Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Spam: Bayesian Throttling. The thing about spam classifiers is, they make mistakes some times.  The good ones, like SpamBayes, don't make all that many mistakes.  But when you're making a back-end spam solution, you really can't afford to have any rejected emails.  You have to let everything through.  It has to let the user make the final decision. So where can the mostly accurate nature of a Bayesian classifier help us out? We can use it to throttle back spam from a given source. Most emails come routed to us through servers, but increasingly, we are receiving emails directly from the servers that are the culprits.  It's pretty straightforward to use Bayesian classification on the emails that are coming in; when we see the spam percentage is getting high from a given server, we throttle back substantially on what we'll allow that server to send us.  That way we can make it inefficient to be a target. If the big services could do this, then we could make pretty good headway against spam.  It should be relatively simple to bind it into the various server environments. 7:57:37 PM    comment []

Containment Strategy. Wake up...it's not about the 16 words.  You will note that the administration has gone fairly nuts over them -- what they're doing (and what is working) is trying to shift attention from everything else that was said about WMD.  It's funny though -- I don't really know what I have available to me that would show the timeline of what administration officials have really been saying over the past year.  Without a doubt, Bush and his team stressed and sought to create a substantial link between Iraq and WMD.  Without a doubt, they also attempted to create the same link with regards to terrorism.  There is little question that they did this to advance their policies in the area, and did it with the intention of gaining the support of the congress. That means there are a couple of questions.  First, is it legal?  The answer there is, probably.  I think they were very careful not to lie about anything.  So we really don't have much that's illegal going on.  It is possible that the President truly did believe that Iraq represented an imminent danger to the US.  It's highly unlikely that the personnel surrounding the Prez truly thought so.  Iraq was invaded to further policy goals.  That is not necessarily a bad thing to do, in and of itself.  Making use of the military to achieve effects in the Middle East is a legitimate use of force.  The constitution does require that the Congress assent, and in a back-handed, puzzled sort of way, it did. If we pull back from the strict focus of legality, we get into a grayer area.  Did the Administration deliberately mislead the Congress, and hence the American people?  It's hard to say.  The problem is that we don't truly know what they were thinking, in the year after 9/11.  It's clear that from day one, after 9/11, there were those who wanted to use it as an opportunity to move against Iraq, and perhaps they truly believed that Iraq was the root of evil.  As a civilized society we need to have more than supposition, though.  Breaking the covenant of pre-emption needs to be done for the right reasons, every time.  You can't screw around with that kind of thing and still consider yourself to be the good guy. And that's what this is ultimately about.  We need to be damn sure that whenever we use force, we're doing it for the right reasons, and that we truly are the "good guy".  Invading Iraq was probably the right thing to do, on some levels.  Setting it up via the mechanism of a lie or an exaggeration was definitely not.  Our credibility in front of the world is substantially lessened.  A good showing in the conversion of Iraq to a modern democracy isn't going to rebuild that credibility.  The short attention span possessed by the American Public doesn't seem to be shared by the rest of world, who put this episode squarely into the category of "what's wrong with America".  We'll pay a price eventually. 7:47:34 PM    comment []