This summary seems to have been written to pick on these people. If they don't want wireless technology in their town, what is the harm in letting them ban it? We wouldn't expect the Amish to accept it either.
In fact, they almost seem to be a small religion that is lacking a charismatic leader. There are plenty of religious movements in this country that are based on nonsense that have more acceptance than this because they have convincing leaders.
My day job *is* computer science, and I am well compensated for the skills I provide.
Considering the outright statistical failure that you demonstrated a few comments ago, I very highly doubt that - unless you are just punching buttons on a POS all day and calling it "computer science" to make yourself feel better. You haven't exactly been demonstrating the personality traits of people who tend to retain jobs for long either.
What was I supposed to learn?
You could have learned the causative agents of spam, and the consequences of not dealing with it properly. You could have learned how to use statistics properly, and the dangers of not knowing statistics. You could have learned the important trends of spam that certain people are willingly ignorant towards and the consequences of that ignorance.
How to use English words improperly? How to lack reading comprehension? How to make arguments based on flawed premises? How to draw the wrong conclusions from facts that aren't even relevant?
You demonstrated those skills well in your posts in this discussion already.
In fact it is hard to find even a single fact that you used in your entire rant here. You are so far behind the curve on this problem that you might not even be ready to read a dummies book on the topic as it would assume more prior knowledge than you have demonstrated so far.
You attempt at humor isn't any better than your attempt at an argument. If you have a day job, don't quit it hoping for a career in comedy - or computer science. It's too bad you walked away from an opportunity to actually learn something, hopefully you are on a career path where that won't come back to hurt you later in life.
The fact that you don't understand the things I am saying doesn't make them incorrect.
I understand fully what you are saying. You gave me a statement of your faith regarding spam filters.
I even conceded that faith is not inherently a bad thing, however your understanding of the matter is clouded by your faith.
Simply repeating your ridiculous illogical arguments doesn't make them correct.
There is nothing ridiculous or illogical about my arguments. If you reached that conclusion it is most likely because you did not read or comprehend them. As stated earlier, your faith in filters has clouded your judgement and impaired your ability to be rational on the matter.
I am the one who is making an argument that is backed up by facts here. You are making an argument that is backed up by your own faith.
It's like you are trying to explain that airplanes don't really exist to someone who flies on them everyday. It just makes you look foolish.
Considering how you fell flat on your face trying to discuss statistics in your previous post - in an attempt to defend your faith in response to fact-based arguments - the fool here is unquestionably you.
At the end of the day though, if you want to use filters, I don't care what you decide to do for yourself. Just don't pretend that they are anything close to a long-term solution or that they can make a positive change in response to the worldwide spam problem. Your filters have huge costs to all users of email worldwide and indeed all users of the internet regardless of how, where, or if they use email. Your faith-driven intentional blindness does not help this.
Doubling down, ignoring the facts of the matter, and calling me "foolish" does not, either.
The more people who are using filters, the more CPU time and storage space is consumed by the filtering processes. Meanwhile, global spam volume continues to increase, which only further increases that resource consumption.
CPU time and disk space continue to get exponentially cheaper.
Disk space in particular is most certainly not getting "exponentially cheaper". It was before, but we are no longer in that phase of the price chart. It is certainly getting cheaper, but it is certainly not getting exponentially cheaper - particularly as we reach the limits of storage density for extant hardware.
Furthermore, the storage required is not only the spam itself - which email hosts and ISPs often end up storing in vast duplication - but also for the algorithms and matching databases for the filters. While the algorithms of course are not enormous they do continue to grow and will effectively never shrink; the databases are already large and growing.
No, I am pointing out that filters don't actually help the long term problem at all. You then react by shoving your fingers in your ears and pretending otherwise.
No I am saying the long term problem you are describing doesn't actually appear to exist. Of all the seemingly intractable problems our society is facing, one of the few that actually seems solved is spam filtering.
When you're ready to pull your fingers out of your ears, let me know. Denying that the problem exists will never help anyone to solve it, I'm glad you are not employed in a group that aims to solve this problem. Are you by chance a marketing guy for a company who sells spam filtering software? Your blind faith in it suggests that may be the case.
First of all, filters will never bring about an end to spam. I've stated exactly why that is more than once in this discussion. Second, it is well documented that the global volume of spam year-to-year is still up, not down. Spammers are not getting close to giving up by any sane metric.
I don't consider "an end to spam" to be a realistic goal
Well, you are certainly using the right tool if you don't care about ever ending spam. Indeed, filters are great if you only want to temporarily resolve the situation for yourself and you don't give a shit about what happens a few years out.
That said, your statement seems to be somewhat contradictory to what you said before
effectively spammers are in the process of giving up, which will continue until the last spam message ever is sent.
Which was another apparent demonstration of your blind faith in filters.
If you think it's getting better you aren't paying attention. It is actually getting worse on many important metrics.
And what metrics are those?
Amongst others, the one I have mentioned multiple times in this thread - global spam volume, which continues to rise. But keep shoving your fingers in your ears and pretend that your faith will deliver you to a better solution by nothing but its own existence. That at least leaves those of us who actually care about the problem more ability to do something since people like you who don't care about it won't be in the way.
It has been discussed on the front page of this very site. If you can't search for it yourself I'm not going to do it for you.
I'm not interested in what I can find. I am interested in the particular evidence that you find convincing.
That is a really lame justification for your ignorance and laziness. I know you're new here, but you should be aware of at least how to find older front page articles before you go and dive in to a discussion that you are t
That still does not make them free. Someone has to pay for them. They have very real costs.
The more people that the filters benefit, the higher the utility/cost ratio becomes.
That is debatable, at best. The more people who are using filters, the more CPU time and storage space is consumed by the filtering processes. Meanwhile, global spam volume continues to increase, which only further increases that resource consumption.
If filters were truly effective, then spammers would give up.
Like I said, you seem to be conflating "effective" with "100% effective".
No, I am pointing out that filters don't actually help the long term problem at all. You then react by shoving your fingers in your ears and pretending otherwise.
Some spammers will likely continue to use spam, if there is any utility at all to doing so. If there is a continually smaller ratio of spammers to people using email, then effectively spammers are in the process of giving up, which will continue until the last spam message ever is sent.
First of all, filters will never bring about an end to spam. I've stated exactly why that is more than once in this discussion. Second, it is well documented that the global volume of spam year-to-year is still up, not down. Spammers are not getting close to giving up by any sane metric.
The spammers don't get the money spent on filtering technologies.
Considering there is spam sent to advertise shoddy anti-spam software, you are simply not correct in that statement. While the lion's share does not go to the spammers, some of it does.
Spammers don't win the war by causing filtering technology to get better.
If you think it's getting better you aren't paying attention. It is actually getting worse on many important metrics.
Spammers win the war by getting more messages to get through the spam filters with fewer resources (which they are failing)
That is an oversimplification. I already described how and why they are winning. Are you reading what I am writing?
Does something need to be a perfect solution to be useful?
No, but it needs to make the situation - particularly the long-term situation - better. Filters cannot do that.
Are cars not useful because they sometimes break down?
Cars make the long-term situation better. Spam filters do not. Period.
Again, if that were the case, then we would see less spam as total % of internet traffic than we saw 20 years ago. Unfortunately the reality is exactly the opposite.
Citation please. I find it very hard to believe that in the age of 4K streaming video, spam email messages are a higher percentage of total internet traffic.
It has been discussed on the front page of this very site. If you can't search for it yourself I'm not going to do it for you.
How often do you check the junk mail filter on your inbox?
Maybe twice a year, if I have reason to believe something may have been miscategorized as spam. I can only think of a single time I actually found anything important in the spam folder.
And how long are messages retained in your junk mail folder? I've heard some online services with auto-filtering only retain messages in junk for a month, which means the majority of what goes in there you never see. This also means you have absolutely no idea what your FP rate is.
Spam *has* come to a screeching halt.
Not. Even. Remotely. Close. To. Reality. ,br>
Again, spam volume is up. Just because you don't see it in your inbox doesn
Filters are ubiquitous. You get them whether you explicitly pay for them or not. They are like cup holders in cars.
That still does not make them free. Someone has to pay for them. They have very real costs.
The fact that the amount of spam sent is higher, but the amount reaching its destination is vastly lower, is evidence of the effectiveness of filtering.
No, it is not. At least, not if you measure effectiveness in terms of actual costs (to the public) and actual benefits (to the spammers and their cohorts). If filters were truly effective, then spammers would give up. Indeed, they - the spammers - realize that they are actually winning this war as the cost of filtering - both in dollars invested as well as in ever-increasing FP and ever-decreasing FN rates - is going up.
Indeed, no reasonable person could look at this and conclude that filtering is a useful long-term strategy or even a relevant strategy to continue working on past a few years ago in history.
When email servers are inundated with spam, it means that incredibly fast machines are using advanced algorithms to sift through it automatically. It's not free, but it's almost free, and certainly much cheaper than the time that it saves humans.
That still has a nonzero cost and requires investment of capital and human time. Just because it goes in to training machines to do the sorting doesn't mean it will work right every time, and as the volume shifts towards more spam the FP rate inevitably goes up.
But a spam message sent today is far less effective than a spam message sent 20 years ago.
Again, if that were the case, then we would see less spam as total % of internet traffic than we saw 20 years ago. Unfortunately the reality is exactly the opposite.
The spammers are gradually driving down the TP and FN rates on the implemented filters and making them less useful.
You say that, but the reality of my inbox and junk mail folder tells a different story.
How often do you check the junk mail filter on your inbox?
... or filtering continues to outpace the filter countermeasures.
I'm sorry but you are utterly delirious if you think that countermeasures from spammers come after the changes in filters - it is exactly the opposite. If the filters were ever ahead then spammers would come to a screeching halt. Instead the spammers are well aware of what they are doing to the filter results as they continue to change the structure of their messages. The spammers are well aware that they are not far from pushing up the noise to the point where filters fail completely.
but filtering has gotten so damn good, that there seems to be no demand for a replacement to something that works good enough.
Also even if you pull boxes and domains after abuse complaints have been made, its usually too late because any victims have already fallen for the spam.
Which is why - as I said before - you interrupt the flow of money instead. There is a lag between the sucker entering their CC info on a crappy website and hitting "buy' and the spammers receiving their compensation for bringing suckers to the spamvertised domain. In fact, there are at least three transactions along the way:
Authorization from the victim's bank
Reception of victim's funds by the spamvertised domain's financial institution
Transmission of funds from spamvertised group to the spammer
Any one of those are spots where the flow of money can be interrupted. Generally the second step is the most accessible, as shown by other research groups, and very effective at driving the spammers away. A similar flow of money can be tracked between the spammer, the spamvertised domain, and the registrar who registered said spamvertised domain (who is often in on the take for more than just registration fees). It is not uncommon for the hosting service (generally not the same as the registrar in the case of spamvertised domains) to also get a cut of the action.
Impressive. Two AC replies with the standard form, and they both show that they don't have a clue what I am talking about. Was the second one supposed to be a correction for the first (as it is a slightly less awful interpretation of what I wrote)?
Citizens United is a very popular decision here on slashdot (even though the vast overwhelming majority of slashdot readers will never be helped by it). I would expect this PAC to be only marginally more popular than Diane Feinstein with this crowd.
If you can effectively filter spam, then you *have* prevented them from getting paid (via spam).
The main problem with that notion is that the people most likely to pay for a filter are the ones least likely to buy anything as a result of spam anyways. Hence you are not preventing the spammers from reaching their customers.
The fact that we used to be completely inundated with spam, and now it is relatively rare to get spam with a good filter
You are ignoring the volume of spam that traverses the internet at any given moment in time. The volume is UP, not down. Just because a lot of it doesn't reach human eyes doesn't mean there is less of it. In fact, ISPs and email providers are inundated with spam traffic more now than ever before.
is a good sign that spammers are losing this battle.
If they were "losing this battle", why would they respond by sending more? A lot of people don't realize that the people losing the battle - at least any time that someone thinks a filter is an effective solution - are the users and not the spammers. The spammers are gradually driving down the TP and FN rates on the implemented filters and making them less useful. ISPs and email providers who are sold on the foolish gamble of using filters are left with no choice but to counter with more investment of time and hardware. Eventually the walls will come crashing down unless someone actually counters the situation for what it really is.
It seems that in 2015 it is far more profitable to sell products through means other than spam (e.g. google advertisements, etc).
You can send a lot of spam for a lot less money than the cost of a single google advertisement. That won't change any time soon, and it fits the model of the spamvertised operations much better as well; they don't want to become amazon they just want to pull in some quick money.
If you don't check your spam folder than you cannot make a statement of your FP rate, until someone tells you that they sent you an email and you realize you never saw it - but you may be too late to do anything about it by then as the spam folder retention is not particularly long on gmail.
I would hear about a missed message if there were one and every once in a while I check just to be sure but my statement stands.
From a statistical standpoint it does not. You cannot make a statement about your false positive rate if you do nothing to evaluate it. It is like saying you don't crush any ants under your shoes on your walk in to work, made without ever looking at the sidewalk or your shoes.
No. By the time spam makes it to your ISP you've already paid for it.
Wrong ISP. It needs to be handled by the outgoing ISP, not the incoming one. Yes it will cost money but less than later in the delivery process.
It doesn't matter which ISP you want to process it, you will end up paying for it regardless. Furthermore as most spam is distributed across a large number of (often compromised) mail servers anyways, it wouldn't be that useful for the ISPs who sell bandwidth to the owners of said servers to manage it.
In any case the notion that you are somehow going to get greedy a-holes to stop sending spam is delusional. If there is money to be made (and there always is) then the problem will persist. It is quite correct that it is an economic problem but there is no viable economic solution.
That is not true. There have been demonstrated economic solutions that have been shown effective - particularly ones that involve interrupting the flow of money to the spammers. These are not hard to implement - particularly when the vast overwhelming majority of online transactions are handled by a very short list of financial institutions - and shut down the operations quickly.
So while indeed there are profiteering assholes making large piles of cash from being complacent towards spam, there are also players in the game who can preserve their finances by taking steps against it.
They may be about money, but let us be clear that they aren't legitimate companies making money, they are about fraud.
That depends on how you define "legitimate companies". I agree that they are generally not legitimate - particularly by first-world standards - but they are often established operations with leaders and business plans. They consider themselves to be legitimate, even if they are involved in activities that they know are illegal in some places.
Looking at several people's spam filters, most of it purports to come from Walmart, Amazon, iTunes, Overstock.com,... These are legit companies who are not sending me free $50 gift coupons every day
They are still spamvertising for someone. The spammers are still getting paid by whoever their spam directs people to. It doesn't matter if the target site is selling something or just collecting personal data for mailing lists, the goal and end result for the spammer are the same.
The rest are offering stock tips, "adult" services, diplomas, antivirus, or prescription medication.
Which is still spam. It works the same way. Even if the viagra is a blue sugar pill from China, the company selling it is still paying a spammer to bring them business.
Since you dismissed the two (IMHO) best ways to keep spammers away from the money, let's hear your solutions instead of lecturing and challenging others.
I dismissed filters, and filters only, because they are ineffective. I endorse interrupting the flow of money to the spammers. There are multiple ways to do this, one particularly good way is to go through the credit card industry to flag the transactions and have them refuse payment - this was used effectively by a group at Georgia Tech several years ago and caused a couple smaller spamming operations to shrivel up promptly.
Other approaches can include going after the registrars (hence my slashdot username) who are often on the take. Some registrars are particularly well known as being spammer-friendly, if you can prevent the registrars from selling the spamvertised domains then again the spammers won't get paid as no business will get to the spamvertised company.
If you want to make a difference on spam, you need to go after the only thing spammers care about - money. The most effective tactics ever used against spam have been the ones that prevented spammers from getting paid, nothing else
Sending them to PMITA prison would also be effective.
Wrong. That has been tried before. In fact one of the world's all-time top spammers is sitting in a prison in Russia (Leo Kuvayev, aka "BadCow", aka "Alex Rodrigez") (on kiddie porn and child abuse, not spamming, charges) right now and it did not move the needle on spam volume.
As would feeding them into a woodchipper.
Don't be stupid. Just because it makes you feel better doesn't mean it helps the problem. I'm surprised you posted AC, though, as murdering spammers is generally a very popular proposal here on slashdot.
I honestly cannot remember the last time I had a false positive (non-spam sent to the spam folder) and false negatives (spam that gets to my inbox) are fairly rare - less than 10 a month usually. It's good enough I don't even bother to check my spam folder anymore.
If you don't check your spam folder than you cannot make a statement of your FP rate, until someone tells you that they sent you an email and you realize you never saw it - but you may be too late to do anything about it by then as the spam folder retention is not particularly long on gmail.
The ISPs are the only ones really in a position to do something about the problem
No. By the time spam makes it to your ISP you've already paid for it. At that point you have to pay your ISP to accept it, analyze it, tag it, and store it. Sure, they do it all at such high volumes that the cost is pretty minimal relative to your monthly bill but the cost is not zero either. As the volume of spam goes up - and filters only cause it to go up - the cost of dealing with it goes up as well. You have to pay for your ISP to keep more storage around just to hold spam so people can check their spam folders. You have to pay for your ISP to upgrade CPUs and RAM to process spam more quickly.
But if you like paying for spam, your ISP is happy to charge you for it.
You can set up a filter that removes (what you consider to be) an acceptable TP:FP ratio, but it won't be effective for long. The Spammers are constantly adjusting their tactics to get around filters. Eventually the noise will take over and you will either lose an unacceptable amount of non-spam email or you will receive an unacceptable amount of spam email.
You cannot win with filters, period.
The truth of the matter - that a lot of people seem to either not be aware of or not be concerned with - is that spam is an economic problem. Spammers don't send out spam to piss you off, they send it out to make money. No amount of filtering or criminal prosecution will change that; in fact it generally just increases the total volume of spam that traverses the internet continuously. We all pay for this spam to be transmitted, stored, processed, downloaded, etc, even if we never buy any spamvertised product. We pay for it in that it increases the consumption of internet bandwidth, it increases the consumption of storage at ISPs, and has other downstream impacts as well
If you want to make a difference on spam, you need to go after the only thing spammers care about - money. The most effective tactics ever used against spam have been the ones that prevented spammers from getting paid, nothing else - not even the sum total of all the filters ever installed worldwide - has had an impact even remotely near it.
Stop thinking about filters an start thinking about solutions.
The biggest homeopathic "remedy" companies won't be hurt by this at all. They already use a different method to get their products to consumers that won't change, by using multi-level marketing (aka pyramid schemes) to push products and (questionable) information on them. A good example of this is the "essential oils" scheme that is quite popular right now, which often appears to be a weird hybrid of Shaklee and Scientology. Look at how they push their product, and tell me how it would matter if the government changed their position tomorrow.
It's a shame that I somehow landed myself on the never-get-mod-points-again-ever-period list some time ago, because your comment deserves at least a +1, Insightful.
As almost nobody (excluding the president himself) is as popular of a boogeyman here on slashdot as Feinstein, I know just from the first sentence that slashdot wants me to hate this bill! Thank you, now I don't have to worry about its content or intent, as you've already told me it is pure evil. I can go back to reading the other drudge report now instead of reading further into the summaries on the front page of this one.
It appears the subsidy would help pay for it, but not make it free or mandatory. If the people who persue the subsidy can meet somehwere in the middle on the cost of broadband they probably have some sense to themselves economically and likely are at least marginally techincally competent.
This may even lead more companies to try to compete in the market of providing broadband to low-income areas, which would be a good thing as well.
Getting rid of all of our nukes would be about the dumbest thing imaginable. They're pretty much the only reason we didn't have WWIII and maybe WWIV.
Mutual Assured Destruction was just... mad.
That said, what have our nukes done to prevent the war on terror? What have they done to prevent all the other wars we have fought in since WWII? You can make a (dubious) claim that the nukes on their own prevented other nations from attacking the US directly if you want, but conflict doesn't occur in vacuo on this planet. There are other factors that are arguably more critical to preventing war.
In case you haven't noticed, for the last decade or so the gaming industry has been catering mostly to casual gamers and shitting all over hardcore gamers as a matter of course.
I definitely have not noticed that in the market. In fact, the market suggests exactly the opposite of that. How many games come out in a given month that are designed to be playable in short (say 30 minutes or less) increments? How many games are playable with only 6 or fewer buttons and a D-pad? How many games are designed to be multiplayer experiences with the players all in the same physical room? Those are some of the aspects that characterize casual gaming.
Instead what I see sold in the ads today are fancy headsets, expensive controllers, $70-80 new titles touting special DLC offers, and highly caffeinated beverages so people can stay up all night gaming.
Similarly, think of the video games that we've had movies based on. We've seen Doom, Tomb Raider, etc... Have you seen anything for Mario Kart the movie? Me neither.
There is simply more money to be made on the hard core gamers. They are willing to buy new titles all the time and pay for DLC. Casual gamers just want scattered bits of interactive entertainment here and there. This is also part of why so many people put so much energy into shitting on the Wii consoles - not because they are that concerned about the hardware differences but because they despise casual gaming as a matter of practice.
Slashdot Mirror
This summary seems to have been written to pick on these people. If they don't want wireless technology in their town, what is the harm in letting them ban it? We wouldn't expect the Amish to accept it either.
In fact, they almost seem to be a small religion that is lacking a charismatic leader. There are plenty of religious movements in this country that are based on nonsense that have more acceptance than this because they have convincing leaders.
My day job *is* computer science, and I am well compensated for the skills I provide.
Considering the outright statistical failure that you demonstrated a few comments ago, I very highly doubt that - unless you are just punching buttons on a POS all day and calling it "computer science" to make yourself feel better. You haven't exactly been demonstrating the personality traits of people who tend to retain jobs for long either.
What was I supposed to learn?
You could have learned the causative agents of spam, and the consequences of not dealing with it properly. You could have learned how to use statistics properly, and the dangers of not knowing statistics. You could have learned the important trends of spam that certain people are willingly ignorant towards and the consequences of that ignorance.
How to use English words improperly? How to lack reading comprehension? How to make arguments based on flawed premises? How to draw the wrong conclusions from facts that aren't even relevant?
You demonstrated those skills well in your posts in this discussion already.
In fact it is hard to find even a single fact that you used in your entire rant here. You are so far behind the curve on this problem that you might not even be ready to read a dummies book on the topic as it would assume more prior knowledge than you have demonstrated so far.
You attempt at humor isn't any better than your attempt at an argument. If you have a day job, don't quit it hoping for a career in comedy - or computer science. It's too bad you walked away from an opportunity to actually learn something, hopefully you are on a career path where that won't come back to hurt you later in life.
The fact that you don't understand the things I am saying doesn't make them incorrect.
I understand fully what you are saying. You gave me a statement of your faith regarding spam filters.
I even conceded that faith is not inherently a bad thing, however your understanding of the matter is clouded by your faith.
Simply repeating your ridiculous illogical arguments doesn't make them correct.
There is nothing ridiculous or illogical about my arguments. If you reached that conclusion it is most likely because you did not read or comprehend them. As stated earlier, your faith in filters has clouded your judgement and impaired your ability to be rational on the matter.
I am the one who is making an argument that is backed up by facts here. You are making an argument that is backed up by your own faith.
It's like you are trying to explain that airplanes don't really exist to someone who flies on them everyday. It just makes you look foolish.
Considering how you fell flat on your face trying to discuss statistics in your previous post - in an attempt to defend your faith in response to fact-based arguments - the fool here is unquestionably you.
At the end of the day though, if you want to use filters, I don't care what you decide to do for yourself. Just don't pretend that they are anything close to a long-term solution or that they can make a positive change in response to the worldwide spam problem. Your filters have huge costs to all users of email worldwide and indeed all users of the internet regardless of how, where, or if they use email. Your faith-driven intentional blindness does not help this.
Doubling down, ignoring the facts of the matter, and calling me "foolish" does not, either.
The more people who are using filters, the more CPU time and storage space is consumed by the filtering processes. Meanwhile, global spam volume continues to increase, which only further increases that resource consumption.
CPU time and disk space continue to get exponentially cheaper.
Disk space in particular is most certainly not getting "exponentially cheaper". It was before, but we are no longer in that phase of the price chart. It is certainly getting cheaper, but it is certainly not getting exponentially cheaper - particularly as we reach the limits of storage density for extant hardware.
Furthermore, the storage required is not only the spam itself - which email hosts and ISPs often end up storing in vast duplication - but also for the algorithms and matching databases for the filters. While the algorithms of course are not enormous they do continue to grow and will effectively never shrink; the databases are already large and growing.
No, I am pointing out that filters don't actually help the long term problem at all. You then react by shoving your fingers in your ears and pretending otherwise.
No I am saying the long term problem you are describing doesn't actually appear to exist. Of all the seemingly intractable problems our society is facing, one of the few that actually seems solved is spam filtering.
When you're ready to pull your fingers out of your ears, let me know. Denying that the problem exists will never help anyone to solve it, I'm glad you are not employed in a group that aims to solve this problem. Are you by chance a marketing guy for a company who sells spam filtering software? Your blind faith in it suggests that may be the case.
First of all, filters will never bring about an end to spam. I've stated exactly why that is more than once in this discussion. Second, it is well documented that the global volume of spam year-to-year is still up, not down. Spammers are not getting close to giving up by any sane metric.
I don't consider "an end to spam" to be a realistic goal
Well, you are certainly using the right tool if you don't care about ever ending spam. Indeed, filters are great if you only want to temporarily resolve the situation for yourself and you don't give a shit about what happens a few years out.
That said, your statement seems to be somewhat contradictory to what you said before
effectively spammers are in the process of giving up, which will continue until the last spam message ever is sent.
Which was another apparent demonstration of your blind faith in filters.
If you think it's getting better you aren't paying attention. It is actually getting worse on many important metrics.
And what metrics are those?
Amongst others, the one I have mentioned multiple times in this thread - global spam volume, which continues to rise. But keep shoving your fingers in your ears and pretend that your faith will deliver you to a better solution by nothing but its own existence. That at least leaves those of us who actually care about the problem more ability to do something since people like you who don't care about it won't be in the way.
It has been discussed on the front page of this very site. If you can't search for it yourself I'm not going to do it for you.
I'm not interested in what I can find. I am interested in the particular evidence that you find convincing.
That is a really lame justification for your ignorance and laziness. I know you're new here, but you should be aware of at least how to find older front page articles before you go and dive in to a discussion that you are t
That still does not make them free. Someone has to pay for them. They have very real costs.
The more people that the filters benefit, the higher the utility/cost ratio becomes.
That is debatable, at best. The more people who are using filters, the more CPU time and storage space is consumed by the filtering processes. Meanwhile, global spam volume continues to increase, which only further increases that resource consumption.
If filters were truly effective, then spammers would give up.
Like I said, you seem to be conflating "effective" with "100% effective".
No, I am pointing out that filters don't actually help the long term problem at all. You then react by shoving your fingers in your ears and pretending otherwise.
Some spammers will likely continue to use spam, if there is any utility at all to doing so. If there is a continually smaller ratio of spammers to people using email, then effectively spammers are in the process of giving up, which will continue until the last spam message ever is sent.
First of all, filters will never bring about an end to spam. I've stated exactly why that is more than once in this discussion. Second, it is well documented that the global volume of spam year-to-year is still up, not down. Spammers are not getting close to giving up by any sane metric.
The spammers don't get the money spent on filtering technologies.
Considering there is spam sent to advertise shoddy anti-spam software, you are simply not correct in that statement. While the lion's share does not go to the spammers, some of it does.
Spammers don't win the war by causing filtering technology to get better.
If you think it's getting better you aren't paying attention. It is actually getting worse on many important metrics.
Spammers win the war by getting more messages to get through the spam filters with fewer resources (which they are failing)
That is an oversimplification. I already described how and why they are winning. Are you reading what I am writing?
Does something need to be a perfect solution to be useful?
No, but it needs to make the situation - particularly the long-term situation - better. Filters cannot do that.
Are cars not useful because they sometimes break down?
Cars make the long-term situation better. Spam filters do not. Period.
Again, if that were the case, then we would see less spam as total % of internet traffic than we saw 20 years ago. Unfortunately the reality is exactly the opposite.
Citation please. I find it very hard to believe that in the age of 4K streaming video, spam email messages are a higher percentage of total internet traffic.
It has been discussed on the front page of this very site. If you can't search for it yourself I'm not going to do it for you.
How often do you check the junk mail filter on your inbox?
Maybe twice a year, if I have reason to believe something may have been miscategorized as spam. I can only think of a single time I actually found anything important in the spam folder.
And how long are messages retained in your junk mail folder? I've heard some online services with auto-filtering only retain messages in junk for a month, which means the majority of what goes in there you never see. This also means you have absolutely no idea what your FP rate is.
Spam *has* come to a screeching halt.
Not. Even. Remotely. Close. To. Reality.
,br> Again, spam volume is up. Just because you don't see it in your inbox doesn
Filters are ubiquitous. You get them whether you explicitly pay for them or not. They are like cup holders in cars.
That still does not make them free. Someone has to pay for them. They have very real costs.
The fact that the amount of spam sent is higher, but the amount reaching its destination is vastly lower, is evidence of the effectiveness of filtering.
No, it is not. At least, not if you measure effectiveness in terms of actual costs (to the public) and actual benefits (to the spammers and their cohorts). If filters were truly effective, then spammers would give up. Indeed, they - the spammers - realize that they are actually winning this war as the cost of filtering - both in dollars invested as well as in ever-increasing FP and ever-decreasing FN rates - is going up.
Indeed, no reasonable person could look at this and conclude that filtering is a useful long-term strategy or even a relevant strategy to continue working on past a few years ago in history.
When email servers are inundated with spam, it means that incredibly fast machines are using advanced algorithms to sift through it automatically. It's not free, but it's almost free, and certainly much cheaper than the time that it saves humans.
That still has a nonzero cost and requires investment of capital and human time. Just because it goes in to training machines to do the sorting doesn't mean it will work right every time, and as the volume shifts towards more spam the FP rate inevitably goes up.
But a spam message sent today is far less effective than a spam message sent 20 years ago.
Again, if that were the case, then we would see less spam as total % of internet traffic than we saw 20 years ago. Unfortunately the reality is exactly the opposite.
The spammers are gradually driving down the TP and FN rates on the implemented filters and making them less useful.
You say that, but the reality of my inbox and junk mail folder tells a different story.
How often do you check the junk mail filter on your inbox?
... or filtering continues to outpace the filter countermeasures.
I'm sorry but you are utterly delirious if you think that countermeasures from spammers come after the changes in filters - it is exactly the opposite. If the filters were ever ahead then spammers would come to a screeching halt. Instead the spammers are well aware of what they are doing to the filter results as they continue to change the structure of their messages. The spammers are well aware that they are not far from pushing up the noise to the point where filters fail completely.
but filtering has gotten so damn good, that there seems to be no demand for a replacement to something that works good enough.
Your faith is misplaced.
Also even if you pull boxes and domains after abuse complaints have been made, its usually too late because any victims have already fallen for the spam.
Which is why - as I said before - you interrupt the flow of money instead. There is a lag between the sucker entering their CC info on a crappy website and hitting "buy' and the spammers receiving their compensation for bringing suckers to the spamvertised domain. In fact, there are at least three transactions along the way:
Any one of those are spots where the flow of money can be interrupted. Generally the second step is the most accessible, as shown by other research groups, and very effective at driving the spammers away. A similar flow of money can be tracked between the spammer, the spamvertised domain, and the registrar who registered said spamvertised domain (who is often in on the take for more than just registration fees). It is not uncommon for the hosting service (generally not the same as the registrar in the case of spamvertised domains) to also get a cut of the action.
Impressive. Two AC replies with the standard form, and they both show that they don't have a clue what I am talking about. Was the second one supposed to be a correction for the first (as it is a slightly less awful interpretation of what I wrote)?
Citizens United is a very popular decision here on slashdot (even though the vast overwhelming majority of slashdot readers will never be helped by it). I would expect this PAC to be only marginally more popular than Diane Feinstein with this crowd.
If you can effectively filter spam, then you *have* prevented them from getting paid (via spam).
The main problem with that notion is that the people most likely to pay for a filter are the ones least likely to buy anything as a result of spam anyways. Hence you are not preventing the spammers from reaching their customers.
The fact that we used to be completely inundated with spam, and now it is relatively rare to get spam with a good filter
You are ignoring the volume of spam that traverses the internet at any given moment in time. The volume is UP, not down. Just because a lot of it doesn't reach human eyes doesn't mean there is less of it. In fact, ISPs and email providers are inundated with spam traffic more now than ever before.
is a good sign that spammers are losing this battle.
If they were "losing this battle", why would they respond by sending more? A lot of people don't realize that the people losing the battle - at least any time that someone thinks a filter is an effective solution - are the users and not the spammers. The spammers are gradually driving down the TP and FN rates on the implemented filters and making them less useful. ISPs and email providers who are sold on the foolish gamble of using filters are left with no choice but to counter with more investment of time and hardware. Eventually the walls will come crashing down unless someone actually counters the situation for what it really is.
It seems that in 2015 it is far more profitable to sell products through means other than spam (e.g. google advertisements, etc).
You can send a lot of spam for a lot less money than the cost of a single google advertisement. That won't change any time soon, and it fits the model of the spamvertised operations much better as well; they don't want to become amazon they just want to pull in some quick money.
If you don't check your spam folder than you cannot make a statement of your FP rate, until someone tells you that they sent you an email and you realize you never saw it - but you may be too late to do anything about it by then as the spam folder retention is not particularly long on gmail.
I would hear about a missed message if there were one and every once in a while I check just to be sure but my statement stands.
From a statistical standpoint it does not. You cannot make a statement about your false positive rate if you do nothing to evaluate it. It is like saying you don't crush any ants under your shoes on your walk in to work, made without ever looking at the sidewalk or your shoes.
No. By the time spam makes it to your ISP you've already paid for it.
Wrong ISP. It needs to be handled by the outgoing ISP, not the incoming one. Yes it will cost money but less than later in the delivery process.
It doesn't matter which ISP you want to process it, you will end up paying for it regardless. Furthermore as most spam is distributed across a large number of (often compromised) mail servers anyways, it wouldn't be that useful for the ISPs who sell bandwidth to the owners of said servers to manage it.
In any case the notion that you are somehow going to get greedy a-holes to stop sending spam is delusional. If there is money to be made (and there always is) then the problem will persist. It is quite correct that it is an economic problem but there is no viable economic solution.
That is not true. There have been demonstrated economic solutions that have been shown effective - particularly ones that involve interrupting the flow of money to the spammers. These are not hard to implement - particularly when the vast overwhelming majority of online transactions are handled by a very short list of financial institutions - and shut down the operations quickly.
So while indeed there are profiteering assholes making large piles of cash from being complacent towards spam, there are also players in the game who can preserve their finances by taking steps against it.
They may be about money, but let us be clear that they aren't legitimate companies making money, they are about fraud.
That depends on how you define "legitimate companies". I agree that they are generally not legitimate - particularly by first-world standards - but they are often established operations with leaders and business plans. They consider themselves to be legitimate, even if they are involved in activities that they know are illegal in some places.
Looking at several people's spam filters, most of it purports to come from Walmart, Amazon, iTunes, Overstock.com, ... These are legit companies who are not sending me free $50 gift coupons every day
They are still spamvertising for someone. The spammers are still getting paid by whoever their spam directs people to. It doesn't matter if the target site is selling something or just collecting personal data for mailing lists, the goal and end result for the spammer are the same.
The rest are offering stock tips, "adult" services, diplomas, antivirus, or prescription medication.
Which is still spam. It works the same way. Even if the viagra is a blue sugar pill from China, the company selling it is still paying a spammer to bring them business.
Since you dismissed the two (IMHO) best ways to keep spammers away from the money, let's hear your solutions instead of lecturing and challenging others.
I dismissed filters, and filters only, because they are ineffective. I endorse interrupting the flow of money to the spammers. There are multiple ways to do this, one particularly good way is to go through the credit card industry to flag the transactions and have them refuse payment - this was used effectively by a group at Georgia Tech several years ago and caused a couple smaller spamming operations to shrivel up promptly.
Other approaches can include going after the registrars (hence my slashdot username) who are often on the take. Some registrars are particularly well known as being spammer-friendly, if you can prevent the registrars from selling the spamvertised domains then again the spammers won't get paid as no business will get to the spamvertised company.
If you want to make a difference on spam, you need to go after the only thing spammers care about - money. The most effective tactics ever used against spam have been the ones that prevented spammers from getting paid, nothing else
Sending them to PMITA prison would also be effective.
Wrong. That has been tried before. In fact one of the world's all-time top spammers is sitting in a prison in Russia (Leo Kuvayev, aka "BadCow", aka "Alex Rodrigez") (on kiddie porn and child abuse, not spamming, charges) right now and it did not move the needle on spam volume.
As would feeding them into a woodchipper.
Don't be stupid. Just because it makes you feel better doesn't mean it helps the problem. I'm surprised you posted AC, though, as murdering spammers is generally a very popular proposal here on slashdot.
I honestly cannot remember the last time I had a false positive (non-spam sent to the spam folder) and false negatives (spam that gets to my inbox) are fairly rare - less than 10 a month usually. It's good enough I don't even bother to check my spam folder anymore.
If you don't check your spam folder than you cannot make a statement of your FP rate, until someone tells you that they sent you an email and you realize you never saw it - but you may be too late to do anything about it by then as the spam folder retention is not particularly long on gmail.
The ISPs are the only ones really in a position to do something about the problem
No. By the time spam makes it to your ISP you've already paid for it. At that point you have to pay your ISP to accept it, analyze it, tag it, and store it. Sure, they do it all at such high volumes that the cost is pretty minimal relative to your monthly bill but the cost is not zero either. As the volume of spam goes up - and filters only cause it to go up - the cost of dealing with it goes up as well. You have to pay for your ISP to keep more storage around just to hold spam so people can check their spam folders. You have to pay for your ISP to upgrade CPUs and RAM to process spam more quickly.
But if you like paying for spam, your ISP is happy to charge you for it.
Don't fool yourself on this one.
You can set up a filter that removes (what you consider to be) an acceptable TP:FP ratio, but it won't be effective for long. The Spammers are constantly adjusting their tactics to get around filters. Eventually the noise will take over and you will either lose an unacceptable amount of non-spam email or you will receive an unacceptable amount of spam email.
You cannot win with filters, period.
The truth of the matter - that a lot of people seem to either not be aware of or not be concerned with - is that spam is an economic problem. Spammers don't send out spam to piss you off, they send it out to make money. No amount of filtering or criminal prosecution will change that; in fact it generally just increases the total volume of spam that traverses the internet continuously. We all pay for this spam to be transmitted, stored, processed, downloaded, etc, even if we never buy any spamvertised product. We pay for it in that it increases the consumption of internet bandwidth, it increases the consumption of storage at ISPs, and has other downstream impacts as well
If you want to make a difference on spam, you need to go after the only thing spammers care about - money. The most effective tactics ever used against spam have been the ones that prevented spammers from getting paid, nothing else - not even the sum total of all the filters ever installed worldwide - has had an impact even remotely near it.
Stop thinking about filters an start thinking about solutions.
The biggest homeopathic "remedy" companies won't be hurt by this at all. They already use a different method to get their products to consumers that won't change, by using multi-level marketing (aka pyramid schemes) to push products and (questionable) information on them. A good example of this is the "essential oils" scheme that is quite popular right now, which often appears to be a weird hybrid of Shaklee and Scientology. Look at how they push their product, and tell me how it would matter if the government changed their position tomorrow.
It's a shame that I somehow landed myself on the never-get-mod-points-again-ever-period list some time ago, because your comment deserves at least a +1, Insightful.
As almost nobody (excluding the president himself) is as popular of a boogeyman here on slashdot as Feinstein, I know just from the first sentence that slashdot wants me to hate this bill! Thank you, now I don't have to worry about its content or intent, as you've already told me it is pure evil. I can go back to reading the other drudge report now instead of reading further into the summaries on the front page of this one.
It appears the subsidy would help pay for it, but not make it free or mandatory. If the people who persue the subsidy can meet somehwere in the middle on the cost of broadband they probably have some sense to themselves economically and likely are at least marginally techincally competent.
This may even lead more companies to try to compete in the market of providing broadband to low-income areas, which would be a good thing as well.
The idea is that instead of testing your changes, you just make them directly on your production site and see what happens
Does that mean that slashdot is extremely cutting edge? They've been doing this for years!
Getting rid of all of our nukes would be about the dumbest thing imaginable. They're pretty much the only reason we didn't have WWIII and maybe WWIV.
Mutual Assured Destruction was just ... mad.
That said, what have our nukes done to prevent the war on terror? What have they done to prevent all the other wars we have fought in since WWII? You can make a (dubious) claim that the nukes on their own prevented other nations from attacking the US directly if you want, but conflict doesn't occur in vacuo on this planet. There are other factors that are arguably more critical to preventing war.
This sounds like someone just trying to justify not getting rid of all of our nukes.
In case you haven't noticed, for the last decade or so the gaming industry has been catering mostly to casual gamers and shitting all over hardcore gamers as a matter of course.
I definitely have not noticed that in the market. In fact, the market suggests exactly the opposite of that. How many games come out in a given month that are designed to be playable in short (say 30 minutes or less) increments? How many games are playable with only 6 or fewer buttons and a D-pad? How many games are designed to be multiplayer experiences with the players all in the same physical room? Those are some of the aspects that characterize casual gaming.
Instead what I see sold in the ads today are fancy headsets, expensive controllers, $70-80 new titles touting special DLC offers, and highly caffeinated beverages so people can stay up all night gaming.
Similarly, think of the video games that we've had movies based on. We've seen Doom, Tomb Raider, etc... Have you seen anything for Mario Kart the movie? Me neither.
There is simply more money to be made on the hard core gamers. They are willing to buy new titles all the time and pay for DLC. Casual gamers just want scattered bits of interactive entertainment here and there. This is also part of why so many people put so much energy into shitting on the Wii consoles - not because they are that concerned about the hardware differences but because they despise casual gaming as a matter of practice.