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!
"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.
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!
"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.
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?
Well.... I don't know about you folks, but it's pouring down rain in my neck of the woods. :)
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
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