SGI sues ATI for IP related to R&D
Alexander Muse , October 31, 2006
Comments OffEvidently ATI has been selling a “display system having floating point rasterization and floating point frame buffering.” Hm, I think someone should sue anyone who uses so many acronyms.
Use a wiki instead of email!
Alexander Muse , October 31, 2006
Comments OffDo you discuss various issues using email? Do you include more than one other person on the email by using CC? You might consider using an internal wiki instead. Why? Email is becoming less reliable (i.e. spam), and it is a poor and inefficient collaboration tool. Wikis allow for teams to work through issues, documenting the process and the result for posterity. True collaboration is important ~ try a wiki they work!
Microsoft’s email team is using a wiki for internal communication instead of email? Why? Terry explains:
Those of us in the spam team have decided to create an internal wiki designed to house all of our knowledge. Personally, I think this is a good idea as there is a lot of information buried somewhere in all of our email, and the wiki is a good place to organize it all.
We have a spam analysis manual as a document which is the most comprehensive documentation that we have, but it is my hope that all of the little tidbits of information that a spam analyst needs to know will eventually be housed in the most comprehensive collection of spam fighting information anywhere on the planet.
Microsoft crying uncle?
Alexander Muse , October 30, 2006
Comments OffTerry from Microsoft’s spam team claims they are not, but she does a good job of explaining the problem spam is creating for her group as well as users of email:
The month of October has been the highest ever in terms of overall volume. We set a record on on October 18, and we broke it on October 24. To put this in perspective, our volume yesterday was 47% higher than the average daily volume for all of September. If this were the stock market, ticker SPAM would be making new highs every week. If this were the stock market and I had invested in it, I’d be making a fortune.
The sudden increase in volume has challenged assumptions about the nature of email. It used to be that good mail account for 10-15% of all mail. Now, I’d say that it’s maybe 5%. Furthermore, the increase of spam expands the way we think about handling it - users are going to start getting lots of spam in their quarantines or junk folders, what happens if spammers send so much mail that disk space gets used up? Can servers handle the sheer volume of mail? And will the crash survivors ever get off the island?
These are the types of issues that spammers are forcing our hands with and these issues simply were non-existent 6 months ago. They were non-existent 2 months ago. This is a fast changing business and the rate of change is increasing. Anti-spam companies need to be able to respond to the changing nature of the threat almost instantaneously.
Is it just me?
Alexander Muse , October 30, 2006
Comments OffThere is a serious glut of spam out there. Literally, a glut! Microsoft’s spam team is having fits. All SimpleTicket development has been put on hold until we get a better handle on the new spam problem.
Terry Zink from Microsoft’s spam team explains better than we can,
“In the past, we used to get spam outbreaks every few months. Then it was every couple of months, then once a month. This past year it started once every two weeks, then it summer it moved up to once a week. Now, we get new spam outbreaks two or three times per week. Volume doesn’t drop off for one or two days, it drops off for maybe 12-16 hours before the next spam blitz occurs.”
Architel’s spam filtering efficiency hasn’t dropped over the past three months (in fact it has improved slightly) ~ we are still blocking as much spam on a percentage basis as we have been for the past two years. You ask, “so why are we seeing so much more spam?” Again, Terry from Microsoft explains better than I can,
“The reason people see so much in their inboxes (where “so much” is a relative term) is because there is so much traffic flowing around. Like I said, our resources are stretched as much as they can go but that’s because there is literally so much to do 8 hours a day per spam analyst sometimes doesn’t seem like enough.”
Let me put it this way, our system is blocking 97% of messages that are spam. So we let 3% of the total number of spam messages you get actually reach your inbox. If you received 1000 spam messages per day last month you would have seen about 30 spam messages in an average day. We have seen the volume of spam increase up-to 10 times for most users for the past two months. Now you receive 300 spam messages in an average day, and our spam filters are operating perfectly. Get it? The industries filter rates from between 70% and 97% are not the problem ~ it is the sheer volume of spam messages. This is a HUGE problem for everyone.
Apple Booming!
Alexander Muse , October 28, 2006
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Apple just grabbed 6.1% of market share (almost as much as Gateway). [via]
U.S. PC Market Share
- Dell - 32.1%
- HP - 23%
- Gateway - 6.4%
- Apple - 6.1%
- Toshiba - 5.1%
World-wide PC Market Share
- HP - 16.3%
- Dell - 16.1%
- Lenovo - 7.5%
- Acer - 5.9%
- Toshiba - 4.3%
Germ-free Mice
Alexander Muse , October 26, 2006
Comments OffIogear is offering a germ free wireless laser mouse. They boast a special coating that will neutralize 99% of the microbes on its surface. [via]
Firefox 2.0 is Out!
Alexander Muse , October 25, 2006
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I was excited to learn that Firefox 2.0 was available, but I wasn’t so excited when it lost all of my bookmarks. Evidently one of the plugins replaced all of my bookmarks with Delicious bookmarks - ouch! Architel clients should not immediately install Firefox 2.0 without help from an engineer. Just enter a ticket if you need help!
zBox - Turnkey Backup
Alexander Muse , October 25, 2006
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The zBox gives you an external backup solution. You can backup your data on the box, but this solution offers a twist. Once your backup is complete the zBox will upload your data to Amazon’s S3 storage cloud. Nice, but pricey ($1/gig/month).
We have been working with Amazon to use the S3 storage cloud for our online backup service. How would it work? In much the same way it does today, but our backups would be “backed up” in Amazon’s data center! A backup for your backup. [via]
Ultra-Mobile PC from Quanta
Alexander Muse , October 25, 2006
Comments OffLooking for a tiny PC that actually works? This one from Quanta is based on Intel’s ViiV platform allowing: hi-def video playback, 5.1 Dolby, GigE, RAID and a dual-core CPU. Very nice!
Strange Spam?
Alexander Muse , October 23, 2006
Comments OffTerry Zink has been talking about some strange trends in spam over the last week. The newest trend is image spam in the form of text. Don’t ge it? Neither does Terry, here are her theories:
- These are newbie spammers who haven’t figured out how to embed their spam in images yet but have heard great things from others who have done it.
- Spammers have some broken spamware.
- It’s deliberate - spammers are mixing things up. They may have stopped having as much success with their image spam so they are going old-school back to plain old text spam. They are testing to see if this gets through filters any better.
She suggests,
If it is point 3, I would say that it’s clever but probably not going to help very much. Spam filters build layers of protection on top of previous layers; previous layers are not stripped away when new ones are introduced. I am wondering just what they are up to, however. Stock spam is a problem but clearly spammers have figured out that sending stuff in images works (that is, it appears to work). To revert back to an older technique is unusual.
Here at Architel we are working various solutions to reduce the number of spam messages our it support clients receive. Our current hosted spam system is doing a bang up job ~ but it is being stressed to the breaking limit. We are resolving the scaling issue by adding additional servers to balance the load. It is also missing a lot of messages (so is everyone else) and we are working on using the collective intelligence of our 3,000+ users to try to make our system smarter.
One method we are exploring is the use of each client’s monitoring server as a auto-white list. Any reciepient of an email from the client’s network would be auto-white listed for that client. The list of ‘good addresses’ would be stored on the client’s monitoring server. This list would then be sent to our servers to create a off-white list ~ each of our clients would contribute to this list. While the good address would be auto-white listed at the clients site, the address would be scored lower (i.e. lower score means the message can get in). This, of course, is in addition to our other methods currently in use.
