14 June 2005
Worse Than Spam?
Challenge-and-response systems pose particular problems for newsletters and listservs. These systems try to cut down on fraudulent e-mail by not delivering a message until the sender replies to a confirmation e-mail sent by the intended recipient's ISP or e-mail host.
"Declan McCullagh of Politech and Dave Farber of Interesting-People can't do 100 challenge-responses a day," said Cohn. "That, as a solution, doesn't scale."
It would be wrong to call Cohn soft on spam. While in private practice she sued a spammer and won a court injunction and $60,000. And her employer uses antispam technology on its own servers.
The difference, according to Cohn, is that the SpamAssassin software EFF uses doesn't block spam, it simply rates each e-mail. Staffers then set up their e-mail clients to separate messages into different inboxes. This keeps the main e-mail boxes free of spam, but allows individuals to check the spam folder occasionally to see if a legitimate e-mail was incorrectly tagged as junk.
Many in the technology industry think that only better technology can stop the spam deluge.
"The only people who can stop spammers are other technologists," said trimMail's Gillette.
The most promising new approach is better filters that use Bayesian algorithms to tag spam automatically and move it into a spam folder. The algorithms look at the body and header of an e-mail and judge from past experience whether an incoming message is junk. Users then train the algorithm, by moving misclassified e-mail from one e-mail folder to another.
Paul Graham, who many credit for applying Bayesian filtering to the spam problem, is ecstatic at the power of the new filters.
"I don't need blacklists," said Graham. "My own software is better than I am at deciding what is spam and what is not."
Several open-source and commercial products, such as SpamBayes and Spam Bully, already use Bayesian filtering.
The ACLU's Johnson hopes the new technology will head off the worst of the antispam legislation.
"Why do we want to start imposing a different world for the Internet than we have in the real world?" asked Johnson.
"Let the marketplace handle spam," he said. "When Congress wants to show they are doing something about an issue, they often screw it up."
"Declan McCullagh of Politech and Dave Farber of Interesting-People can't do 100 challenge-responses a day," said Cohn. "That, as a solution, doesn't scale."
It would be wrong to call Cohn soft on spam. While in private practice she sued a spammer and won a court injunction and $60,000. And her employer uses antispam technology on its own servers.
The difference, according to Cohn, is that the SpamAssassin software EFF uses doesn't block spam, it simply rates each e-mail. Staffers then set up their e-mail clients to separate messages into different inboxes. This keeps the main e-mail boxes free of spam, but allows individuals to check the spam folder occasionally to see if a legitimate e-mail was incorrectly tagged as junk.
Many in the technology industry think that only better technology can stop the spam deluge.
"The only people who can stop spammers are other technologists," said trimMail's Gillette.
The most promising new approach is better filters that use Bayesian algorithms to tag spam automatically and move it into a spam folder. The algorithms look at the body and header of an e-mail and judge from past experience whether an incoming message is junk. Users then train the algorithm, by moving misclassified e-mail from one e-mail folder to another.
Paul Graham, who many credit for applying Bayesian filtering to the spam problem, is ecstatic at the power of the new filters.
"I don't need blacklists," said Graham. "My own software is better than I am at deciding what is spam and what is not."
Several open-source and commercial products, such as SpamBayes and Spam Bully, already use Bayesian filtering.
The ACLU's Johnson hopes the new technology will head off the worst of the antispam legislation.
"Why do we want to start imposing a different world for the Internet than we have in the real world?" asked Johnson.
"Let the marketplace handle spam," he said. "When Congress wants to show they are doing something about an issue, they often screw it up."
# posted by vdodon @ 03:50 
