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
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
"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 ?
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?
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
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?
What's to get? My business depends on putting my contact information on the web so that potential customers can get in touch with me. I use orbs, spamassassin, ipchains based blocks, a host of other heuristics, procmail filters and even honeypot aliases to automatically block robots. Sure, it's easy to keep a personal email address free of spam -- don't register with that name, don't give it out to anyone but trusted folks, don't let anyone who has your email fill out some web form to "send this joke/animation/picture to your friend", etc... But imagine if people you don't know need to get in touch with you. You need a valid, non-munged email address What would you have them do? Fax everything? Send a letter? Just because you don't get spam doesn't mean it's not a problem for lots of other people.
No, you really don't get it, do you? I receive over 100 spam emails every single day - so on average over 90% of my personal mail is now spam. This is NOT because I publish the address all over the web - nor do I use it to sign up on any websites or mailing lists.
The reason is that I use demon internet and so have a unique hostname (and fixed IP address) - the spammers frequently launch dictionary attacks against demon customers since it's simple to get a list of the hostnames. Of course, I have sendmail configured to bounce anything not sent to legitimate users, so I see almost nothing except the huge amount of mail in root's mailbox. I actually run cron every week now to clear out the crap in there.
Since I'm on ADSL and use fetchmail to periodically pick up the mail for my server I don't notice the bandwidth use. However, I'm sure it would now be almost impossible to use my account normally if I were a modem user (as many demon subscribers still are).
Seriously, I'm at the point now where I believe we need to take some sort of action against the scum spraying this stuff around the net while laughing in the face of the law (such as it is). It's a shame the script kiddies with armies of infected drones don't turn their attention away from IRC and onto DOS'ing the hell out of the known spam-servers in Asia and the US. A few weeks/months of continuous attacks might well put some of the crooked ISPs out of business for good and disuade others.
Before you dismiss me as just another anarchist, I'm really not - I have no idea of how or where to get the software required to attack systems. I'm just fed up with sitting back and taking this shit from a few scumbags who're getting rich on the misery of millions of people (and bragging about it). The legal methods are not working, and as far as I can see, will not work any time soon without the political will/interest to push them harder.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Have you ever gotten ANY email to that gif-address?
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.
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.
You mean to say you married someone who likes Celine Dion? :-)
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 ]
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>
Not exactly. You put information out on the web for the purpose of it being accessible -- if you didn't want it to be accessible, you wouldn't put it on the web. You don't set up an email address for the purpose of getting spam (hopefully not, at least). And if you consider penis enlargement and other such spam 'informative and useful mail', well, no comment :P.
All of these people complain about slashdot linking to pages, but you won't see them stop clicking on the links to help solve the problem. Although I do believe they could be a little more considerate about linking to small personal pages, it is the responsibility of the web server's administrator to set up policies to avoid bandwidth overusage. There are hundreds of ways a website can get its bandwidth eaten up like crazy, including being in the top 10 on a google search, being linked by any large news site, or just rampantly (un)lucky word-of-mouth. If the system administrator of a web server has done nothing to compensate for cases of usage spikes, it is not slashdot's place to do it for them.
Why is that, exactly?
So in other words, while spam itself isn't a problem for you, the fear of getting spam has severely limited the ways in which you feel confident in using the internet.
And I guess you're confident that a dictionary attack against your server will never succeed.
Still think spam isn't a problem?
Sean
You work from home and you use a MODEM? You need to find an employer that'll pay for DSL or cable...
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.