Paul Graham: A Plan for Spam: “I think we will be able to solve the problem with fairly simple algorithms. In fact, I’ve found that you can filter present-day spam acceptably well using nothing more than a Bayesian combination of the spam probabilities of individual words. Using a slightly tweaked (as described below) Bayesian filter, we now miss only 5 per 1000 spams, with 0 false positives.”
IWT Bans RIAA From Accessing Its Network: “Information Wave Technologies has announced it will actively deny the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) from accessing the contents of its network. Earlier this year, the RIAA announced its new plan to access computers without owner’s consent for the sake of protecting its assets. Information Wave believes this policy puts its customers at risk of unintentional damage, corporate espionage, and invasion of privacy to say the least.”
Darwin Magazine: Who Should Own What? Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. The reality now is that every new innovation has got to not only fund a development cycle and fund a marketing cycle, it’s got to fund a legal cycle during which you go into court and demonstrate that your new technology should be allowed in the innovative system. [Tomalak’s Realm]
Amy Wohl: “So far, Sun has never been a smart and persistent seller of software. Scott has, in fact, been their own worst enemy, telling me on many occasions that software exists for the purpose of selling hardware. Maybe he’s now changed his mind. That would be a good first step.” 
[Scripting News]
VNUnet: SnoSoft faces DMCA breach: Citing breach of the DMCA and Computer Fraud Abuse Act as grounds for attack, HP is threatening to sue security researcher SnoSoft for publishing an exploit for a vulnerability in HP’s Tru64 Unix operating system.
Back to School: “Now let’s move on to the other criminally dumb figure in this fiasco. That Yale Web site was designed by a self-promoting Yale sophomore who brags that he has worked for Microsoft since he was 14. He’s the genius who decided that birth dates and Social Security numbers would make the perfect passwords because of their “personally identifiable nature,” according to the Yale Daily News, the student newspaper that broke the story late last month before it was picked up by The Washington Post and the wire services…. Outside audits of security still matter, too. Yale actually has an Information Security Office that investigates cases such as identity theft - but apparently no one talked to the office until after the site had been up for six months and had already been hacked. “
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