A new addition to the blogroll: The Boston Globe's new Dishing. Pretty snooty, as you might expect, but just about every entry is tempting in one way or another.
Hopefully they'll have more entries like great cheap eats in Vermont than how connected food writers get free premium steaks. OK, I'm just envious!
3.31.2006
Scare science
Isn't it useless to know that 85 of 905 Swedes with brain tumors were "high users" of mobile phones without knowing what proportion of the Swedish population overall are "high users" of mobile phones? It's hard to believe it would be so much less than 9% that it would justify the claim of a link.
The study wasn't even posted on the "National Institute for Working Life"'s web page before they blabbed to Reuters, so it's hard to take seriously.
UPDATE: As always, the British have the right response.
The study wasn't even posted on the "National Institute for Working Life"'s web page before they blabbed to Reuters, so it's hard to take seriously.
UPDATE: As always, the British have the right response.
3.15.2006
The Horror: Fooling Thunderbird's Spam Filter with Stephen King
I really like Thunderbird, the Mozilla mail client, but the spam filtering is not particularly useful. I keep getting the same luxury watch and prescription drug emails over and over, and maybe 5% of them are actually filtered, despite training the Bayesian "learning" filter for months.
The spammers seem to be fooling it by including invisible text of a non-spam-sounding nature. At least in the one I looked at this morning, it was a sequence of rarely appearing words ("operatic hermaneutic escherichia") followed by some text from Misery:
I have to say this is pretty clever, in that it's not obvious to me that there's a good solution, short of filtering any HTML message with a certain percent content of "hidden" text (figuring that out would be a little tricky, as they vary the font color in a range of "invisible"). And even if Thunderbird did that, there are probably lots of places to hide text that doesn't scan like spam. Has Bayesian filtering failed? What say you Paul Graham? Or is Thunderbird's implementation just broken because it doesn't pay enough attention to my "good" mail and is too concerned with false positives filtering things I actually want to see?
The spammers seem to be fooling it by including invisible text of a non-spam-sounding nature. At least in the one I looked at this morning, it was a sequence of rarely appearing words ("operatic hermaneutic escherichia") followed by some text from Misery:
With Annie Wilkes that is a question which has no sane answer. Being such a straight arrow was part of the reason for this amazing fecundity, but Annie herself was a bigger one. "You don't want to write my book and so you're making up tricks not to start."
I have to say this is pretty clever, in that it's not obvious to me that there's a good solution, short of filtering any HTML message with a certain percent content of "hidden" text (figuring that out would be a little tricky, as they vary the font color in a range of "invisible"). And even if Thunderbird did that, there are probably lots of places to hide text that doesn't scan like spam. Has Bayesian filtering failed? What say you Paul Graham? Or is Thunderbird's implementation just broken because it doesn't pay enough attention to my "good" mail and is too concerned with false positives filtering things I actually want to see?
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