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Detecting spam from http headers?November 22

Greg Linden describes a paper about finding spam simply by inspecting the returned http headers:

In our proposed approach, the [crawler] only reads the response line and HTTP session headers ... then ... employs a classifier to evaluate the headers ... If the headers are classified as spam, the [crawler] closes the connection ... [and] ignores the [content] ... saving valuable bandwidth and storage.

We were able to detect 88.2% of the Web spam pages with a false positive rate of only 0.4% ... while only adding an average of 101 [microseconds] to each HTTP retrieval operation .... [and saving] an average of 15.4K of bandwidth and storage.

After running web crawls for the past year and finding all manner of spam, I have to say I'm skeptical this technique would really catch much spam on the actual web. Among the top 10 http header features they identify as spam-predictors are:

Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Server: Fedora
X-powered-by: php/4
64.225.154.135

These are pretty standard-looking headers. Let's look at some actual spam though and see if we can see anything funny.

$ curl -I http://www.fancieface.com/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:13:11 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.6b Last-Modif

Thank heaven for tax refundsNovember 21

In 2000 before the dot-com meltdown I bought a few cases of french bordeaux. Even though I like bordeaux, it half-seemed like a silly purchase at the time, but when the wine arrived I was happy because the bordeaux had risen in value since I purchased it, but due to the stock market death-spiral my accounts had gone down in the meantime. win, sorta.

Unfortunately there was also a bmw 540 that I decided was too indulgent to buy and passed on. Afterward I kicked myself -- it would have been free. I would have exercised some netscape options I had to buy it. I held onto them, eventually they declined in value until they were worthless. I should have bought the car!

I saw a joke circulating at the time that beer would have yielded a better return than some stocks. The beer bottles could be returned for the 5 cent deposit, but stocks became worthless. Plus you would get to drink the beer.

Now we're going through it again, but even worse. The banker line now is that it's not the return on your capital that you should be worried about, it's the return of your capital.

I just got a state of California tax refund check. Normally it's ineffecient to pay too much withholding, essentially lending the government your money interest-free until tax time. In this case though it turned out to be a decent investment. :-|

Cold calls, cold responseNovember 14

Every few days cold-calling salespeople show up at our office unnannounced to pitch us on insurance, lease deals, laser toner, office supplies, voip plans, bottled water, etc.

We have an open office. So when they enter, 11 people immediately look up at them. This can apparently be somewhat intimidating, based on their flummoxed reactions. They usually ask for a business card so they can call us later. I sometimes offer them mine, since my card doesn't have a phone number on it. Then they beat a hasty retreat.

Lately we've been trying a new tactic - not acking their presence when they come in. There's no receptionist (of course), and it's not clear who they should attempt to speak with. None of us really want to listen to their pitch or take their flier anyway, so playing the game of chicken with the other folks in the office sort of emerged as a default behavior. Who will be the first to crack at their nervousness, make eye contact, and thus become the dupe left holding the flier or handing out their business card?

I almost feel sorry for them. Almost!

Lucy on ElectionsNovember 2

It's hard being a campaign worker.
We're completely at the mercy of our candidate.
We do all the work, and the candidate gets all the credit.
We ring doorbells, and make the posters, and build up the candidate's image.
And then he says something stupid, and ruins everything we've done.

The next time I do any campaigning, it's gonna to be for myself!

-- Lucy, You're (not) elected, Charlie Brown

Retro Conservation AdvertisingOctober 29

The modern green/eco movement is bringing back the idea of eating local, having a garden, saving energy, etc. and pointing out the links between items (like bottled water and oil).

But we've been here before. Check out these WWI gov't posters.

"Don't waste paper - a pound of paper wasted is a pound of fuel wasted"

"Keep the home garden going"

Check out all the detailed instructions in that one. Public education indeed.