taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Spam: if you work in anti-spam, especially in filtering, or even just in working with email in general, it’s well worth going to CEAS 2005, the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, on Thursday July 21st and Friday 22nd in Stanford:

The organizers of the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam invite you to participate in its second annual meeting. This forum brings together academic and industrial researchers to present new work in all aspects of email, messaging and spam — with papers this year covering fields as diverse as text classification, clustering and visualization of email, social network analysis applied to both email and spam, spam filtering methods including text classification and systems approaches, game theory, data analysis, Human Interactive Proofs, and legal studies, among others. The conference will feature 26 paper presentations, a banquet, and two invited speakers. See http://www.ceas.cc for details of the current program, as well as on-line registration.

Registration runs out on July 10th.

I went last year, and it was excellent — several very interesting papers were presented. I’m going this year, too, along with quite a few SpamAssassin committers, and I’m looking forward to it.

Tags: analysis, classification, conference, email, going, july, registration, spam, text, year

Patents: yes, I keep rattling on about this — the vote is coming up on July 6th. I promise I’ll shut up after that ;)

UEAPME has issued a statement regarding the directive which is strongly critical of its current wording (UEAPME is the European small and medium-sized business trade association, comprising 11 million SMEs). Quote:

‘The failure to clearly remove software from the scope of the directive is a setback for small businesses throughout Europe. UEAPME is now calling on the European Parliament to reverse yesterday’s decision at plenary session next month and send a strong message that an EU software patent is not an option,’ Hans-Werner Müller, UEAPME Secretary General, stated.

‘There is growing agreement among all actors that software should not be patented, so providing an unequivocal definition in the directive that guarantees this is clearly in the general interest. We are calling on the Parliament to support the amendments that would ensure this,’ said Mr Müller.

‘The cacophony of misinformation and misleading spin from the large industry lobby in the run up to this vote has obscured the general consensus on preventing the patenting of pure software.’

That’s all well and good. So presumably the Irish members of UEAPME, ISME and the SFA, are agreeing, right? Sadly, neither of these have issued any press releases on the subject, as far as I can see, and approaches by members of IFSO have been totally fruitless.

Since both have made recent press noting that Irish small businesses face difficulties with the rising costs of doing business, this would seem to be a no-brainer — legalising software patents would immediately open Irish SMEs up to the costs associated with them: licensing fees, fighting spurious infringement litigation from ‘patent troll’ companies, the ‘chilling effects’ on investors noted by Laura Creighton, and of course the high price of retaining patent lawyers to file patents on your own innovations. One wonders why they aren’t concerned about these costs…

Tags: business, directive, july, parliament, patent, patents, press, smes, software, ueapme, vote

Web: the June part of the contest is over, but given that there’s a July part still to go — here’s a ‘Nigritude Ultramarine‘ link to Anil Dash.

I wasn’t really bothered at all about this, until I came across this guy, whose technique involved spamming third-party Wiki sandboxes with backlinks. His excuse? ‘A Sandbox (is) a part of a system in which everybody is urged to play around freely. Usually for testing purposes. You can post headings, paragraphs, lists and links here. The content in return will be indexed by Google.’

As this forum thread points out — ‘The SandBox page is there for a purpose: to allow users of the wiki to learn to use the software. It is
not meant to be “a place where anyone can create backlinks.”‘

Sorry, that’s spam in my book.

Tags: anil, contest, july, june, link, nigritude, part, sandbox, ultramarine, web, wiki

The sustainably-powered wireless network with satellite uplink set up at the Big Green Gathering, near Cheddar in Somerset, last July. Pretty interesting, although ghod knows I would not want to have to pedal too much just to check my mail.

And, oh look, there’s a spam-relevant comment in the Lessons Learnt section!

Many people will check their email happily, unless they have to (pedal) for an equal amount of time! If this is extended to the environment, then slow email servers and spam are causing huge amounts of wasted energy and pollution, and not just psychologically. The question on many people’s lips was “what is the alternative?”

Answer: SquirrelMail.

Tags: big, cheddar, email, gathering, green, july, network, pretty, satellite, uplink