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.

Party like its...

[ericspinder]

Our company, eProvisia LLC,

I always worry about companies which use "LLC" as soon as the name is mentioned - 'Limited Liability Corporation'. It screams 'we are not responsable!'

[the address]

...Palmyra Atoll (Uninhabited Sovereign Territory)

Sounds like the 21th century equilivant of 'Florida Swamp land'.

Four pages, home, the product, terms of service, and about the company. The only thing they are missing is bios of the 'management team'. Even better the $67 million dollars in cash reserves are in Palmyra Atoll dollars; I wonder what the exchange rate is?

Overall, it looks like someone stole a 'dot com' idea from 1999. Anyone have a little red Corvette?

I'll stick with Spamassassin, Thunderbird.

Re:How about wiki spam

[troon]

Already baked [halfbakery.com]: it's called Vipul's Razor [sourceforge.net].

RE: Barracuda

[numbski]

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sa-milt-quar

I'm working on mimicking the barracuda's functionality, and have the spam quarantine working.

I apologize that sourceforge is showing no releases, the files ARE in cvs, and are stable after much testing. I'll try to get in and do a release later today.

My hope is to build a full spam firewall suite that is easy to set up and still have much scalability and control.

Re:Party like its...

[Anonymous Coward]

Limited Liability Corporation

You do know that the Cingular, largest wireless carrier in the US of A, (largest at the end of the year once merged with AWE) is an LLC...

Re:Party like its...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really - LLC is more like a cross between a corporation and a partnership. There seem to be some tax benefits, depending on the situation.

this has to be a joke

[unformed]

Palmyra Atoll is a thousand miles south of Hawaii, an untold distance from civilization. Uninhabited by humans and wild to the core, it is the last intact marine wilderness in the U.S. tropics.

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[alakon]

but you missed the asterisks- * - Not all currently recognized by UN. ** - Palmyra Atoll dollars. ...from http://eprovisia.dione.cc/about.html As far as I can see, the Palmyra Atoll doesn't have it's own currency... and anyone in the world can make up their own countries.

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[Chris_Jefferson]

What is more impressive is:

Conveniently located in the heart of Palmyra Atoll, eProvisia LLC is the leading provider of reliable, robust, powerful and cost-efficient spam filtering solutions for world-class corporations and individual users.

Privately funded in 1993, now with customers in 40 countries* and over $67 million** in cash reserves, ....

* - Not all currently recognized by UN. ** - Palmyra Atoll dollars.

Palmyra Atoll is uninhabited, and doesn't have a currency. The phone number is invalid (nowhere has a +78 extension), and what kind of place lists in its address "Islet 7, 5 52 N 162 06 W"?

I wouldn't have bothered posting this except it seems like both slashdot and most of the people reading this seem to be taking it seriously. It's not.

Re:Party like its...

[TykeClone]

Just like a coporation, the "LLC" is part of the entity's legal name. They're not advertising that they're an LLC, they're just stating their name.

There's a dupe site

[Colonel Cholling]

at eprovisia.coredump.cx. [http]

This site is a joke, and no more represents an actual business than that other famous site with a .cx domain.

Slashdot has been trolled, kthanxbye

[brickbat]

This company can't possibly be real.

Anybody read their terms of service? You understand that there are no guarantees, either expressed or implied, regarding the accuracy, confidentiality or availability of the service. eProvisia LCC may choose to share any information acquired in the course of providing its services with other entities, and may, at its sole discretion and based on this information, take whichever actions the company, its affiliates, subsidiaries, or representatives, consider to be appropriate. You henceforth void your reasonable expectation of privacy, and your constitutional rights to a fair and speedy trial.

And their contact information. Um, Palmyra Atoll is an uninhabited pile of sand in the Pacific Ocean. "Palmyra Atoll dollars?" BWAHAHAHA.

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. That line sounds like it was generated with the Web Economy Bullshit Generator [dack.com].

Thanks for the laugh, Hemos. No, I'm laughing at you, not with you.

Re:Party like its...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you should research things before talking about them. The limited liabilty has nothing to do with liability to the consumer, it is just limited liabilty within the partnership. If his parter jumps town then the one remaining is not left with all the debt his old partner ran up on new cars, hookers, drugs and booze.

Re:Carl Sagan beat you to it...

[OneOver137]

Although he called it the 'Bologna Detection Kit' and applied it to pseudo-science. It actually works quite well here on /.

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[sh0rtie]

Funny i know, but actually such an app actually exists
Deloitte & Touche's Bullfighter [deloitte.com]

BullfighterTM is software that runs in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, within Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP. It works a lot like the spelling and grammar checker in those applications, but focuses on jargon and readability.

Yahoo's spam filtering

[PW2]

I think Yahoo's spam filtering is also human powered. It seems to be contantly getting better. I signed up for webspace with them ($20 per month) and get a lot of POP3 2G email accounts; their spam filter gets most of the spam and then I mark spam that is remaining in the inbox. Lastly I check for false positives and occasionally download the highly spam free email messages once a month or so using POP3 (I usually just use the web front-end for daily email access).

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[DoctorHoe]

I found more information on this Island. You can checkout this [bartleby.com] for more information.

Re:hilarious

[Anonymous Coward]

The terms of service are even better (emphasis added):

(1) Warranties and waivers. You understand that there are no guarantees, either expressed or implied, regarding the accuracy, confidentiality or availability of the service. eProvisia LCC may choose to share any information acquired in the course of providing its services with other entities, and may, at its sole discretion and based on this information, take whichever actions the company, its affiliates, subsidiaries, or representatives, consider to be appropriate.

You henceforth void your reasonable expectation of privacy, and your constitutional rights to a fair and speedy trial.

Wow, I can't believe slashdot took this seriously.

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[lofoforabr]

Just look at the Terms of Service in their page. This must have been put under the wrong slashdot section. It's more suited for the "It's funny. Laugh".

Terms of Service and Legal Disclaimer

By viewing pages or using products and services of eProvisia LCC, you acknowledge and consent to the following terms and conditions:

(1) Warranties and waivers. You understand that there are no guarantees, either expressed or implied, regarding the accuracy, confidentiality or availability of the service. eProvisia LCC may choose to share any information acquired in the course of providing its services with other entities, and may, at its sole discretion and based on this information, take whichever actions the company, its affiliates, subsidiaries, or representatives, consider to be appropriate. You henceforth void your reasonable expectation of privacy, and your constitutional rights to a fair and speedy trial.

(2) Indemnification. You agree to hold harmless and indemnify eProvisia LCC and its affiliates, subsidiaries, and representatives, from and against any legal claims, including liability for the company not adhering to the terms and conditions of this agreement.

(3) Choice of Law and Jurisdiction. These Terms of Use will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Uninhabited Sovereign Territory of Palmyra Atoll, without giving effect to its conflict of laws and provisions of your actual state or country of residence. Any claims, legal proceedings, or litigations regarding eProvisia LCC and its affiliates, subsidiaries, and representatives, will be brought solely in and you consent to the jurisdiction of Palmyra Atoll courts.

Re:Party like its...

[ericspinder]

As someone else pointed out, you are thinking about a LLP - "Limited Liability Partnership" An LLC is what corporations use when they engage with other corporations to conduct business. An LLC with a single Corporate owner (functionally) is either a liability firewall for a risky business (or division), or just another part of complicated deception (kinda like Enron).

The LLC complaint was a minor issue, mostly based on personal observations, it's amazing how many people are willing to jump on me about *the meaning* of an LLC

Re:synergy!

[hunterx11]

"What do you do?"
"I produce synergy. And books on how to cheat at Bridge."

Re:Yahoo's spam filtering

[shotgunefx]

Yahoo's spam filtering sucks. I trained it with 15,000 messages (over 99% spam) and it hasn't got one yet. Only 2 false positives. (I get around 100 spam a day on this account)

After much nagging, the answer I got was basically that if you forward mail to your Y! account, it doesn't filter it AT ALL. So anything that has a different to gets by. I wonder how this works if you pay yahoo to be [e-mail].

I wish I knew this before I spent all that time classifying. And I know your not supposed to bitch about free stuff and I'm not. Been a MailPlus customer for years.

At the very least they should have a swear filter you could use to catch the obvious shit such as "Tight Anal Teens get fucked in the ASS!"

You only have 50 or so filters and it's just not practical to try and catch even a small portion of blue language.

Re:Won't work

[Punknubbins]

The cost can be brought down using automated prefiltering both with currently available commercial/oss packages and by injecting the manually verified spam data back into the prefiltering system. However, I personaly would not trust anyone to do this sort of manual filtering unless they where actually located in a country with very good intellectually property protection and privacy protection laws, and kept a very big insurence policy for data theft or they where bonded using some other method which was easily verifiable. And still I would only suggest this for personal email accounts which don't contain anything that they need to keep secret, such as my grandparents personal email account as baby photos and weather reports need not be to secure.

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[1u3hr]

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.

It was obviously designed to do that; it's a joke. And if you look up the location of their company, it's basically Gilligan's Island: an uninhabited (except for 20 Fish and Wildlife Service staff) atoll 1000 miles south of Hawaii.