The first (annual?) spam conference took place this month at MIT in Cambridge, MA. Most of it was about current spam filtering technology... Bayesian filtering, and training your spam filter. A Bayesian filter trained on its errors quickly reaches > 99.8% accuracy. Training needs to be on non-spam as well as on spam.
One of the speakers was a lawyer from Virginia who has sued and won many cases against spammers. Outlawing spam has been the topic here on several occasions, and perhaps some would be interested to know that spam is illegal in all 50 States... under Common Law (trespass of chattel) if not under a specific anti-spam law such as the well-known statutes of Virginia and Washington. Unfortunately, the full text of the presenatations isn't available, but abstracts are here, http://spamconference.org/abstracts.txt and if you have capability of RealPlayer at 80Kbps, you can see the entire conference ( http://spamconference.org/webcast.html ). The spam lawyer, Jon Praed of the Internet Law Group, is in Session 4. Skip ahead to minute 34. Actually, the whole conference is quite interesting if you're into battling spam, albeit rather time consuming. -- Steve Ackman http://twoloonscoffee.com (Need green beans?) http://twovoyagers.com (glass, linux & other stuff)
