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Monday, February 10, 2003 |
I know I'm late, I know Julio mentioned this to me months ago (that's why it was in my check list), but if you have not checked out O'reily's Safari yet, you should...
I guess I am finally caught up with things, being free from the slavery of work and all... He.
10:26:04 PM 
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Tangled Up in Spam
by James GleickI know what your in-box looks like, and it isn't pretty. It looks like mine: a babble of come-ons and lies from hucksters and con artists.
No, my inbox doesn't look anything like Mr. Gleick describes... I guess he needs to switch. Seriously, what a terrible article! He thinks the techniques against Spam are failing because he doesn't use them right! A choice quote: A human being, looking at a sender called ''Ug56miZ5w@msn.com,'' can guess it's not a real person. Looking at subjects like ''Do your butt, hips and thighs embarrass you'' and ''My husband's not home, come and have me!'' and ''Make money fast'' (yes, this ancient artifact still makes the rounds), a human being knows enough to press the delete key. Why can't a computer be that smart? My computer is that smart! And if Mr. Gleick computer isn't is because he hasn't tried hard enough. I said it before: Spam is a solved problem, so are virii. We just need Users and Operating Systems that take these issues seriously. Virii are a bigger problem because even if one gets through is a big problem. Getting a couple of Spams a day, as I am now, is not big deal. Mr. Gleick fails to understand this
After weeks of training, my spam filter didn't see a problem with a letter titled ''See what hot girlz do behind closed doors!'' To a wary human, just the word ''girlz'' would be a giveaway. The filter didn't suspect anything unwelcome about a letter from Ivanna Come titled Obscene Facial Pictures. You can't say these spammers are brilliantly concealing their intentions. A human being gets the point. Yet none of these words, singly or in combination, triggered the alarm in my filtering software. The filter still thought this might be legitimate e-mail:
False negatives are not a problem, if they are few. False positive are a problem but not as big as they want us to think. My Spam filter doesn't touch messages from people in my address book, the people I want to converse with. Only unknown senders are candidates for filtering, if a few of these get deleted it isn't a big deal, unless you think every piece of email is guarantee to be delivered and read! Nothing important can be trusted to email. If you send your resume through email (or fax) you should call to see if it got through okey... Email is not FedEx, it doesn't keep much track, you have to do that your self.James Gleick is an intelligent guy and a good writer, clearly he dropped the ball on this one, he didn't talk with the right people, he didn't do enough research. I hope someone close to him can hammer the point home...
3:12:43 PM
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Papa Doc: "My laptop was stolen this morning. Pretty much my whole life was on it. I'm not even sure what to do next, other than go get a new pair of glasses, because they're gone too. Gotta restart somewhere." [Scripting News] Ouch! I'm sorry, Doc, that is one of the worse experiences possible... I hope you get it back!
2:58:59 PM
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© Copyleft 2005 Alfredo Octavio.
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