Hackers to brainstorm on spam

Hacker's, once again show they are not all bad.

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Hackers are headed for MIT in Massachusetts this week to brainstorm about spam. One, for example, will present his research on a filter that he said can trap 99.9% of spam without a mistake. However, few of these filters have been commercialized and that gives advertisers the edge right now. Other hackers have been tracking spammers, studying their habits and working on filters. Some say the real heroes in the spam fight could be Internet service providers.

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Full article --> HERE


Cheers:

good idea to post that, hopefully people like this will be able to put a stop to the amount of spam that makes the 'net become so slow due to the wasted bandwidth it creates, this is bound to make a difference in the end

I know of 1 kind of anti spam that could work on almost all computers,
but it can ony stop the spam thats generated from a modified netsend
protocall. All you have to do is delete the netsend.com file and now you
can't sent OR receive spam that uses the modified netsend.com file.:shootem:

Hope they find a way to stop the Spam all I do is delete it and remove and unsubscrbibe to all I can Then I have learned a better way of doing it I WILL NOT BUY FROM A SPAMMER I WILL PAY MORE FROM ONE OF HIS COMPETITORS. If more would do it that way then the spammer would learn to Quit if they want to stay in Business.

While it's true that almost everybody hates spam, I was thinking about something while I was reading this. Whether we like it or not, spam is one of the things that is keeping the Internet working. Commercialism is everywhere. Like it or not. If spam was successfully blocked on a 99.9% basis, either one of two things would happen. One, the R&D people would come up with another way to distribute advertisments to users. Or the other. Companies would pull from the net. I know that's kinda drastic, but anything could happen. Could you imagine what would happen if companies would withdraw from the Internet? It would be interesting to watch. I know this sounds stupid, but this country revolves around the all-mighty dollar. That's it. Nothing else.

Just thinking back to what H-Z was saying. Without a database tally to back up my suspicions, i would bet that 99% of the actual spam does not come from anyone who actually supports the internet with advertising dollars: Even when you get a spam from someone like Delta (free tickets) Ramada (free 3-night vacation) or any other brick-and-mortar, i believe if you traced the "reply-to" address it would be some independent dude trying to snag some sales for those companies on a fee-per-referral basis. The loss of those responses to spam advertisement would not bog down the internet financial base or convince brick-and-mortars and other legitimate businesses to close down their domains. The "real" companies you get ads from are usually ones you have done business with such as Macromedia, Adobe, M$, Norton (and Norton even brands their own incoming mail at my box with a "Spam Alert" tag! - (huge belly laugh)- but even though spam is tagged by the SpamAlert you still have it plugging up your resources. Besides, i believe that most of the legitimate companies are fairly careful of their subscriber lists, especially if, when you "opt-in" to their announcements, you do not tick the box for any third-parties to have your address. Many spammers know how to code their headers to an ISP, and have it hit every mailbox on the server no matter what their real email name is. I have probably 75 IP's blocked, along with another 50 terms, and another dozen here waiting for me to post them to the blocking file. My state has a law against spammers with civil/criminal penalties, but how do you bust somebody operating from some offshore beachhouse? My vote is for the hackers to blast the spammers. I'd buy the product.

Check out this link--the news itself predates Christmas.

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html