Pinboard (jm) https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/ recent bookmarks from jm GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work 2025-09-09T11:48:40+00:00 https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/09/gop-cries-censorship-over-spam-filters-that-work/ jm Tossavainen told KrebsOnSecurity that WinRed’s emails hit its spamtraps in the .com, .net, and .org space far more frequently than do fundraising emails sent by ActBlue. Koli-Lõks published a graph of the stark disparity in spamtrap activity for WinRed versus ActBlue, showing a nearly fourfold increase in spamtrap hits from WinRed emails in the final week of July 2025.]]> spam anti-spam spamtraps winred us-politics gop republicans filtering https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:677abd183e10/ SpamAssassin is back [LWN.net] 2018-11-15T14:52:47+00:00 https://lwn.net/Articles/769917/ jmThe SpamAssassin 3.4.2 release was the first from that project in well over three years. At the 2018 Open Source Summit Europe, Giovanni Bechis talked about that release and those that will be coming in the near future. It would seem that, after an extended period of quiet, the SpamAssassin project is back and has rededicated itself to the task of keeping junk out of our inboxes. This is good to see! Also, newsy thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18458212]]> spamassassin open-source oss anti-spam https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ad7b21874c70/ GCHQ's Spam Problem 2016-02-05T13:15:57+00:00 http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/gchqs-spam-problem jm spam anti-spam gchq funny boing-boing sigint snowden surveillance https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9191635e58f3/ Exclusive: Snowden intelligence docs reveal UK spooks' malware checklist / Boing Boing 2016-02-03T14:02:06+00:00 https://boingboing.net/2016/02/02/doxxing-sherlock-3.html jmThe problem with this is that once you accept this framing, and note the happy coincidence that your paymasters just happen to have found a way to spy on everyone, the conclusion is obvious: just mine all of the data, from everyone to everyone, and use an algorithm to figure out who’s guilty. The bad guys have a Modus Operandi, as anyone who’s watched a cop show knows. Find the MO, turn it into a data fingerprint, and you can just sort the firehose’s output into ”terrorist-ish” and ”unterrorist-ish.” Once you accept this premise, then it’s equally obvious that the whole methodology has to be kept from scrutiny. If you’re depending on three ”tells” as indicators of terrorist planning, the terrorists will figure out how to plan their attacks without doing those three things. This even has a name: Goodhart's law. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Google started out by gauging a web page’s importance by counting the number of links they could find to it. This worked well before they told people what they were doing. Once getting a page ranked by Google became important, unscrupulous people set up dummy sites (“link-farms”) with lots of links pointing at their pages. ]]> adversarial-classification classification surveillance nsa gchq cory-doctorow privacy snooping goodharts-law google anti-spam filtering spying snowden https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4d0273cfe1c7/ UK's ICO spam regulator even more toothless now 2014-09-16T09:26:25+00:00 http://iconewsblog.wordpress.com/2014/08/12/an-effective-regulator-needs-effective-powers/ jmWe appealed this decision, but on June 2014 the Upper Tribunal agreed with the First-tier Tribunal, cancelling our monetary penalty notice against Niebel and McNeish, and largely rendering our power to issue fines for breaches of PECR involving spam texts redundant. This is pretty terrible. The UK appears to have the weakest anti-spam regime in Europe due to the lack of powers given to ICO.]]> ico anti-spam uk law regulation spam sms https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d733c758b0b7/ SI336 - current Irish anti-spam law 2014-09-08T10:27:46+00:00 http://dataprotection.ie/documents/legal/SI336of2011.pdf jm spam anti-spam law ireland eu ec sms email si336 privacy regulation https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c2c1c676b86d/ 'The very first release of Gmail simply used spamassassin on the backend' 2014-09-06T22:42:16+00:00 https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780.html jm Brief note about my background, to establish credentials: I worked at Google for about 7.5 years. For about 4.5 of those I worked on the Gmail abuse team, which is very tightly linked with the spam team (they use the same software, share the same on-call rotations etc). Reading this kind of stuff is awesome for me, since it's a nice picture of a fun problem to work on -- the Gmail team took the right ideas about how to fight spam, and scaled them up to the 10s-of-millions DAU mark. Nicely done. The second half is some interesting musings on end-to-end encrypted communications and how it would deal with spam. Worth a read...]]> gmail google spam anti-spam filtering spamassassin history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f10b10591ff0/ Fighting spam with BotMaker 2014-08-22T15:13:35+00:00 https://blog.twitter.com/2014/fighting-spam-with-botmaker jmThe main challenges in supporting this type of system are evaluating rules with low enough latency that they can run on the write path for Twitter’s main features (i.e., Tweets, Retweets, favorites, follows and messages), supporting computationally intense machine learning based rules, and providing Twitter engineers with the ability to modify and create new rules instantaneously. ]]> spam realtime scaling twitter anti-spam botmaker rules https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:608530e05a81/ Next clothing retailer loses appeal over €100 fine in ‘spam’ case - Crime & Law News from Ireland & Abroad | The Irish Times - Wed, Mar 19, 2014 2014-03-20T10:32:18+00:00 http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/next-clothing-retailer-loses-appeal-over-100-fine-in-spam-case-1.1730846#.UyohKRjbLjY.twitter jm cheap farce dpc data-protection privacy anti-spam next spam convictions fines ireland https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:223f349a1567/ Spam-Friendly Registrar ‘Dynamic Dolphin’ Shuttered 2013-11-25T15:58:47+00:00 http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/11/spam-friendly-registrar-dynamic-dolphin-shuttered/ jm dynamic-dolphin registrars dns spam scott-richter anti-spam brian-krebs https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6e64ea7e2de6/ Storm at spider.io - London Storm Meetup 2013-06-18 2013-10-29T11:18:21+00:00 http://www.slideshare.net/ashleywbrown/storm-at-spiderio-london-storm-meetup-20130618 jm storm realtime hadoop cascading python cep spider.io anti-spam events architecture distcomp low-latency slides rabbitmq https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3fcd16536c76/ Even the NSA is finding it hard to cope with spam 2013-10-15T14:32:39+00:00 https://twitter.com/tjmcintyre/statuses/390034109630009344 jm spam spammers nsa snowden leaks anti-spam yahoo im mail https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:adb60d7f01ca/ How not to stop spammers 2013-09-16T22:37:41+00:00 http://jl.ly/Email/spamarrest.html jmSpam Arrest is a company that sells an anti-spam service. They attempted to sue some spammers and, as has been widely reported, lost badly. This case emphasizes three points that litigious antispammers seem not to grasp: Under CAN SPAM, a lot of spam is legal. Judges hate plaintiffs who try to be too clever, and hate sloppy preparation even more. Never, ever, file a spam suit in Seattle. ]]> anti-spam spam law seattle us can-spam spamarrest sentient-jets https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9276665bfc83/ Persuading David Simon (Pinboard Blog) 2013-06-17T14:13:20+00:00 https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/06/persuading_david_simon/ jmThe point is, you don't need human investigators to find leads, you can have the algorithms do it [based on the call graph or network of who-calls-who]. They will find people of interest, assemble the watch lists, and flag whomever you like for further tracking. And since the number of actual terrorists is very, very, very small, the output of these algorithms will consist overwhelmingly of false positives. ]]> false-positives maciej privacy security nsa prism david-simon accuracy big-data filtering anti-spam https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5fb59daa02a0/ Spamalot reigns: the spoils of Ireland’s EU kingship | The Irish Times - Thu, Jun 13, 2013 2013-06-13T13:44:25+00:00 http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/technology/spamalot-reigns-the-spoils-of-ireland-s-eu-kingship-1.1426389#.UbmEcGHAdss.twitter jmThe spam presidency. As European citizens are made the miserable targets of unimpeded “direct marketing”, that may be how Ireland’s stint in the EU presidency seat is recalled for years to come. Under the guiding hand of Minister for Justice Alan Shatter, the Council of the European Union has submitted proposals for amendments to a proposed new data protection regulation, all of which overwhelmingly favour business and big organisations, not citizens. The most obviously repugnant and surprising element in the amendments is a watering down of existing protections for EU citizens against the willy-nilly marketing Americans are forced to endure. In the US there are few meaningful restrictions on what businesses can do with people’s personal information when pitching products and services at them. In the EU, this has always been strictly controlled; information gathered for one purpose cannot be used by a business to sell whatever it wants – unless you have opted in to receive such solicitations. This means you are not constantly bombarded by emails and junk mail, nor do you get non-stop phone calls from telemarketers. Under the proposed amendments to the draft data protection regulation, direct marketing would become a legal form of data processing. In effect, this would legitimise spam email, junk print mail and marketing calls. This unexpected provision signals just how successful powerful corporate lobbyists have been in convincing ministers that business matters more than privacy or giving citizens reasonable control over their personal information. Far worse is contained in other amendments, which in effect turn the original draft of the regulation upside down. Fantastic article from Karlin Lillington in today's Times on the terrible amendments proposed for the EU's data protection law.]]> eu law prism data-protection privacy ireland ec marketing spam anti-spam email https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:11445f4c180f/ Council of the European Union Releases Draft Compromise Text on the Proposed EU Data Protection Regulation 2013-06-09T21:53:39+00:00 http://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/2013/06/articles/council-of-the-european-union-releases-draft-compromise-text-on-the-proposed-eu-data-protection-regulation/ jmOverall, the [Irish EC Presidency’s] draft compromise text can be seen as a more business-focused, pragmatic approach. For example, the Presidency has drafted an additional recital (Recital 3a), clarifying the right to data protection as a qualified right, highlighting the principle of proportionality and importance of other competing fundamental rights, including the freedom to conduct a business. and some pretty serious relaxation of how consent for use of personal data is measured:
The criterion for valid consent is amended from “explicit” to “unambiguous,” except in the case of processing special categories of data (i.e., sensitive personal data) (Recital 25 and Article 9(2)). This reverts to the current position under the Data Protection Directive and is a concession to the practical difficulty of obtaining explicit consent in all cases. The criteria for valid consent are further relaxed by the ability to obtain consent in writing, orally or in an electronic manner, and where technically feasible and effective, valid consent can be given using browser settings and other technical solutions. Further, the requirement that the controller bear the burden of proof that valid consent was obtained is limited to a requirement that the controller be able to “demonstrate” that consent was obtained (Recital 32 and Article 7(1)). The need for “informed” consent is also relaxed from the requirement to provide the full information requirements laid out in Article 14 to the minimal requirements that the data subject “at least” be made aware of: (1) the identity of the data controller, and (2) the purpose(s) of the processing of their personal data (Recitals 33 and 48).
]]> anti-spam privacy data-protection spam ireland eu ec regulation https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b59985c24906/ EDRI's comments on EU proposals to reform privacy law 2013-06-07T14:49:14+00:00 http://dpreform.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/edri-analysis-of-libe-ams.pdf jm law privacy anti-spam eu spam edri https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0418ca2907a6/ EU Council deals killer blow to privacy reforms 2013-06-06T21:15:48+00:00 http://www.privacysurgeon.org/blog/incision/eu-council-deals-killer-blow-to-privacy-reforms/ jm'In an extraordinary result for corporate lobbying, direct marketing would by default be considered a legitimate data process and would therefore – by default – be lawful.' ]]> eu politics data-protection privacy anti-spam spam eu-council direct-marketing https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6e42e3094f30/ Abusing hash kernels for wildly unprincipled machine learning 2013-04-04T23:01:51+00:00 http://jeremydhoon.github.com/2013/03/19/abusing-hash-kernels-for-wildly-unprincipled-machine-learning/ jm ai machine-learning python data hashing features feature-selection anti-spam spamassassin https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:28d641a0b96e/ Clairvoyant Squirrel: Large Scale Malicious Domain Classification 2013-02-04T12:10:24+00:00 http://www.slideshare.net/jasontrost/flo-con-clairvoyant-squirrel-final jm storm distributed distcomp random-forest classifiers machine-learning anti-spam slides https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a15baf072e8e/ Practical machine learning tricks from the KDD 2011 best industry paper 2012-07-30T20:20:41+00:00 http://blog.david-andrzejewski.com/machine-learning/practical-machine-learning-tricks-from-the-kdd-2011-best-industry-paper/ jm classification via:codeslinger training machine-learning google ops kdd best-practices anti-spam classifiers ensemble map-reduce https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c81a4d28d529/ Sci-Fi Short Story: 'Press Enter to Execute' 2012-04-18T13:15:45+00:00 http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/04/press-enter-to-execute/ jm scifi spamassassin anti-spam spam via:lee-maguire whoa fiction short-stories https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3249615b406e/ IETF expedited publication of RFC6449 before J.D. Falk passed away 2011-11-17T13:21:08+00:00 http://www.virusbtn.com/news/2011/11_17.xml jm jd-falk death cancer rfcs ietf anti-spam people https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a7394e2b729c/ feedback loop n-gram analyzer 2011-09-29T21:10:15+00:00 http://petermblair.com/fbl-n-gram-analyzer/ jm anti-spam spam fbl feedback filtering n-grams similarity hashing redis searching https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:00bea3b79665/ UK Government Agency wants your spam, but filters the submission address 2011-03-01T18:01:05+00:00 http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/02/28/uk-government-agency-wants-your-email-scams-but-is-doing-it-the-right-way/#IDComment131650035 jm via:gcluley spam uk filtering anti-spam doh funny https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c390e032036f/ Spamwiki 2011-02-03T11:16:14+00:00 http://www.spamtrackers.eu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page jm wiki spam anti-spam https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:78a1fc6cb03b/ Changes at dnswl.org 2010-10-04T09:06:18+00:00 http://www.dnswl.org/news/archives/18-Changes-at-dnswl.org.html jm dnswl dns whitelists dnsbls filtering anti-spam https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:60f92b3a0d9c/ The Spamhaus Whitelist 2010-09-26T20:48:19+00:00 http://www.spamhauswhitelist.com/en/ jm spamhaus anti-spam whitelisting spamassassin https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:76c68a2be594/ JAM Software - SpamAssassin for Windows 2010-09-17T10:37:49+00:00 http://www.jam-software.com/spamassassin/ jm windows spamassassin anti-spam software win32 jam-software https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cccf02bcdc3d/ Exploring the Spam Arms Race to Characterize Spam Evolution 2010-07-23T14:50:36+00:00 http://ceas.cc/2010/papers/Paper%2019.pdf jm spam anti-spam ceas conference papers research spamassassin adversarial-classification evolution arms-race via:jd https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8d00be060af0/ Tesco fined for sending junk e-mail 2010-07-13T16:21:17+00:00 http://www.herald.ie/national-news/tesco-fined-for-sending-junk-email-by-andrew-phelan-2256532.html jm dpc anti-spam ireland law tesco prosecutions convictions via:bnisbet https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:87bae3c5d61a/ Hadoop and the fight against shape-shifting spam 2010-06-23T16:06:32+00:00 http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/hadoop/2010/06/hadoop_and_yahoo_maill_anti_sp.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+YDNHadoop+%28Hadoop+and+Distributed+Computing+at+Yahoo%21%29 jm hadoop yahoo anti-spam filtering https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:13551b9233b3/ BBC News - How spam filters dictated Canadian magazine's fate 2010-03-30T15:34:39+00:00 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8528672.stm jm anti-spam false-positives beaver canadia canada bbc https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2f342c7c49aa/ TLS-encrypted spam 2010-03-30T10:31:48+00:00 http://mailchannels.com/blog/?p=117 jm tls rustock botnets anti-spam mailchannels ssl encryption https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6933155bd46e/ Approaching 100% spam block: Spamhaus releases the Domain Block List 2010-03-01T11:45:18+00:00 http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=655 jm spamassassin anti-spam dbl spamhaus dnsbls https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bb8b8ef4c980/ RFC 5782 - DNS Blacklists and Whitelists 2010-02-18T21:59:06+00:00 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5782 jm dnsbls anti-spam dnswl dnsbl rfcs standards via:fanf https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:98ea42e82a8b/ Inside View from Ireland: Analysing Electronic Forensics Evidence 2010-02-07T22:32:00+00:00 http://www.insideview.ie/irisheyes/2010/02/analysing-electronic-forensics-evidence.html jm bernie spam anti-spam authentication spoofing security phishing https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a0a606b6bd03/ Spamalyser 2010-02-01T15:08:13+00:00 https://secure.grepular.com/Spamalyser_Lives jm spamalyser spam anti-spam paste pastebin web https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d725a8a97ffa/ The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache SpamAssassin Version 3.3.0 2010-01-26T16:34:43+00:00 http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-apache-software-foundation-announces-apache-spamassassin-version-330-82677727.html jm asf apache spamassassin releases 3.3.0 anti-spam https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1d69fed5b2e1/ _Botnet Judo: Fighting Spam with Itself_ 2010-01-26T00:11:18+00:00 http://www.icir.org/christian/publications.html jm spam anti-spam botnets templates toread papers https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:906a1e87dc66/ AOL sacks pretty much the entire US postmaster team 2010-01-22T22:25:32+00:00 http://www.annaliviaford.com/2010/01/postmaster-team-update.html jm aol anti-spam layoffs postmaster email smtp https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1cc5778c0b54/ MAAWG notes drop in spam levels 2009-10-28T17:41:44+00:00 http://www.darkreading.com/securityservices/security/app-security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220900608 jm spam anti-spam maawg press-releases isps internet abuse https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:94e37d321f73/ IAMA person who sends "spam" email for a living 2009-10-27T13:03:19+00:00 http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9xrn1/iama_person_who_sends_spam_email_for_a_living_ama/ jm reddit spam anti-spam interviews ipv6 iama spammers https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1738c8e9da5f/ Anti Spear-phishing SpamAssassin ruleset 2009-08-07T09:06:23+00:00 http://www.jules.fm/Logbook/files/anti-spear-phishing.html jm spamassassin anti-spam rulesets sa-update phishing blocklists https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1944e08a83e0/