Posted on by lhl

I read the leaked Matrix Reloaded draft last week (couldn’t resist — looks like while there are similarities, that a lot has changed), which led to me doing some digging to see if a Revolutions draft had also been leaked (as far as I can tell, no). They weren’t kidding when they said it’d be a cliffhanger.

While looking around, I stumbled Philosophy Section of the official site. While some weren’t that great, there were actually a number that were very interesting:

  • Never The Twain Shall Meet: Reflections on the First Matrix – Richard Hanley writes a great analysis on the nature of paradise. I was impressed by its clarity and insight
  • Reality, What Matters, and the Matrix – while it seems to stray and wander a bit, but this piece does mostly address the issues revolving around why the Matrix might not be such a bad thing. My personal feeling is there really isn’t anything wrong with living in ‘the Matrix’, because well, that’s what we live in now (well, ‘a matrix’ anyway).
  • Wake Up! Gnosticism & Buddhism in the Matrix – I’ve seen better writeups on the eastern influence in the Matrix, but the gnosticism stuff was new to me. (I suppose this is technically philosophy, but in general I much prefer the more abstract and braintwisty reasoning revolving around metaphysical issues (epistemology, ontology, identity, blah blah)
Posted on by lhl

Been watching the Spam Conference webcast (indexes at Oliver Schmelzle’s TechBlog).

  • CRM114 – >99.9% accuracy
  • John Graham-Cumming’s (POPFile) “The Spammer’s Compendium” prsentation is great. The slice and dice technique really is dastardly (yet ingenious)

Actually, many of the talks are really good. Other standouts: Paul Graham, Arc Project, “Better Bayesian Spam Filtering”, Matt Sergeant, MessageLabs, “Spam Filtering at the Network Level”, Joshua Goodman, Microsoft Research, “Spam Filtering: From the Lab to the Real World”, Michael Salib, MIT, “Integrating Heuristics with n-grams using Bayes and LMMSE”, Jon Praed, Internet Law Group, “How Lawsuits Against Spammers Can Aid Spam-Filtering Technology: A Spam Litigator’s View From the Front Lines”, David Berlind, CNET, “Desperately Seeking: An Anti-Spam Consortium”, and Ken Schneider, Brightmail, “Fighting Spam in Real Time”

While spam filtering is good, I don’t think anyone really questions that email as it currently stands it just plain broken. Ken Schneider had some very telling numbers. The percentage of spam (of total messages) has increased from something like 10% last September to over 40% today. And that’s on average. It seems that the larger the organization (company/isp), the larger the percentage grows.

I’ve posted some of these before, but I decided to round up some possible long-term solutions:

There’s a new and what looks like a fairly complete spam analysis (Spam Control: Problems & Opportunities) online, but it looks like it’s a for-pay report. Also: spam costs