Let's not get too nostalgic. The whole point of the space race was as a proxy for the Americans and Soviets to one-up each other in their nuclear delivery capacity. The cold war gave us NASA and microelectronics while WWII gave us the Manhattan project and computers. War, not any sort of benign application of human ingenuity and effort.
Once Apollo 11 landed on the moon, interest in the space program quickly faded. Even Apollo 13 rekindled it only for the duration of the mission. While spinoff benefits of the program were manifold, these were unintentional. It was a publicity stunt, plain and simple.
Everybody knows to put *doubleclick* in every blacklist/adblock list. Now that Google has bought them, the public might wake up to the fact that they are in the same business. True, Google, provides a pretty good search engine, email service, and whatever. But the bottom line is profiling for the purpose of advertising.
Google's adsense is a major cash cow for web spammers. Although Google purports to clamp down on the worst offenders, they are in conflict of interest because they profit directly from this sort of thing -- exactly what earned Doubleclick its well-deserved reputation.
You probably couldn't force people to allow the companies to rent out their roof, but the option could be there. I think most people would do this, if it wasn't an eyesore.
No more so than the oil pumps you see scattered throughout Alberta. And the landowners have no choice, because somebody else owns the mineral rights. Perhaps the government should expropriate solar rights (eminent domain) and grant them to the energy companies.
The issue is that in Ubuntu (and Linux in general) the entire state of the system can be captured and restored by copying plain files/partitions. With Windows this is not possible. The registry has a magic format and many files are unreadable while the system is running. So you have to put yourself at the mercy of a special backup program. I have not used Vista, but the XP backup facilities are abysmal but unavoidable.
So the plan is actually to stick this stuff in barrels and bury it?
(In Canada anyway) Not in barrels, but diffused through stable geological formations. And the CO2 that they're planning to capture is that generated by the oil and/or electricity production process, not from free air.
Sure the capacity of the geological formations is limited, but so is the amount of oil or coal that can be recovered from any particular place. While I agree that carbon sequestration have long-term sustainability issues, they are perhaps more managable than the alternative -- simply using the sky as a garbage dump.
This forum --./ -- is a good example of what repels many women and non-geek guys. Note that I said "geek" not "nerd." People that bite the heads of chickens to get attention. Or brag about knowing all the details of Virtual Universe.viper framework, and deride anyone who've never heard of it. Or groove on adversarial games.
I object to the characterization of the solution as removing the emphasis on programming. Programming is foundational to computer science, in addition to algorithms, theory, systems and applications. What is not foundational is memorizing some complex and bloated IDE and the associated dogma of contemporary software development practice. The hurdles one has to overcome in programming using contemporary tools are immense, and one of the biggest hurdles is the existence of people who belittle them.
Women can and do survive and thrive in competitive technical environments. That's not what's turning them off. It is the culture; at least their perception of the culture. Perhaps their impression is not fair. There are CS people who bathe occasionally, have an interest in the arts and humanities, and so on. If we really want to attract women, and non-geek men, we'd better put more of these people forward as role models.
First, the contest will establish a baseline against which greylisting may be compared. It is much more difficult to measure false positive and false negative rates for intrusive techniques like greylisting and challenge-response. Too difficult to be done in an open competition. But the open competition can show what other techniques can do, and then there will be some onus on the greylisters and challenge-responders to show that their techniques really are a value-add. It would be feasible, for example, to compare the best approach from the open competition against a select few greylisting etc. techniques.
Second, spam filters cannot always be deployed upstream of the first SMTP relay. This test models the situation in which the filter is immediately downstream from a trusted relay. In that situation, the filter has access to all the SMTP information from the sender; it just doesn't have the opportunity to perturb the SMTP session by, for example, issuing a false error message.
Third, many people and organizations find the delay, intrusion and risk of methods like greylisting to be unacceptable. I'm not sure that I would consent to replacing or modifying my well-tested "blah.com" mail gateway server to summarily bounce messages. At least not without very strong evidence as to the reliability and efficacy of the replacement, now and in the long run. "I think greylisting will continue to work as long as the good guys stick to the RFCs" wouldn't be enough of an assurance for me, were I CIO of blah.com
I thought I'd be a smart-ass and show you that it didn't run on Linux. But, damn! I have Wine installed.
./News.exe
Could not stat/mnt/cdrom (No such file or directory), ignoring drive D:
err:win32:PE_fixup_imports No implementation for lz32.dll.2(LZCloseFile) imported from F:\News.exe, setting to 0xdeadbeef
wine: Unhandled exception, starting debugger...
If the CEAS Live Challenge had occurred over the last 24 hours, participants would've had to deal with several copies of this virus. Note how it morphed from news headlines to greeting card lines over the course of the day.
USA Missle Strike: Iran War just have started attach="News.exe"
Israel Just Have Started World War III attach="Video.exe"
Missle Strike: The USA kills more then 10000 Iranian citizens attach="Click Here.exe"
USA Missle Strike: Iran War just have started attach="News.exe"
USA Just Have Started World War III attach="Read More.exe"
Iran Just Have Started World War III attach="Movie.exe"
Missle Strike: The USA kills more then 10000 Iranian citizens attach="Click Me.exe"
Missle Strike: The USA kills more then 10000 Iranian citizens attach="Video.exe"
USA Just Have Started World War III attach="News.exe"
I Love You Because attach="flash postcard.exe"
You're In My Thoughts attach="postcard.exe"
You're In My Thoughts attach="flash postcard.exe"
Love Remains attach="Love Card.exe"
Inside My Heart attach="greeting card.exe"
A Kiss So Gentle attach="Postcard.exe"
a low false positive average over an entire set (like <1%) might seem okay, but that doesn't take into account what's important to users.
A 1% false positive rate is not OK. The good systems will misclassify at most a couple of good emails per thousand, and the vast majority of those will lie in the grey area between ham and spam. A few will be internet transactions -- sign-up messages, receipts, and the like -- and a vanishingly small number will be personal communications.
Microsoft's own Hotmail, of course, is notorious for spamboxing messages like that. And yet the conference is being held at Microsoft, and Microsoft's own spam researchers proudly touted their system in the February 2007 Communications of the ACM.
Only two of the three authors are from Microsoft, and they are from Microsoft Research, not Hotmail. The methods described are not in particular those deployed at Hotmail. None of the organizers of CEAS 2007 or the Live Spam Challenge is from Microsoft. The Microsoft venue is convenient and economical and made available to CEAS as a courtesy.
Something tells me the leaders in the field are sort of missing the point. Simply bringing down the aggregate false positive rate is *not* enough. The measure needs to take into account how often the user actually misses information that's important to them.
The data will be available to participants to do whatever post-hoc analysis they like. They may, for example, wish to classify misclassified mail into genres, as discussed here.:
Caution should be exercised in treating ham misclassification as a simple propor-
tion. Extremely large samples would be needed to estimate it with any degree of
statistical confidence, and even so, it is not clear what effect differences in proportion would have on the overall probability of catastrophic loss.
But if you're going to rank systems you need some sort of simple summary measure and the logistic mean of false positive and false negative rates works pretty well. Have a look at TREC 2005 or TREC 2006 summary results, for example.
I don't think you understood the parent. The messages are from actual spammers, not from the contest organization. The spams are merely relayed, and they are relayed accurately.
The mail messages will contain header information from which the sending IP may be derived. Of course, spammers try to forge this info, but the most recent header is guaranteed to be correct.
I meant live to mean that the spam was captured and delivered in real time. If one or more spam filters adds the spam to Razor, or an RBL, or whatever, that'll be observable -- by spammers and filters alike.
So here's the issue. If you are going to try to discriminate among filters using several thousand messages, you have to send them all the same messages. To send them the same messages you have to capture and redistribute them. You can pass on all the info from the capture, including all SMTP commands, but you can't do intrusive protocol probes. And since this is *real spam* you can't very well ask the sender to act in an obliging way by repeating its message and behavior for each participant.
I'd be very interested to hear of a design that would allow greylisting to be tested. The best I can come up with is to fail the message after transmission, then to try to simulate the behavior of the sender in response to this failure. But that would be catering to one very specific method of perturbing the protocol. And it would be necessary to do a fair amount of work to spoof the IP address presented to the participant filters.
For this reason, we chose to exclude all SMTP interactions, and simulate a second-in-the-chain filter appliance application. The reasons are practical, not policy.
Envelope information will be preserved, so you can determine the purported sender, multiple recipients, HELO IP, actual IP, etc. But you can't play interactive games with the SMTP protocol because the same email must be delivered to all participants.
Slashdot Mirror
Once Apollo 11 landed on the moon, interest in the space program quickly faded. Even Apollo 13 rekindled it only for the duration of the mission. While spinoff benefits of the program were manifold, these were unintentional. It was a publicity stunt, plain and simple.
Yet another
Why is it a troll to point out that Doubleclick has an image problem that might hurt Google?
Google's adsense is a major cash cow for web spammers. Although Google purports to clamp down on the worst offenders, they are in conflict of interest because they profit directly from this sort of thing -- exactly what earned Doubleclick its well-deserved reputation.
I think you need a remedial course in geometry. The parent says
No more so than the oil pumps you see scattered throughout Alberta. And the landowners have no choice, because somebody else owns the mineral rights. Perhaps the government should expropriate solar rights (eminent domain) and grant them to the energy companies.
To start with, this popular press article does not name the study, its authors, or the journal it is to appear in. i.e., the article is a puff piece.
That said, a placebo-controlled intervention can indeed show causality.
The issue is that in Ubuntu (and Linux in general) the entire state of the system can be captured and restored by copying plain files/partitions. With Windows this is not possible. The registry has a magic format and many files are unreadable while the system is running. So you have to put yourself at the mercy of a special backup program. I have not used Vista, but the XP backup facilities are abysmal but unavoidable.
Sure the capacity of the geological formations is limited, but so is the amount of oil or coal that can be recovered from any particular place. While I agree that carbon sequestration have long-term sustainability issues, they are perhaps more managable than the alternative -- simply using the sky as a garbage dump.
What's your definition of "real?"
Try your motherboard model number and some combination of SATA, SATA II, Linux.
Don't forget "blog search" if "web search" doesn't get you what you want.
Also, when you figure it out, give something back: post the solution someplace. Anyplace.
Person fined for using MacDonald's toilet without being a customer.
This forum -- ./ -- is a good example of what repels many women and non-geek guys. Note that I said "geek" not "nerd." People that bite the heads of chickens to get attention. Or brag about knowing all the details of Virtual Universe .viper framework, and deride anyone who've never heard of it. Or groove on adversarial games.
I object to the characterization of the solution as removing the emphasis on programming. Programming is foundational to computer science, in addition to algorithms, theory, systems and applications. What is not foundational is memorizing some complex and bloated IDE and the associated dogma of contemporary software development practice. The hurdles one has to overcome in programming using contemporary tools are immense, and one of the biggest hurdles is the existence of people who belittle them.
Women can and do survive and thrive in competitive technical environments. That's not what's turning them off. It is the culture; at least their perception of the culture. Perhaps their impression is not fair. There are CS people who bathe occasionally, have an interest in the arts and humanities, and so on. If we really want to attract women, and non-geek men, we'd better put more of these people forward as role models.
It looks like the sort of work he might do, but a one-sentence paraphrasal is scant information on which to base any comment.
So what's the purpose of the contest, then?
First, the contest will establish a baseline against which greylisting may be compared. It is much more difficult to measure false positive and false negative rates for intrusive techniques like greylisting and challenge-response. Too difficult to be done in an open competition. But the open competition can show what other techniques can do, and then there will be some onus on the greylisters and challenge-responders to show that their techniques really are a value-add. It would be feasible, for example, to compare the best approach from the open competition against a select few greylisting etc. techniques.
Second, spam filters cannot always be deployed upstream of the first SMTP relay. This test models the situation in which the filter is immediately downstream from a trusted relay. In that situation, the filter has access to all the SMTP information from the sender; it just doesn't have the opportunity to perturb the SMTP session by, for example, issuing a false error message.
Third, many people and organizations find the delay, intrusion and risk of methods like greylisting to be unacceptable. I'm not sure that I would consent to replacing or modifying my well-tested "blah.com" mail gateway server to summarily bounce messages. At least not without very strong evidence as to the reliability and efficacy of the replacement, now and in the long run. "I think greylisting will continue to work as long as the good guys stick to the RFCs" wouldn't be enough of an assurance for me, were I CIO of blah.com
I thought I'd be a smart-ass and show you that it didn't run on Linux. But, damn! I have Wine installed.
The data will be available to participants to do whatever post-hoc analysis they like. They may, for example, wish to classify misclassified mail into genres, as discussed here.:
But if you're going to rank systems you need some sort of simple summary measure and the logistic mean of false positive and false negative rates works pretty well. Have a look at TREC 2005 or TREC 2006 summary results, for example.
I don't think you understood the parent. The messages are from actual spammers, not from the contest organization. The spams are merely relayed, and they are relayed accurately.
The mail messages will contain header information from which the sending IP may be derived. Of course, spammers try to forge this info, but the most recent header is guaranteed to be correct.
I meant live to mean that the spam was captured and delivered in real time. If one or more spam filters adds the spam to Razor, or an RBL, or whatever, that'll be observable -- by spammers and filters alike.
So here's the issue. If you are going to try to discriminate among filters using several thousand messages, you have to send them all the same messages. To send them the same messages you have to capture and redistribute them. You can pass on all the info from the capture, including all SMTP commands, but you can't do intrusive protocol probes. And since this is *real spam* you can't very well ask the sender to act in an obliging way by repeating its message and behavior for each participant.
I'd be very interested to hear of a design that would allow greylisting to be tested. The best I can come up with is to fail the message after transmission, then to try to simulate the behavior of the sender in response to this failure. But that would be catering to one very specific method of perturbing the protocol. And it would be necessary to do a fair amount of work to spoof the IP address presented to the participant filters.
For this reason, we chose to exclude all SMTP interactions, and simulate a second-in-the-chain filter appliance application. The reasons are practical, not policy.
Envelope information will be preserved, so you can determine the purported sender, multiple recipients, HELO IP, actual IP, etc. But you can't play interactive games with the SMTP protocol because the same email must be delivered to all participants.
You're welcome to use Gmail -- or any other filter you like, animal, vegetable, or mineral -- to participate in the Live Challenge.
The trouble I can see with a test like this is that's it's a static test.
No it isn't. Hence the name Live Spam Challenge.