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Paul Graham on Fighting Spam
Ramakrishnan M writes "Paul Graham, the Lisp Guru is back with a great technique to fight spam. It is based on trust matric, and he claims, only 5 out of 1000 spams got leaked out of this system with 0 false positives. Worth looking at."
1) [...] A nice Hoo-ha to anyone who says there are no practical applications of lisp based languages. (except haskell...which personally, i think sucks! [...])
You ridicule people who dismiss the usefulness of your personal "favorite" language, and then you dismiss the usefulness of one particular language that you happen to dislike? That's a bit hypocritical.
3) [...] what happens when a few smart spammers get their hands on this analysis[?]
Paul covers this. First, he suggests that each user's filters should be personalized, so that any spammer would not be able to circumvent everyone's filters. Second, the filters would be continually learning, possibly dumping older words from the corpus in favor of newer ones. And third, even if a spammer put at the end of his spam "describe describe describe describe", this still wouldn't work; the basic premise of the filter is that the spammer HAS to tell you what he's selling, and in the process of doing that, gives himself away as a spammer.
The spam message is entirely contained as an /image/ within the html.
Thankfully, my e-mail client is set up to not render any HTML in an e-mail. I have yet to send back any information to a spammer via specially-coded image tags and am proud of it.
HTML-based e-mail is fundamentally insecure and really should be used by no one (except those who simply don't care about privacy). Go here to learn just what a spammer--or anyone who sends you an HTML-based e-mail--can learn about you with just one "click" of your mouse.
Yes, the spammer can learn what browser version you use, what OS you use, and even what city you live in (via the traceroute). An unusually savvy spammer could use this information to install spyware via known exploits in certain browsers and operating systems.
In short, HTML e-mail is damn scary knowing that so many people us it not knowing just how much information they are giving away for free!
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Freedom of speech is not the freedom to tresspass on my computer equiptment, use my resources for me to listen to your advertising!
This is not a prohibition on your paying your moneyto spread your advertising. This is a prohibition on you spending my money to spread your advertising.
Commercial speech does have some constitutional protection, but not to the same level as non-commercial speech. But even with pure political speech, there is no requirement for me to pay for your speech.
As for hitting the delete key, at that point, you have already tied up at least 2 of my computers used my disk storage, my time, my bandwidth without paying for it.
If you want to spam, no problem, just pay me in advance.
Fight Spammers!