Europe is, slowly and quietly, moving towards the status of Superpower
Superpower? They have a lot of internal divisions and disagreements to deal with before they get to that level.
and it is unsurprising that it is seeking independence of technical material.
I think the European GPS is a waste of money. Unless they anticipate a U.S. vs Europe war then I don't see this is the best use of limited resources.
On the up side I think it'll be cool if we see GPS receivers that receive BOTH signals and can use the combined data of both systems to produce an even more accurate fix.
I've been flamed for "advertising," but try the site in my signature. It is Bayesian and doesn't require you install anything on your machine or server. Just setup an account and point Evolution to the site below and you'll be downloading filtered email. I use Evolution via the site below and I'm filtering 99.4% of spam for the month, 99.7% this week.
Have you noted those lkhassxx34mmdc in you SPAM lately? These random nonsense words will corrupt your Bayesian filtering stats, and eventually some spam will start to get through. They just put enough random words in the message
Actually, no, it won't. Those weird letter combinations are there to make the messages "distinct" (so it's hard to tell if two spams received by two different people are the same) and also those that try to break the spam down into sentences or whatever to, again, try to determine if it is spam by comparing it to other reported spam.
These ramdom words will not do anything to corrupt Bayesian at all. Since an unknown word in Bayesian is assigned some rather-neutral value (such as 0.4 or 0.5) that is not enough to make an otherwise 0.99 spammy message come down to a non-spammy level. I.e., Bayesian only takes into account the most spammy terms ("sex"=0.99, etc.) and the least spammy terms ("Doug"=a friend of mine that appears often in my email=0.01). Inserting random words will generate terms worth 0.4 or 0.5 which will NOT be considered because they are not far away from the neutral 0.5, so all the other spammy indicators will decide the Bayesian score, not the random words.
The only thing these random words do is make your Bayesian statistics file grow a bit. But if your Bayesian filter is worth its weight in salt old terms over some age that have only been seen once will be purged since they are probably useless and there are definitely more interesting tokens that will indicate spam or not.
There are in fact two big problems with Bayesian filtering (or any content-based filtering) from the perspective of an ISP or company... 1) one person's spam is another person's necessity
But that's why Bayesian advocates every user having their own Bayesian statistics. It's not a "one size fits all" for the entire ISP or company, as is the case with most keyword filters. Every user has a different set of Bayesian statistics which is why it is very difficult for spammers to get around this filter--they have no way of knowing what words are in each users' statistics.
2) you still have to waste your bandwidth and CPU before you reject it.
It's better to waste your bandwidth and your CPU than to waste the time of those receiving the spam. IMHO...
So Bayesian filters are a good tool of last resort, but there are many other tools that should be used too.
The quicker everyone uses Bayesian filters (as opposed to waiting until all the other filters are incapable of keeping up with spam) the sooner the spammers will be in trouble. I personally use both a Bayesian filter with an up-to-date blacklist of known spamvertised domains, etc. I find that, quite simply, the simple keyword filters catch spam from known spam sites and Bayesian catches the rest. But if I turned off my normal filters Bayesian would have caught it all since those spams are always assigned a high Bayesian score, too. It almost makes sense to turn off the other filters, but they can be useful if a spammer comes up with a truly unique spam and someone else has already identified the domain name. It's rare, but it can happen. So a combination of technologies is probably the best... but a combination that lacks Bayesian is a combination that could be better.
I can see the casual (mis)use of this technique by your average user rapidly becoming a problem - putting just one email from a legit e-mail sender into the bayesian filter could concievably snowball into a block on a lot of legit traffic under certain circumstances.
It's natural to think that is the case, but in reality it isn't. Accidentally putting one email in the wrong corpus ("good" or "spam") will not be enough to kill you. If you consistently fail to put them in the right corpus then over time, yes, things would snowball. But that'll only happen over time. A mistake now and then isn't enough to mess things up.
The question is, which produces more false positives: The occasional Bayesian false positive, or the occasional (or not so occasional) good mail that you'll accidentally delete when you're deleting 150 spams per day? If I'm getting 150 spams per day that's 1050 spams per week which is an awful lot of "deletes." You don't think you're going to accidentally throw out a good message now and then when manually deleting that much spam? I'd venture to say that you'll probably accidentally delete more yourself by accident than Bayesian will toss as false positives.
A gynecologist probably wouldn't have a corpus that indicates that "sex" is a.97 spam probability. That's the great thing about Bayesian: the spam probability for each word depends on the mail and spam YOU receive. It works dang well, just as Paul Graham claims. I'm averaging 99.7% accuracy this week, and the one spam that got through was written in German.
Yep, Spam Assassin works for many people. Different market--requires downloads and installations and doesn't necessarily work on all platforms. But if it works for you, knock yourself out.
Bayesian filtering could stop all the spam that easily? This is great! Where can I download a filter like this?
Quite a few sources, but feel free to try this site which offers it as a service. Nothing to download, nothing to install. Just point your POP3 client to this site and it'll filter your mail for you. I'm at 99.4% of spam filtered for this month and 99.7% for this week.
Yep, I've been using my own Bayesian filter since about January. I'm currently filtering 99.7% of all spam and my only false positive was arguably acceptable (it wasn't written in English and I didn't really want it).
For me, spam is a solved problem. It's actually fun watching the spam roll in and watch the statistics counting how many emails have been filtered. Anyone that wants plug-and-play Bayesian filtering along with optional keyword filters, blacklists, whitelists, etc. for their POP3 mailbox with nothing to install on the client or server. is invited to check out the site listed in my sig. It just works.
Someone else: "... One of the nice things about living in Nebraska..."
You: You say this like there must be a really long list of nice things. Do tell...
Another nice thing about living in Nebraska, presumably, is it means you don't live in Kansas.:)
I was employed by another firm before the sun set that day and I called to tell the old firm to stuff it.
While I'm sure there isn't much they could do, wouldn't it have just been easier to gracefully except their letting you go and casually get hired again the same day? Unless you make a point of telling them what you're doing it's doubtful they'll know. Would've saved you a year of harrasment.
On the other hand, the part where The Architect was talking about all of the evil of humanity and the screens behind him kept flashing up pictures of Dubya were kind of cool.
Ahh, forgot about that... Nice copy of the idea from "The Abyss.":)
At this point I'll watch and think about The Matrix movies far more than Star Wars.
At this point the only thing I'll think about the Matrix is: "Why did I spend 30 dollars on tickets and snacks to watch it?"
[Very minor spoilers below]...
I know The Matrix has a cult following so I'll probably be modded down, but... I couldn't even remember the first Matrix when we went to see Reloaded last night. After about 20 minutes I more or less remembered the whole setting, etc. First hour or so was pretty boring... seemed like a mix of Planet of the Apes crossed with some drugged out rave (yes, we are free humans and immediately become some degenerate mob dancing like apes underground), Star Wars ("It is our destiny" seemed just ripped out of Return of the Jedi, even the way it was spoken), mixed with Terminator 2 (exploding building that contains important stuff), and some kind of mystical Harry Potter fantasy type of thing (where a character asks a simple question and the other character avoids answering it in a direct fashion but just answers in some psuedo-esoteric, mystical way).
The action in the last half was kind of cool, but no more so than any other action movie. The plot was almost non-existant and I didn't really leave the movie knowing anything particularly new about the "Matrix" and the position of the human race was not particularly different at the end than the beginning... seemed like a useless Harry Potter movie to me... where you just spend a couple hours watching silly mini-stories of 5 to 10 minutes one after another that don't really have anything to do with the real plot of the story.
Oh well... there was nothing else to see at the movies so that's what we saw. The hot dog bun was even a little dry.:)
That happens to me at NYTimes, too. I'm on Mozilla 1.3.1 and I have popups turned off. Works everywhere else, but I too wonder how NYTimes does it and how to kill that.
Me: 1) Non-personal and 2) Unsolicited is spam. Pass go, collect $500.
You: Great. Now if you can only define with specificity what "non-personal" means with respect to e-mail, which is almost inherently personal, without telling people what they can and can't say, then you can pass Go.
Hmm, there is nothing inherently personal about email. You can't say that the advertisements I receive for pornographic sites, penis enlargement, breast enlargement, online casinos, get rich quick schemes, and all the other junk they send was written to me personally. There's nothing personal about it except that someone found and abused my personal email address.
Define "non-personal"? Some convincing indication that the message was written by a human being for my consumption and was sent to me personally [form letters being emailed one by one is still spam even though it might have my name or address on it]. If it was mass mailed by a computer OR not sent to me personally then I damn well better have SOLICITED it.
I.e., any UNSOLICTED email should be written to me personally by a human and not just a form letter. If it's not solicited and not personal it's spam.
Otherwise, it will be struck down, because you can't tell people what they can and can't say.
The government can't, but I'm entirely in my right to say who I do and don't want to listen to, and whether or not I'm willing to subsidize someone else's babbling. And the government is in its right--in fact it is obligated--to protect my right to make that choice.
I'd start with "bulk," (which you left out) since that can be defined.
Perhaps, but it is subjective. What is bulk? 10 recepients? 100? 1000? Over what period of time? An hour? A day? A week?
Outlawing unsolicited communications will bring all communication to a grinding halt. Think about it.
Instead why don't you re-read my previous post. I didn't say that "unsolicited communications" is spam. I said unsolicited, non-personal email. If anyone in the world has something to say to me they are more than welcome to send me an email and say it. It's unsolicited but it isn't spam because someone (human) is actually engaging in communication. There will be no halt to communication.
It's very simple: 1) If a real human is typing up a real email and really talking to me, it's not spam. 2) If a real person isn't emailing me then it better be solicited.
And everyone complains about the DMCA. Shit, this stuff makes the DMCA look like a fucking No Parking sign.
Hmm, only if you're a spammer, me thinks. Otherwise it's entirely straight-forward.
Seem to be lots of Anonymous Cowards saying silly things in this particular thread. Or maybe it's just one, who knows...
Spam is: 1) Bulk (yes, more than several),
2) Commercial (a direct solicitation to purchase a product or service WITH A PRICE), 3) Unsolicited (obvious)
We can argue about definitions, of course, but #2 definitely isn't a requirement. A non-profit organization soliciting donations is spam even though it's not commercial. A religious email sent to a million people with a religious message is spam even if it just offers words of encouragement. A political email soliciting support in a vote or campaign contributions is certainly spam.
I'd say spam is more accurately: 1) Bulk and/or non-personal, 2) Unsolicited.
Depending on your definition "Bulk" is usually non-personal, but most non-personal unsolicited email is also spam even if we don't know how many people were targetted. Since we aren't in a position to know exactly how many people received a given spam I'm almost more comfortable saying that any email that is 1) Non-personal and 2) Unsolicited is spam. Pass go, collect $500.
And, honestly, I get really annoyed with people who claim that their time is incredibly valuable. It's arrogant to act like those 2-3 minutes that it takes to delete your spam are that important. I mean, sure, it's annoying, but in the grand scheme of things, it's irrelevant.
Hmmm... Let's say it takes just 1 second to delete 1 spam, which is not unreasonable if you actually look at the subject to determine it's not spam. Let's say the spammer sent that advertisement to 30 million email addresses, which isn't unreasonable either. So a single spam session to 30 million people, the spammer caused humanity to lose 30 million seconds. That's 8333 hours which is just shy of a year. Or let's say that we call our time worth about $5/hr--less than minimum wage. That spam session that cost the spammer a few dollars at best cost humanity $41,000.
And that's just one spam! How many individual spams do you think are sent per day? By some estimates, spam will cost the American economy nearly $10 billion this year (I've also seen $8.9 billion mentioned).
Let's look at it more personally. Last month I received 2171 spams. This month I'm on track to receive 3022. So call it 2800 per month. That's 33,600 spams per year. Again, assuming 1 second per spam that's 9 hours of my time that will be wasted on spam this year. That's one work-day, or a nice Saturday afternoon.
Those that say "Who cares? Just click delete. How long does it really take?" are quite clueless. Spam robs time from others and it DOES add up personally, economically, and at the societal level.
That said, I don't worry about spam much. Using some good filters and Bayesian statistics I'm seeing just a few spam per month even though I'm receiving about 3000 per month. What a relief.
I think you're a little confused. No one is forcing you to run an email server. Also, no one is forcing you to run an email server accessible to the internet.
So you're saying that because I run an email server connected to the Internet that I am obligated to accept postage-due advertisements, which is what spam is? Because I have a mail server I am obligated to receive hundreds of fradulent advertisements every day on my dime and on my time? I am required to subsidize someone else's marketing campaign?
The fact that I run an email server does not give you--or any spammer--the implicit right to abuse it or shift costs to me. Mail servers are accessible via the Internet because they have to me--it does not convey some automatic invitation to subsidize the costs of an advertising campaign much less a fradulent or pornographic one.
While we're at it, why don't we go ahead and have some human refuse unloaded on your front lawn and charge you for delivery? After all, your front lawn is publically-accessible. No-one forced you to have a front lawn so everyone is free to unload whatever refuse they want there because we thought it "might be useful". And charge you, to boot.
I think you're a little confused about spam. Spam doesn't cost the spammers, it costs the ISPs and the users that have no choice but to receive it. Spammers don't have the right to send me a package postage due or to forcefully enter my house and makes a sales pitch--nor do they have the right to invade my inbox with garbage I didn't ask for and don't want. It's theft of service.
I'm a little uncomfortable with the government passing laws specifically against spam--not because I think spamming is something to defend, I'm just worried about government getting on a roll and meddling in other Internet areas that they have no place being.
Spam should be prosecuted under existing laws regarding theft of service and computing resources. I wouldn't mind a federal law that specifically restates that so there is no doubt and I'd like to see existing laws enforced against spammers, but I'm a little worried about government trying to regulate Internet. They have a hard enough time trying to regulate things they understand let alone things they don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, yeah, because the UN has such a great history of efficiency and effectiveness. NOT. :)
Superpower? They have a lot of internal divisions and disagreements to deal with before they get to that level.
and it is unsurprising that it is seeking independence of technical material.
I think the European GPS is a waste of money. Unless they anticipate a U.S. vs Europe war then I don't see this is the best use of limited resources.
On the up side I think it'll be cool if we see GPS receivers that receive BOTH signals and can use the combined data of both systems to produce an even more accurate fix.
Actually, no, it won't. Those weird letter combinations are there to make the messages "distinct" (so it's hard to tell if two spams received by two different people are the same) and also those that try to break the spam down into sentences or whatever to, again, try to determine if it is spam by comparing it to other reported spam.
These ramdom words will not do anything to corrupt Bayesian at all. Since an unknown word in Bayesian is assigned some rather-neutral value (such as 0.4 or 0.5) that is not enough to make an otherwise 0.99 spammy message come down to a non-spammy level. I.e., Bayesian only takes into account the most spammy terms ("sex"=0.99, etc.) and the least spammy terms ("Doug"=a friend of mine that appears often in my email=0.01). Inserting random words will generate terms worth 0.4 or 0.5 which will NOT be considered because they are not far away from the neutral 0.5, so all the other spammy indicators will decide the Bayesian score, not the random words.
The only thing these random words do is make your Bayesian statistics file grow a bit. But if your Bayesian filter is worth its weight in salt old terms over some age that have only been seen once will be purged since they are probably useless and there are definitely more interesting tokens that will indicate spam or not.
But that's why Bayesian advocates every user having their own Bayesian statistics. It's not a "one size fits all" for the entire ISP or company, as is the case with most keyword filters. Every user has a different set of Bayesian statistics which is why it is very difficult for spammers to get around this filter--they have no way of knowing what words are in each users' statistics.
2) you still have to waste your bandwidth and CPU before you reject it.
It's better to waste your bandwidth and your CPU than to waste the time of those receiving the spam. IMHO...
So Bayesian filters are a good tool of last resort, but there are many other tools that should be used too.
The quicker everyone uses Bayesian filters (as opposed to waiting until all the other filters are incapable of keeping up with spam) the sooner the spammers will be in trouble. I personally use both a Bayesian filter with an up-to-date blacklist of known spamvertised domains, etc. I find that, quite simply, the simple keyword filters catch spam from known spam sites and Bayesian catches the rest. But if I turned off my normal filters Bayesian would have caught it all since those spams are always assigned a high Bayesian score, too. It almost makes sense to turn off the other filters, but they can be useful if a spammer comes up with a truly unique spam and someone else has already identified the domain name. It's rare, but it can happen. So a combination of technologies is probably the best... but a combination that lacks Bayesian is a combination that could be better.
It's natural to think that is the case, but in reality it isn't. Accidentally putting one email in the wrong corpus ("good" or "spam") will not be enough to kill you. If you consistently fail to put them in the right corpus then over time, yes, things would snowball. But that'll only happen over time. A mistake now and then isn't enough to mess things up.
It should be free? Why? It costs bandwidth... But thanks for your most constructive input.
Quite a few sources, but feel free to try this site which offers it as a service. Nothing to download, nothing to install. Just point your POP3 client to this site and it'll filter your mail for you. I'm at 99.4% of spam filtered for this month and 99.7% for this week.
For me, spam is a solved problem. It's actually fun watching the spam roll in and watch the statistics counting how many emails have been filtered. Anyone that wants plug-and-play Bayesian filtering along with optional keyword filters, blacklists, whitelists, etc. for their POP3 mailbox with nothing to install on the client or server. is invited to check out the site listed in my sig. It just works.
You: You say this like there must be a really long list of nice things. Do tell...
Another nice thing about living in Nebraska, presumably, is it means you don't live in Kansas. :)
While I'm sure there isn't much they could do, wouldn't it have just been easier to gracefully except their letting you go and casually get hired again the same day? Unless you make a point of telling them what you're doing it's doubtful they'll know. Would've saved you a year of harrasment.
Which raises the question: If something happens and it isn't on Google, did it really happen? :)
Ahh, forgot about that... Nice copy of the idea from "The Abyss." :)
At this point the only thing I'll think about the Matrix is: "Why did I spend 30 dollars on tickets and snacks to watch it?"
[Very minor spoilers below]...
I know The Matrix has a cult following so I'll probably be modded down, but... I couldn't even remember the first Matrix when we went to see Reloaded last night. After about 20 minutes I more or less remembered the whole setting, etc. First hour or so was pretty boring... seemed like a mix of Planet of the Apes crossed with some drugged out rave (yes, we are free humans and immediately become some degenerate mob dancing like apes underground), Star Wars ("It is our destiny" seemed just ripped out of Return of the Jedi, even the way it was spoken), mixed with Terminator 2 (exploding building that contains important stuff), and some kind of mystical Harry Potter fantasy type of thing (where a character asks a simple question and the other character avoids answering it in a direct fashion but just answers in some psuedo-esoteric, mystical way).
The action in the last half was kind of cool, but no more so than any other action movie. The plot was almost non-existant and I didn't really leave the movie knowing anything particularly new about the "Matrix" and the position of the human race was not particularly different at the end than the beginning... seemed like a useless Harry Potter movie to me... where you just spend a couple hours watching silly mini-stories of 5 to 10 minutes one after another that don't really have anything to do with the real plot of the story.
Oh well... there was nothing else to see at the movies so that's what we saw. The hot dog bun was even a little dry. :)
You: Great. Now if you can only define with specificity what "non-personal" means with respect to e-mail, which is almost inherently personal, without telling people what they can and can't say, then you can pass Go.
Hmm, there is nothing inherently personal about email. You can't say that the advertisements I receive for pornographic sites, penis enlargement, breast enlargement, online casinos, get rich quick schemes, and all the other junk they send was written to me personally. There's nothing personal about it except that someone found and abused my personal email address.
Define "non-personal"? Some convincing indication that the message was written by a human being for my consumption and was sent to me personally [form letters being emailed one by one is still spam even though it might have my name or address on it]. If it was mass mailed by a computer OR not sent to me personally then I damn well better have SOLICITED it.
I.e., any UNSOLICTED email should be written to me personally by a human and not just a form letter. If it's not solicited and not personal it's spam.
Otherwise, it will be struck down, because you can't tell people what they can and can't say.
The government can't, but I'm entirely in my right to say who I do and don't want to listen to, and whether or not I'm willing to subsidize someone else's babbling. And the government is in its right--in fact it is obligated--to protect my right to make that choice.
I'd start with "bulk," (which you left out) since that can be defined.
Perhaps, but it is subjective. What is bulk? 10 recepients? 100? 1000? Over what period of time? An hour? A day? A week?
Outlawing unsolicited communications will bring all communication to a grinding halt. Think about it.
Instead why don't you re-read my previous post. I didn't say that "unsolicited communications" is spam. I said unsolicited, non-personal email. If anyone in the world has something to say to me they are more than welcome to send me an email and say it. It's unsolicited but it isn't spam because someone (human) is actually engaging in communication. There will be no halt to communication.
It's very simple: 1) If a real human is typing up a real email and really talking to me, it's not spam. 2) If a real person isn't emailing me then it better be solicited.
And everyone complains about the DMCA. Shit, this stuff makes the DMCA look like a fucking No Parking sign.
Hmm, only if you're a spammer, me thinks. Otherwise it's entirely straight-forward.
Spam is: 1) Bulk (yes, more than several), 2) Commercial (a direct solicitation to purchase a product or service WITH A PRICE), 3) Unsolicited (obvious)
We can argue about definitions, of course, but #2 definitely isn't a requirement. A non-profit organization soliciting donations is spam even though it's not commercial. A religious email sent to a million people with a religious message is spam even if it just offers words of encouragement. A political email soliciting support in a vote or campaign contributions is certainly spam.
I'd say spam is more accurately: 1) Bulk and/or non-personal, 2) Unsolicited.
Depending on your definition "Bulk" is usually non-personal, but most non-personal unsolicited email is also spam even if we don't know how many people were targetted. Since we aren't in a position to know exactly how many people received a given spam I'm almost more comfortable saying that any email that is 1) Non-personal and 2) Unsolicited is spam. Pass go, collect $500.
It probably would if that junk mail was arriving postage-due.
Hmmm... Let's say it takes just 1 second to delete 1 spam, which is not unreasonable if you actually look at the subject to determine it's not spam. Let's say the spammer sent that advertisement to 30 million email addresses, which isn't unreasonable either. So a single spam session to 30 million people, the spammer caused humanity to lose 30 million seconds. That's 8333 hours which is just shy of a year. Or let's say that we call our time worth about $5/hr--less than minimum wage. That spam session that cost the spammer a few dollars at best cost humanity $41,000.
And that's just one spam! How many individual spams do you think are sent per day? By some estimates, spam will cost the American economy nearly $10 billion this year (I've also seen $8.9 billion mentioned).
Let's look at it more personally. Last month I received 2171 spams. This month I'm on track to receive 3022. So call it 2800 per month. That's 33,600 spams per year. Again, assuming 1 second per spam that's 9 hours of my time that will be wasted on spam this year. That's one work-day, or a nice Saturday afternoon.
Those that say "Who cares? Just click delete. How long does it really take?" are quite clueless. Spam robs time from others and it DOES add up personally, economically, and at the societal level.
That said, I don't worry about spam much. Using some good filters and Bayesian statistics I'm seeing just a few spam per month even though I'm receiving about 3000 per month. What a relief.
So you're saying that because I run an email server connected to the Internet that I am obligated to accept postage-due advertisements, which is what spam is? Because I have a mail server I am obligated to receive hundreds of fradulent advertisements every day on my dime and on my time? I am required to subsidize someone else's marketing campaign?
The fact that I run an email server does not give you--or any spammer--the implicit right to abuse it or shift costs to me. Mail servers are accessible via the Internet because they have to me--it does not convey some automatic invitation to subsidize the costs of an advertising campaign much less a fradulent or pornographic one.
While we're at it, why don't we go ahead and have some human refuse unloaded on your front lawn and charge you for delivery? After all, your front lawn is publically-accessible. No-one forced you to have a front lawn so everyone is free to unload whatever refuse they want there because we thought it "might be useful". And charge you, to boot.
I'm a little uncomfortable with the government passing laws specifically against spam--not because I think spamming is something to defend, I'm just worried about government getting on a roll and meddling in other Internet areas that they have no place being.
Spam should be prosecuted under existing laws regarding theft of service and computing resources. I wouldn't mind a federal law that specifically restates that so there is no doubt and I'd like to see existing laws enforced against spammers, but I'm a little worried about government trying to regulate Internet. They have a hard enough time trying to regulate things they understand let alone things they don't.