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The Spam Conference 2005
dos_dude writes "This year's Spam Conference is over. As usual, the MIT provides low and high bandwidth webcasts. The talks featured a full spectrum of anything possible. From absurd to sound, from boring to entertaining, and from dead-horse-beating to brand-new. Highlights: John Graham-Cumming presented the results of the survey he did with the help of many Slashdot readers, Jon Praed gave the details of the trial against spammer Jeremy Jaynes and friends, Brian McWilliams posed the question what will happen when all spam is finally filtered, and Matthew Prince plugged Project Honeypot in a very entertaining way. Shameless but useful plug: here's the final schedule with links to the webcasts."
The only way to truely stop spam is build a white list, in which you can only recieve e-mail from the addresses on the white list. The downfall is that you cannot recieve e-mail from people that aren't on the list.
But if you only send and recieve e-mail from a few select people on your e-mail account, then a white list may be a good option for you.
The only way for spam to finally be filtered and gone would be for the government to make it a felony to send spam
Government of what? Of the Planet Earth?
Excuse me, but you, Americans, aren't the only nation in the world who sends spam.
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Who in their right mind decides to publish media in RealMedia format?? Seriously? I'm really, really sick of that real stuff. Anyway, I found a decent solution... use Real Alternative on Windows (contains a simple media player and real codecs!) or the heavenly RealPlayer for Linux.
My guess is that the corporations who filtered your email's just didn't want political stuff floating around their networks because of the potential for complaints of harassment from their employees and/or for productivity reasons (too many people wasting company time discussing politics and not getting their work done). I doubt they were filtering you specifically. I try to use personal email accounts for such correspondence.
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
It's already been established that MOST spam comes from the USA. So, if it was in any way possible to enforce laws against spam, which is questionable, it would at least be a good first step. I get spam in english, from presumably from American companies. Maybe the spam gets routed through foreign countries, but I don't give a shit because if the company that paid the spammer to do it gets shut down, I don't get their spam. Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't care if other countries get spam, I care if I get spam. If it works for us, it'll work for you too, so it's really not hard to parse his statement to read "everybody should make it against the law to send spam." Or, you could jump on his ass, whatever you prefer.
"Bush" is political when used in political context.
"Bush" is sexual when used in a sexual context.
"Bush" refers to plants when used in that context.
"Bush" can be used in one context to make a comment in a different context in a single message.
It's all about the CONTEXT because "Bush" is just a string.Again, ONLY if a message with those STRINGS in it was submitted to YOUR Bayesian database as SPAM.
If they were NOT, then they will NOT count towards the spam count.
There is nothing magical about it.
There isn't a government agency secretly populating your Bayes databases.
The Bayesian databases reflect exactly what was put in them. Which is why they are so effective at fighting spam.And WHO is telling the database to do that?
Hmmmmmmm?
Do you believe that someone is pre-loading your Bayesian database?
Do you believe that someone is intentionally altering the settings on your Bayesian database?Well I'm certainly not surprised. Even though it wouldn't take much effort to look at the headers to see.And that's just more evidence that you do NOT understand the situation.
You're still putting "political" in there.
It isn't "political".
If a friend emails me that he's selling his home because he doesn't want to pay the mortgage while his cheating wife has sex there and it gets flagged as spam, I don't worry that there's some RELIGIOUS problem with my filters. I understand what "strings" are and how they are used in these Bayesian databases based filters.
But to you, it's all about some political catastrophe.No. The problem is that you don't understand the technology.
You don't understand how/where spammers get addresses.
You don't understand how filters (particularly Bayesian based ones) determine whether an email is spam or not.
You don't understand how spammers try to get around those filters.
Despite all of that, you're still convinced that there is a problem that YOU see that others who actually understand the issues are blind to.
Scenario #1:
A completely blank Bayesian database. Brand new. Your son "Kerry" is emailing you about how funny it was that another kid was caught "cheating" in one of his classes.
Those strings populate the database with a high "ham" factor.
Political emails about how "Kerry" was "cheating" in "Vietnam" will come through without any problem (and "Vietnam" will be learned as ham).
So, where's the political bias there?
Scenario #2: Same as scenario #1, except your kid's name is "George" and the political email is about how "George" "Bush" was "cheating" during "Vietnam".
The political crap still gets through.
It's all about technology and statistics.
It only looks like magic to those who don't want to spend the time to learn it.