FYI: Computer scientists suggest team work to combat ever-growing spam problem

[Tom Johnson]

http://www.newsfox.com/pte.mc?pte=050513030

pte050513030
Computer/Telecommunications, Science/Technology
Pooling information to crack down on spam
Computer scientists suggest team work to combat ever-growing spam problem

Los Angeles (pte/13.05.2005/13:38) - Combatting spam needs to be a joint
effort, a pooling of anti-spam programme information the way police join
forces to catch criminals, say computer scientists Vwani Roychowdhury of the
University of California, Los Angeles
http://www.ee.ucla.edu/faculty/bios/roychowdhury.htm , and Oscar Boykin of
the University of Florida.

The scientists believe that additional software in standard email programmes
could facilitate a 'behind-the-scenes collaboration'. The idea is to
increase the accuracy of spam filters by the following process: When
receiving a new message, anti-spam software checks it against the database
of recognised spam. If no match is found, the programme would forward a
query to other randomly selected email addresses in the contacts book. If
other computers receiving the query have compatible software, the database
check would be done until a match is found, or the message is found to be
original.

Using this software a whole social network of email users could pool their
spam filter knowledge.

Tests conducted in simulation with hundreds of thousands to millions of
users have shown that the programme detected almost all the spam emails and
seldom misclassified legitimate messages.

Computer scientist David Hales of the University of Bologna
http://cfpm.org/~david/ , Italy, said: "This is a really great idea. It
turns the existing trusted social network into a kind of extended spam
filter."

The system relies on this social network, and the recognition within the
network of spam-listed emails. It is also based on trust - the system could
be infiltrated, but from an inside user.

The scientists hope their software will be available on the market soon.

"The main strength of the idea is that essentially everyone on the planet
would be collaboratively filtering spam," Boykin said. (end)



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J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism
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"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."
            -John McCarthy, Stanford University mathematician
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