Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Used for Artificial Intelligence
eldavojohn writes "It may be no surprise but Wikipedia is now being used in the field of artificial intelligence. The applications for this may be endless. For instance, the front of spam fighting is a tough one and it looks as though researchers are now turning towards an ontology or taxonomy based solution to fight spammers. The concept is also on the forefront of artificial intelligence and progress towards an application passing the Turing Test and creating semantically aware applications. The article comments on uses of Wikipedia in this manner: '"... spam filters block all messages containing the word 'vitamin,' but fail to block messages containing the word B12. If the program never saw B12 before, it's just a word without any meaning. But you would know it's a vitamin," Markovitch said. "With our methodology, however, the computer will use its Wikipedia-based knowledge base to infer that 'B12' is strongly associated with the concept of vitamins, and will correctly identify the message as spam," he added.'"
This isn't new to Slashdotters...
For years, Slashdot posts have used wikipedia as a form of artificial intelligence.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
You don't think there are hundreds of thousands of zombifiable computers in the United States?
Um, so? That doesn't make it inappropriate to block traffic from places where the overwhelming majority of the packets are toxic. It's a system-by-system, admin-by-admin judgement call, but there's no question that Korea isn't doing nearly enough to stop this problem locally. If the local culture starts to realize that they're isolating themselves from large sections of the internet because they won't do something to prevent 99% of their outbound mail from being spam, then maybe the need to filter will also go away.
And what about people with business connections in China or Korea?
I have a lot of customers with contacts like that. All of them (their Asian contacts) use Yahoo, Gmail, and similar accounts specifically to avoid this problem. Businesses in China and Korea are totally aware that most ISPs in those areas have poisoned outbound SMTP relays and user desktops. Or, they host their western-facing mail servers with providers in the west - I see a lot of that, too, since many of those businesses have two separate messaging platforms for the different international audiences with whom they communicate.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Spam Map
"South Korea, Indonesia, and especially Nigeria, etc"
While we're at it, why not block Alberta, California, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Spain, France and Portugal - all spam hotspots according to the map cited? What's that, you receive email from people in these places? Tough titties, if we're to block email coming from spam hotspots as you say.
Also, you've managed to point a finger of blame at Indonesia and Nigeria who are saintly in comparison to some more developed nations. Go racism!