New and noteworthy in spam for 5/24/09

By Ben Gross
in

New Technique’s Gonna Find Out Who’s Spammy or Nice: Lizzie Buchen writes for Wired about recent publication from a team of researchers at Northwestern and Yahoo! Research. The researchers investigate the email communication patterns of two groups of university users that were located on different countries and separated by several years. The resulting temporal models provide a fascinating look at what our email habits can tell about us. The authors hypothesize that service providers such as Yahoo could use the these temporal models to help filter spam as a great deal of spam is sent at abnormal times. “Characterizing Individual Communication Patterns,” is authored by R. Dean Malmgren, Jake M. Hofman, Luis A. N. Amaral, Duncan J. Watts will appear in Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD’09), June 28–July 1, Paris, France. The paper is currently available as a preprint on arxiv.org.

Twitter Alert: Be Careful With Your Email: Chris Crum at WebProNews shows the ease at which spammers are able to harvest email addresses from Twitter. Scripts to collect email addresses are simple to write and are now readily available so Twitter users will likely begin to adjust their behavior to avoid posting or at least obfuscate their email addresses as they currently in many other locations online.

Whimsical Illustrations Based on Spam: A post on Laughing Squid shows some of Elliot Burford’s humorous illustrations based on otherwise offensive subject lines from spam.

Published May 24, 2009