iDunzo.com

As any grizzled football coach will tell you, good defense beats a good offense but that wisdom doesn’t apply to the realm of spam, where porn peddlers and Nigerian hucksters regularly outwit the latest filtering software.

The most obvious problem is that it’s simply not possible to update filtering software frequently enough to catch all of the spammers’ assorted innovations.

Techniques like disguising unsolicited messages by replacing the “i” in Viagra with a “1″ or using images in lieu of text, for example drive me crazy.

At the same time, an overly aggressive approach can be disastrous, trapping legitimate email as false positives which also sucks.

One possible route to improvement: Instead of focusing on suspicious content, consider the trustworthiness of the sources.

Oscar Boykin, a computer engineering professor at the University of Florida, suggests that filters would work better with more widespread use of authentication systems, which make it harder for spammers to forge source addresses.

Emerging standards like Sender ID and DomainKeys, for instance, verify that a message’s sender and domain are legit.

Improved computer security would also help, since many illicit messages are sent from computers infected with malware. Here’s some additional food for thought on the issue of spam.

There’s egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam;

So what do you think? Could we do the egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam then?

Urgghh! What do you mean ‘Urgghh’? I don’t like spam!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Food, Technology, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.