Monday 10 February 2003

Spambashing I've been using Apple OS X e-mail client for some months now and I'm very happy with it's spam-filtering technology. However, Mike Scott, AKA Dr Plokta has not had as pleasant an experience. I've been changing my spam filtering techniques again. Once upon a time, I set up SpamAssassin on my Unix account at plokta.com, with some procmail configuration to filter messages through it appropriately. And it mostly worked, with some false negatives (spam marked as clean) and a few false positives (which are more serious), but I couldn't trust it to delete spam unseen, just to let me filter it to a different mailbox for manual inspection. It took more memory than my quota allowed, and if the reaper (running every thirty seconds) happened to run while it was filtering a message, it was killed and the message wasn't filtered -- but procmail let me run it again if it failed the first time, which fixed that. Then the influential essay A Plan for Spam was published, outlining a plan for building a learning filter using a Bayesian algorithm (which apparently later turned out not to actually be Bayesian). It promised better detection rates than SpamAssassin. So I installed SpamOracle in the shell account, and set to training it. It seemed to work rather better than SpamAssassin, but it was difficult to continue to train it because I was reading my email... [Ask Dr Plokta] 11:44:29 AM    comment []  Google It!

New wireless 11g 'standard' ends in tears If it hasn't done so already, Apple is about to start shipping its new 17" Powerbook G4 with built in Airport Extreme. But has the company made a strategic mistake? The Register seems to think so in this article. Apparently, a lot of manufacturers started shipping products based on draft standards. With the earlier equipment based on the 802.11b standard, users could check for Wi-Fi certification to ensure the kit they were buying was compatible with everyone else's. That's not the case here. 10:27:07 AM    comment []  Google It!

Remember the brou-ha-ha when IOL No Limits imposed limits on the amount users could download? Well apparently NTL UK has tried the same thing with predictable results. Anger over broadband limits. Users vent their fury as it emerges cable company NTL is imposing one gigabyte per day download limits on its broadband service. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition] 12:52:36 AM    comment []

There's a lot of noise made about the potential dangers of genetically modified organisms, so it's good to see the other point of view being put. GM Crops Perform Far Better in Third World Than U.S. [Scientific American] 12:50:21 AM    comment []

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