My G+ Profile
« October 15, 2004 | Main | October 20, 2004 »
October 18, 2004
An Idea for Spam
In the shower after my walk tonight, I was thinking about Google's page rank and that Spam is actually the opposite problem. The more people "paying attention" to a particular email message, the more likely it is Spam. So, here's the idea: strip off the headers and create an MD5 hash of the body. Put that in an associative array associated with a count. Everytime someone sees the email, increment the count. Any message with a count over 1000 is likely Spam (or a big mailing list). You could build this as a module in SpamAssassin and have a central clearing house that SpamAssassin uses. A test and increment function would result in a count being incremented and returned in a single call.
So someone has to have already tried this or determined why its a dumb idea. Which is it? One reason it might not work is that Spammer could individualize each message in a tiny way so that the hash broke.
Update: Pat Ekman writes to say that this is essentially what the Vipal's Razor module for SpamAssassin does. Very good. Does anyone care to comment on how well it works?
07:07 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Calendaring Standards and Tools
Say you wanted to do calendaring on campus and between campuses of a multicampus university. Suppose that each of these organizations had their own technology stacks and standards. How would you do it?
At the simplest level, just saying "everyone publish all relevant campus calendars in the iCalendar format" would allow anyone with an iCalendar compatible browser to subscribe to the calendars. Of course, by publish, I mean "make available via an HTTP GET." As a Mac user, I can see immediate value in this. What about Outlook users? Does Outlook have the ability to subscribe to iCalendar formated calendars delivered via HTTP?
Going beyond just one way communication of calendaring, what else would you do? Are there open standards for creating calendars for meetings? How are they supported? I'm curious how hard it would be, for example, to allow individual instructors to create course calendars in an open system. I've been doing this for sometime using iCal (on the Mac) and a php iCalendar reader.
I'd like your help putting together a resources I could share with a group of CIOs and IT managers on this problem. I've created a page on my Wiki and if you've got an idea, a standard, a case study, or a question, please feel free to leave it there.