taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Meta: I’m back in Dublin for a couple of weeks over xmas, so I won’t be updating this weblog very much. See you in January!

BTW I flew back via Chicago, which is obviously the stopover of choice to Dublin from Silicon Valley — surrounded by 1 iBook per every 8 passengers. ;)

PS: looks like they forgot Poland!

Tags: btw, choice, couple, ibook, january, meta, stopover, weblog

TV: A choice quote from NBC’s Olympics coverage: ‘This girl (one of the US beach volleyball team) reads a book a week!’ (delivered in shocked tones.)

Tags: beach, book, choice, coverage, girl, nbc, quote, team, tv, volleyball, week

Spam: Guardian: Incredible Bulk, by Danny O’Brien. A great article from the
‘Spam and the Law’ conference. ‘This is why people such as Richter are appearing from the shadows. They have a choice: turn legit, or risk an increasingly criminal lifestyle.’

Also spam-related: Code Fish Spam Watch, which lists and dissects phishing attacks, in great detail. Some of those trojans are exceptionally sophisticated – such as this trojan targetting Barclays online banking, which actually takes screenshots of a CAPTCHA-style login protocol. Scary!

Tags: article, bulk, choice, conference, guardian, incredible, law, richter, spam, the

SpamAssassin: The 2003 OSDir.com Editor’s Choice Awards in Open Source. Woo!

Editor’s Choice for Best Application (Top 5 environments):

Email: SpamAssassin (Double Winner)

SpamAssassin keeps keeps me out of Anger Management classes. If you are not running SpamAssassin get thee to SpamAssassin.org. Now. If you need your friendly neighborhood system administrator to do it.. start sending flowers or Scotch today with a nice little note asking to get SpamAssassin going medieval on your mail server.

Miscellaneous Editor’s Choice:

Can’t Live Without: SpamAssassin

The fact that this doesn’t have to be explained says it all.

Tags: application, awards, choice, com, editor, open, osdir, source, spamassassin, woo

Congrats to Craig and Erica! Sounds like there was quite a lot of work involved for Erica — ouch — but the end result looks very cute.

Good choice of name, too — my friends Tom and Colette will be tickled by this one, given that they’ve named their son ‘Evan’, and their daughter ‘Alice’ ;)

Tags: choice, congrats, daughter, end, lot, name, ouch, result, son, work

I’ve just found Gary Robinson’s blog, which is a bit silly, as boasts the primary source after Paul Graham’s‘A Plan For Spam’ paper for modern Bayesian spamfiltering techniques. I’d only read Gary’s page describing the Robinson-combining technique, but he’s been doing a good job of blogging the anti-spam world in general recently. Hence, he’s made the blogroll ;)

Some choice links from his blog:

First off — Jon Udell points out why reply-to-whitelist systems are Bad:

The email thread that provoked this message will soon dissolve. Including x@y.com might have been useful, but the moment has passed. If I urgently need to contact x@y.com , I may have to grit my teeth and register to do so. But no ad-hoc communication is going to make it over that activation threshold.

And a different kind of whitelist — the IronPort Bonded Sender type, from Whitelists: the weapon of choice against spam (ZDNet):

After a one and half months of testing, IronPort identified hundreds of thousands of false-positives. At that rate, the mail generated by IronPort’s customers alone, which make up a small percentage of the total amount of e-mail that traverses the Internet, is resulting in over one million false-positives per year.

Hmm. Well, I’m not 100% convinced here — I did see Amazon.FR, who are apparently Bonded Sender customers, send a promotional mail to a mailing list. I also saw several reports from other places regarding the same mail. How often does a mailing list order goods from an e-commerce site? (But, having said that, that’s the only Bonded Sender issue I’ve seen in about 6 months — so let’s put that down to teething issues, or someone on the list who decided to act up when ordering some goods.)

Spamland.org, a new Wiki for spamfiltering.

Debra Bowen, a California State Senator, is proposing a hardcore new anti-spam bill. “It would bar unsolicited e-mail advertising and allow people who receive it to sue the senders for $500 per transmission. A judge could triple the penalty if he or she decided the violation was intentional. … ‘The ($500) fine’s really intended to get a whole generation of computer-savvy folks to help us do the enforcement,’ Bowen says. ‘Getting rid of spam is never going to be the district attorney’s first priority and it shouldn’t be.”‘ She notes also that she’s “seen estimates that it could grow to 50 percent in the next five years.” Too late — it’s already there, as far as I can tell.

FWIW, I like the sound of this — she’s requiring that commercial e-mail senders have an existing verified-opt-in relationship beforehand. Sounds good to me.

And finally, a very interesting set of tests on Robinson-combining strategies. Very interesting, that is, if you’re implementing a Bayesian spam filter. Otherwise quite boring. ;)

Tags: blog, bonded, choice, com, ironport, list, mail, mailing, sender, spam