Is there anyone left in the world unacquainted with the plight of the Abachas of Nigeria? The Abacha family fortune is not only down to a mere US $30 million, but it’s inaccessible, frozen in certain bank accounts that can be unlocked only with your Urgent Assistance, which usually consists of disclosing a bank account number, to your ultimate detriment.
The Abacha e-mails are just one of the many waves of Nigerian-based fraud schemes, which date back to faxes in the 1980s. And in turn, they’re just the tip of the spam sewage tsunami that, by some estimates, is much as 90%+ percent of all e-mails, and its volume is growing ever larger.
For years people have been trying, with only limited success, to sort the good mail wheat from the spam chaff in a variety of ways, such as creating lists of known spammers, or mail servers that harbor known spammers, blacklisting and lists of known spam messages, filtering. When done conservatively, such methods still let a lot of spam through. When done aggressively, they block legitimate messages as well as spam.
But these are hacksaws, when what’s needed are scalpels. And sure enough, a new technique has come along recently that promises to shunt almost all one’s unwanted messages to the virtual trash bin without also zapping any of the mail you want to read. It works by a sort of mathematical induction: you identify which messages are spam, and pattern-matching software, based on principles of probability theory first formulated by Thomas Bayes in the 18th century, finds commonalities among the bad messages, and among the remaining good ones as well. Rules are then formulated that generalize from those particulars.
firmware, Apple TV 2.4, doesn’t have any major improvements, but it does include a few nice, new features and, from what I can see, gives the Apple TV a real performance kick.