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New Method of Spam Filtering
Alephcat writes "A simple and easily implemented scheme for combating e-mail spam has been devised by two researchers in the United States. P. Oscar Boykin and Vwani Roychowdhury of the University of California, Los Angeles use their method to exploit the structure of social networks to quickly determine whether a given message comes from a friend or a spammer. The method works for only about half of all e-mails received - but in all of those cases, it sorts the mail into the right category. The article was published on Nature magazines website earlier today."
>/dev/null
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
You take food away from a spammer and his children. Don't block spam, or else you hate childeren. You don't hate children... do you?
He was probably sick of people like me mistaking his name for a made up spam "from" line.
Spammers suck, right? And their children have obviously inherited the spamming gene. So, by starving the children to death, we're preventing the spam gene from spreading. It may sound wrong, but we're actually helping society.
If it doesn't use bullets, I don't want to hear about it.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Can't stop the friend-of-a-friend idiot who hits "reply to all."
It might not be "spam" but I filter it now. I'll stick with my procmail filters.
Hey, don't knock a filter that can correctly sort mail in to two piles fifty percent of the time. CoinToss 1.0 has been a real innovation!
Member of the Stop Fucking Saying 'M$' army
Right, from now on, it's "micros~1" for me.
Maybe if we somehow figured out wonderful technologies to *stop* spammers instead of blocking them, we'd be getting towards the ultimate goal
Such as spam-seeking missiles??
The Spam Gene is actually a regressive gene, not likely it appeared in the parents or ofspring. It's affect is similar to fouling the nest or pissing on food before eating.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So it works 100% of the time in 50% of the cases? There is only a 25% chance that I would be interested in something like this.
Which means that after you track them down and actually find someone operating inside the borders of your country, you can DO something about it.
Screw that; if they send even one spam to an FBI agent, they're interfering with his ability to do his job, and thus providing aid and comfort to terrorists.
Try the link at the bottom of the page:h tml
Sniffing stools speeds diarrhoea diagnosis
19 February 2004
http://www.nature.com/nsu/040216/040216-13.
Do you work for a penis enlargement company? Coz that'd explain a whole lot..
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Next thing I know all my email is going to have a reply-to: Kevin Bacon.
I think you're getting confused with "Received" headers, where each mail system inserts its own bit of tracking information
Which, for all completeness, is now also totally useless since spammers use compromised boxen to do the dirty work from them (hence you can only track it back to some worm-infected box owned by grandma who's just been taken to the hospital with a severe cramp in the left side of the body after pressing the 'Ctrl' key 4,523,098 times when the computer said 'press any key to continue'. This, of course, after the RMA'd keyboard arrived, which yet again did not contain the 'any' key, but did come with a friendly letter clearing up the issue.)
All seriousness aside, as an owner of a common word domain name, I get to be the target of many a spammer. Not in the To field, but in the From field.
For said domain, I receive everything that is sent to *@mydomain.tld. I used this to keep track of which people would sell my email address. For example if I had to register with shavedpussy.com, I'd give them the email address: shavedpussy.com@mydomain.tld. Now when I get spam at that email address I know I can't trust shavedpussy.com and it hurts my feelings.
Well, the motherfucker, fudgepacker [no, sorry, I take that back. I'm ovbiously drawing a blank, there's gotta be a better suiting swearword out there.] spammers have decided that it would be a great idea to send their crap from those owned computers, forging the From field to something like randomcrap@mydomain.tld.
So now I get hundreds of emails a day from all those friendly mail servers around that world that Jake is Out Of the Office, and that sillybunns@telstar.com is not a Known User. I'm the most grateful person on the planet, obviously, to have been relayed this information. I think the SMTP protocol is swell and any software that automatically replies to email is a Good Thing(tm).
So my sneaky system has been turned against me by the exact people that I was trying to defeat. Now I have to block *@mydomain.tld and specifically add any new email that I assign. I'm extatic, because it's not a lot of work at all and just in general I'm bored most of the time, so I can use the distraction.
It actually didn't work that well anyways, because after receiving spam to mom845@mydomain.tld I realized that mom just couldn't resist the excitement of sending just one more eCard because this one was just too funny to not send. At least she stopped forwarding me chain-letters (which she really wasn't into, but this one was for a good cause) with all the email addresses in the To or Cc field. She's good now, she puts the addresses in the Bcc field. Of course after learning of this technique she broadcasted an email to everyone she knew to make sure that they were aware of it as well. Cc: mom452@mydomain.tld.
The point of my story: let's say I have changed my mind about the right to bear arms. And I understand that the intention of the constitution may not be my interpretation of it and all, but times change and since spammers didn't exist when the constitution was written, I figure I'm a pretty well regulated Militia, and spammers, well, they just screw things up. (I'm still working on the wording of that a little, it's become terribly hard to interpret the part about security and stuff, especially now that Ashcroft is playing grab-ass with anyone willing to pitch in a dime to keep Patriot Act II moving along, but that's an whole nother can of worms. Speaking of worms....).
Am I the only one who read this sentence and said "huh??"
Oh, no -- makes perfect sense to me. I applied that logic to quite a few exams when I was in college: "My score on this exam is perfect...I could only come up with answers to half of the questions, but every one that I answered was correct! a+ for me!"
My professors were the bastards who didn't understand...
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.