Liudvikas Bukys

David Berlind‘s

JamSpam.org

Cringely: Collateral Damage:
Why Most Internet Advertising Doesn’t Work and What Little Does Work Is Killing Us:

“ At the same time that the sheer volume of spam is clogging networks and demanding server upgrades to handle all the sludge, crude anti-spam techniques are making our Internet communications less effective and less efficient. We are both drowning in spam and trying to stop it by hitting ourselves in the head. But wait, there’s more! Politicians, who think their job is to make laws that tell us when to breathe, now want to make spam illegal, which might be nice if it didn’t at the same time trample on the U.S. Constitution. One minute spam will be illegal and the next minute it will be against the law to say vice president Dick Cheney really ought to lose a little weight. Killing spam isn’t worth the loss of free speech, at least not to me.”

Antivirus firm joins war on spam:
“The software will use a scientific method known as heuristics, which calculates the probability that a particular e-mail is spam by examining a pattern of characteristics in the message.” !

Tim Bray tries OS X “Mail.app” and Mozilla 1.3beta mail filters, and concludes that this easy availability of
good (learning) mail filters may represent a
Spam Inflection Point.

Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG): IRTF Charter:

The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) focuses on the problem of unwanted email messages, loosely referred to as spam. The scale, growth, and effect of spam on the Internet have generated considerable interest in addressing this problem. Once considered a nuisance, spam has grown to account for a large percentage of the mail volume on the Internet. This unwanted traffic stands to affect local networks, the infrastructure, and the way that people use email.

The definition of spam messages is not clear and is not consistent across different individuals or organizations. Therefore, we generalize the problem into “consent-based communication”. This means that an individual or organization should be able to express consent or lack of consent for certain communication and have the architecture support those desires. Expressing consent is more straightforward on an individual basis; as the solution is moved closer to the source, it is more difficult to express a policy that satisfies all downstream receivers. The research group will investigate the feasibility of: (1) a single architecture that supports this and (2) a framework that allows different systems to be plugged in to provide different pieces of the solution.

Network World Fusion article

Wired News article

Spammers hiding behind students
“University networks already stressed by file-sharing programs, viruses and hackers now face a new threat: students who sublet their network access to spammers for as little as $20 per month.”

Microsoft Research:
The Penny Black Project
“The introduction of the Penny Black stamp played an important role in the reform of the British Postal System during the 1830’s. Before this time, postage fees were based on weight and on distance involved. Postage had to be calculated for each letter, and was typically paid by the addressee. The introduction of the Penny Black shifted the cost of postage to the sender and eliminated the complexity of postage computation by requiring a uniform, low rate. … The Penny Black project is investigating several techniques to reduce spam by making the sender pay. We’re considering several currencies for payment: CPU cycles, memory cycles, Turing tests (proof that a human was involved), and plain old cash. There are multiple system organizations that can support this: senders can pre-compute the appropriate function, tied to a particular message; senders can come up with the payment in response to a challenge after they’ve submitted their message; senders can acquire a ticket pre-authorizing the message. Recipients would aggressively white-list good senders.”

Jon Udell doesn’t like
James Gleick’s article on spam.
He does think that 2003 will be the year of anti-spam initiatives. (I concur.)
Regarding identity guarantees, and new “jump through this hoop
before you can talk to me” systems, don’t forget his previous important statement, “If we rule out spontaneous association then we will not have defeated the spammers.
They will have defeated us.”

James Gleick, New York Times Magazine:
Tangled Up In Spam:

As remote as an effective solution seems, the spam problem might not be so intractable after all. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 made it illegal to send unsolicited faxes; that law passed with strong backing from manufacturers of fax machines. It should be extended to include unsolicited bulk e-mail.

For free-speech reasons, any legislation should avoid considering e-mail’s content; trying to define key words like ”commercial” and ”pornographic” only leads to trouble. And it isn’t necessary. For that matter, even short of outlawing spam, two simple measures might be enough to stem the tide:

1. Forging Internet headers should be made illegal. The system depends on accurate information about senders and servers and relays; no one needs a right to falsify this information.
2. Unsolicited bulk mail should carry a mandatory tag. That alone would put consumers back in control; all the complex technological challenge of identifying the spam would vanish.

MPs call for anti-spam rethink. BBC Feb 10 2003 5:40AM ET [Moreover – Tech latest]