« Two negative views of social networking services |
Main
| Diego Doval on mapping social relationships »
February 18, 2004
Social Networking Cuts Spam in Half
Posted by Ross Mayfield
We've blogged quite a bit about how social networking can be used as a filter for inbound and outbound messages, forming a mutable whitelist. Now in Nature Magazine, UCLA researchers are showing it can be effective for
half of email by forming both whitelists and blacklists.
The e-mail clusters can be mapped out by inspecting the 'from', 'to' and 'cc' fields in a user's inbox. An automated system can quickly build up a blacklist of spammers, as well as a 'whitelist' of approved sources.
Boykin and Roychowdhury found that by quantifying the clustering of incoming e-mails, they could eliminate about 54% of spam. E-mails above a certain 'clustering threshold' are always friendly, and those below a lower threshold are always spam. Messages that fall between these two clustering thresholds are 'don't knows' - the system can't be sure how to classify them. Typically, say the researchers, this applies to about 50% of the mail received.
The remaining half of the e-mail then has to be filtered in a more sophisticated way. But by then the scale of the problem has been cut in half.
When combined with other techniques it can be fairly effective, the remaining spam is waiting for an economic solution.
[via
Techdirt]
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category:
- RELATED ENTRIES
- › Spolsky on Blog Comments: Scale matters
- › "The internet's output is data, but its product is freedom"
- › Andrew Keen: Rescuing 'Luddite' from the Luddites
- › knowledge access as a public good
- › viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
- › Gorman, redux: The Siren Song of the Internet
- › Mis-understanding Fred Wilson's 'Age and Entrepreneurship' argument
- › The Future Belongs to Those Who Take The Present For Granted: A return to Fred Wilson's "age question"
1. Zack Lynch on February 19, 2004 9:57 AM writes...
Half of 1,000 is still 500. It's an arms race. The more we run away from SPAM, the more will flow. What do you think...five years from now all email is based on a social networking protocol?
Permalink to Comment2. Adam Fields on February 20, 2004 4:26 PM writes...
I suspect that this can be easily subverted if you have access to the data from any of the social networks - simply send your spams in groups of friends.
Permalink to Comment