spam problems solved

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624996.700

All of our spam problems are solved.

--
T R O Y P I G G I N S
e : usenet@piggo.com

Re: spam problems solved

On comp.mail.misc, in , "Troy Piggins" wrote:
>
>
> http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624996.700
>
> All of our spam problems are solved.
>

I'm laughing with you, Troy :-)



MORE than two-thirds of all email traffic is spam. But
the problem could be reduced if our computers work
together to control it.

[that bad?]

Today's anti-spam software-filters block messages that
have content such as advertising slogans or sexually
explicit words that is similar to that of spam emails
already received and identified. Therefore, they cannot
pick up new spam messages that are unlike any received
before.

[truly this person is ignorant -- SOME spam filters
work that way]


But anti-spam programs would be vastly more powerful if
they could pool information about spam, much as police in
different places share tips on known criminals. So says
computer scientist Vwani Roychowdhury of the University
of California, Los Angeles, who together with Oscar
Boykin of the University of Florida and other colleagues
has now proposed a practical way of doing it.

[that's already being done in many ways, and it hasn't
worked]

The team suggests adding software to standard email
programs that could orchestrate a behind-the-scenes
collaboration. When you receive a new message, your
anti-spam software would first check it against your own
database of known spam. If it doesn't find a match, it
would then forward the same query to a few randomly
selected email addresses in your contacts book. Similar
software on each computer that receives the query would
then check the message against its own spam database, and
so on, until a match is found, or the message is deemed
original.

[another variation on a failed strategy and more
security holes]


In this way, an entire social network of email users can
pool its experience of spam messages, greatly increasing
a spam filter's accuracy. In simulations, the researchers
found that if the network contained many users - hundreds
of thousands or millions - then it would detect almost
all spam emails, while only rarely misclassifying
legitimate messages.

"This is a really great idea," says computer scientist
David Hales of the University of Bologna in Italy. "It
turns the existing trusted social network into a kind of
extended spam filter."

?The trust within the social email network could be used
to foil spammers' attempts to sabotage the system from
within?

As Roychowdhury and his colleagues point out, the
inherent trust within the social email network can also
be used to foil spammers' attempts to sabotage the
system. A spammer might try to wreck the system from
within, posing as an ordinary user, but supplying false
information: listing legitimate emails as "known spam" in
their own email system, for example.
to foil spammers' attempts to sabotage the system from
within?

As Roychowdhury and his colleagues point out, the
inherent trust within the social email network can also
be used to foil spammers' attempts to sabotage the
system. A spammer might try to wreck the system from
within, posing as an ordinary user, but supplying false
information: listing legitimate emails as "known spam" in
their own email system, for example.

But the anti-spam software could be told to weight the
responses it gets, lending more weight to those returning
from its most trusted contacts - people to whom the
software's owner frequently sends emails etc. Spammers
give themselves away by their pattern of email usage
because they send a lot of emails but don't receive many.

The researchers aim to make their software available
soon, and hope that it will spread rapidly, as the
system's success depends on it having a large number of
users. "The main strength of the idea," says Boykin, "is
that essentially everyone on the planet would be
collaboratively filtering spam."

From issue 2499 of New Scientist magazine, 12 May 2005,
page 24



A truly stupid article by truly ignorant people.

Or people that don't really want the spam to stop.

Does that seem unreasonable? Ask yourself what the USPS
has done to stop junk mail?

----------------

I don't have any spam problems at all. It just doesn't
exist for me.

And I'm not even a 'scientist'.


:-)

Re: spam problems solved

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Beavis writes:

>
>
> A truly stupid article by truly ignorant people.

Don't be jealous, Beavis. Eventually, someone was bound to come up with
something even more stupid than what you blather forth.



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