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Matts (1087)
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I work for MessageLabs [messagelabs.com] in Toronto, ON, Canada. I write spam filters, MTA software, high performance network software, string matching algorithms, and other cool stuff mostly in Perl and C.
Spam Forum
This week I attended the Washington FTC Spam Forum. I spoke on a panel (I talked about the problem of open proxies) on the first day, and then just watched and listened on the following days.
It was extremely useful for me from a purely networking perspective, to meet up with other anti-spam people and companies and organisations. I managed to form some fairly close relationships with anti-spammers like Alan Murphy (being sued right now for his relationship with spamhaus) and Clifton Royston (operates Hawaiian ISP LavaNet). Pretty much everyone on the "anti" side of things is extremely friendly and welcoming (there are some odd characters in the same way there are in the whole Perl world).
Some of the more interesting things to come out of the conference:
Dr Bill Hanncock from Cable & Wireless gave a fantastic talk about the scary future of spam - where spammers will be controlling zombie networks in exactly the same way that IRC attackers do now to send their spew. That's already started to some degree (see Jeem and Sobig viruses).
Lots of talk about legislation. This is a tough one because while I think legislation against spam is important, I also know it's going to have net zero effect on the volumes in the long term. The problem with current US legislation is that it enforces only forged data and misleading information, which is not the problem with spam.
The problem (as all the anti-spammers told people over and over again) with spam is the volume and the lack of relationship between the sender and recipient (i.e. opt-in vs opt-out). Period. Despite what the press are reporting about the conference (that we apparently don't all agree on a definition of spam) all the anti-spammers agreed that this is the problem, not the forgeries. Even Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo agreed. That's the biggest victory of this conference. Hopefully we can get the US lawmakers to see that, despite the DMA's lobbying. The EU law already has this right at least.
As far as technology goes there were no great leaps forward at this conference. But that's not what it was about. For the most part technology has already solved the spam problem (install SpamAssassin and say goodbye to 99% of your spam problem), it's just a matter of getting people to sit up and notice. And I think that's something we achieved.
In other news I just realised I haven't written any perl for 2 weeks. I just sat down and wrote:
sub run {
And then sat there staring at it trying to figure out if that was valid or not. Shudder.
--Larry Wall in stab.c from the perl source code
volume (Score:2, Funny)
Re:volume (Score:3, Informative)
The panel that talked about this was the "Economics of Spam" panel. They mostly talked about how a large percentage of the budget of an ISP now goes into fighting spam, and that gets reflected directly in your internet bill.
Re:volume (Score:2)
Isn't the argument not so much about bandwidth as about spam requiring people to have faster hardware, more storage, etc., for their mail servers (and thus greater expenses) than they would otherwise?
Re:volume (Score:2)
That translates directly into costs in terms of faster hardware, more storage, more administrators, etc.
jeem (Score:1)
Re:jeem (Score:2)
Re:jeem (Score:1)
atrophied perl (Score:1)
Lavanet (Score:2)
--Nat
(we have operatives everywhere)