""Priscilla Oppenheimer"" wrote in message [EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]... > This discussion could tie into the "New Technologies" thread! Technologies > that do a better job of protecting users from viruses could be big. And an > even harder problem is protecing us from spam. None of the solutions to that > problem work very well yet. The do-gooders that black-list e-mail servers do > more harm than good. The mail applications that try to apply artificial > intelligence to the problem show some promise, but don't work very well yet.
the fundamental problem is determining what is spam and what is not. today's approach is one of examining content, matching keywords against "spam" words. for example "mortgage" or "enlarge" or the many variants that would lead one to p..o..r..n sites. as an aside, when warned that Groupstudy was the source of so much spam, I set up a special e-mail address that is advertised only to Groupstudy. I have yet ( knock on wood ) to receive a single spam message on that account. On the other hand, my primary account is now getting tons of spam, and I am now convinced this is the direct result of my using that e-mail address as the contact point for my web domain. forget hotmail. the folks there have demonstrated no interest at all in solving the spam problem. yahoo mail does a far better job of spam filtering. I have also notied that every ISP I have ever contacted about spam claims that the headers are forged, and that the spam did not originate from their servers. I still say the "solution" is to charge 10 cents for every e-mail sent out over a certain threshold - say 2000 per month. ISP people I have talked to about this say this would be impossible to track and enforce. so in the end, it is left to the recipient to do all the work. > Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are very smart people, but when they champion > software that thinks it's smarter than the user, most users just get > annoyed. ;-) I disagree with your implication here. The whole point of the PC revolution was to make computing easy for the end user. I think apple and eventually mircrosoft have done wonderful things in that respect. however, as with anything else, the law of unintended consequences comes into play. they made it easy for businesses to develope templates to make employees more effective in their work. the unintended consequence is they made it easy for malicious people to use those tools to create maco viruses. they made it easy for you and I to send dfocumnets or pictures to our friends and relatives, and for those people to pen the docs and see the content. the unintended consequence is that they made it easy for malicious people to spread their wickedness. to bring this back into the Cisco realm, Cisco NBAR ( network based application recognition ) I believe was intended to provide another dimension to the QoS classification process. now it can also be used as a filter against certain virus / macro virus attacks. > > Priscilla > > > Howard C. Berkowitz wrote: > > > > At 6:09 PM +0000 1/3/03, Priscilla Oppenheimer wrote: > > >Hopefully you trained her not to open attachemnts in the > > future unless she > > >knows the sender and is expecting an attachment from that > > sender. It's an > > >obvious point, but nobody had brought it up yet! :-) > > > > > >Priscilla > > > > May all such attackers get a personalized virus. There's a > > wide > > range of choices of gastrointestinal ones. Somehow, such > > people > > remind me of a baby's alimentary tract: a loud voice at one end > > and > > no sense of responsibility at the other. Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=60233&t=60114 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
