Brute force approach to beating the current generation of spam filtering tools [Slashdot]. This guy tweaked an email message, sent it to himself, tweaked again and repeated thousands of times until he was able to bypass the spam filters. Then he put his newly acquired filter bypassing technique into a script that could take any message and modify it to allow safe passage right into email inboxes everywhere. The arms race continues.

I think there is really something to be said for the spam arms race. People are already starting to put machine learning techniques to use in both the filtering and bypassing sides of the fence. The measure, counter-measure tennis match may ultimately result in some worthwhile developments in software tools that make use of these techniques. Not unlike the Cold War, which caused huge technological investment and innovation in the name of defense, spam may end up doing the same. 9:50:03 AM    comment []