The Science of Spam
From “How Many Ways Can You Spell V1@gra?” by Brian Hayes at American Scientist (link via Arts & Letters Daily):
At the deepest level, spam is a social and economic phenomenon rather than a technological one. The senders and the intended recipients are people, not computers. Nevertheless, there’s the potential for some interesting computation in the making of the stuff, and even moreso in the defenses that help keep it in check. Cre@tive spe11ing is part of this story, and so is the automated production of meaningless drivel. On the defensive side, tools from statistics, pattern analysis and machine intelligence have been brought to bear. Twenty years ago, who could have guessed that the most widely deployed application of computational linguistics and computational learning theory would be fending off nuisance e-mail?
The spam filters on my private email address are great. Those on Gmail are pretty good. Email I send to friends who have Hotmail are periodically bounced back, presumably because their filters are too touchy. I stopped allowing comments here because the noise/signal ratio was too high; I was spending far more time deleting spam than I was responding to comments.
Hayes’s article made me wonder, as I have many times before: to what circle of Dantean hell will spam creators be consigned?