Paul: Stilgar, do we have backscatter?
Stilgar: Usul, we have backscatter the likes of which God himself has never seen!
July 2006 Archives
Goodbye catch-all
14 July 2006 - 12:32 PM | PermalinkContinue reading 'Goodbye catch-all'
Hanlon's Razor
06 July 2006 - 02:34 PM | PermalinkPrompted by a message from a researcher at NCFTA, I took another look at the mysterious 'poison spams' that I've been receiving. It turns out that they're not part of some fiendish plot to poison Bayesian filters after all. They're just another spammer misconfiguration.
Continue reading 'Hanlon's Razor'
Image-based spam
04 July 2006 - 12:08 PM | PermalinkVarious news articles recently have called attention to the increased use of image-based spam, in which the entire 'payload' of the spam message is carried as an embedded JPEG or GIF image. Because the spam contains only a minimum of text. there's little for keyword-based or Bayesian filters to use to identify the spam. Because the spammers generate the images 'on-the-fly', varying the image slightly each time, even the encoded representation of the image tends not to contain repetitive patterns that can easily be filtered.
Continue reading 'Image-based spam'