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June 21, 2005
Levine on the Paul Graham/Yahoo Debacle
In a recent CircleID article, John Levine discusses the brouhaha surrounding Paul Graham dissing blacklists because he found himself on one. As a quick reminder, Paul Graham played an instrumental role in introducing and popularizing "naive Bayesian" analysis to detect spam, through message body word frequency analysis. You'd think he was antispam, yet his Web site shares an IP address with a known spammer that Spamhaus has notified Yahoo! about with no response. So, when the IP landed (as part of two single-IP blocks) in the SBL, Graham called it -- wait for it -- "terrorism".
Levine wonders whether anyone serious about fighting spam can hope to resolve the fact that they're apparently willing to act as human shields for known longtime spammers. It's a good question.
Posted by schampeo at June 21, 2005 11:46 AM