Well it was a nice trip to MIT. Here is the quick and dirty of it: Caveat: I missed the 2 first presentations. Damn traffic!
No new "WOW!" techniques were introduced. There were some decent data analysis but nothing that screamed it would flag a large volume of spam. The techniques that were introduced seemed to be pretty CPU intense to me. IBM looked to have a solid model but some parts of their system bothered me. Particularly the ability, at least in their flow chart, to allow people to train the global bayes DB. Lots of other good stats presented by numerous people. But that was a lot of the conference, analysis of data. Some ideas, IMHO, were ridiculous. Had these people posted their papers to spam-l they would have been nailed to a cross. I truly believe these people meant well, but had tunnel vision. "Regulation Instead of Stopping" presented by the guys from Georgia had me biting my lip! The idea that a 3rd party arbitrator should handle email requests set off so many red flags I thought I was going to faint. "Spam Kings" by Brian McWilliams. NICE book! I wrestled my free copy from the pile. Done reading it by Sunday. Very low on technical explanations, but good insight into spammers. "You've Got Jail. Some First Hand Observations from the Jeremy Jaynes Spam Trial" Jon Praed, Founding Partner, Internet Law Group. Stole the show! Could have listened to him all day! Finally a lawyer I actually like ;) Other legislative ideas seemed very flawed. VERY FLAWED. During the French presentation, they were explaining how much better their laws were and how they were working with EU and international groups. When someone asked them how many people had been prosecuted under this fantastic, almost 2 year old, law, and she answered "None" I think the entire auditorium whispered "NEXT!" "Using Lexigraphical Distancing to Block Spam" Jonathan Oliver, Director of Research, MailFrontier, Inc. This has seemed to be an interesting problem in a lot of the conferences. Private company says they got this technique to fight spam. But its private and can't go into specific detail on how they do it. And most likely it is patented. So its not as helpful to the community. Although I liked the idea, it also felt VERY intensive to me. I could see their DB getting big very fast. Big whitelist as well! Bayes, bayes, and more bayes. Everyone seemed to be talking about using bayes in different ways. I was SO HAPPY to see a few others felt the same way as I did. Bayes ROCKS for a private email account with a techie kind of owner. But as a more global/luser solution, it just isn't going to work well at all. And I don't see it scaling to something like AOL. (Not much does!) The best part of the trip were the side discussions. Finally meeting people face to face. Many people have the same thoughts ideas that I have had. For instance some of the best minds in antispam make ZERO dollars from fighting spam. I really found that interesting how many antis would like a full time career in it. This included the discussion of *hypothetically* going to the dark side. No one seriously considering it, but discussing about how we knew the weaknesses of the current anti-spam measures. Very interesting stuff. Frankly I think a day of round table discussion groups would have been even better then having presentations. Ideas were debated during dinner and that was a blast! Also January in Cambridge. I thought antis were smart? :) I've NEVER seen so many people sleep sitting up! Tai desserts? I'm still not sure what was in it, but I swear there is a squirrel somewhere who can't reproduce. "Is your saki hot?" is a good pickup line. The MIT train room, is more then a train room. Its Tetris! ;) As soon as it gets warmer, I owe someone up north a dinner! Warmer! Hopefully I can make the spam conference on the wrong coa.... I mean West coast. How about those Patriots!! Dynasty baby!! :-) Chris Santerre System Admin and SARE/SURBL Ninja http://www.rulesemporium.com http://www.surbl.org 'It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.' Charles Darwin
