Human-Powered Spam Filtering

arturs writes "A company called eProvisia started an unusal business: they filter out spam not by using complicated algorithms, but human beings... It costs around $20/year - is the war against spam over?" It's an interesting idea - the privacy concerns are big of course, but how would this stack up to, say SpamAssassin or a suite like Barracuda's Spam firewall. We tested the Barracuda device - great integration of OSS software, with a nice interface. Update: 09/20 15:12 GMT by J : Corrected price of Spam Eradicator.

Buzzword Bingo

[Lord Grey]

From the company's "About Our Company [dione.cc]" page:

Privately funded in 1993, now with customers in 40 countries* and over $67 million** in cash reserves, the company experienced a phenomenal growth and continues to aggressively pursue new frontiers in order to meet or exceed the needs of most demanding customers by providing a scalable, seamless, comprehensive offering.

Leveraging our paradigm-shifting product line with state of the art technology developed by a dedicated team of professionals, we offer a significant competitive advantage on the diversified but fragmented market of best of breed anti-spam solutions.

These people score a 9.8 out of 10 in the Buzzword Bingo game. That second paragraph, in particular, would keep me as far away from them as possible.

With a personal touch

[mod_critical]

I wonder if they ever verify their decisions with you:

Mark,
This is Eric, your spam d00d. You got a message about fisting, you into that? Let me know, thanks!
-- Eric

Now here's a job...

[Anonymous Coward]

That I would not mind outsourcing to the indians and chinese!

Imagine a ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Can they be used for other tasks? Like, what sort of frame rate can they get in Doom3?

Re:With a personal touch

[PhotoBoy]

Yeah I was thinking that, how well does this solution work for non-graduate drug addicts who have erectile disfunction problems and need a loan?

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[AndroidCat]

Ah man, I just needed "synchronicity" or "win-win situation" to fill my card!

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[The-Bus]

Damn it, I almost had a double diagonal if they had said "enterprise" and "legacy" --- drat!.

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[Aliencow]

. ** - Palmyra Atoll dollars.

It is by spam alone I set my mind in motion

[Colonel Cholling]

What the article doesn't mention is that this "human-powered spam filtering" consists of Mentats who have been specially trained to use the latest Bayesian filters, and who bear the Imperial conditioning against deleting important messages.

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[spellraiser]

I hereby propose a new mathematical function. It is called BSD (no relation to the OS), short for BullShit-Detector.

The calculation of BSD is simple. Its domain is the set of all strings. The range is all real numbers from 0.0 - 1.0. To calculate BSD(s) for string s, simply take the length of s (call this l). Then, divide the number of of characters that contribute to the actual, non-bullshit content of the string by l. This is the value of BSD(s).

To give a pertinent example, it is plainly apparent that BSD('Leveraging our paradigm-shifting product line with state of the art technology developed by a dedicated team of professionals, we offer a significant competitive advantage on the diversified but fragmented market of best of breed anti-spam solutions.') = 0.0.

It is my hope that this will leverage the ever-expanding work of linguistics researchers around the world in utilizing paradigm-shifting methods for significantly empowering their abilities to detect bullshit.

synergy!

[H8X55]

synergy!

I was waiting for synergy to pop up there somewhere...

What's a mission statement, About Us page, or memo from management without synergy?!?

Palmyra Atoll dollars

[Colonel Cholling]

Even better the $67 million dollars in cash reserves are in Palmyra Atoll dollars; I wonder what the exchange rate is?

One Palmyra Atoll dollar = 17 pieces of mithril, or approximately twenty kilograms of fairy dust.

There's no such thing, people. This is a joke.

Hmmmm.

[modifried]

"... working 24 hours a day**..."

"** - Timezone differences may apply."

Damn. I was all excited about the fact that they worked 24 hours a day, but I live on the west coast.

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[Clay Mitchell]

Well, if they are reading everybody's spam, they are going to be damn good at spitting out buzzwords.

Re:hilarious

[Colonel Cholling]

Coincidentally, $67 million Palmyra Atoll dollars is the estimated value of that Free Dell Desktop PC that's just waiting for those who click on your .sig.

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[Aggrazel]

Worse than that, click on the signup:

The minute your mail starts flowing, a dedicated team of over a hundred trained Screening and Preselection Specialists, working 24 hours a day**


** - Timezone differences may apply.
....

Re:Party like its...

[secolactico]

[the address]...Palmyra Atoll (Uninhabited Sovereign Territory)

This is thge odd part. How can an uninhabited territory be sovereign. According to the CIA Factbook [cia.gov] it is a National Wildlife Refuge managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Also, it says it has no economic activity. What the heck would back Palmyra Atoll's dollar?

Re:Having RTFA...

[crowdozer]

Yah I bet a small nature reserve island in the middle of the Pacific has a sweet broadband connection and population to facilitate such a business. Perhaps they are training monkeys to sort your spam. That would explain the price.

Re:ideas?

[HTH NE1]

I thought this up long ago when address munging was in its infancy on Usenet. I referred to it as hiring a secretary.

They'd better not be applying for a patent.

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[myc_lykaon]

It also sent the Wankometer [cynicalbastards.com] bananas.

See the result here [cynicalbastards.com]

Re:hilarious

[Umbro2]

With all your attention focused on annoying us with your free ads for a DellPC (who wants one?) or an IPod (who doesn't already have one?); you missed the best one:

These people are "working 24 hours a day (Timezone differences may apply)"

Re:Filtering using spelling checker...

[Andrewkov]

Unfortunately that would block email from most of my friends...

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[maxwell demon]

Well, if a state had the advancement of art as first goal in its constitution, it could rightfully considered a state of the art, couldn't it?

Re:Filtering using spelling checker...

[Tar-Palantir]

I take it you've never seen how my 12-year-old sister and her friends type.

OMG tht is sooo cool!!!1 rlly? no way!! ... you get the idea. It's enough to make a spell-checker turn in its dictionary.

Re:Party like its...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but does Cingular have terms like these

"(1) Warranties and waivers... LCC may choose to share any information acquired in the course of providing its services .... You henceforth void your reasonable expectation of privacy, and your constitutional rights to a fair and speedy trial."

(lots of stuff chopped, but it just makes it worse if you read the whole thing. [dione.cc])

I was in the process of signing up (I have a serious junkmail problem)...

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[drakaan]

Somebody kill him. Kill him now.