Slashdot Mirror
Did You Really Want To Read That Spam?
Henn writes "The BBC is carrying
a story about computers that track how much attention you are paying and the "worth" of individual messages. Based on these criterion, it adjusts how intrusive to make the alerts. The story is fairly short, however you can find more depth
over here." Interesting ideas, but for me it's becomming less about time- my filters catch 80% of my spam, meaning it only takes me 10-20 minutes to deal with it, and more about bandwidth. At home, on my modem, downloading several megs of spam seriously interferes with my ability to work. Yay spam!
...is like a day without sunshine.
I'm really sorry, but I have to be the grammar dork this morning:
;-)
"Based on these criterion [...]"?
This is incorrect.
"Based on these criteria [...]"?
This is correct.
I mean, you wouldn't say, "Based on these fact," would you?
-/-
Mikey-San
Burninating karma at the speed of TROGDOR!
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
CmdrTaco still uses a modem to work from home? What happened to the slashdot house? That modern oasis of nerdlyness with a mythical amount of bandwidth?
"Other applications developed at the Human Media Lab include a pair
of robotic eyes that allow a computer to look back at the user"
People are already get skitish when they think someone is watching
them, it would be interesting to see how they'd react when the
computer really is watching them.
I wonder how well suited this technology will be for practical
application. I'm a fan of the plan for spam laid out by Paul Graham,
http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html and as he notes in his
articles one of the most important things with filters is the false
positive rate. Will the computer be able to accurately assess if I'm
in the middle of an important task and not disturb me? What if the
incoming message is more important, and it's urgent that it distracts
me? If they could solve these issues, I think it could have some
potential. Interruptions are a big problem IMHO in the work place.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
What we really need is to have advertisers PAY users when they send spam. When will we finally see federal requirements, like those instituted in places in Europe, requiring ADV in the subject line? I'm tired of having to battle these soulless advertisers. If time is money... and this crap has to occupy my time, give me some MONEY.
Great, the more I ignore it, the more annoying it will be. I'm glad I have a reasonably spam proof e-mail system.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
I still just don't get you spam people. Yes, I think spammers are bad because people who pay for bandwith and have mail servers end up having to pay lots of money. Yes it is super annoying and time wasting to have to sift through spam. Yes there are filters that work really well. But you know what?
I don't get spam. I just don't get any. I don't let my e-mail get out to stupid places on the net where a spider will get them. I don't sign up for weird things. I avoid anything slightly untrustworthy. And as a result I get no spam. I can't lie, I don't get no spam. I get maybe 1 spam every 2 weeks. That's right, 1. If I have managed to prevent myself from getting more than 2 spams a month so can you. So do it and stop complaining.
Oh, and if you have an aol,msn,hotmail,yahoo e-mail address then you don't have a right to complain about spam.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Huh?
That could be embarrasing, my computer knowing how much attention i pay to those "awful" pictures i get sent every day that "i have no idea why i keep getting sent them" :P
This is bound to impose on corporate synergy. Spam filter developers need to think 'out of the box', possibly utilising the power of OSS development.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
CmdrTaco, lovechild of the Internet dotcom explosion, uses an analog modem? This isn't April Fool's Day anymore.
If you can kill 80-90% of your spam on the server end, and end up with 2 or 3 spams per day, even on a modem its tolerable. Geesh.
Go drink more coffee.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
"We now need computers that sense when we are busy, when we are available for interruption and know when to wait their turn - just as we do in human-to-human interaction," said Dr Vertegaal. /. - it means I'm busy? Great, now my boss can remotely monitor my activities and think I'm working! Still a neat concept though... I wonder if you can set the "attention level" yourself. I mean if you're stuck with a problem and just thinking behind your computer doesn't necessarily mean you can be bothered with something else, especially spam. If anything, I want to be left alone....
So if my eyes are in motion - like reading
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
...with their online email. They pay attention to how much you pay attention to different types of email and then tries to put most of the spam in a "Bulk Mail" folder.
John
We know that spam has become part of your work.
You can't fool us!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
At home, on my modem, downloading several megs of spam seriously interferes with my ability to work.
So how do you think operators of websites feel when their sites are brought to their knees and/or they are hit with huge and unexpected ISP bills, because of an article posted on your company's website ? How do you think these operators feel when said effects become little more than a running joke on your company's website ?
If you can't see the parallel between spam and slashdotting, then you're not being fair. What's that old saw about the goose and the gander ?
This could have implications for not only email but the entire way we use our computers. What if the operating system delivered appropiate messages about the status of the network based on the sysadmins attention and the piority of the message?
Web pages that could deliver shorter copy if the user is in a hurry/inattentive and longer copy if they are paying attention?
This is only the beginning.
___
:*) cheap web site hosting :*)
It's always a trade off as to how we want to administer our mail server. The more spammers lists we add in, the less spam we get, but we end up bouncing a lot of legit mail and having to deal with clients who get rejected for spam. Of course, why anyone wants to put penis enlargement in a normal email subject line is beyond me.
/24.
Case in point: If you follow the letter of the spec, you really are supposed to reject email which comes from a server who's forward and reverse lookups don't match, or who are missing either. Logic behind this is to block people on DSL lines who have a DHCP-assigned IP address from sending spam through one of the few ISP's who aren't yet blocking outbound port 25 traffic.
Unfortunately, what this ends up doing is pissing off a lot of people who run their own little mail server in their office of 20 people, and don't have it configured correctly in the DNS, or something like that.
So, it's hard to know where the line is. Spam costs us money either way - but it costs us less money in bandwidth than in tech support, so we're inclined to go for slightly less strict spam rules (aka good sendmail rules and only one spam db instead of like 6 of them) so that we don't have to deal with the customer complaints. Surprisingly, few customers complain about spam, compared to customers who complain about spam rejections. I would attribute that to the fact that, even with only light spam filtering, we still catch a lot of spam (I would say probably 80%), and what gets through, most people accept as an inevitibility. But, the bandwidth issue is small, because spam constitutes incomming bandwidth, and as a webhosting provider, incomming bandwidth is never in short supply.
Now, if we catch someone doing spamming on the network (outgoing), we deal with that damn quick. Some of those spam lists, if they catch you, will block your entire
~Will
sig?
I get my share of spam too.. but I really have to question getting several MB of spam a day. The only spam I get larger than a normal 2k message are people trying to pass virus files. What have you done to get yourself so adored by spammers? I have two email addresses that get 95% of my email - one since 1990 and the other from 1994 and do a fair amount of purchasing and usenet posting (the past few years with my email blocked - but its certainly in the archives), but I dont think I've ever had more than 100k in a day. I wonder what others on here feel is a typical amount of spam?
In Soviet Russia, spam reads YOU!
It's YOUR fault I posted this. You didn't mod me low enough last time!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Hmmm, speaking of the goose and the gander, looks like you need a good goosing! Too bad you didn't post the URL of your website so /.r's could goose you. /. provides a valuable tool that inspires awe and admiration in each and every marketing department.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
About 3 years ago my local ISP was bought out by a large nation wide ISP (E****Link). Up until that point(5 + yrs of internet access) I was in control of my email (read 2 - 5 spams a week). Once the acquisition (or was that inquision, as in Spanish) I was getting 30 - 40 SPAMS PER DAY. Explain how it was my fault. I have since changed ISP's and thus my email address and am back to 0 spam.
Meddle thou not in the affairs of Dragons, for thou art crunchy and with most anything.
First off I could publish your email address here to make sure you do get your share of spam. Searching for "apreche" on rit.edu (from your profile), gives me a web page, and the email to the webmaster of that page. But I wouldn't be that mean. :-)
Second, you don't have to give out your email address to get spam. Giving it out will increase your spam, but most of the spam I get comes from username generating programs. It usually has about 100 other adressees on the email, all with similar userids as mine. So it isn't about them finding my email address, because I haven't given that one out to anyone. It is my login email for my provider (earthlink). There are programs that just churn, generating login IDs and sending emails to them. If they don't get a bounce from the email server, voila! A valid email address.
Third, if you are at a learning institution, they probably have spam blockers in place. So you aren't even seeing all of the potential spam sent to you.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
That's okay, we know who modded it down. Why fix a problem when you can complain about it?
The real question is, how much time are people spending resolving the problem of false positives?
We've all been there...the CEO bitches because someone can't get an email through because it has a combination of "adult" "free" in the subject!
-rob
... and created a new email address for myself, and not only do I not let my address get out to stupid places on the net, I didn't give it to a single person! I have yet, in 8+ months, to get a *single* email sent to that account. Ha! Take that, you spammer bastards.
If you don't like spam, take a look at my guarded email protocol: http://www.dwheeler.com/guarded-email.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
i dont get spam either, but i do have a hotmail account. i register to all my webpages with my hotmail account to, no smap still. i dont even have a filter up. dont know how it works, but i think ive got an idea. because i could not get *********@hotmail.com as my adress, i tried ****_*****@hotmail.com taken as well, finally i did ****__*****@hotmail.com this account gets no spam and i am lead to belive it is due to the 2 _ in my name. dont know if that is actually true, but its hotmail, with no filters, and no spam
Your filters suck. Try POPFile, a cross-platform open-source mail sorter. Once it is properly trained you shouldn't get less than 90% accuracy and you will probably get even higher.
I agree that spam is awful, and the scourge of the earth. But realistically I dont think I have ever had nearly as many problems as most slashdot story posters have...and I am not sure why.
Perhaps it is because I dont use a yahoo or hotmail account (they will sell you out in a heartbeat) and perhaps it is because I am VERY careful about giving my email address out...(the phone company asks for your email address? well I told them it was devnull@mydomain.com..). I think that if you are just a little careful (you dont have to be all "conspiracy theory" in order to have a clean inbox) , you can keep the spam fairly low, meaning only having to spend about one minute per day clicking delete on the few that make it though. Does anyone else feel this way, or is it just really much worse than that?
You mean to say you married someone who likes Celine Dion? :-)
I have long suspected that Spammers are really Anti-Virus companies trying to survive or create another niche market.
Spam creates the need for anti-spam software, it really looks like a new Industry! Just look at the banners on Slashdot, Anti-Spam Software!? Now I get it!
People and Companies who spam, create virus or create virus platforms (e.g. Windows) should really be put in prison! They can render email comunication useless, by abusing the technology.
You more legal guys should denounce this to the Justice Department!? The Anti-Virus Companies are a sham.
A four-letter word springs to mind: RTFA.
(Or RTFS - read the la-la-laa submission)
The messages the article and the submitter are talking about are the various alerts, instant messages etc. that interrupt our concentration.
The device described in the article monitors the attention of the user and uses it to prioritise different messages the user sees; the pdf-link gives more details about the technology.
I repeat: the article is far more interesting than Yet Another Solution to Spam.
--Antti
[ Antti Rasinen ]
Why not combine both? Put spamvertized sites slashdot front page, so this sites and maybe the entire countries that host them be slashdotted, and you did part of your job (post/moderate stories here) and at the same time, did something against spam (most of those sites will dissapear after several slashdotting incidents faster than because spam complains). With the time, you mail address will be the scariest one for spammers, and you will be slowly off of most lists.
Oh please. If you put something on the web, then you are inviting people to come see it. If you put something out there that MANY people want to see, then dont get upset when MANY people come to see it. That would be like putting up a sign in a busy city stating you had free donuts and then yelling at the customers for coming to eat them.
If I stuck something on my website that people wanted to see, then I would expect them to come see it. If I wanted to stick something up for just a few people, I'd either put it up in such a way so as only they could get to it, else I'd send the file/image/information only to them.
So slashdot "slashdots" people. They made the choice to put the information on the web, pardon us for wanting to look at it.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
C'mon Rob, get with the times... time to upgrade that old 14.4 to something with horsepower..
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Spam is easy to stop. Forget using this filter crap and start requiring that unrecognized senders go through a confirmation step. For a good pre-canned solution, use tmda. Or, you can do what I did and write a custom confirmation system in procmail, which takes some skill but is enormously fun.
Note that for for this solution, you should have access to a real email server, whether your own or at a hosting company; the confirmation software has to run somewhere. For personal use, I recommend a hosting service, even if you do have a mail server at home. That puts the spam bandwidth somewhere other than your personal internet pipe. There's always fetchmail to pull mail off of your hosting service.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
I've got Herbivore (my anti-spam program) set up to retrieve my mail from the mail server every 2.5 minutes and I've never noticed a slowdown from spam. Most spam messages aren't very big. They include links to images instead of the actual images. Still, I guess 1000 messages at 2K each is around 2MB but spread that over 24 hours and there's very little impact on my work.
<shamelessplug> :-)
If you're interested in Herbivore enter "slashdot" as the promotional code when you join to get 2 years free.
</shamelessplug>
...track how much attention you are paying and the "worth" of individual messages. Based on these criterion, it adjusts how intrusive to make the alerts.
...". Do we really need computers doing this, too?
There are already many millions of children across the world saying (in their native tounge, of course), "Look at me daddy! (gauging pause) LOOK AT ME DADDY!!!! (tug at daddy's arm)
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I have a a couple of Yahoo accounts in addition to my main personal account, and I have (so far) not received a single spam mail on either of them in over 18 months. That's quite a feat on Yahoo's part, and I'm impressed, given that both of those addresses are made up of standard dictionary words without resorting to mixtures of alpha/numeric characters. Compare that to hotmail, where I set up an account a few weeks ago (as an experiment) with all the so-called "privacy" options checked, and it was spammed to the brim within 24 hours. Conspiracy theory? I don't think so.
I'm not dead, yet. I think I'll go for a walk.
Previous posts talk about SPAM filters and making new laws.
The filters are NOT an acceptable solution because bandwidth and disk space are still consumed. Even if your MUA marks a message with *** SPAM ***, you still have to take time to delete it.
Laws will NOT work because of the cost of enforcement and the fact that they will never be uniform across political boundaries.
The only solution is to make a new SMTP that is much -tighter-. It should have the actual IP address of the sender rather that allowing anybody to specify their own FROM part.
I should also be able to use my MUA to tell the MTA to return the message to the sender (not the reply-to or apparent from) as a 'mail undeliverable - account does not exist' message. Maybe spammers will prune their lists when their own mailboxes start filling up with bounces.
Those geeks having a recent KDE desktop (3+) should enjoy the benefits of pop3 email filtering in KMail that allows to kill the spam *before* it kills your bandwidth.
In several states the requirement is "ADV:" as the first 4 characters of the subject. It is a simple test, only 4 characters tested -- even with a long subject.
The only problem is that most spammers ignore laws and are morally one step above child molesters.
Fight Spammers!
There should be more publicity about the guy(s) who would send mail-bombs (ala Kazcinsky) to the spammers. I hear that someone else is going to the folks who advertise via spammers and physically threatening/assaulting them.
Considering the trolls and people who hate him are crap flooding his mail box.
Since I got married and started having kids, I have found that one of the best ways to not deal with spam at home (among other problems) is to leave work at work; and when I do (rarely) check my work email at home, I download just headers first.
Count yuorself lucky you havent been found by these clueless Argentinian spammers who spam in microsoft .doc and .bmp format. Who send it, the same thing several times a day, just to make certain you see it.
.ar. Tough for any legit businesses in Argentina.
They spam everything from local palm readers to local case mod shops to Buenos Aires discos and warez discs in espanol. They spam your postmaster@ and legal@ email addresses. I have had to block anything coming thru
You will learn, shortly, how fast your 2mb Hotmail inbox will fill up.
I'm a fan of the plan for spam laid out by Paul Graham
Dr. Seuss? Is that you?
You don't have to download the whole thing to filter it, you just download the headers and reject based on the header.
Somebody get me a cluebat!
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I am actually participating in an experiment right now that measure how much spam you can get by signing up on message boards etc. This is one of my first entries but re-post my personal results. We only are allowed to post on message boards and the like, no signing up for things so this will measure how much SPAM we actually get. People asking for it are the ones who sign up for free daily porn e-mails and what not. It is their fault. They get all that crap.
I don't like spam. For example, I don't like spam coming from the "managed list blah blah blah solutions blah blah blah customer responsiveness opt-in company" that I got today from a domain which belongs to:
Joseph Canoso
2100 W. 100th Ave
Westminster, CO 80260
US
303-466-0990
ipadmin@myemailwizard.com
This is all true! After all, everything you read on the 'net is true.
My email address is 19 characters long before the @hotmail.com and it contains my name, the year I signed up for the hotmail account, and a pronounceable randomly generated psuedo-word.
Actually I find the only Spam I get is to buy "Norton" which I run linux and is kinda useless. Also I used to get alot of those e-mail worms. You know the "True Love" the screensavers. I don't get those often. Once in awhile I guess. But that's about it.
Solosoft.org - Your Online Resource to Nothing
Forget using this filter crap and start requiring that unrecognized senders go through a confirmation step.
Uh, and when your confirmation requesting system sends your confirmation request to my confirmation requesting system, can you confirm you'll see and respond to the confirmation request it sends? If you have a hole to prevent this loop, demonstrate that its exploitation isn't the next great frontier of spam abuse.
A friend and I were comparing how much SPAM we get last night. His ISP is willing to put a spam filter in place for a fee whereas mine does it free of charge.
I have had the account with this ISP for 18 months and have yet to get any spam whereas he is getting about 60 a day. Small numbers maybe for those of you not in New Zealand but I am quite impressed by my ISP especially since they appear to use Microsoft only.
If you are wondering I use http://www.xtra.co.nz
I have yet to have a valid email not delivered, although this is difficult to establish if the sender never lets you know.
Not sure of how they keep all the spam away but it would be nice if more ISP's were this diligent.
"He who dies with the most toys wins"
You work from home and you use a MODEM? You need to find an employer that'll pay for DSL or cable...
I use a Perl script based on ImapAssassin (which in turn uses Spamassassin) which logs into my ISP imap account, zaps the spam straight off, and then fires up fetchmail to download what's left.
:)
It still uses some bandwidth granted, and only stops it traversing the last leg, but I never see it. I know it still comes - as I see the cron output listing msg IDs that were zapped.
I just updated to 2.52 a couple of days ago - just waiting for the Bayes to kick in
CmdrTaco uses a *modem* to *dial up* for his email?
Get with the times d00d! Broadband it, man.
-Nano.
but I really have to question getting several MB of spam a day.
"Hey, this stupid page wants my email address and personal details just to post a stupid comment on a no-name message board... fuck that, I'll just put Taco's address in."
It's kind of like saying, "Please saw my legs off," or "Hand me that piano."
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
The assumptions that seem to be built into the system just aren't accurate for me, and quite likely aren't accurate for many other creative folk (writers, programmers, etc) either. As for the rest of the world, aside from the folks who download Bonzi Buddy for Web-surfing company, I'm betting that folks will either become very uncomfortable with being "watched"... or will find a way to screw with the system, amen, selah.
Interesting is what happened to me.
I used to report every spam that reached my mailbox, and most of the times the ISP took some action against the spammer's account.
But a few months ago, I reported some spams to an ISP, and opposed to what I expected, the spams sent to me via this ISP increased notably by almost 200% every month.
I cannot completely block this ISP from my mailserver, because several people I use to exchange mail with are clients of this spam-friendly ISP.
And unfortunately, there's still no legislation against spam in Argentina.
--- "pero toda poesía es hostil al capitalismo"
It wasn't funny the first time you posted it, either.
Well, I was going to be the bigger man and leave this, but the rudeness of your post annoyed me somewhat.
Could I refer you to the RFC for the POP3 protocol:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1939.txt
Now, if you check the TOP command (required to retrieve the headers and a portion of the body), you'll find that it is OPTIONAL - ie. Not supported by all POP software (a quick scan of the web reveals quite a few packages without it - therefore it's POSSIBLE that some ISPs do not support it).
Do you know for certain that this is the method employed by KMail? Evolution for example offers filtering based on headers but still retrieves the entire mail before executing the filter.
I was merely pointing out that filtering mail AFTER your resources have already been wasted by the evil spammers defeats the object somewhat.
As for technologically impaired, I have worked professionally in the industry for the last 15 years, I code in every high level language there is, along with assembly for 5 chipsets and run a number of mail/web servers.