Ending Spam 184
Shalendra Chhabra writes "Jonathan
Zdziarski has been fighting spam since before the first MIT
spam conference in 2003, and has now released a full-on technical
book,
Ending Spam, on spam filtering. Ending Spam
covers how
the current
and near-future crop of heuristic and statistical filters actually work
under the hood, and how you can most effectively use such filters to
protect your inbox." Read on for the rest of Chhabra's review.
| Ending Spam: Bayesian Content Filtering and the Art of Statistical Language Classification | |
| author | Jonathan A. Zdziarski |
| pages | 312 |
| publisher | No Starch Press |
| rating | 8 |
| reviewer | Shalendra Chhabra |
| ISBN | 1593270526 |
| summary | Very Good Book Covering Statistical Models and Techniques Implemented in Current Spam Filters |
Spam (unsolicited commercial email) and phishing (fraudulent emails) are causing losses of billions of dollars to businesses. Many initiatives are currently underway for fighting this challenge. On the legal front, a Virginia court recently sentenced a prolific spammer, Jeremy Jaynes, to nine years in prison, and a Nigerian court sentenced a woman to two and a half years for phishing. Michigan and Utah have both passed laws creating "do-not-contact" registries in July/August 2005, covering e-mail addresses, instant messaging addresses and telephone numbers. Technical initiatives to fight spam include server- or client-side spam filtering, using Lists (Blacklists, Whitelists, Greylists), Email Authentication Standards (IIM, DK, DKIM, SPF, SenderID), and emerging sender reputation and accreditation services.
Ending Spam is the first book explaining the fine details of the theoretical models and machine-learning algorithms implemented in these filters. The book is divided into three parts: introduction to spam filtering, fundamentals of statistical filtering, and advanced concepts of statistical filtering.
The first section of the book discusses the history of spam, spam kings, different approaches for fighting spam such as blacklisting, whitelisting, heuristic filtering, challenge response, throttling, collaborative filtering, Authenticated SMTP, Sender Policy Framework and SenderID, spammer fingerprinting, etc. However, the author omitted any mention of locally-sensitive hash functions (such as Nilsimsa Hash) to counter spammers' random insertion of words, the use of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), Greylisting, Identified Internet Mail, and Domain Keys (now Domain Keys Identified Mail).
In the next chapter, the author clearly explains various components of a Language Classifier Pipeline, including the Historical Dataset (aka wordlist, database, dictionary, filter memory), Tokenizer, and the Analysis Engine with its feedback loop. However, the process flow of a language classifier could have been more generalized, e.g. incorporating an initial text-to-text transformer. This chapter also covers the advantages and disadvantages of various training modes for filters, such as Train Everything (TEFT), Train-on-Error (TOE), and Train Until No Errors (TUNE). This part concludes with the description of Paul Graham's famous spam-filtering technique using Bayesian classification (as described in "A Plan for Spam"), Gary Robinson's Geometric Mean Test, Fisher-Robinsons Inverse Chi Square (including the source code for the inversion function), and some other tricks for optimizing spam- filtering accuracy.
The second part of this book deals with the fundamentals of statistical filtering. The author explains HTML and Base64 encoding, followed by a detailed description of tokenization techniques (e.g. Sparse Binary Polynomial Hashing). Then there's a discussion of the various tricks that spammers use for penetrating filters. Although these tactics are mentioned in John Graham-Cumming's "Spammers Compendium," Jonathan has very elegantly explained why some tricks work for spammers and some don't. This part concludes by addressing some of the resource, storage and scaling concerns raised by the large number of features generated from tokenization techniques.
The third part of this book deals with advanced concepts of statistical filtering. This includes the testing criteria for measuring accuracy of an email filter, and some advanced tokenization concepts, e.g. chained tokens (taking word-pairs and phrases into account, instead of individual words) generated using a sliding 5-byte window as mentioned in Sparse Binary Polynomial Hashing. The next chapter describes the Markovian Model implemented in the CRM114 Discriminator, but the author fails to describe different weighting schemes for features implemented in the Markovian-based version of CRM114. The author then describes the Bayesian Noise Reduction Technique for purging "out of context" data from the mail text. This chapter concludes with a very nice summary of collaborative algorithms and techniques, such as Message Innoculation, Streamlined Blackhole List, Fingerprinting, Automatic Whitelisting, URL Blacklisting, and Honeypot email addresses for snaring spammers' address harvesting bots.
The most interesting part of this book is the appendix, where the author presents interviews with John Graham-Cumming of POPFile, Brian Burton of SpamProbe, Marty Lamb of TarProxy, Bill Yerazunis of CRM114 Discriminator, and Jonathan Zdziarski of DSPAM (himself). I loved this section.
The salient points of the book: it's very easy to read; each chapter begins with a very thought-provoking introduction, and concludes with a crisp "final thoughts" section. The number of technical errors are very few in this print, and the illustrations are of good quality. Since the book is geared more toward the Bayesian and statistical generation of spam filters, the absence of certain spam-busting technologies is acceptable. However, a noticeable omission is the lack of discussion about measuring spam-filter accuracy, and what impact this has on setting filtration thresholds. A section on the economics of tradeoffs, and the use of a Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (ROC) would have been very helpful.
Overall, by putting together Ending Spam, Jonathan Zdziarski has made another significant contribution (after DSPAM) to the anti-spam community. Whether you are a system administrator, anti-spam researcher, engineer or a newbie interested in fighting spam, this book is a great reference.
William S Yerazunis and Richard Jowsey also contributed to this review. Shalendra Chhabra is a Graduate Student in Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of California, Riverside. He is on the development team of CRM114 Discriminator and has presented his work at MIT Spam Conference 2005, Cisco Systems, and Stanford University. You can purchase Ending Spam: Bayesian Content Filtering and the Art of Statistical Language Classification from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
You can't have both... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bill Gates promised to end it (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Bill Gates promised to end it (Score:2)
Like most parasitic maldies (Score:2)
Or will these dedicated folks and others be able to eliminate it, perhaps by changes to the mail protocols?
Is spam a parasitic malady and, if so, what next? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or will these dedicated folks and others be able to eliminate it, perhaps by changes to the mail protocols?
Interesting question that, considering my work involves malaria.
My guess is that, like malaria and most parasitic infestations, we will at some point develop a "cure". The "cure" will work for a few years, after which the parasite (spam) will have adapted, surviving until then in different hosts (old windows machines donated to Africa, who knows). Then, having developed a new trick, it will come back as strong as ever.
Biology teaches us that organisms adapt to changing environments, thru selective breeding (natural), point mutations, and unforseen combinations (see the H51N avian influenza). We can develop cures, but once we do so, we can be fairly sure that, baring species extinction, it will develop methods to cope with our cures.
An easy solution would be to move to IPv6 - but this, like authentication, will only kill off the spam which doesn't use "trusted email clients that are identified" while the spam that can survive will be encouraged to spread like wildfire.
So long as the fiscal, legal, and societal penalties for spamming are fairly low and the rewards are high, and while most people do nothing about it, it will spread.
Re:Is spam a parasitic malady and, if so, what nex (Score:2, Interesting)
If it's a business model, where's the underwear? (Score:2, Interesting)
True and False.
Spam acts like a parasitic organism, due to the favorable conditions for the business model. It does, in some cases, actually "survive" in certain computers, which are spam zombies that spew out spam from a spam source - in fact, there are a few at the other UW (in Wisconsin) which utilize the identified computers th
Re:If it's a business model, where's the underwear (Score:2, Interesting)
That's not survival in the "organism" analogy, since a zombie will not send spam without a source, which will be gone when the business model is not workable, and especially not cause new source to appear.
like the malarial mosquito, spam uses those responders (infected persons) to download more spam zombie software, since they tend not to be technical enough to remove the infection.
Yo
Re:If it's a business model, where's the underwear (Score:2, Interesting)
Just as a mosquito is merely a tool the malarial parasite uses to spread itself.
Let's say we knock out something that permits mosquitos to infect human hosts. Chances are that it might only partially impact malarial infections of non-human hosts. The impacted malarial bug, provided it survives and breeds, may then decide to
Re:If it's a business model, where's the underwear (Score:2, Insightful)
Except that spam does not use zombies to spread itself, SPAMMERS use zombies to spread spam.
Your analogy is simply flawed. Spam is NOT an organism. It does NOT "survive" somewhere, adapt and spread from the places where it survived.
And we certainly DO go for "species extinction", by eliminating the conditions that make spam practicable and profitable. You enumerate some of those conditions yourself in the end.
Re:If it's a business model, where's the underwear (Score:2, Insightful)
Your analogy is simply flawed. Spam is NOT an organism. It does NOT "survive" somewhere, adapt and spread from the places where it survived.
And we certainly DO go for "species extinction", by eliminating the conditions that make spam practicable and profitable. You enumerate some of those conditions yourself in the end.
If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and it paddles like a duck, you want me to chec
Re:Is spam a parasitic malady and, if so, what nex (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is spam a parasitic malady and, if so, what nex (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is spam a parasitic malady and, if so, what nex (Score:4, Funny)
Yet.
Esprit d'Corps (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Esprit d'Corps (Score:2, Insightful)
Mobs attacking spammers should only be armed with plastic spoons. All fourteen million of them.
Remember, if you only poke them once, it's not only not murder, it's not even assault, and perfectly legal under the CAN-POKE-SPAMMERS act, as long as they have a 'business relationship' with you, which they obviously created by spamming you.
And, to make it fair, they are allowed to opt out of any member of the mob poking them. One at a time, in writing, and we'll even waive the 48 hours to proce
Re:Esprit d'Corps (Score:2)
Sorry for the flamebait but (Score:2, Funny)
Awww, poor babies. That's a long time to fight spam.
Re:Sorry for the flamebait but (Score:5, Informative)
HERE [castlecops.com]
"ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jonathan A. Zdziarski has been fighting spam for eight years, and has spent a significant portion of the past two years working on the next generation spam filter DSPAM. His research in algorithmic theory and neural networking has led to the development of many new approaches in language classification, and he has played a key role in designing some popular algorithms in use today, including Message Inoculation, Bayesian Noise Reduction, and the first functional Neural Networking algorithm for spam filters. Zdziarski lectures widely on the topic of spam and was a speaker at the 2004 and 2005 MIT Spam Conference.
"
The best way to fight spam (Score:5, Funny)
Yum!
Re:The best way to fight spam (Score:2)
Score -5 Outdated. (Score:2, Insightful)
By the time a book has been written edited, proof read(though many publishers skip this part), type set, printed, distributed and sold, it no longer resembles the technology.
Fundamentals Don't Change Much/Fast (Score:3, Interesting)
Rule 1 (Spammers always lie) wo
Re:Fundamentals Don't Change Much/Fast (Score:2)
Re:Fundamentals Don't Change Much/Fast (Score:2, Informative)
Right... except you don't need to. If you ever actually use your account to, well, email people, it means that address is out there somewhere. And it will get out as soon as your aunt sends you your next "FREE" birthday e-card, or some virus/worm takes over her computer and harvests her address book.
Note that this is not wild speculation, I have followed this same technique, and while it is undoubtedly one of the most effec
You can't catch it all (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You can't catch it all (Score:2, Interesting)
The ultimate solution will come when we move to a new-generation mail delivery system. But the day is a long ways off, because the sheer cost of implementing such a system and the necessity of having it integrate with older SMTP systems for the years required for large-scale adoption means that spa
Re:You can't catch it all (Score:5, Interesting)
Spam is no longer simply the domain of a giant server with a huge database. It's increasingly being sent out by zombie PCs, infected with viruses or trojans. Spammers pay the zombie-farmers to send their crap. Zombies send the email masquerading as the PC owner, using their credentials. Sender-ID? No problem, he's got one. SMTP? Sure, use the victim's server.
Zombies mean that no matter what technology is used for sending validated, signed, pre-paid, whatever email, the zombies will have access to those resources and will still spew their crap. No anti-spam server technologies are going to prevent Windows machines from getting infested.
Re:You can't catch it all (Score:5, Interesting)
The first step to a new mail system is to assure that only legitimate and properly configured mail servers honoring MX records on outgoing mail (or whatever ends up replacing MX records) can expect delivery. Mail admins' hands are tied by stealth systems or badly configured ones, but if we do try to implement the no-MX rule, which would eliminate the zombie attacks, we end up shutting out systems that, for whatever reason, don't publish an MX record for outgoing servers.
Zombies ought to be the easiest thing to shut down by a) not permitting non-MTA machines to push anything beyond the network via port 25 and b) publishing both incoming and outgoing mail servers.
Re:You can't catch it all (Score:2)
Your post advocates a
(*) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be
Re:You can't catch it all (Score:3, Insightful)
In the end, no technical solution is really going to solve it; you're using "is this machine meant to send mail?" as a heuristic for "is this mail junk mail?". As you can't define junk mail objectively, in computer-friendly criteria, any filter is inevitably going to make mistakes. The only question is whether your filter tends towards false positives or false negatives.
Ending Spam? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't see it, it ain't there?
Re:Ending Spam? (Score:3, Insightful)
And yes, if you don't see it, then unless you're a system administrator (can't be more than 0.001% of the population), the problem IS solved. The problem isn't spam per se, but that spam clogs up MY inbox.
It'
Re:Ending Spam? (Score:2)
Effecitve filtering will end spam (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think we'll ever get there, but yes filtering really could end spam.
I know it's a cliché movie, but I can't help (Score:3, Insightful)
Gordon: "Batman making a stand as he has will only escalate the problem."
If suddenly the masses are educated on spam filtering, wouldn't spammers just adobt tactics to avoid them?
I mean it is afterall a "spammers market". They have increased resources because they're getting all the money. I'm sure the spammers are much smarter than most techies who use filters, they just don't care. They think, "If this techie is going to us
Re:I know it's a cliché movie, but I can't he (Score:2)
But that's exactly what we've been seeing over the years.
Granny has never filtered a spam in her life. The ISPs have taken up automated spam filtering on her behalf. That's why the spammers can't stand still and let just us techies filter their sludge. The techies took the fight to the next level, blocking spam further up the chain so the benefits of spam-blocking translated to everyone. Thus,
Re:I know it's a cliché movie, but I can't he (Score:2)
That's why the solution has to treat the evasion of spam filtering like any other sort of computer cracking (i.e. a federal offense resulting in a few years of PMITA prison).
Re:Effecitve filtering will end spam (Score:2)
The only real way to stop a spamer is jail or a baseball bat but someone else will always be in line to replace them.
Re:Effecitve filtering will end spam (Score:2)
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (*) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the mon
Re:Effecitve filtering will end spam (Score:2)
I know of 3 cases where spamers have stopped (at least for a bit) doing their dirty work where a baseball bat (or similar) were used. The results are one dead Russian who won't be spaming any more (but his friends have taken over his work), A Kiwi that is now back spaming even though there are rumors that his kid has taken at least one beating for his activity, and one Aussie spamer that decided that a few people showing up at his
Re:Effecitve filtering will end spam (Score:2)
I agree with the original post -- this is not 'stopping spam'.
Re:Effecitve filtering will end spam (Score:2)
If only that were the case... Really, they'd just have to figure out what is special about the 1% that gets through and make all the spam look like that.
Spam filtering is like DRM. Somebody wants to bypass it badly enough that they will.
Re:Effecitve filtering will end spam (Score:2)
I disagree. Spammers aren't advertising their own products, they're advertising the products of suckers who beleive that it is worthwhile to pay the spammers to send their spam into a void. Even if all the spam in the world was filtered with 100% effectiveness, there would still be greed fueled suckers who beleived that a spammer could bring them customers for their phony erection drugs and porn link site
Re:Effecitve filtering will end spam (Score:2)
Re:Ending Spam? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no such thing as a perfect filtering system, but for every message blocked, that's extra effort for the spammer to get through, making it less and less worthwhile to spam at all.
Or maybe they'll just send more and more, hoping at least one gets through.
fantastic advice (Score:2, Interesting)
Heck
Email is mostly broken (Score:4, Interesting)
Current anti-spam solutions are to email what an Antivirus package is to Windows - a hack add-on that increases complexity and costs without solving the underlying problem(s).
Rather than fight viruses, we should be engineering an O/S that's inherently resistent to them. How many of you Linux/BSD/MacOS users EVER use antivirus, or need to?
Rather than build ever-better antispam filters for Email, we should be engineering an email solution that's inherenly resistant to SPAM.
The answer lies in authentication - who is sending the email. Some of the best technologies now available use degrees of authentication without actually *saying* it outright. Examples are: refusing invalid domains, greylisting, challenge-response, SenderID - all of these are some form of authentication.
As these are, one-by-one bypassed by the spammers, the need for authentication of senders will continue to increase, until the dolts who will invariably reply with that "your solution will not work because... (check the options)" are shown to simply be.... wrong.
Give it time. It's already happening whatever the originators of the SMTP protocol desired.
Re:Email is mostly broken (Score:5, Insightful)
And it requires central control. Is this what you want?
Re:Email is mostly broken (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose the "legitimate" spam (not generated by
Claiming "SMTP is Broken" without any better ideas (Score:2)
The funda
Re:Email is mostly broken (Score:2)
So spammers have a 16% ad
Gotta use it right (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a good thing. It lets them spew all of the email they want; let's call it freedom of speech (since I don't want any legal limitations on spam also being used to prevent legitimate speech). And I get to ignore them; I can filter them at the SMTP layer even before they get to send the whole message.
It may not be su
Re:Gotta use it right (Score:2)
Re:Gotta use it right (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, there will have to be layers of responsibility, and we can encourage the various layers to be responsible
Re:Gotta use it right (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Gotta use it right (Score:2)
Re:Email is mostly broken (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, it's a possibility. Unfortunately, in this case the 'dolts who invariably reply with the survey' are actually right. The survey is funny, but it serves a very important purpose in this case - it shows that completely re-engineering the entire e-mail system means that the problems we have are masked temporarily and then reemerge. Identity, no identity, in the end the 'stopgaps' are actually better than the 'build it from the ground up' solution.
You Personally advocate a
(x) technical (x) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(x) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(N/A) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(x) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
(x) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(x) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a fascist for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
what (Score:2)
Did you just fill in the list at random?
Re:what (Score:2)
(x) technical (x) legislative (x) market-based
You need all three of these to make a system like this work.
(x) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses - Along with a centralized repository for management comes a centralized directory.
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected - Current e-mail systems would all have to be scrapped.
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money - Finding a spammer would be the same as finding a telem
Re:OT: What's with these forms? (Score:2)
Re:Email is mostly broken (Score:2)
No, the answer isn't authentication. The answer is economics.
Right now, the recipient pays the primary cost of an email. All the sender has to do is connec to a server, dump some data, and be done. The recipient, on the other hand, has to sort out to whom that data belongs, store it, cache it, pass it on to other systems, drop it in mailboxes, etc. On top of this, the recipient's server must always be online just in case some more mail comes
Re:Email is mostly broken (Score:2)
Not only that, but companies pay the post office a lot of money to put their junk mail in your box, which is why the USPS is not about to stop it. Spam, however, doesn't cost the spammer much (apart from the software and know-how to get set up). Then they can tie up a virtually limitless amount of bandwidth at no additional cost, until they get caught. The cost of this is borne by ISPs and ultimately everyone o
Re:Email is mostly broken (Score:2)
Ads sent by paper mail reduce your costs to send normal paper mail.
Ads sent by email *increase* your costs for Internet (email) service. (And this is true wethe
No good publisher (Score:2, Interesting)
If this was published by O'Reilly, I'd have bought it on sight as they bother to edit their books. As it is, I'll give it a wide berth.
Re:No good publisher (Score:2)
This should really be entitled "Hiding Spam" (Score:3, Insightful)
Even a manservant reading all of my mail and hand-carying printouts of nothing but personal messages to my Jamacian bungalow doesn't "end" spam.
It would seem that These Guys [slashdot.org] are actually making an attempt to "end" spam.
All this guy is just talking about is hiding it from view. Big deal...
Re:This should really be entitled "Hiding Spam" (Score:2)
Which raises the question: why do we still get spam? There have been good filters for years, but there is still spam. So it must be getting through somewhere. My guess is that it gets through to (a) people who get email service from their local ISP, and (b) users at medium-sized businesses, who are compelled to use wretched "enterprise" spam filters.
If everyone used Gma
Re:This should really be entitled "Hiding Spam" (Score:2)
We've moved to a market where the product for sale is being sold through a number of venues, and spam is just one of them. Paying someone an extra $1000 to send out a few million emails is no more than insurance of maximum exposure. It might buy you a few sales or it might not--but it's so cheap
Easy Solution to Spam (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Easy Solution to Spam (Score:2)
Seriously, blacklists work on the personal front, if you have a fairly static list of people you keep in touch with. In the business world, it doesn't fly--even if you put the onus for maintaining the list(s) on the users, rather than admins. Business contacts are far too fluid and losing a non-whitelisted m
Re:Easy Solution to Spam (Score:2)
"So Bob wants us to pre-submit our email addresses, and continue to do so for each new employee contact. Jeff wants us to email him, and close the deal. Hmmm..."
Trust me. I've tried it in a corporate setting, and beyond a few dozen employees, blacklisting doesn't work. You can come up with endless reasons it _should_ work ('staff who are too stupid to maintain a whitelist shouldn't have email') b
Re:Easy Solution to Spam (Score:2)
Re:Easy Solution to Spam (Score:2)
Greylisting solves 95% for me (Score:2, Informative)
Should one invest time and money in this book? (Score:2)
Some of the previous posters mentioned the rather eccentric views (in my opinion) of the author of Ending Spam (Jonathan Zdziarski). You can sample some of these yourself by reading the essays Mr. Zdziarski has posted on his web site NuclearElephant.com [nuclearelephant.com].
While someone might have, in practice, unlimited amounts of money, none of us have unlimited amounts of time. So a book is always an investement in both time and, for those with more finite amounts of money, cash. With this in mind, there is the quest
An Idea or 2 (Score:2)
Or
Jhunkhad: A Holy War Against the Infidel Spammers!
In front of a camera, stand them up and make them recite that they have small, flacid penises and need to refinance their homes and consolidate their debt because they owe all their money to hot horny teen girl web cam sites. Then slap them with a herring until they are unconcious.
Re:An Idea or 2 (Score:2)
When we start hearing it on FOX news and CNN, we now know who to blame.
Re:An Idea or 2 (Score:2)
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:5, Insightful)
This may be the case; however, that doesn't invalidate his work on spam. Remember, Sir Isaac Newton was a firm believer in the more exotic aspects of mystical alchemy, and the vast bulk of his 'research' was complete gibberish. That doesn't make his work on gravity any less valuable.
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
"Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness." - 1984, George Orwell.
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
That you think that an understanding based on available evidence and the man's personal religious beliefs is irrational shows that you aren't willing to hear alternative ideas, and that you're p
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
I never called him stupid, just crazy. I never dismissed anything, he did. And if you read his writing on the topic, there is no other conclusion you can com
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
It's really a shame that you don't want to have a sane, reasonable discussion. Then again, this is Slashdot.
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
I never said anything about creationism, or any particular religion. I said he belives the world cannot possibly be more than 10,000 years old, which is completely insane.
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
These are the same biblical texts in which no one seems to agree on what the actual amount of time involved is when the word "day" or "year" is used?
I think that argument needs to be cleared up and defined correctly before using "biblical time" as a standard by which other things are measured. But since this will never happen, I personally will choose to use more rational and consisten
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
I only have your word for it.
You can't define something in terms of itself, and no other "evidence" exists to confirm or deny the "truths" in the Good Book. Only what people say about it. What they believe.
On the other hand I can define radioactive decay for you in many consistent ways, and can prove its consistency by obtaining reproducible experimental results. Do you
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski is out of his mind. (Score:2)
You do realize the bible says nothing about the age of the earth right? That the 6,000-10,000 figures are the wildly speculative opinions of assorted people's interpretations of the bible, not actually the bi
Re:Absolutely (Score:2)
Darwin was a creationist.
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski's DSPAM claims are bogus too (Score:2)
-matthew
Re:Jonathan Zdziarski's DSPAM claims are bogus too (Score:2)
-matthew
Do something, then (Score:2)
Re:Do something, then (Score:2)
No thanks.
Re:Do something, then (Score:2)
2. It doesn't effect zombies. If you took the time to read, you'd see that this hits the website being advertised, thus hitting the source of the spam in the wallet.
3. It does more than just piss them off... it runs up their bandwidth bills quite high, actually. They generally quit (at least with that domain) after being hit with spamvampire for a few days. A
Web site running on zombies (Score:2)
Generally, home users in the US don't have metered bandwidth. If you have a limit at home, then you should look into finding a new provider.
Moving to North America costs a lot of money and time (which is money).
It doesn't effect zombies. If you took the time to read, you'd see that this hits the website being advertised
Which might have the DNS running on two zombies and the HTTP running on two more zombies.