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Spam Conference in Boston
bpfinn writes "Are you working on your own anti-spam solution? Would you like to compare notes with other coders? You'll get your chance at the
Spam Conference in Cambridge on January 17, 2003. Among the speakers are: Paul Graham (of "a plan for spam" fame), ESR, John Graham-Cumming (of "POPFile" fame), and Matt Sergeant from MessageLabs. According to the homepage, this conference will be very informal: "no fees, sponsorships, proceedings, luncheons, contests, etc. Just a series of quick, concentrated talks, and then we all go off and get Chinese food." Slashdotters who are peeved about spam can register here."
What they should do is to advertise the event using popups.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
"Are you working on your own anti-spam solution? Would you like to compare notes with other coders?"
If you are, and would like the NATIONAL EXPOSURE only email can get you, call the number listed below. You will be giving MILLIONS the opportunity to receive your amazing breakthrough via email.
To unsubscribe (suckers!!) please click the link below.
Sent from your iPad.
A conference where they actually confer and (As implied by going to eat together) discuss what they're talking about rather than just visiting booths. It's about time some of that hacker-ethic efficiency made its way to the computer conference world.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
The reason why I'm using it (spam assassin) is because spam is a big issue in my e-mail accounts. :(
That's all
Moderators: Don't agree? pray tell why.
umm...
since spammers and advertisers always stay one step ahead of technology, shouldn't users register to get in?
i know there's a few spam artists out there i'd like to keep out. any open source software or ideas they come up with and speak about may be directly spoken to the enemy.
granted, this is worst case scenerio, but oh well
Runnin' On Empty
Whatever happened to that idea where any message sender (with a white list to op certain ones out) would have to make a nummerically intensive calculation before delivering the message? Easy for single messages, but hard for a million.
The better spam filters get, the more horsepower these fuckers are going to put into plying their trade. That 100 million herbal viagra batch didn't work? Oh, OK, let's send out 1 billion messages then.
Their capacity to add processing power to their operations will grow exponentially as the efficiency of spam blocks increases. But there's only so much bandwidth to go around. Ergo, suffer the ISP (mine and yours, not theirs). Something's gotta give.
I shudder to even contemplate it, but unless their revenue stream is cut off, this is going to continue. And that means educating users to NOT FUCKING BUY ANYTHING SOLD THROUGH SPAM. Until then, well...
Because we're having a conference on spam to begin with already means that the spammers have won. Besides, what keeps spammers from attending the conference and figuring out how all the spam guarding stuff works?
Its ironic that this conference (and other discussion groups) are focusing on dealing with, filtering, and otherwise trapping SPAM. It appears that the only solution to eliminating SPAM is to develop a completely new architecture for handling email which would simply not provide mechanisms for the broadcast of SPAM, and the hijacking of mail servers. Spammers are just as ingenious as the folks valiantly trying to filter it. Until we consider a new approach, we will just be battling an ever growing volume of SPAM mail.
There is no such thing as anti-spam, thank goodness. If there were, and if the spammers sent it spam, the spam would be gone, but copious gamma rays and neutrinos would result, and the bystanders would all die from the radiation.
This problem is not difficult to solve. All you need is a "conference" of enraged global villagers marching up the road to Alan Ralsky's house equipped with dynamite, pitchforks, Bayesian filters, and burning torches! We could bring some diplomas from prestigious nonaccredited universities to get the fire going. And afterwards everyone gets Chinese food.
OK, maybe it wouldn't solve the problem, but it would make great reality TV. Wouldn't you rather watch a spammer get lynched than sit through yet another gold digger beauty pageant on FOX?
could it be here?? here?
oh well since it's about spam only makes sense to post it more than once.Doesn't this seem just a bit fishy to anybody else?
I use SpamAssassin, combined with some scripts available here. Since I implemented this system last month, I have gotten exactly one piece of spam, and it got through because the body contained nothing except a URL.
2. Fly a C130 "Ghost" Gunship over their house.
3. Open Fire.
4. Enjoy "Miller" brand beer in a Spam Free world.
What is so difficult about blocking spam and e-mail worms? Just have a shared word that must be in the subject line (or else it gets filered out) and give that word to anyone you want to allow to contact you. Here on slashdot you could tell people about it in your sig, and never get a single piece of spam again, and what makes it better than whitelisting, even your friends, if infected with an e-mail worm, will not pass it to you, as the worm has no way of knowing the shared word.
And people are spending millions to block spam and worms why?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Then we could destroy them all in one place.
Finally a cause the entire internet community could rally around.
Username taken, please choose another one.
www.cloudmark.com
It uses a moderation system not dissimilar to Slashdot (but maybe without the weird 2+2=5 maths) and in my experience DOES work. YMMV. I've yet to have it filter a legitimate message, and it picks up about 70% of spam into my Inbox...
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
I've been promoting this notion for a couple years at least, while at the same time offering a spam filtering tutorial for Pegasus users. I've seen others also promoting the same general concept, sometimes with more details. However...
To see this happen, somebody needs to do it rather than talking about it. A technical demonstration, at the very least. And if I'm missing something and there's something like this in the works, it needs publicity, development support, testing, etc. to take it "out of the lab" and moving toward common use.
No Laughing Allowed!
If this conference is anti-spam, why are they using slashdot to spam for this conference ?
This thing must have been featured 3 or 4 times on slashdot now...
I would suggest a second and parallel email channel be introduced. Leave the current sendmail system in place. Those desiring better email and no spam will migrate to the new channel. Those who don't care can remain on the SPAM channel.
What could be better for a professional Spammer than attending an Anti-Spam Conference? Learn all the techniques and issues you will have to encounter in the upcoming months. I would be on the look out for people wearing too many gold chains reaking of hottub clorine wanting to make your penis larger in less than 7 days while offering you a Micro RC Car.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
It appears that the only solution to eliminating SPAM is to develop a completely new architecture for handling email...
Not true. The simplest solution is economic. If raise the cost of sending e-mail by as little as one penny / thousand e-mails, most spam becomes uneconomical. Poof, the spammers go out of business.
Where are my moderator points when I need them!!! Thanks for this. :)
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
... an anti-spam conference. Nobody would want to exchange business cards at pro-spam conference.
Now if they could just get Bernard Shifman to show up...
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
I actually publicize my email address to get more spam now, just to watch PF smack it!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Ding!
Get out those AOL CDs and bags of dog poo!
hehe...
Happy New Year Ralsky.
It appears that the only solution to eliminating SPAM is to develop a completely new architecture for handling email which would simply not provide mechanisms for the broadcast of SPAM, and the hijacking of mail servers.
How about just properly configuring the existing mailservers?
The hijacking problem is mainly with mail servers misconfigured as open relays.
No switchover needed.
As was pointed out in the last round of spam-article comments, you can't eliminate the header-forging problem, as at some point you have to trust the server that's supplying you with mail. So a new scheme would not help with this.
In summary, I don't see how switching to a new scheme would help.
I would watch out for spammers crashing the party and trying to cause serious problems. If you read some of the rants from these people on nanae, you can see how they would be capable of causing trouble for the anti-spammers gathered at the convention. There are a ton of spammers and it only takes a few of them to file false police reports, harass attendeees, etc. They've shown again and again that they are immature. Just look at how Ralsky harassed that guy who took pictures of his house. Many prominent anti-spammers have received death threats, this shows the level of hatred that some spammers have.
> Slashdotters who are peeved about spam can register here.
For which they want your email address--and add that it shouldn't be too heavily shielded against spam. Hmmm....
Chris Mattern
Again and again it's been proposed, and every time it is calmly explained to the proponent why it's totally unworkable. What's your idea, micropayments, public key authentication, etc.? People are always glad to hear someone's solution to all spam, but understand it's probably been posted and debunked already.
Can anyone recommend a Bayesian Spam filter that (a) works with Outlook and Outlook Express, (b) is dead simple to install and use, and (c) works really well? I'd love to be able to point them at a URL.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
What could be better for a professional Spammer than attending an Anti-Spam Conference? Learn all the techniques and issues you will have to encounter in the upcoming months.
... have to contain spam.
How would this help them? People have known how the RBL, for instance, works for years, and yet it's still quite effective.
Likewise, filtering based on content still works despite being around for a while because spam mails
In summary, I don't see what they'd learn that would be of use to them.
Sort of - there was an article earlier about it. Of course, now that ESR has confirmed, they had to rehash teh article. =^_^=
This sig no verb.
Popfile works reasonably for Outlook and Outlook Express.
One approach would be to use TLS with certificates signed by trusted anti-spam certification agents, and give TLS mail priority over plain-old cleartext SMTP.
Basically, nearly all current anti-spam techniques (one exception being whitelisting) work on the concept of "marking down" certain messages or sending hosts as being less trusted. Our goal is to use TLS and other approaches to apply the concept of "elevating trust", of elevating the trust level of certain hosts and messages.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Someone 4 posts down was modded +4 Insightful for saying the same damn thing. Geez, wake up..
Anyway, this is correct. Spammers already troll anti-spam lists looking for information on new anti-spam techniques just so they can slip around them.
Does it work with web based hotmail or outlook express?
Not quite what you're looking for, but the upcoming 1.3 release of Mozilla runs on Windows, imports contacts & messages from Outlook / Outlook Express, and will have Bayesian spam filtering.
I transfered over to the alpha recently, loving it so far.
>And that means educating users to NOT FUCKING BUY ANYTHING SOLD THROUGH SPAM
Why the carrot and not the stick? Imagine spam honeypots luring the people who answer spam into giving up their credit cards and posting them publicly. Or listing names of people who visit honeypot sites like animalsexxxxxxx.com through a spam click. Make sure to report them to their employer if this is done during 9-5.
Then we'll see the obligatory news articles about hackers co-opting spam. Something tells me that all the spam marketers and companies that use spam won't be much of a problem when Joe Blow is worried about hackers and losing his job over spam.
According to the website, postini is a spam filtering company. Doesn't it seem a little bit strange that they'd host a spam relay? Exodus (postini's primary provider) doesn't seem to care too much, since postini is a well to do business. Postini sends an automated response that says "this message is only passing through postini's mailserver. it's not our problem". My first thought would be that postini is running open mail relays as a form of gaurilla advertising to spam busters, but it seems a little bit far fetched. I don't keep a list of addresses or domains, but postini is the only one that i've noticed for about a month that keeps reacuring.Is this sort of thing normal?
If you email me, and you're not in my whitelist, you get a message from my "secretary" asking you to confirm your email address. If you're a spammer, you never see that message. If you're a human being, you either reply to the confirmation request (if the message was important) or you ignore it (if the message wasn't important, in which case I'm happy not to hear from you).
The only problem is those damn Nigerian bank scammers. They actually read their replies. i've heard from two of them in the six or seven months I've been running this whitelist contraption.
But anyhow, spam is no longer the annoyance it once was. I still look forward to strong laws against spam, because I know my bandwidth is being wasted (and other peoples' too), but at least I don't have to see it.
I used to look down on the whitelist approach, because in a sense it is admitting defeat - they're still out there burning up bandwidth, and this doesn't help catch them. But, I'm so glad to be free of spam... Every time I check my email and find no spam, it feels like victory. For me, the great annoyance of time wasted dealing with spam far outweighs the minor inconvenience of increased bandwidth consumption.
Y'all can play games with spam and spammers if you want to, but for me, for now, it's yesterday's problem.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
Try Spambayes, even though it is early in development I didn't have any problems getting it to work. After some initial training it catches about 99% of my spam without one false positive.
t ml
http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/applications.h
better to use something like spambayes that learns from your actions and doesn't depend on external decisions, corruption and mistakes.
yup, spambayes get's my vote too. the integration with outlook is excellent and once you've got it set up you don't even notice it (apart from the fact you're not getting all that spam anymore).
> only solution to eliminating SPAM is to develop a completely new architecture
Take a look at DJB's im2000 concept
http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
LL
An email message (or packet) should be authenticated at its source as coming from a valid, certifyable and traceable source.
The problem with this is twofold: First, you're going to have a very difficult time getting people to agree on trustworthy sources, and second, you get the same problem as we have with DNS - the people who hold the keys have far too much power.
And unless all servers on the planet agree on a set of athentication servers, you'll still be able to inject spam into the system from remote relays (c.f. the china problem right now).
I'm not convinced this approach is practical. It's great in principle; I just don't think any likely implementation would work very well.
City by the sea
Cradle of revolution
All spam overboard
If there is going to be a Spam conference there has got to be a representative from Hormel, the makers of Spam. They even have a Spam Museum, Spam Recipes and much more on their Website. You can even order online, if you don't want anyone to know you are a closet Spam Freak, or read Spam Trivia.
Regardless of what you think of Spam, someones eating those 6 BILLION cans they have produced since 1937.
I've installed 3 weeks ago, and only 1 spam went through, and I've got only 1 false positive, out of over 700 messages received in that time.
They distribute a set of MD5 hashes of E-mail addresses, as an opt-out list. Bad idea. Now, a spammer can get that list, run their lists against it, find all the people who opted out, and use that as a mailing list for stuff like phone line blockers, alarms, and similar products that would appeal to the anti-spam demographic.
Some spammers have realized that the outrage that follows their mailings is a resource that they can use against their enemies.
They do this by forging the headers in such a way that it appears that a "white hat" has actually been responsible for the spam in some way.
Then when the zealous, but unsuspecting user examines the headers, they end up directing their perfectly understandable opprobrium towards the spammer's enemies (anti-spam groups and companies, usually) instead of the spammer themselves.
It's called a "Joe Job" and it's the new price of admission for anti-spam activists.
You're forgetting that spam has all the "substance" of an electron on a diet. You'd be lucky to light a match with the energy released by even a million spams a day colliding with anti-spam.
Thanks for the feedback. The inline frame is relatively new and there is already an alternative for browsers that don't support inline frames. A way to manually bypass it for a browser that supports inline frames but does so in a troublesome way is a worthwhile idea (even if rudely presented). I'll add that when I get a chance. It might be useful for my short stories as well, as they gain illustrations.
No Laughing Allowed!
They've got a web site. They've got a press relations person named Joann joann@postini.com, and in Cyberspace, everybody's the press. They're ostensibly looking to hire people. You've got expertise they obviously need. And either they're Evil, in which case you won't mind blocking them, or they're Good Guys but have some bad customers they haven't caught, in which case they probably want to know, or they're clueless or overloaded, in which case their PR person ought to know.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Different ways to help spammers find them are to put them on web pages, or to have a spider-trap just waiting to generate them for web crawlers, or of course to be sure to unsubscribe them to all the spam unsubscribe addresses you've got, as well as the yes-tell-me-more addresses. They're more fun if you've got a lot of domain names to play with, but even if spammers kill off dangerous domains, you can trick some of them by doing addresses from lots of different thirdlevel domains, like alice@aardvark.example.com, alice@aardwulf.example.com, ... alice@zymurgy.example.com, bob@aardvark.example.com, ... And just to make things fun for the harvesters, you might as well make sure they've all got web pages pointing to a couple of other subdomains on your system.
If you want to get fancy with DNS, you can also set some of your subdomains to point to known open relays, if you happen to know anybody. Instead of having the spammer deliver all the email directly to aardvark.example.com, you can tell them that aardvark.example.com is at an IP address that's that misconfigured machine in Korea that's been spamming you, and have _them_ get teergrubed also.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks