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Repurposing Anti-Spam Tools For Detecting Mutations In HIV
chicksdaddy writes "Security researchers often use language and metaphors from the natural world to describe problems in the virtual world. (Consider 'virus,' and 'worm.') Now it turns out that the links may be more than just rhetoric. Microsoft Researchers say that tools they developed to detect spammers' efforts to avoid anti-spam filters were also great at spotting mutations in the HIV virus. A report from Microsoft Research in honor of World AIDS Day yesterday described how Microsoft Researchers David Heckerman and Jonathan Carlson were called upon to help AIDS researchers analyze data about how the human immune system attacks the HIV virus. To do so, they turned to tools and algorithms developed at Microsoft to detect and block spam e-mail in the company's Hotmail, Outlook and Exchange e-mail products."
The really big news here is - Slashdot has finally ditched the Gates "Borg" icon!
#DeleteChrome
is also a created simulation. If so, then of course viruses in both computers and nature will share common characteristics.
BUDDHA: All is illusion
NEO: There is no spoon
Come on gang, this is pretty cool.
To re-adapt the tech that picks up Nigerian Scams and send it to pick up HIV strains is pretty neat. I sure as **** didn't see that app.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Once my university decided to switch to MS as their email provider, the span in my inbox has gone up. They don't even have to use the trick of changing spellings, I get lots of junk about penis enlargement, hot Russian girls, and Viagra every day. What I do NOT get are emails from the registrar, the university police, and the Dean. Those all go to the junk folder. I suggest they take whatever data they get from these MS researchers and do the opposite.
It would have been nice if some sort of example of how these things (spam and virual mutations) are alike was actually presented. The full article is no more useful than the abstract posted here.
Spam filters, viruses. Yeah, I can see the connection there. Now, if they were doing quality control on canned meat products....
Assuming Microsoft uses some form of naive Bayesian classifier to do spam filtering like everyone else does, their spam filtering technology was in use by a lot of other people for a lot of other things before it came to be a spam filter anyway.
http://dbacl.sourceforge.net/spam_chess.html
Now that's cool.
Deleted
But they should call google about the spam detecting algorithm...
If hotmail's spam filter is what they have to show for, thanks but I'll keep using condoms.
What's sad is, people still think like that. It's a shame that few people know where AIDS came from. Short version, it's a result of overpopulation. AIDS has always existed, but when population density was lower, it wasn't transmitted between humans. Go ahead, look it up. See where AIDS actually came from. It most definitely was not divine intervention, in retribution for homosexuality. If that were so, it would have killed off all the queers, and left everyone else alone, right?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
So the war on spam and computer viruses has become as or more complex than figuring out how HIV mutates? How soon before it reaches cancer-level? lol
Maybe they should look at viruses and the immune system when designing spam filters.
Why not both?
If the programmer is lazy enough, he'll write one tool that does both.
I am John Hurt.
thanks for linking to the article. now i will read it and consider the points your angry anonymous comment instead of just blowing it off as a stupid angry internet comment.
Google's anti-spam is pretty good but is, of course, not perfect. Then where it really bites the big one is when you (the user) tries to manually tune it. The ui is beyond retarded. Also it's pretty bad about false positives. Attention Google analysts: If I send someone an email, I probably don't think they are a spammer! Duh...
Social Credit would solve everything...
The linked paper does a wonderful job of exposing the greasy circle jerk that passes for oversight and regulation of big pharma, but it debunks two drugs, AZT and Nevirapine, out of how many? How does that prove that AIDS is not caused by HIV?
Social Credit would solve everything...
Wow, your angry rant is fascinating and displays a complete lack of understanding of what you're talking about.
HIV = Human Immunodeficiency Virus, like rotavirus or rhinovirus or cytoplasmic polyhedrosis virus, is the name we give to the retrovirus entity with a very narrow and specific set of viral proteins, very specific physical characteristics, and the unique reverse transcriptase enzyme method used by viral entities in the same family to unbind host cell DNA and copy in their own RNA strand.
AIDS = Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, like the common cold or diarrhea, it is a set of symptoms and physiological changes to the body, characterized by the drop in CD4+ T cells below the threshold that confers cellular immunity to pathogens. (I can't remember the exact number this takes, look it up.)
So, could AIDS be caused by something else in the body that targets the CD4+T cells in the immune system? Yes, that is possible. However, no research to date has shown any vector that attacks our immune system so specifically.
However, decades of research has shown that a majority of persons infected with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus that attacks a specific set of helper T-cells in the body's immune system, will develop... are you read for this... ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME or AIDS, a set of symptoms and changes to the body characterized by the drop in CD4+T cells below a certain threshold.
So, is that simple enough for you? Do I need to get out the crayons and a special sheet of science paper and draw you pretty pictures of googly-eyed virus phospholipids shooting little DNA guns at similarly googly-eyed CD4+T cells?
Though, that probably won't help. One of the worst things that the internet has brought the world of science has been the ease with which crackpot conspiracy theories can be distributed to a gullible public that is either too stupid, lazy, or unconcerned to look it up for themselves. Rather than believe the people who spend their entire lives dealing with deadly pathogens for little money and even less recognition, the people who have sunk small fortunes in to an education system full of ideologues who often do require you to parrot their preferred theories in order to get a degree thereby depriving you of some of the best opportunities for research, the people who already have to deal with a whole raft of ignorant fucksticks with MBAs who spout such winners as "I'm not sure we have the budget for basic research after spending so much on administrator bonuses" and "Can't you pick a more profitable topic for study"; they believe the mouth-foaming twonk who spouts utter bullshit, anonymously, on the fucking internet.
Demonize you? Gladly. You deserve it. My hope for you sir is that you develop a disease that your tin-foil hat wearing friends convince you is from chem trails, or fluoridated water, or government mind control lasers on the moon and you spend your entire estate on quack doctors who prescribe drinking your own urine and sell you ten thousand dollar machines chock full of magnets and blinky lights, and make sit under a pyramid shaped tent while a large Turkish man gives you an enema with a ten horse-power pressure washer. After all of this, you die in a fashion most agonizing and painful, while fully aware that a seventy-nine cent dose of antibiotics from some "evil big pharma" company with their "science" and their "research" that you distrust so much would have knocked that thing out in a couple of days.