Repurposing Anti-Spam Tools For Detecting Mutations In HIV 67
chicksdaddy writes "Security researchers often use language and metaphors from the natural world to describe problems in the virtual world. (Consider 'virus,' and 'worm.') Now it turns out that the links may be more than just rhetoric. Microsoft Researchers say that tools they developed to detect spammers' efforts to avoid anti-spam filters were also great at spotting mutations in the HIV virus. A report from Microsoft Research in honor of World AIDS Day yesterday described how Microsoft Researchers David Heckerman and Jonathan Carlson were called upon to help AIDS researchers analyze data about how the human immune system attacks the HIV virus. To do so, they turned to tools and algorithms developed at Microsoft to detect and block spam e-mail in the company's Hotmail, Outlook and Exchange e-mail products."
Never mind that! (Score:5, Funny)
The really big news here is - Slashdot has finally ditched the Gates "Borg" icon!
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Really for a joke that was 'kinda' funny back in 1992.... It needed to go a long time ago...
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Maybe the "natural world" (Score:5, Insightful)
is also a created simulation. If so, then of course viruses in both computers and nature will share common characteristics.
BUDDHA: All is illusion
NEO: There is no spoon
Re:Maybe the "natural world" (Score:4, Funny)
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It was undocumented 20 years ago.
Nowadays it's documented but deprecated, and has been that was for the last 15 years. But everyone's still using it, anyway.
That said, we're rolling out a new framework that'll have a brand new API to do the same exact thing. But don't worry, the old one is still supported. So are the three preceding new ones. ~
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When I say "we", I actually mean it. See the profile.
And trust me on this: if any developer in Office (or other product division) tries to use an undocumented Windows API, they'll have someone from legal knocking on their door real soon. It's a very, very big no-no in the company. I know, because it's actually part of things like code reviews and such. Simply put, no-one wants to be the guy responsible for another multibillion dollar fine in EU or other places which actually take such things seriously. For
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You'd be surprised how getting sued and losing can turn things around. One of the reasons why I've grown to believe that regulation of businesses is beneficial is because I witnessed the effects of it first-hand, and they are much bigger than many people on /. imagine. It just takes time for the changes to have an effect outside, especially when you start with a monopoly as entrenched as that.
You are, of course, free to disbelieve anything I tell you. But keep in mind that I post here as a fellow geek, not
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I'm sorry that the facts that I have to share are not to your liking. I don't have any other, on this subject - I can only state that which I've seen. If you feel that they threaten your deeply held beliefs, feel free to ignore them, and lets get back to meaningful discussions on less flamebaity topics.
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As a parting gift: It's probably OK to try to dick with other people to push your memes. Don't mess around with symbolset and this would probably have gone better for you. I figured you'd have known that by now though. You've seen this go down a hundred times at least and the end was always the same. I don't have any sockpuppets - this is really me. You don't have to reply to comments.
BTW: Flohawks has openings. I'd look into that before I went your way. It's honest work.
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I haven't read that email before. Having seen it now, in what way did it "define my response"? It's rather vaguely worded, and the only thing I can gather from it is that they admit that MS has an image problem - but it's something any random guy in the industry knows. Can you be more specific in your reference?
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Shouldn't you be at GNU/Church about now?
Re:Maybe the "natural world" (Score:5, Interesting)
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Okay then. When are you open source cocksuckers gonna get a working version of Adblock for my goddamned brain? If I hear "4G Wonderland" one more time I'm going to start doing drive-bys on T-Mobile stores.
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Stephen Wolfram: is that you?
Insightful (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on gang, this is pretty cool.
To re-adapt the tech that picks up Nigerian Scams and send it to pick up HIV strains is pretty neat. I sure as **** didn't see that app.
Re:Insightful (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Insightful (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, I've seen some classics too.
For a while I actually deliberately allowed stuff from the "Lads from Nigeria" through and put in its own inbox for everyone at the firm to laugh over. I created a second specially trained SA Bayesian classifier in front of the main filter to siphon this stuff off.
It was trained on a hand crafted corpus gleaned from a mailbox of stuff behind a sacrificial Exim daemon on its own connection that strangely runs really slow but not too slow to put off the spammers.
SA can be made to work in very strange ways. Perhaps I ought to get out more ...
Cheers
Jon
Making a spam filter play chess. (Score:4, Informative)
http://dbacl.sourceforge.net/spam_chess.html [sourceforge.net]
Now that's cool.
But Microsoft doesn't detect spam?! (Score:1)
Once my university decided to switch to MS as their email provider, the span in my inbox has gone up. They don't even have to use the trick of changing spellings, I get lots of junk about penis enlargement, hot Russian girls, and Viagra every day. What I do NOT get are emails from the registrar, the university police, and the Dean. Those all go to the junk folder. I suggest they take whatever data they get from these MS researchers and do the opposite.
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I'd say your university didn't setup Exchange correctly then.
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Have you ever tried it (I can't speak for 2010)? The Intelligent Message Filter is dreadful.
You pretty much only get two knobs to turn: 0-10 for either block or quarantine. On the switches front you get to use someone else's service ie DNSBLs or you can (naively) fill in blocked address lists.
That's why have been doing a roaring trade (10 odd years) in tiny Gentoo (VMs nowadays) machines with Exim 'n' Spam Assassin + Clam AV doing the stuff that Exchange just can't.
So yes his Uni probably did cock up the
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What's sad is, people still think like that. It's a shame that few people know where AIDS came from. Short version, it's a result of overpopulation. AIDS has always existed, but when population density was lower, it wasn't transmitted between humans. Go ahead, look it up. See where AIDS actually came from. It most definitely was not divine intervention, in retribution for homosexuality. If that were so, it would have killed off all the queers, and left everyone else alone, right?
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Why not both?
If the programmer is lazy enough, he'll write one tool that does both.
I Read the Full Article (Score:2, Insightful)
It would have been nice if some sort of example of how these things (spam and virual mutations) are alike was actually presented. The full article is no more useful than the abstract posted here.
Holy mixed metaphors Batman! (Score:3)
Spam filters, viruses. Yeah, I can see the connection there. Now, if they were doing quality control on canned meat products....
Assuming Microsoft uses some form of naive Bayesian classifier to do spam filtering like everyone else does, their spam filtering technology was in use by a lot of other people for a lot of other things before it came to be a spam filter anyway.
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yes! The Bayesian filter (if I recall popularized by paul graham) is amazing for spam. And did not originate there... Bayesian tools have been here a long long time
ok how many.. (Score:1)
... of you guys have made a lame "Blue screen of death" joke?
Sounds great (Score:1)
But they should call google about the spam detecting algorithm...
If hotmail's spam filter is what they have to show for, thanks but I'll keep using condoms.
The ever escalating war... (Score:1)
So the war on spam and computer viruses has become as or more complex than figuring out how HIV mutates? How soon before it reaches cancer-level? lol
Look the other way (Score:2)
Maybe they should look at viruses and the immune system when designing spam filters.
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thanks for linking to the article. now i will read it and consider the points your angry anonymous comment instead of just blowing it off as a stupid angry internet comment.
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Wow, your angry rant is fascinating and displays a complete lack of understanding of what you're talking about.
HIV = Human Immunodeficiency Virus, like rotavirus or rhinovirus or cytoplasmic polyhedrosis virus, is the name we give to the retrovirus entity with a very narrow and specific set of viral proteins, very specific physical characteristics, and the unique reverse transcriptase enzyme method used by viral entities in the same family to unbind host cell DNA and copy in their own RNA strand.
AIDS = Acqu