Comments on: A New Battle in the War on Spam http://www.robhyndman.com/2006/10/12/a-new-battle-in-the-war-on-spam/ any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:12:36 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6 By: Ben Lucier http://www.robhyndman.com/2006/10/12/a-new-battle-in-the-war-on-spam/#comment-18661 Ben Lucier Fri, 13 Oct 2006 13:54:36 +0000 http://www.robhyndman.com/2006/10/12/a-new-battle-in-the-war-on-spam/#comment-18661 I'm confident that SPAM software will catch up, but it will become more and more important to combat spam at the service provider level. Tyler's piece is accurate in that more spam is being delivered through digital images. Without getting into too much detail (maybe I'll post my own entry soon), service providers are beginning to implement OCR technology to "read" the images and convert the image into written text that can then be spam filtered. While this sounds CPU intensive, the systems are pretty efficient: Since the spammers use the same image, sent to millions of different users, after the image is OCR'ed, a unique hash is generated and stored to immediately identify other matching images, without the cpu intensive OCR method. This is why it's important to filter SPAM at the service provider level - stop it at the source. I’m confident that SPAM software will catch up, but it will become more and more important to combat spam at the service provider level.

Tyler’s piece is accurate in that more spam is being delivered through digital images. Without getting into too much detail (maybe I’ll post my own entry soon), service providers are beginning to implement OCR technology to “read” the images and convert the image into written text that can then be spam filtered.

While this sounds CPU intensive, the systems are pretty efficient: Since the spammers use the same image, sent to millions of different users, after the image is OCR’ed, a unique hash is generated and stored to immediately identify other matching images, without the cpu intensive OCR method.

This is why it’s important to filter SPAM at the service provider level - stop it at the source.

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