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It's been over a week since McColo's operations had its plug pulled, and our spam volumes are still way down (I still haven't figured out a way to take credit for that). On average, it is down by around 40-50%. The last couple of days have
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A few months ago, Yahoo rebuffed Microsoft's attempt to purchase it. Now, this morning, I come across the following story : Now that quasi-white knight Google is out of the picture , Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang has some advice for
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In an ideal world, all you would really need in order to do spam filtering is one filter - this filter would be able to do everything. It would catch spam, keep the obvious stuff out of the network and let all of the good mail through. In the real
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We're at the state now where the problem of spam has grown to the point that it threatens to ruin the Internet. Spammers and their botnets spew out piles of mail, infect computers worldwide, sign up for free web accounts, create landing pages in
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One of the ideas that floats around in my head from time to time is that of automation vs human analysis - which works better to fight spam? In an ideal world, machines would be able to generate spam rules to fight spam and humans would be taken
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Spamwars reports that the SANS Internet Storm Center have reported a number of domain names containing the word "gustav" are being registered. In case you are unaware, Hurricane Gustav is the latest hurricane that threatens to pummel the
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I have a Windows Live Space blog that I update somewhat less frequently than I update this one. I rarely get comments on that one, either. But once in a while I do. It's linked to my Hotmail account which I have had for years. I rarely
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Following on from my previous post on my comments on Mark Risher of Yahoo, with whom there was a user interview, I'd like to respond to a couple more of his responses to users. Mindy: What are you recommendations for handling blocks due to complaint volume,
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A reader sent me a link to a list of points that make Gmail really great. I'm not sure whether or not these points are enough to convince me that Gmail is fantastic, but I admit that it does do some things well (Hotmail does a few things well, also).
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Over the past couple of weeks, I have seen a particular spam pattern hitting my Yahoo inbox. Krissy@alleninfo013.info Elodia@dataex621.info In other words, it follows the regular expression: [A-Z][a-z]+\@[a-z]+\d{3}\.info For those of you who can't read
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About 15 months ago I started work on a project that measures our spam effectiveness. Just last week the first part of it finally went live, end-to-end. It was a long time coming but we finally got it done. If you're wondering what took
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I've blogged about broken CAPTCHA's in the past, but I thought I'd touch on it again. Websense is reporting on their discovery that a new botnet is breaking Hotmail's CAPTCHA in order to send out spam. It really is a nice report and demonstrates
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Here's an article from the March 31, 2008 issue of Investors Business Daily: About half of all hacker attacks originate from the .edu domain used by colleges, according to data recently compiled by network security experts at Microsoft. The software
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One of my favorite fiction writers is Michael Crichton. His books often center around technology and how when humans try to control or influence the physical environment, things go awry. In Jurassic Park, humans recreated dinosaurs and attempted
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Alleged spammer Robert Soloway's trial will start next month in Seattle. From Computerworld : Soloway was arrested in May and charged with sending out tens of millions of unsolicited messages; so many, in fact, that investigators called him the "Spam
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