Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Spam Trap Claims 10x-100x Accuracy Gain

Posted by kdawson on from the see-it-when-i-believe-it dept.

SpiritGod21 writes in with a NYTimes article on a new approach to spam detection that claims out-of-the-box improvement of 1 or 2 orders of magnitude over existing approaches. The article wanders off into human-interest territory as the inventor, Steven T. Kirsch, has an incurable disease and an engineer's approach to fighting it. But a description of the anti-spam tech, based on the reputation of the receiver and not the sender, is worth a read.

5 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. Yet another wrong answer... by damn_registrars · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At least once a week there seems to be another flashy technique to filter or block spam. Great.

    Except that this ignores the truth behind the spam problem, that many people don't seem to care about. Spam is, at its root, an economic problem. Spam is sent by people who are making money helping someone sell something. The spam you got this afternoon for discount v!@gra or 0EM software is making money for someone. And as long as someone can still make money off of it, they'll keep doing it.

    If you want to stop spam, you need to take away the economic incentive. We've already seen how many spam filtering / blocking programs produced in the past 5 years? But yet the spam problem just keeps growing as the number of "solutions" grows. This tells us that the spammers are more than willing to work on ways to circumvent these reactive techniques, so that they can continue to make money off their deeds.

    Once we can stop spam from being profitable, we will finally see it go away. But no sooner.

    --
    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    1. Re:Yet another wrong answer... by ender- · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you want to stop spam, you need to take away the economic incentive. We've already seen how many spam filtering / blocking programs produced in the past 5 years? But yet the spam problem just keeps growing as the number of "solutions" grows. This tells us that the spammers are more than willing to work on ways to circumvent these reactive techniques, so that they can continue to make money off their deeds.

      Once we can stop spam from being profitable, we will finally see it go away. But no sooner. But why would the anti-spam software companies want that? If they succeed in actually eliminating spam, they'd also go out of business. It may be profitable for the spammers, but I suspect it's even more profitable for the anti-spam companies.

      --
      Nothing to see here
    2. Re:Yet another wrong answer... by pclminion · · Score: 4, Insightful

      At least once a week there seems to be another flashy technique to filter or block spam. Great.

      It's not "flashy." It's called information theory and statistics. It is an extremely powerful concept that has far more important potential uses than simply filtering spam email. Every new advancement in automated classification and knowledge extraction is VITALLY IMPORTANT to our ability to cope in a world which has suddenly been flooding with SO MUCH information. This power tool is being applied to what some might see as a "silly" problem, but the fact remains that spam is a powerful motivation to researchers to push further limits in the fields of pattern recognition, information and natural language processing.

      If you're against the advancement of information processing techniques, then... uh, okay, I guess. If you can't see beyond spam, you are terribly short sighted.

    3. Re:Yet another wrong answer... by choongiri · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, if you are harvesting email addresses and sending unsolicited commercial messages to them, it is quite simple:

      You are a spammer.

  2. Re:Ummmm.... by Mundocani · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The main problem I can see is that even if this system works it is easily circumvented. The big assumption is that you can identify the recipients of a particular message, but spammers can easily ensure that information isn't easily obtained.

    First they can ensure that the message itself doesn't contain any recipient info (a big bcc basically).

    Then they avoid batching recipients based on their domain so he SMTP server can't tell who else is receiving the message.

    The only way to derive the recipients now is to compare all messages against all others in order
    to match them up. So they hash every message and combine those with identical hashes.

    But putting a little unique text in each message during transmission foils that.

    Spammers: 1 New weapons: 0