First the image spam was coming through, then penny stocks, now we’re back to Nigeria….ugh!
In the last several days, I’ve been getting messages like this one -
My name is Mr Usman Lama, I am a former military intelligence officer, a captain by rank and a Presidential aide under the government of President Charles Taylor of Liberia .I want to invest the fund that i have made during my time in service into a well profitable business and i want to invest this fund outside my country for safety reason because i don’t want the government to question me of getting this large amount of money…
This is so 2002.
image by Flickr user Santos
Apparently, Twitter has been severely hobbled from the convergence of nerds in Austin for SXSW.
I’m still not sure I’d use the service as much in my day to day (maybe Stuart can change my mind), but man I can see it’s use here at a big conference. At smaller shows, like Northern Voice or Gnomedex, Twitter might be less useful, but sending status and finding your friends here in Texas seems to be really handy.
I’m stewtopia on Twitter if you want to help make my txt messaging bill go through the roof.
I’m beginning to think conferences are my job… I think SXSW will make my 4th conference this year…oy. Maybe I’m just fulfilling my dream to be a trucker being on the road again.
If you’re in Austin this week(end) give me a shout! Email me at randy@boxbe.com if you want to talk social media, Boxbe, Bay Area vs Seattle, or where to get good BBQ in Austin. Look forward to seeing you there.
Dale Dougherty over on O’Reilly Radar attempts to answer that question and reports on their efforts to combat spam.
In a given week, 94% of the 904,060 all messages sent to O’Reilly servers are rejected because:
- the IP has been blacklisted
- the message had a SpamAssassin score of 10 or higher
- the message contained viruses or malware
- the message failed some other anti-spam technique
(And that doesn’t even account for messages the recipients didn’t actually want.)
Dale interviewed a number of industry luminaries on whether or not “we” are winning the war on spam. Here are a few quotes:
Eric Allman - developer of sendmail, a prominent email protocol
It depends on how you define “win”. I still get junk phone calls, but the phone system is reasonably usable today. I think that spam can get to that level.
Brad Templeton - Chairman of the Board, Electronic Frontier Foundation
I wouldn’t say that. There are a number of fairly decently working filtering systems, though a number of them have concerns about false positives. This doesn’t rely on draconian blacklists, though some people use them.
Danny Goodman - prolific tech writer and programmer
“It’s a lot like the war on terrorism. The hardest part is defining what the war is. The offenders are not clearly defined, the war is not clearly defined.” He said the war seems like “a constant game of whack-a-mole.”
If you are interested in the war on spam, this article is a great overview.
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