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Human-Powered Spam Filtering
arturs writes "A company called eProvisia
started an unusal business: they filter out spam not by using complicated algorithms, but human beings... It costs around $20/year - is the war against spam over?" It's an interesting idea - the privacy concerns are big of course, but how would this stack up to, say SpamAssassin or a suite like Barracuda's Spam firewall. We tested the Barracuda device - great integration of OSS software, with a nice interface. Update: 09/20 15:12 GMT by J : Corrected price of Spam Eradicator.
privacy concerns are big of course
I thoroughly enjoy wikpedia and I have always thought of new ways of using the wiki concept - here is one solution to spam without privacy concerns.
Your email interface would look at a list on the wiki page and filter out any known spam. One spam slips through and you can make a new entry at wik (like database or text page whatever). The entry could be the whole email or an algorithm but either way an algorithm would eventually be made based on a pattern to reduce the entry size (who knows the community is in control of it). Fixed the privacy concerns unless you did it to yourself.
The next great thing about the wiki is you could take that 20 bucks a month and make a donation to the wiki. Not only would you be helping thwart spam but also supporting a great dictionary, encyclopedia and all things great with the open concept.
I wonder if they ever verify their decisions with you:
Mark,
This is Eric, your spam d00d. You got a message about fisting, you into that? Let me know, thanks!
-- Eric
That I would not mind outsourcing to the indians and chinese!
Four pages, home, the product, terms of service, and about the company. The only thing they are missing is bios of the 'management team'. Even better the $67 million dollars in cash reserves are in Palmyra Atoll dollars; I wonder what the exchange rate is?
Overall, it looks like someone stole a 'dot com' idea from 1999. Anyone have a little red Corvette?
I'll stick with Spamassassin, Thunderbird.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
Why did I think of this?
You would only have to classify each message once by a person... and then have all messages like that blocked. Very sweet. Very India?
I am not sure I want somebody reading through all my email though...
Can they be used for other tasks? Like, what sort of frame rate can they get in Doom3?
Hell, I think even I'd like to be trained liek that, too..
With great power comes great electricity bills.
1. The only way that they'll be able to do this at a good cost is to use some kind of third world labour with a first language that isn't english. 2. Given that my baysian spam solution seems to be better at sorting spam than me (I've accidently deleted items which were not spam before), then I'm not entirely sure that a stranger could do better. They offer a 100% guarantee. I doubt they'll be able to offer a 100% service.
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
Another example of the age old technique of profiting off dumbasses, this time by charging them money to do what they usually do for free, or could quite adequately automate for free.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
https://sourceforge.net/projects/sa-milt-quar
I'm working on mimicking the barracuda's functionality, and have the spam quarantine working.
I apologize that sourceforge is showing no releases, the files ARE in cvs, and are stable after much testing. I'll try to get in and do a release later today.
My hope is to build a full spam firewall suite that is easy to set up and still have much scalability and control.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
The $20/month figure sounded a little high until I read that it is $19.95/year, not per month.
That being said, I don't know if I see the benefit of paying someone else to read my email. They even offer more expensive packages to have them categorize and summarize your mail for you, as well as discard non-spam mails that you don't want anyway. I suppose it could be useful for really busy executive types, but then can't they afford secretaries anyway?
[Someone had to say it]
So presumably they need to read your "ham" too, that's slightly worrying.
Also, one man's newsletter is another man's spam.
You've probably noticed that people's noses get bigger as they get older. That's because old people are huge liars.
My brain already runs on HPOS - the human-powered Operating System.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This is great. I've always said that I would be willing to pay someone to filter my spam for me because that would be a "perfect" solution with human eyes looking at my spam.
I might see if I can sell the enterprise on this, because we have people complaining because we don't use site-wide bayes because some people might want mail that other people don't want.
Chris
MailWasher Pro from Firetrust has an option similar to that known as FirstAlert, you sign up for a year membership and use their app to submit spam type messages to them, later, a human verifies that the e-mail is indeed spam and adds it to their database. Once added, any MWP users using FirstAlert will hit the database, see that the message is there and act accordingly (often times deleting without even showing it to the user). It works... ok, about 30% of my spam is nuked this way, the built in Bayesian filtering catches another 40% or so, and the DNS blacklists catch most of the rest. Of the last two groups I verify manually, but have come to trust FirstAlert... it's just a shame it's not getting the high %'s it used to.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Oops, forgot to link the Setup Instructions.
Please use the files in cvs. Kthx!
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
This would be the difinitive way of getting around all the little ploys that spammers use, just register to all the crap on the internet and sign up for everything you can, then just mark everything off as spam.
.. would be nice living in a world with no spam, if even only for a bit.
Whenever you get spam let through, ask people to forward a copy to you so that you can add it to the list, and so you can sign up from the details on the email.
The only problem is, this is shooting themselves in the foot, if they eliminate all spam, spammers can't make money, no more spam, no more job for blocking spam till spammers start up again
But still
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
You could find a better
spam tool in this list
My favorite tool is sa-exim and tarproxy which fight back.
People stop trying to profit so much to help reduce or stop it...
I'm not sure who's worse anymore, the companies out there who sell services to 'help' you reduce/eliminate spam, or the spammers. (Maybe one in the same, in some instances)..
The only resolution I see to spam is good, solid legislation THAT IS ENFORCED. Country harbors spammers, cut them off from the US internet. Spammers AND the companies that hire them BOTH held equally liable. If it's a criminal act to spam, it's a criminal act to hire someone to spam.
People can write programs all day to try and stop spam, it won't matter. If someone can write a program to filter x out, someone else will find a way to get y through. It's an endless cycle.
Spam is like a virus in so many ways...
At first, I thought that too cheap to be true. However, let's do the math. I receive c. 200 spams a day. That's 6000 per month. I think I could hand-filter that many spams within an hour, so that gives a rate of $20/hour -- which isn't bargain basement, but still pretty reasonable.
The problem comes, of course, in whether they can hand-filter my inbox with the same speed and accuracy as me. 99 times out of 100, I don't even need to open an email to see if its spam -- I know what emails I'm expecting to receive on a given day. Therefore, I can do the filtering pretty fast -- especially if the spam titles are sorted alphabetically, as this makes duplicates stick out like a sore thumb.
But could this company, who has no knowledge of what I consider to be spam, filter at the same rate? If not, then their income rate starts to drop to levels where I don't think they can be commercially viable.
Of course, I haven't read the article yet, so I'm probably blowing hot air out of my arse. But hey, it's Monday morning, and I'd far rather be waffling on /, than writing up a very boring paper.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
...that site *must* be a spoof. All the disclaimers and address in Palmyra Atoll is so dodgy.
Besides, I used to live out that way (Kiribati, in the early 1970s, then called the Gilbert Islands), and I don't recall hearing about these guys! Oh, wait, 1993...
Ydco co
"24 hours a day" * 30 days/month = 720 hours
$20 per month / 720 hours = about 3 cents an hour.
Since they say they begin "manually reviewing, hand-picking and approving important correspondence", how does this work? To pay someone $6/hour, they'd need to be reviewing at least 200 mailboxes simultaneously. My confidence level of their accuracy under these circumstances would be considerably -lower- than a software solution.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Look at this about page.
Im going to include their footnotes on that pge in parentheses and bold.
Privately funded in 1993, now with customers in 40 countries(Not all currently recognized by UN) and over $67 million(Palmyra Atoll dollars) in cash reserves, the company experienced a phenomenal growth
if its setup properly and bayes is enabled. Since Aug. 1st i've recieved 1800 emails flagged as spam... A few false positives but I have my threshold set pretty low. About 140 emails have gotten through and soon i'll take that folder and process it. Before I started processing spam that wasn't caught by spamassassin about 4-5 were getting through a day.. Now its once every few days.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
What the article doesn't mention is that this "human-powered spam filtering" consists of Mentats who have been specially trained to use the latest Bayesian filters, and who bear the Imperial conditioning against deleting important messages.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
(3) Choice of Law and Jurisdiction. These Terms of Use will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Uninhabited Sovereign Territory of Palmyra Atoll, without giving effect to its conflict of laws and provisions of your actual state or country of residence. Any claims, legal proceedings, or litigations regarding eProvisia LCC and its affiliates, subsidiaries, and representatives, will be brought solely in and you consent to the jurisdiction of Palmyra Atoll courts.
...What does the word ``privacy'' mean? Do you really want to get rid of spam (perhaps, even in significant quantities) by the cost of letting strangers, thus anonymous for yourself, read your mail?
...Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall. After we got it where I work, it didn't take me much time to set up and it seems to do a great job after the initial training period.
At home I use ASSP as it's pretty simple to set up sompared to Spam Assassin.
Un-news
from my understanding, all gmail users that click the little "report spam" button are essentially helping build the database and increase the effectiveness of its filters... though I guess they must be careful because this could potentially generate a lot of false positives.
--- If we knew half the things we shouldn't we'd stop wishing we knew it all
I've got my bank and credicard statement sent by email, hope they won't look into those email. :)
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Actually, LLC's are the smart way to do a partnership. In a partnership, all principles enjoy equal responsibility for mishaps. In LLC's, all principles enjoy shared responsibility.
I guess the best way to sum it up would be to quote my Business Legal Environment professor: "...and I hope that now you all have a clear understanding of partnerships. Now let me give you a word of advice, never form one."
This article has recently been linked from Slashdot. Please keep an eye on the page history for errors or vandalism.
Palmyra Atoll is a thousand miles south of Hawaii, an untold distance from civilization. Uninhabited by humans and wild to the core, it is the last intact marine wilderness in the U.S. tropics.
And people were upset when it was 'discovered' that GMail was going to programatically 'read' your email to provide contextual advertising (and spam filtering) as an invasion of privacy? Here we will have actual _people_ reading your private correspondences. No thanks.
They probably use open source spam filtering apps to presort the e-mails into definite spam, definite non-spam, and uncertain. Then only check the borderline cases by hand.
So the first line on their front page reads:
"For the first time ever: 100% reliability in combating spam. Guaranteed."
But the first two bullet points of their TOS also read:
"You understand that there are no guarantees, either expressed or implied, regarding the accuracy, confidentiality or availability of the service."
AND
"You agree to hold harmless and indemnify eProvisia LCC and its affiliates, subsidiaries, and representatives, from and against any legal claims, including liability for the company not adhering to the terms and conditions of this agreement. "
So they guarantee to stop 100% of spam...but if they don't, that's too bad as they never claimed to anyway and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.
Some juicy info on the Palmyra Atoll:
"Palmyra Atoll Palmyra is an equatorial atoll, a circular string of 54 small, heavily vegetated islets formed by the growth of coral on the rim of an ancient submerged volcano. The Palmyra Atoll is a thousand miles south of Hawaii, an untold distance from civilization. Uninhabited by humans and wild to the core, it is the last intact marine wilderness in the U.S. tropics."
So they are claiming human spam filtering from a place which is uninhabited by humans. I guess it is true that if you have a million monkeys banging on the keyboard they could actually turn out a real product.
the phone number [(+78 327) 47 01 99 ] they provide does not exist. No country has +78 has their country code.
I dunno, I just get this image of a spam filtering sweatshop in southeast asia. People being forced to read about penis enlargements, mortgages and porn sites all day long for pennies a day and no bathroom breaks.
synergy!
I was waiting for synergy to pop up there somewhere...
What's a mission statement, About Us page, or memo from management without synergy?!?
A piece of software that is filtering your spam is not being paid to do it. Yes it's creators were perhaps paid, but at least they are one step removed. A paid human-based service doing spam-filtering, however, would have a direct motive to want as much spam flying around as possible, so as to have as many potential customers as possible. I wouldn't be surprised if this company was created by and is being funded by the spammers themselves as just one more way to make money from spam! .
Jiggity
The human rate of error would actually be far worse than that of a spamassassin + RBL + DNSBL type filter. A human fatigues, the machine does not. The new filters are smart enough to update themselves, and while a human might catch some things the machine does not, the machine is less likely to fat finger a button and send your important emails to /dev/null.
Besides, machines are faster. Big John be damned.
Even better the $67 million dollars in cash reserves are in Palmyra Atoll dollars; I wonder what the exchange rate is?
One Palmyra Atoll dollar = 17 pieces of mithril, or approximately twenty kilograms of fairy dust.
There's no such thing, people. This is a joke.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
Maybe if you actually *made* a release, sf.net would show it. I know it would, because it works for my projects.
"... working 24 hours a day**..."
"** - Timezone differences may apply."
Damn. I was all excited about the fact that they worked 24 hours a day, but I live on the west coast.
Why can't we use spelling checkers to filter spam? It seems all the spam now uses mispelled words and numbers in words to trip other filtering methods. So measure percent words mispelled or with numbers in them and above a particular threshold consider it spam.
I was out with my girlfriend yesterday morning, we went to breakfast and left the restaurant. When we arrived back at her place, she noticed that I had a flier attached to my car window. Something I had never even noticed when driving. It was for some silly event that I can't remember but it made me start thinking. You know, this is just spam..and yet I'm not all that upset about it. In fact, you see spam everywhere in life, but people rarely get as upset or harbor such a strong emotional feeling toward it. For example:
Billboards - Spam. I didn't ask to see all that while driving
Homeless people begging for money - Spam. Like the Nigerian guys trying who promise you 1 gazillion dollars once you donate 5k
Fliers - Spam. (eventhough I'm always interested in what what is going on my city, but please don't put it on my car window without asking)
People who wear clothes that have the clothing logo in 20 inch font plastered on the chest - Spam. I'm not going to buy clothes just because they say Von Dutch so stop trying to get me to buy them
Cell phone company trademarked ring tones - Spam. It's like they're trying to get me to buy a nokia phone by playing it's themesong over and over.
Bumperstickers - Spam.
Racing Decals - Spam.
Racing Decals on Jackets - Spam.
Can you think of any more? Feel free to jump in
Sorry if this is off topic..I just wanted to share. Why? Because sharing is caring.
We use the Baraccuda spam firewall here at work and it works great. We have approximately 250 users, so the smallest version was fine for us. It's blocking an average of 1000 spam, 100 virus infected emails, and allowing less than 5 spam through per day (company wide, not per user). It's NEVER incorrectly blocked a message, especially since I have it set up with the proper whitelists from our business partners. I've spent an average of 15 minutes a week tweaking the settings, and it automatically updates its filters, so administration costs are low. I'd recommend it to any company.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
...and you'd be a fool to pay $20 per.
I recently started a service for spam filtering. The idea was to combine several types of filtering as well as allowing a given user to create their own rules. Between whitelisting your uploaded address book, effective use of Spamassassin, Vipul's Razor, (careful use of) the RBL, we also create human made global rules to reject certain types of spam that slip through.
The real draw of the service is that people can use it on an existing email address, by providing POP3 info and picking up filtered mail at the Snaremail server. This is the novelty that I believe makes most new users happy - not having to switch email addresses.
A good friend of mine worked at Brightmail and told me for years, they had many people assigned to adding new mail rules via regular expressions all day. It's a never ending job if you take that approach I'd imagine ...
I'm sure many of the /. crowd has got their own solutions, but for the joe user who wishes to keep an existing email address, I'm getting good feedback.
--- end on-topic shameless plug ---
One look at the terms of service ought to be enough to scare away any customer (at least one with half a brain):
Have a look at: http://eprovisia.dione.cc/tos.html. An excerpt is below:
Yikes!
But I would want the BSD rating to be 1 for complete bullshit and 0 for no Bullshit. So take 1 and subtract your result of 0 for a BSD of 1 for the paragraph.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The most dismaying is the number of suckers who'll fall in it.
Hey, maybe if all the offshore people who know English are tied up in spam filtering jobs, they won't be available to take away our programming jobs.
Table-ized A.I.
Not only that, but the contract is "governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Uninhabited Sovereign Territory of Palmyra Atoll, ..."
Many popular anti-spam systems, e.g. those implemented by webmail services, are already indirectly human-powered. Users classify their own spam emails and the everyone benefits system-wide without privacy concerns.
I'd say the system works pretty well. My Yahoo account, which was unusable after being harvested from my Usenet postings, is usable again. I just checked, and I have 426 messages in my bulk (spam) folder and 9 in my inbox. Of the nine, half (ok, 4!) are auto-responses from mail daemons to messages I never sent, while the other half are spam that escaped the filters. Not bad at all for a few days' worth of mail.
I think a sensible business model is for the webmail services to leverage their huge, continually updated, spam database and license them to ISPs, who can then filter spam at the server level before users download anything. I think that's much more elegant than software+community based solutions implemented at the user level.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
This is a great joke, and once more Slashdot's been had.
-Rabin
This website is obviously playing a very subtle joke... the kind that slashdotters are oblivious too.
Don't believe me? Think about it for a second. The company states that it is convieniently located in the Palmyra Atoll, which is a thousand miles from nowhere. I doubt it even has Internet capabilities. eProvisia was founded in 1993... when spam really wasn't a problem yet. Certainly not enough of a problem for people to pay money to have their inboxes cleaned. These things plus a whole lot of other things say this website is just a joke, probably created by the story submitter.
Now take a deep breath, and laugh. Please?
Their contact email (eprovisia@dione.cc) is interesting too. "whois dione.cc@whois.www.tv" tells me that the domain is registered to a Canadian address, but "www.dione.cc" is full of polish text and is the same as "www.dione.ids.pl".
C'mon, they only have like 4 pages to their site, and each one of them has a obvious scam red flag...
at eprovisia.coredump.cx.
.cx domain.
This site is a joke, and no more represents an actual business than that other famous site with a
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
i'm having a hard time believing this service is for real, but if it is, you would think they could take some of that $67 million and get a decent web site design done....not that there's anything wrong with teenage girls and FrontPage...but i'm just saying....
This company can't possibly be real.
Anybody read their terms of service? You understand that there are no guarantees, either expressed or implied, regarding the accuracy, confidentiality or availability of the service. eProvisia LCC may choose to share any information acquired in the course of providing its services with other entities, and may, at its sole discretion and based on this information, take whichever actions the company, its affiliates, subsidiaries, or representatives, consider to be appropriate. You henceforth void your reasonable expectation of privacy, and your constitutional rights to a fair and speedy trial.
And their contact information. Um, Palmyra Atoll is an uninhabited pile of sand in the Pacific Ocean. "Palmyra Atoll dollars?" BWAHAHAHA.
Leveraging our paradigm-shifting product line with state of the art technology developed by a dedicated team of professionals, we offer a significant competitive advantage on the diversified but fragmented market of best of breed anti-spam solutions. That line sounds like it was generated with the Web Economy Bullshit Generator.
Thanks for the laugh, Hemos. No, I'm laughing at you, not with you.
or is it just me..
http://dione.cc/ is administered by Michal Zalewski of http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ fame.. quite admired for his hacking skills.
Some quick hacks that come to mind immediately are p0f/p0f2 and catty
For stuff in the mailbox or fliers on your windshieled you "pay" by having to remove it.
Help fight continental drift.
From the CIA World Factbook on Palmyra Atoll:
Translation of eProvisia's four-page web site : We're from the Government, and we're here to help you.
Hey. Why doesn't the company get a dummy account at yahoo or hotmail (to get the incoming data) and then program an algorithm which can read twisted and l33t words? A simple Neural Network can be trained (even manually by humans). Let the algorithm send the "unmasked" output to the real spam filter.
Hint: The number of mispellings could be a significant variable in determining whether something is spam or not. Ta-da!
Too funny. Have a look at the CIA World Factbook location this company claims to be based on. Its a Natural preserve with 4-20 Nature Conservancy staff... Too funny.
-Andres.
Although he called it the 'Bologna Detection Kit' and applied it to pseudo-science. It actually works quite well here on /.
Hm, thinking about this some more though there would need to be some safeguard to protect people who's PC's got Owned from excessive bills. Maybe the ability for users to set a limit for themselves on the number of SMTP MB's sent per month before their connection gets locked out. Plus good support from their ISP on how to lock down their PC to avoid these issues in future.
If tou looked at the site for more than 2 seconds and didn't realize this, than you have brought shame to /. and all of geekdom.
At first glance, this solution might look like one which can be trusted as a reliable method to avoid having unsolicitated mail in one's inbox, but it takes just a little curiosity to be somewhat put off the idea of paying the stated yearly fee for the service.
On the eProvisia LLC - Spam Eradicator presentation page, it is written that for 'a low yearly fee of $19.95', one can benefit of the enjoyment of a 'guaranteed 100% protection against spam [...] with the unprecedented reliability and simplicity of [their] all-in-one solution!' It first sounds like a rather interesting deal thus said, and one is incited to read on. After all, how do they obtain an unprecedented reliability against protection? It is written further on, that 'a dedicated team of over a hundred trained Screening and Preselection Specialists, working 24 hours a day, will begin manually reviewing, hand-picking and approving important correspondence, vigilantly discarding all junk mail.' Perhaps this company has 'thousands of satisfied customers' as it is said on the same page, but I would certainly not be volunteering to pay for some people I do not know reading my personal e-mail and sorting it according to what they think is or is not what I would like to recieve in my inbox.
After all, how could I know what are the ethics of my 'Specialist', what he or she considers to be correct and what he or she considers not to be, whether or not the 'Specialist' in question may just employ some subjectivity when sorting my e-mail? What's more, from what I understand basing myself on what is indicated on the given site, the client is not actually able to recieve the e-mail marked as unsolicitated by the 'Specialist', and hence cannot verify whether or not there are some false positives with a quick glance, as one usually can. I do recognize this is intentional so the client is free of the mail marked as unsolicitated, but it would be appreciated if there was the option of recieving the junk mail with a specific tag (such as 'X-Unsolicitated') which the mail client would filter so the user of the service could have the -mail marked as unsolicitated by the 'Specialist' sent in a folder, just so results can be checked.
If I want human-powered spam filtering, I would rather try Cloudmark SpamNet as a solution. It is a product based on the active participation of the community, and it works by marking as spam mail marked as such by users of the service. Users with a greater reliability in the past use of the product have a greater influence in the marking as spam of e-mail, and the general reliability of the program is said to be of 98% if the company producing it is to be believed. (It costs $39.95 per annum for the subscription to the community filtering, though a 30-day trial version is provided.)
I think Yahoo's spam filtering is also human powered. It seems to be contantly getting better. I signed up for webspace with them ($20 per month) and get a lot of POP3 2G email accounts; their spam filter gets most of the spam and then I mark spam that is remaining in the inbox. Lastly I check for false positives and occasionally download the highly spam free email messages once a month or so using POP3 (I usually just use the web front-end for daily email access).
this site is obviously built to acquire new addresses to send spam to. idiots will sign up for awesome spam blocking and end up with more spam from this bogus company. what kind of business model is it to charge only $20/year and expect to earn enough to pay for manual labor?
I'm sick and tired of people holding our Barracuda as some kind of measuring stick for anti-spam methods.
1.) Barracuda is just a SpamAssassin bundle with a nice interface and some REGEX updates. There isn't any contrast between SpamAssassing and Barracuda, the one is simply a super-set containing the other.
2.) Barracuda has less than 2 percent of the market share, while other companies have significantly more! (link is to IDC data, I couldn't readily find it other than on CipherTrust's site). Further, most of Barracuda's customers are educational insituations and other tiny entities that don't have the budget to spend on a real solution. They have virtually none of the Fortune 500 (maybe two or three customers in that bracket, total). If they were so great, a lot more large enterprises would have adopted their solution.
For some reason OSS zealots have a love affair with Barracuda, because their product is nearly 100% an OSS bundle and because they advertise on /., I guess. Curiously, there are other products out there primarily built on OSS as well, such as McAfee's e250/500/1000 product line (who is also interestingly #2 in the secure content management appliance marketshare with nearly 20%, or 10 times Barracuda's share)
You should all should quit being blind zealots and do some objective research, the Barracuda product isn't even close to being the best in it's space. On the other hand, that would be so un-Slashdot to actually take an objective look at an issue and not comment on things you don't understand.
Someone is WRONG on the Internet!
isn't that what a secretary is for?
Shame it's a hoax.
As seen here the Palmyra Atoll is nothing more then an inhabited ring of island a thousand miles south of Hawaii. There is no population, no government, no money, and very likely no eProvisia. The site is a complete farce, and is probably run by spammers collecting email addresses and names.
Given whats been discussed already about Palmyra Atoll, I wonder if it's possible that they have courts on this pile of sand, much less a written consitution. Sounds like a place I wouldn't mind living.
(1) Warranties and waivers. You understand that there are no guarantees, either expressed or implied, regarding the accuracy, confidentiality or availability of the service. eProvisia LCC may choose to share any information acquired in the course of providing its services with other entities, and may, at its sole discretion and based on this information, take whichever actions the company, its affiliates, subsidiaries, or representatives, consider to be appropriate. You henceforth void your reasonable expectation of privacy, and your constitutional rights to a fair and speedy trial.
Choice of Law and Jurisdiction. These Terms of Use will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Uninhabited Sovereign Territory of Palmyra Atoll, without giving effect to its conflict of laws and provisions of your actual state or country of residence. Any claims, legal proceedings, or litigations regarding eProvisia LCC and its affiliates, subsidiaries, and representatives, will be brought solely in and you consent to the jurisdiction of Palmyra Atoll courts.
Mmmmmm, Soylent Spam Filter.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
a dumdum that submitted a fake story is going to receive countless spams from the spam spiders that got his un-obsfuscated email adress?
yes.
yes it is,
arturs@linuxpl.org
I BREACHED YOUR WALL, BABY. HEh Heh HEH
Hmmmm.......
unless arturs@linuxpl.org is a fake address.
I haven't heard of it before.. I'll do a google after but does anyone have any comparisons of dspam vs spamassassin? tnx.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
You're confusing the definition of the word spam with the definition for the word advertising. Spam is a specific subcategory of advertising, the qualifier being that it intrudes into email. Not all ads are desired, but they are nowhere near as intrusive, time consuming, or resource consuming as spam.
If you go to http://www.dione.cc/ ?
Domain Name: dione.cc
Registrant: Antoni Sawicki (asawicki@tenox.tc)
Suite 879
101-1001 West Broadway
Vancouver, BC V6H 4E4
CA
604-608-3264
Administrative, Technical, Billing Contact: Antoni Sawicki (asawicki@tenox.tc)
Suite 879
101-1001 West Broadway
Vancouver, BC V6H 4E4
CA
604-608-3264
Record expires on:
Record created on: Sep 26 2008
Sep 26 2003
Domain Name Servers: ns1.tenox.tc
ns2.tenox.tc
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
...through bulk unsolicited e-mail?
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
This stuff rocks. Zero false positives. Easy setup and interface. http://www.cloudmark.com/
It transformed my e-mail from a Kafka/Milton-esque mill of grinding misery into the basically useful enterprise it oughta be. Simple as that.
All it does is check your incoming mail against mail reported as spam by 1.08x10^6 other users. A simple idea, well executed. No, I don't work for them or own stock. I'm just a regular schlub who was getting 1000 spams a day for a while, did some looking around, and came up with a total winner.
When I get the pr0n emails I won't be able to tell my wife that its just spam anymore!
Heh, I am in the UK: yup, it's very very irritating and I too have seen the light of GAIM :P
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Palmyra Atoll is a thousand miles south of Hawaii, an untold distance from civilization.
I think you just told us.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
check it out:
F -8 &q=cubicles
:P
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&ie=UT
the pic they used on their about page is on PAGE ONE of a google image search for cubicles
I love it!!
http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/
is a collaborative spam filtering solution:
Protect you, your friends, and family
Every time you block a spam message that slips through, your vote benefits the entire community.
A bit expensive though : 40 dolls per year.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
They use humans to verify spam filters and propagate these to email servers
m ai l_4.0.html
http://www.isp-planet.com/equipment/2002/bright
Get, don't give
Brightmail's anti-spam strategy is sweet and simple. The company sets up dummy mailboxes, which it calls "probes," for those ISPs whose customers it protects. Most ISPs are eager to give Brightmail the "probe" mailboxes because they want any spam sent to them to be profiled by Brightmail.
Since these mailboxes never send mail, any e-mail they receive is unsolicited. With probes scattered across the Internet, the company can cross-reference the e-mail it collects to determine which messages being sent out are bulk spam.
The probes divide spam messages into identifiable components, and develops a "spam DNA" profiled that is categorized with the aid of Sieve technology (Sieve is also known as IETF RFC 3028). It is then transmitted across the Internet to Brightmail's Network Operation Center (NOC) using an MD5 hash. At the NOC, the various reports are aggregated into a data file that acts like an anti-virus "fingerprint," which is distributed to Brightmail clients. Because of the volume of spam over the Internet, these updates are sent out every five or ten minutes.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
This article is not a troll. This is a very cleverly written ad for Barracuda.
I had a job interview with IBM in the not-so-distant past, and I never got directions because Mozilla's spam filter thought it was junk. I finally realized this, but not after caling them back and saying I never got it. Missing this interview would've cost me well more than $20.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Cloudmark has been doing this for over a year now, I love it and have gotten many "thank yous" form people I have told about it. It uses both Bayesian filtering and uses information gathered from its network of users to help identify spam. And it integrates with MS Outlook. This other eProvisia service forces you to an address on their email server, bogus.
And don't the major web-mail providers (Yahoo mail, Hotmail, etc.) use group-based filtering as well?
BTW, if anyone wants a gmail account, I have 6 available invites. Email me with your reason why you deserve on at
GMail, because automated services are less distracted by hot gossip than human screeners.
Besides, companies shifting paradigms are usually trying to shift those from you pocket to their own...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
How easy would it be to flood them with even more zombies? Let's hope they won't bite off more SPAM than they can chew... so to speak.
Apologies to Hormel.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
More info is here
The site looks like either a joke or a scam to me.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
I think it was T.H. White who once said of business language, that businessmen sees themselves as a knights in shining armor, and use language accordingly.
... exalted. It's the pinstripe version of ebonics.
This exalted view requires languages that sounds
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I've purchased one of their smaller appliances, and it works very well. It handles about 30,000 emails a day, with about 1,000 being legit emails. False positives are VERY low, and even then are tagged and let through.
The biggest thing I like, though, is the hourly updates that they provide for spam and virus definitions.
Just out of curiosity, how are you proposing to duplicate that effort with your project? Or are you?
$0.02 (CDN)
One Palmyra Atoll dollar = 17 pieces of mithril, or approximately twenty kilograms of fairy dust.
Since when can you get 20 kilos of PCP for one dollar? No wait, that's angel dust, but whatever...
Very carefully. First I'm aiming for basic functionality. How does the spam firewall know about end users? Where is it storing it's settings? How does it quarantine and inform end users? What type of anti-virus does it use?
:P I'm presuming these are bayesian updates? Have you looked to see what the updates do? Adding things to /etc/mail/spamassassin? What?
Those questions are getting answered now. The quarantine works along with sa-milt. That alone is a pretty good step forward. Next I'm working on quarantine management.
After that I'm going to be working on optimal spamassassin configuration, then finally web interfaces.
So far as the 'hourly updates', I'll have to say...you get what you pay for?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
I immediately realised such a business would never thrive, because:
Yes, it's a hoax. Which could be immediately deduced from the fact that it is not viable business (especially with the price they quote).
If you check out the "order" form they don't ask for credit cards, etc. So it's not that kind of scam. Probably not a spam-email-collecting list either because if you actually are motivated to fill out the form, you get spam anyway, right? So it's not a scam, just a joke.
I wish they included more details about how their "technology" works, though.
Heh, we didn't have such great luck with it. There are a few bugs surrounding using a single Barracuda to deal with mail for multiple domains, and found that it was randomly just dropping all mail for a given domain every now and again.
Worked very well for a single domain though.
-Matt
We seem to get more and more articles where obviously the editor didn't review the article, or verify it even superficially. Not good for slashdot... So far the trolls have been content with posting comments. These might get modded up for a short-term rush, but they are getting easy to do and get modded-down eventually. Now they see that bigger things can be done: create a joke website, submit an article about it to /. and fool the editors into posting it. The ultimate troll, they will get hundreds of comments, and the article will most certainly stay and eventually make it into google's cache... A trophy to stay around forever...
/. editors, expect to get swamped with troll submissions. You weren't checking the relatively manageable article submissions before so you could pump out a new one every half hour, now you must thoroughly check the deluge of mostly trollish articles, or risk slashdot going the way of internet stocks.
Yes dear
The location of the company is an uninhabited island in the pacific, and its completely obvious that its just a scam... and this got on /.?!
I think the point is that it doesn't have to do anything technologically. Basically, if just a small percentage of the million+ users click the "block" button, Cloudmark gets the message and blocks it for everyone. Then when I get that same message (or, I guess, one basically the same) it gets shunted from Inbox to Spambox.
Finally someone gives un-sugarcoated feedback about the Barracuda product, rather than mindless zombie OSS cheering.
5 years ago I thought about renting an old warehouse downtown by the soup kitchen. Install a couple T1's, MD 20/20 in the vending machines and then hiring the homeless people to "sort" e-mail and filter out the spam. But alas, with the dot com crash my dream was never realized.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
saddle popup horny tiddlywinks
There are competent anti-spam solutions available. From the open source spam-assasin to commercial products based on spam-assasin to commercial products based on independent engines from Nokia or tethernet.com (TetherFilter), for example. It always amazes me how many people I talk to still have a spam problem but remain unaware of competent solutions on the market. _Fish
These Terms of Use will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Uninhabited Sovereign Territory of Palmyra Atoll
It seems slashdot is the victim of a hoax. Good job! I'm thankful there are no hidden goatse images.
Or rather, it will work only until spammers find a way to circumvent this newest method of blocking spam. However "good" mail gets through, that's how they'll get spam to go through. Short this company's stock
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
YHL. HAND.
If this were true, then the way to ruin that type of business would be to convince it to outsource to some country where to local capabilities just don't match US regional dialect or written slang.
I wonder how the Indian tech support lines deal with Cajun or Creole speak. "Zya, mah Splindoz Bzip Bzop cheongwah compu done brokies down." THAT could be funny, two diametrically and diabolically opposed forms of "english".
(I wonder if there'll be another need for Wind Talkers. If so, since that 'code' likely is broken, I recommend sending in the Caj (Cage) Talkers. You'd quantum computing to crack that lingo... (I can tease this since some of that Cajun/Creol chemistry is in my veins...))
"SPAMPERATOR" (think: "operator...", in the wining, carol burnette/sit-com way.)
Hopefully, this is just a gag. Privacy would be in the hands of Internet operators.
OTOH, if ever we have a "Matrix" a way to be "Neo" "conservatives" or conservationists would be to create a "SPATRIX", or "SPAM MATRIX".
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I wonder where in that "V" (shaped runway) their economy is. In our domestic "V" we still have vehicle and human body parts and carnage on the V road ahead...
... Introduction, Palmyra Atoll, Top of Page. ... The Hawaii Statehood Act of 1959 did not include Palmyra Atoll, which is now privately owned by the Nature Conservancy. ...q .html - 47k - Cached - Similar pages
... Palmyra Atoll, a tiny coral atoll in the vast Pacific Ocean, is the keeper of answers to big questions about the health of our coral reefs and oceans. ...
...
Really, does that Atoll have any indigenous or or engenuous or even for that matter DISengenuous lawyers. How many rocks are on that rock. If they have no currency, I wonder how they could afford to import or outsource the lawyer who wrote that bit of legalese. That contract sounds like it's got "Made in America" written all over it.
- I suspect the operation is there because there is not county court, no county assessor, no district taxes, no easements... Who's footing their phone bill?
- 2,437 METER runway? What are they landing there.
- Looks like Maxwell Smart drew that map. Maybe Jaime/Haime wrote the database. The Chief approved it, and Agent 99 typed the web page. Siegfried gave the disinformation, and Klip-Klop (the man with the suction cup shoes) has his finger, ummm clops all over it.
==
From GOOGLE:
CIA - The World Factbook -- Palmyra Atoll
www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/l
============
One World Journeys | Palmyra Atoll: Rainforest of the Sea
www.oneworldjourneys.com/palmyra/ - 32k - Cached - Similar pages
==
From GOOGLE:
Palmyra Atoll - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Palmyra Atoll. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Map of Palmyra Atoll. Palmyra Atoll is an uninhabited, 12 km 2 atoll in the
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmyra_Atoll - 24k - Cached - Similar pages
== Around 1997, a few Navy ships, including the T-AGOS types were doing "ecology" or similar sonar sweeps of the area. I wonder what REALLY was going on. Does anyone know the subsurface topography? Is there a spot to hide boomers, fast attacks or even just minisubs? Maybe they were looking for a lost plane, or worse, a lost A-bomb. Maybe in 250 years we'll know.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/20/1 33258
Be carefull, according to this article Microsoft might have a patent on that process.
A quote from the article: Consuela Xiang a 12 year old veteran employee of Microsoft's Block XP project said, "I get mail. I delete mail. I eat today."
Cheers,
Adolfo
--
Try Nuggets , the mobile search engine. We answer your questions via SMS, across the UK.
Human spam filtering sounds great at first but when you think about it, it'd mean those humans would be scouring through your email deciding which is and which isn't spam. They could delete important documents or read private ones - plus there's the likelihood of human error. Seems a little unsafe to me.
Upon reading the eProvisia webpage I noticed firstly that the two peoples' headsets didn't remotely match, and looked horribly generic. Then I saw a picture of an office with cubicles. I was vaguely intrigued by this; how long would it takle me to find this picture elsewhere? So I timed myself getting into google image search, and looking up the words "cube", "cubicle", "office", and finally "cubicles." All in all I took about one minute nineteen seconds to find the same picture eProvisia's used on their website, the first page of results for google's image search "cubicles": http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www. seat-1.com/IntarS_000001_Ressources/tables/homepag e/cubicles.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.seat-1.com/Int arS_000001_Ressources/tables/homepage/page_0000000 072.html&h=200&w=216&sz=19&tbnid=XxXwAVmEWnEJ:&tbn h=93&tbnw=100&start=16&prev=/images%3Fq%3DCubicles %26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8
It makes me feel good to know there's legitimate, original companies out there which are willing to help as much as eProvisia is :)
Not only are they buzzword bingo winners, they are also Luddites. Not using any technology at all? I wonder where their "hundreds of trained professionals are?" Somewhere totally cheap. Do you really want someone in China reading your e-mail? I am sticking with Cloudmark that harnesses the power of community but doesn't exploit third world people or expose my mail to privacy concerns.
at filtering spam. After all, how would I know that that idiot spewing nonsense is your friend?
I think you are too harsh for their PR dept.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Actually, quite well, thank you.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Hmmm... I'm pretty sure I pay for AOL with dollars...