So tomorrow I have to do a live interview on BBC Radio 5 Live. This is kind of interesting, because according to my boss, radio 5 are also going to have on the other line a spammer (wonder if it'll be Ronald Scelson).
So I need to arm myself. I know the spammer is going to throw out the usual crap about how its the same as junk mail through your letter box (which it's not), and stuff, but can anyone here think of anything that might be worth bringing up? The one thing I don't know enough about is how spamming in the UK relates to the data protection act. And I bet I get asked about that!
If anyone has any good ideas on what sort of things to talk about, attach them to this journal.
Can you tell us when it will be? I'd love to listen in.
Re:When?
Matts on 2002-08-16T14:00:49
Oh yeah, sure. 8:30pm on Saturday 17th August. Apparently.
I'll confirm with more details when I've actually spoken to the lady at the bbc. You can get a Real feed from here if you're not in the UK.
Any chance of an online streaming version? or have the beeb stopped doing oggs now?
-Dom
When highlighting the differences between snail mail and email, it might be worth talking about how email is more like a direct link into your brain, while snail mail is not. (I first heard that from gnat, from his "be an advocate, not an asshole" talk at YAPC).
Re:Might want to read this article...
Matts on 2002-08-16T16:05:07
That's the guy.
There's lots of analysis about spam in the article, including a few well-reasoned explanations on why spam exists and why spam is bad:
All along the spectrum, if you restrict the sales pitches spammers can make, you will inevitably tend to put them out of business. That word business is an important one to remember. The spammers are businessmen. They send spam because it works. It works because although the response rate is abominably low (maybe 15 per million, vs 3000 per million for a catalog mailing), the cost, to them, is practically nothing. The cost is enormous for the recipients, about 5 man-weeks for each million recipients who spend a second to delete the spam, but the spammer doesn't have to pay that. Even so, sending spam does cost the spammer something, so the lower we can get the response rate, the fewer businesses will find it worth their while to send spam.
Re:Paul Graham on spam
Matts on 2002-08-17T08:17:32
Bayes is very good if you can tune it to your type of email. By the looks of things, Paul Graham gets very little business-like emails. That's where we found our largest set of false positives with it. He's also right - doing bayes against word pairs is better than against single words, but your database does grow a lot larger.
We're getting about 90% accuracy with it - on real customer emails.
Re:How did it go?
Matts on 2002-08-19T07:03:08
I think it went fine, but then I could have sounded like a complete twat and my wife wouldn't have told me;-)
It was a very short segment, especially due to all the news about Holly and Jessica that they were trying to squeeze us in between. But I'm sure my company will be pleased, since the closing words were from me and basically a big advert for our service;-)
