It's gotta be Microsoft - how much could licensing the test lab machines run, anyway? The FUD factor is easily worth much more, even if Bill has to foot the bill, personally. Besides, only at Microsoft would anybody actually believe this nonsense has a chance of holding in court...
If this is used wisely, cameras could be used to entirely replace the paperwork and hoopla that teachers these days have to deal with. Most teachers (especially in the BEH - Behaviorally/Emotionally Handicapped - field) have to deal with tons of bureaucratic BS; this could theoretically help. Instead of making Mrs. Waters file a report every time a fly enters the room, you just archive the videos of parent-teacher conferences, etc, and pull them out when disputes arise. Yes, there are technical issues with this. Yes, it still makes more sense than asking hard-working, underpaid teachers to spend up to several hours (unpaid) each day, filling out nonsense forms.
Very true. The question, though, is how to set up effective, mass-scale, voting systems, because counting paper ballots is becoming increasingly difficult. Think what will happen in China and India as democracy develops further and more people vote: we're seriously talking about more than 800 million votes! That's a system that's doomed to break down. In a close election, stealing the race through electronic balloting isn't hard, but it is harder than bribing a couple local officials to change a 5 to a 6, or a 7 to a 4...
True, but how much is an election worth (financially)? Aside from the obvious costs of cleaning up the mess, the damage to the state or nation and parties (both political and individual) affected could be immeasurable. Even if a candidate was innocent, tampering could ruin his or her career.
Theory may be simpler than practice, but one shouldn't put bad theories into practice just to avoid complexity. Proprietary software has its uses, as does OSS, but mission-critical parts of the democratic process call for democratic participation, not privatization.
Somebody (cue 200 replies) help me out here: why wouldn't you go open source for something like this? Other than some company with hands in the governer's pockets (and vice versa), I don't know a single good reason to give a private corporation control over the methods used to conduct democratic elections. Hacking and fraud by voters aside, what about fraud by programmers? Debugging tons of code is hard work - stealing an election is just a matter of a couple of "errors" in the right procedure; that 6% difference in a close race (or.2%, as in the last Presidential election) could be made to disappear, with nobody the wiser.
As for paper audits: if the perpetrators are smart, nobody would ever even suspect that we needed to audit an election...
On the first count, you're right, it's Virginia. Oops. On the second, don't you know the reference? We're not talking about the entire female half of the species, here, but a little girl! (in the original context, of course, which is the only context that counts). Find something better to do...
First of all, these are not apples to apples. Popfile is a multi-purpose classifier; CRM114 is a multi-purpose filter; the others are sole-purpose filters, to my knowledge. So, it depends on:
whether you have more than one use (spam filtering) for it,
how much of a geek you are (do you really want to have to compile it yourself, or does that give you thrills?),
OS - this determines more than you might expect,
the stats that are out there (there's little doubt that CRM114 is the best at what it does, but there are plenty of others in the very high 90's)
Besides, the more the merrier - the more algorithms out there and the more spam corpi that exist, the harder it is to get ANY spam through.
Assuming you're able to initiate this kind of active counter-attack (i.e., talk thousands, or even hundreds, of folks into participating)... how many times do you think it'll work? Do that many people really have nothing better to do? I get 200+ spams a day; replying to every one with any kind of inquiry, no matter how basic, would take hours. Now, come up with a plugin or macro for some mail program or filter that will classify a message and send one of several pre-built responses, and you might be on to something. Still, though, many of the spams I get have invalid reply addresses and little or no way to contact the spammer from the site. More often than not, your options are eat your spam and be quiet about it or simply buy whatever junk is being sold. No dialog, no flexibility.
The way I see it, these are the beefs people have:
Multiplies bandwidth exponentially, automatically. Big corporations, especially, would be hacked off by this, and it has the added downside of slowing whole sections of the net (imagine what happens when a college dorm gets hit and 800 little bots go check out the site 57 times...).
Accidental DDoS on good sites - yes, Victoria, spam can be spoofed VERY convincingly.
Accidental DDoS on good sites (2) - if you've ever maintained a mailing list of more than 20 people, you know that, eventually, some idiot complains he/she got spammed, even if they double-opted in. I've been accused of spamming when I was quoted 2/3 of the way into someone else's (double opt-in) message! I know great sites that are blacklisted, out of human stupidity, alone.
Accidental DDoS on good hosts - imagine the impact on any shared host, or even some virtual hosts, when one bad client mails 5 million spams - before they could react, they could be taken offline!
Bad programmers (gasp!) - yes, those exist, and some of these filters could really go haywire and start thrashing all sorts of sites.
Lawyers - IANAL, but I shudder to think what happens the first time Microsoft or Big Blue sues some programmer, because an abused copy of their software took them down for an hour! (What is the M$ site worth, per hour? Too much, for sure.) Granted, the suit should go the other way, but that's another topic.
Abuse of ISPs - you'd be amazed how many ISPs will pull the plug on paying accounts for even innocent behavior (like sending 1,000 messages on a DSL account in under an hour, even if it's a business and all the messages are unique). This could get a lot of folks kicked offline.
There are probably others... My thought is this - build a really good, Bayesian, SBPH filter like CRM114, and incorporate a "grab questionable sites" option for the "spams of the future," then filter that page as though it were spam. That'll get us all up into the 99.9% range (the noise), and spammers will eventually either (a) go out of business, or (b) only be able to get their messages to the few people that think they're worthwhile, anyway.
Not true; several times I have received spams so carefully put together that they looked like they came from one of my addresses. For example, I used to have an address like me@school.edu; it's been inactive for some time, but once in a while I'll get a message claiming to be from that address, complete with perfectly spoofed headers. Tricky, but entirely possible.
highlight Microsoft's advantages in areas such as security, feature-completeness and total cost of ownership
First, you need a lab to find (or at least invent) such things...
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It's gotta be Microsoft - how much could licensing the test lab machines run, anyway? The FUD factor is easily worth much more, even if Bill has to foot the bill, personally. Besides, only at Microsoft would anybody actually believe this nonsense has a chance of holding in court...
If this is used wisely, cameras could be used to entirely replace the paperwork and hoopla that teachers these days have to deal with. Most teachers (especially in the BEH - Behaviorally/Emotionally Handicapped - field) have to deal with tons of bureaucratic BS; this could theoretically help. Instead of making Mrs. Waters file a report every time a fly enters the room, you just archive the videos of parent-teacher conferences, etc, and pull them out when disputes arise. Yes, there are technical issues with this. Yes, it still makes more sense than asking hard-working, underpaid teachers to spend up to several hours (unpaid) each day, filling out nonsense forms.
My $.02.
Definitely; anybody want to set this up? If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.
Very true. The question, though, is how to set up effective, mass-scale, voting systems, because counting paper ballots is becoming increasingly difficult. Think what will happen in China and India as democracy develops further and more people vote: we're seriously talking about more than 800 million votes! That's a system that's doomed to break down. In a close election, stealing the race through electronic balloting isn't hard, but it is harder than bribing a couple local officials to change a 5 to a 6, or a 7 to a 4...
True, but how much is an election worth (financially)? Aside from the obvious costs of cleaning up the mess, the damage to the state or nation and parties (both political and individual) affected could be immeasurable. Even if a candidate was innocent, tampering could ruin his or her career.
Theory may be simpler than practice, but one shouldn't put bad theories into practice just to avoid complexity. Proprietary software has its uses, as does OSS, but mission-critical parts of the democratic process call for democratic participation, not privatization.
Somebody (cue 200 replies) help me out here: why wouldn't you go open source for something like this? Other than some company with hands in the governer's pockets (and vice versa), I don't know a single good reason to give a private corporation control over the methods used to conduct democratic elections. Hacking and fraud by voters aside, what about fraud by programmers? Debugging tons of code is hard work - stealing an election is just a matter of a couple of "errors" in the right procedure; that 6% difference in a close race (or .2%, as in the last Presidential election) could be made to disappear, with nobody the wiser.
As for paper audits: if the perpetrators are smart, nobody would ever even suspect that we needed to audit an election...
My $.02
On the first count, you're right, it's Virginia. Oops. On the second, don't you know the reference? We're not talking about the entire female half of the species, here, but a little girl! (in the original context, of course, which is the only context that counts). Find something better to do...
- whether you have more than one use (spam filtering) for it,
- how much of a geek you are (do you really want to have to compile it yourself, or does that give you thrills?),
- OS - this determines more than you might expect,
- the stats that are out there (there's little doubt that CRM114 is the best at what it does, but there are plenty of others in the very high 90's)
Besides, the more the merrier - the more algorithms out there and the more spam corpi that exist, the harder it is to get ANY spam through.-Ed
Assuming you're able to initiate this kind of active counter-attack (i.e., talk thousands, or even hundreds, of folks into participating)... how many times do you think it'll work? Do that many people really have nothing better to do? I get 200+ spams a day; replying to every one with any kind of inquiry, no matter how basic, would take hours. Now, come up with a plugin or macro for some mail program or filter that will classify a message and send one of several pre-built responses, and you might be on to something. Still, though, many of the spams I get have invalid reply addresses and little or no way to contact the spammer from the site. More often than not, your options are eat your spam and be quiet about it or simply buy whatever junk is being sold. No dialog, no flexibility.
-Ed
- Multiplies bandwidth exponentially, automatically. Big corporations, especially, would be hacked off by this, and it has the added downside of slowing whole sections of the net (imagine what happens when a college dorm gets hit and 800 little bots go check out the site 57 times...).
- Accidental DDoS on good sites - yes, Victoria, spam can be spoofed VERY convincingly.
- Accidental DDoS on good sites (2) - if you've ever maintained a mailing list of more than 20 people, you know that, eventually, some idiot complains he/she got spammed, even if they double-opted in. I've been accused of spamming when I was quoted 2/3 of the way into someone else's (double opt-in) message! I know great sites that are blacklisted, out of human stupidity, alone.
- Accidental DDoS on good hosts - imagine the impact on any shared host, or even some virtual hosts, when one bad client mails 5 million spams - before they could react, they could be taken offline!
- Bad programmers (gasp!) - yes, those exist, and some of these filters could really go haywire and start thrashing all sorts of sites.
- Lawyers - IANAL, but I shudder to think what happens the first time Microsoft or Big Blue sues some programmer, because an abused copy of their software took them down for an hour! (What is the M$ site worth, per hour? Too much, for sure.) Granted, the suit should go the other way, but that's another topic.
- Abuse of ISPs - you'd be amazed how many ISPs will pull the plug on paying accounts for even innocent behavior (like sending 1,000 messages on a DSL account in under an hour, even if it's a business and all the messages are unique). This could get a lot of folks kicked offline.
There are probably others... My thought is this - build a really good, Bayesian, SBPH filter like CRM114, and incorporate a "grab questionable sites" option for the "spams of the future," then filter that page as though it were spam. That'll get us all up into the 99.9% range (the noise), and spammers will eventually either (a) go out of business, or (b) only be able to get their messages to the few people that think they're worthwhile, anyway.My $.02.
-Ed
there is no 'fake' spam
Not true; several times I have received spams so carefully put together that they looked like they came from one of my addresses. For example, I used to have an address like me@school.edu; it's been inactive for some time, but once in a while I'll get a message claiming to be from that address, complete with perfectly spoofed headers. Tricky, but entirely possible.
highlight Microsoft's advantages in areas such as security, feature-completeness and total cost of ownership First, you need a lab to find (or at least invent) such things...