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25 Oct 2009

How do you test spam filters? Email

(Thanks to Chris Lewis for permission to adapt this)

Everyone who uses e-mail needs spam filtering, and some filters definitely work better than others. Some people we know were trying to design tests of filter quality, which turns out to be extremely difficult.

What one might call 'filtering quality' assessment, should be the very very last step after "does it have the features I want?", "does it install/is it supported/supportable?", "does it crash?", "does it make lots of stupid mistakes?", "is it likely going to compare favorably with what we already have?".

You have to do the latter before the former. The latter is relatively easy. The former is what people keep asking about, and is the really really hard part to do right.

See more ...


  posted at: 00:24 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/filtertest.html

07 Oct 2009

The Internet Archive Really Is Reliable

A recent message in the Risks Digest called Risks of believing what you see on the WayBack Machine (archive.org) claims that:

I have now encountered 2 legal cases in 3 months in which a plaintiff saw images on the WayBack Machine (www.archive.org) and believed that they indicated events in the past that never happened.

This is a big deal in legal circles, since archive.org is widely used in court cases to show the state of a web site at a given time, which can be critical in, for example, cases where the site shows prior art for a patent or infringing copies of copyrighted material. If the archive entries aren't reliable, all of these cases are thrown into doubt. Needless to say, it would be many defendants' dream come true if courts were to stop accepting archived copies.

I have analyzed the material cited in the article and find that the archive is fine, and his claims to the contrary are somewhere between disengenuous and deliberately misleading. Here's why.

See more ...


  posted at: 21:31 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/iarchive.html

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It turns out you don’t need a license to hunt for spam.
5 days ago

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