Re: Warning: Trolling for Dollars, Scammers hard at work {was: forged Failure Notice}

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Norman Bauman  on Fri, 18 Jul 2003
12:46:16 -0400


> Right, one of the developers has a web site, which I read with interest,
> and he claimed it worked very well (for him, anyway).

PolarBar Mailer has had it for about 4 months now (v1.25a is current). I
haven't read one complaint -- and there have been hundreds of msgs about it on
the PBM maillist. It just plain works.

> Unfortunately there are workarounds for spammers -- some spam doesn't have
> any text in the message, just an html link.

Then Bayesian looks at the headers. If you add such msgs to your personal
corpus as "bad", Bayesian flags them as spam. Doesn't miss a single one. The
clever ones that slip through (once! until your re-mark them "bad") are the
very literate ones that come on like personal msgs. But they pose a problem
for spammers, because they don't sell product very well -- I've seen some
experimental "spams" that don't try to sell anything, but simply seem to be
testing the various filtration systems.

> They told me
> that they could distinguish some concepts which were closely associated
> with key words, especially if they were legal terms of art. For example, if
> a lawyer had a case of a child injured on monkey bars, it was easy to go to
> Lexis and find all the previous cases involving monkey bars. Or you could
> easily find a name. But you couldn't easily find concepts.... [snip snip snip]

Great stuff. Absolutely true, and one of the great shortcomings of search
engines. The idea that you just need to find the right combination of keywords
is sometimes sheer bunk: there just isn't any telling combination that points
to a wierd idea. For example, suppose I'm trying to find a browser-like
program that will read HTML files **locally**, and perform just like a browser,
but will ignore all the security precautions embedded in regular browsers
(because you're only using it locally), e.g. will launch say XyWrite on the
local computer (something that is strictly forbidden to an Internet browser --
I mean, a remote webpage that you are reading is not allowed to launch a
program on your computer, period -- that would be a huge security hole -- the
remote page could issue a local instruction to RMDIR "C:\%WINDIR%" /S /Q and
you'd be history). I can find any number of references to browser, local,
dedicated, security, etc etc etc -- but just try to find the concept!

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
-----------------------------