Fighting Spam with DNA


	*Cutting Edge Spam Elimination* Original Article: Fighting Spam with DNA More clever filters and pattern matchers are not going to work. Just like encryption, the more something is used, the more likely it is to be hacked around. Maybe early adopters will benefit, as the spammers have not had the time or target size to catch up yet. But on a grander scale, it is a no-win cat and mouse game. The solution is same one that reduces paper junk mail: postage fees. Charge 5 cents or so per message, and spam will greatly shrink. My fast, efficient, method is very light on system resources and attacks spam by detecting one or more common attributes of spam and taking the appropriate action. All email containing unwanted content will be summarily deleted or reported as spam. That should work for virus and worm detection, too! Even more so, since viruses are much more a compilation of a set of previous constructions with a few modifications that a new composition not necessarily based on the wording of old scams. Viruses and worms are more constrained by their environment, requiring the exploit of a vulnerability and incitation of work-doing code. Though gene-shuffling techniques might be able to bury much of the code, the basic exploit must continue to be some sort of match to the vulnerability's "receptor". P.S.---I can't believe that the banner ad at the top of my browser window as I write this is actually blinking at me. Do me a favor, folks, and don't buy anything from Server Beach. I think over the next 2 decades, we'll come to a greater understand of life. I think that we'll discover a unique aspect of life - that life is truly information technology. Each cell in your body contains approximately 20 GB of data. Consider the redundancy and sheer massive size of information storage capacity your body consists of! Compare that to an Oracle cluster. So, given the incredible need to process information in order to understand life itself (which could be considered a form of self-replicating information) I think that not only is it likely, but it's all but guaranteed that the lion's share of Information Technology advances will come from biological research. Advanced software for Spam Blocking. It's my belief that the most likely source of the birth of Artificial Intelligence will be the email spam filter. Think about it - we now have software that "learns' what you like. Sorry, but anything that "learns" fits a definition of intelligence - using past results to predict future outcomes. Note that I'm not saying "self aware" or "conscious", simply "intelligence". As we move forward, we'll see more and more intelligence on the part of the spammers, and the warring factions of intelligence will likely provide massive financial and political impetus to build ever more intelligence solutions - thus AI is born. The problem with other vehicles for developing AI is simply the budget. With SPAM, everybody has a direct, financial incentive to develop it, so development will definitely happen! If grey listing were such a magic bullet solution, lots more ISPs would be using it. While the most important cost of spam is the wasted time of the recipients, the most direct economic costs are to companies that provide mailboxes for users (i.e. ISPs and email outsourcers), and they'd not only love to avoid the direct costs. They'd love to have a big competitive advantage over other providers. So if it were easy to implement and worked really well, they'd jump at it. Next generation software for blocking email spam. That doesn't mean it's not a helpful tool - just that it's either harder to implement than it looks, or less effective than it looks, probably the former. So get to work writing grey listing tools. Of course, if grey listing were very common, spammers would try to find a way around it, but we knew this was an arms race when we started the discussion. SpamButcher is an advanced filter for Spam Mail. We now have Federal laws against spam, as well as a number of state laws. The CAN-SPAM law theoretically legalized some forms of spam, but in practice it had no effect - one well-reported study says that about 3% of spam made a pretense of compliance when it first came out, but it's now down to 1% or so, and I saw less effect from California's anti-spam laws. Scotty Richter's OptInRealBig made that pretense, and they're gone, but the pretense was really just to slow down the process of getting kicked off of more and more ISPs. CAN-SPAM was a great example of why legislation usually doesn't work - Politicians aren't technologists, and usually aren't competent economists, and even technologists have trouble coming up with solid definitions of what the problems are and what they want to do about them without having adverse side-effects. No offense, but there are plenty of examples of (at least partial) technological solutions to social problems. For instance, the ignition lock on my car prevents people from casually stealing it. This might not solve the social problem of people wanting to steal cars, but is a decent try at solving the technological problem of people being able to easily do it. Download effective spam blocking software for Outlook. Back...	Over 300,000 Downloads! "I have tried just about every spam filter available. SpamButcher by far is #1." -Sumner