reader to draw.

-jhp