Slashdot Mirror
Ask Jonathan Zdziarski
You may recognize the name Jonathan Zdziarski from a recent Slashdot book review of his book Ending Spam. Aside from his DSPAM spam filter Jonathan has also contributed several other projects to the open source community under the GNU General Public License. These projects include Verizon-Compatible SMIL Multimedia Gateway, The Reactive Automated Blackhole List Server, Apache DoS Evasive Maneuvers Module, and several others. Want to know how to effectively contribute projects to the open source community? Curious to ask another programmer about his history? Now is the time to ask. Moderators will select the top few questions that we will forward on to Jonathan sometime tomorrow. The answers to the questions will be displayed next Tuesday when we will encourage Jonathan to participate in the discussion as time permits.
How do you pronounce your name?
Seeing how Johnathan has put much of his time and effort into Open Source projects over the years, it would seem he is a good canadate for this question: What do you think about the proposed change to the GPL with the upcoming GPL 3? Is it a welcomed breath of fresh air to the Open Source Community, or will it just be a reiteration of the previous GPL? What are your thoughts and comments on the GPL 3?
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Do you get those pesky Nigerian 419 emails? Post them here, and watch the database grow! : http://urgentmessage.org/
Most antispam software seems to be fairly reactionary - wither it is based on keyword patters, urls, sender, ip, or the checksum of the message a certain amount of spam has to first be sent and identified before additional messages will be tagged and blocked. Spf, domainkeys, etc... requires a certain percentage of the Internet to adopt before they will be truely effective.
What do you see on the horizon as the next big technique to battle spam? How will this affect legitimate users on the Internet?
"The similarities of sysadmins and drug dealers: both measure stuff in K's, and both have users."
Have you noticed any decrease in the amount of spam since a few of the hardcore spammers have finally been prosecuted? I always wonder if scare tactics will work against these guys, or if they will just move their colo to some small country offshore where it becomes harder to press charges.
Jon, your acheivements thus far are impressive. I am personally most impressed by your adherence to Open Source Solutions in a corporate environment.
I myself have had numerous interactions with less-than-technically-savvy management-types. Any time I bring up solutions that are quite obviously a better technical and financial choice over software-giant-type solutions; conversation seems to hit a brick wall. The ignorance of these people on such topics is astounding, and I find many approaches I have tried seem to yield no results in the short term. "Well, yes, your example proves that we would save $500,000 per year using that Open Source solution. But We've decided to go the Microsoft (or what-have-you) route."
With your track record, I can only assume you have found some ways to overcome this closed-mindedness.
I would greatly appreciate any input you have on this; from the perspective of someone who has overcome this obstacle before.
A couple fans told me that my last journal entry was mint; give it a shot. Hope you like.
I have two questions:
1. In your new book, you basically state that Bogofilter is not a bayesian filter, which was news to some of the Bogofilter people I have spoken to. Can you explain why you feel that Bogofilter is not a bayesian filter?
2. Bayesian filters have been around for some time now but there still seems to be no standardized testing methods for determining how well filters work in comparison to one another. Do you think that comparitive testing would be useful and if so, how should it be performed?
Thanks Jonathan.
Jonathan,
I develop and manage a lightweight Open Source Application that's used to send announce only and discussion mailing lists, similar to the Mailman and Majordomo projects. It's very popular and has a loyal following.
What advice do you have as a developer of this program to:
* Help my users send legitimate messages (either by education (specifically) or by programming techniques)
* Help Spam Filtering Software check the messages my program sends out for possible abuse
* Be a part of the solution to sending legitimate messages to many people, rather than perhaps be part of the problem.
I understand that any tool can be circumvented and abused and I do believe context always plays a part in how to judge something as Good or Bad. I'm sure like many different types of software, Spammers are a problem for my business as well.
I find myself in an interesting position, where I can change how many email messages are sent out. If I can send "better" email messages that are not filtered as spam if they are legitimate and can stop possible abuse of my program, I can help in a solution to people who would like to send out announce only and discussion email messages.
Thanks for your time.
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
This is arguably out of scope for this interview, but I still feel it's something many Slashdotters would be interested in hearing about.
On your webpage you have an essay describing your Christian beliefs and why you have them. You say many things that most Slashdotters (and nerds and scientist in general) regard as utterly ridiculous. You think the earth is no more than 10,000 years old, you think Christianity is logical, you regard the Bible as a historial document, etc.
No doubt you are aware of the fact that most nerds disagree with you on these things. Indeed, they might even consider you "crazy" for holding them.
Without going into the truths of the beliefs in question, which I'm sure will be debated enough in the Slashdot thread anyway (and I hope you'll join in), what do you think the reason is that so many scientists, nerds and people otherwise rather similar to you think your beliefs are obviously incorrect? Do you think they are all deluded? Do you agree that there might be a possibility that your beliefs are not rational (again, without going into whether or not they are so)?
Best regards,
an AC