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I love reading stories like this, but with a background in fighting spam I'm a bit skeptical. I would love to hear more details. For those of you who don't kn
by yajoe 15y ago
I love reading stories like this, but with a background in fighting spam I'm a bit skeptical. I would love to hear more details.
For those of you who don't know, most of Microsoft's anti-spam efforts are from techniques I suspect are hard to translate to the HIV domain. Microsoft catches the overwhelming majority of spam (98%) using IP address blocking. Most of the remaining spam is caught using long lists of regular expressions managed by humans. I would not expect researchers to be crafting regular expressions or mapping blocklists to protein sequences. Maybe they are, but the article makes it sound like some algorithmic approach.
Obviously there are more modern techniques for fighting spam, but Microsoft isn't using them yet, and I hardly think of Microsoft as a leader in this space.
- FooBarWidget 15y agoThe people in Microsoft Research are very different people than the ones in charge of Hotmail. It could be that the Research people are more familiar with content analysis methods.
- jarin 15y agoI've said it before, but I really think Microsoft would be a completely different (and better) company if Microsoft Research was a bigger part of their product development. Just look at the insane stuff they're doing with Kinect, for instance.
- riffraff 15y agothere is a chance if they were more involved there would be an implicit loss on their freedom to do amazing stuff.
- ashr 15y agoWhile you mentioned that you would like to know more details, at the same time you make it sound like you know the current inner workings of how Microsoft spam filters work. Do you work for Microsoft spam filtering/email software teams and know the details you mentioned and thus have the inside information? Even then, I am not sure how you can extend that to what are the spam filtering techniques that Microsoft Research has been working on lately.
- yajoe 15y agoFair questions and no details to share :). I don't work for Microsoft, but my path has crossed with the FOPE team a few times where we got into specifics about their platform. Hence my surprise to see this article about how their tech is used by research.