Re: any particular reason my posts get deleted?

From: Phil Weldon (notdisclosed_at_example.com)
Date: 12/04/03 

Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 00:14:59 GMT

I agree.

You would think that any filters used by MS would, at the least, pass words
used in Microsoft publications; as in "Cumulative Security Update for
Internet Explorer 6 SP1 (KB824145)".

Any system, even with just the minimum necessary virus protection, scans for
quite a lot of signatures (and those signitures, necessarily, are more
complicated than just the presence of a short string.) Therefore a filter
that kicks a three character string is, if not dumb, a strong indication of
elevators that don't reach the top floor.

Even more telling, the volume for microsoft.public.* newsgroups is not all
that large. How many posts to microsoft.public.* arrive each day?
Certainly fewer than(10*1000) + (100*100) + (1000*10) + (10,000*1) = 40,000.
Assume an average body length of 100 bytes*30 lines = 3000 bytes per post
(ignoring quotes from earlier in the thread.) That is a volume of less than
120 Mbytes for ALL posts to all of the microsoft.public.* hierarchy in a
day. Allow 600,000,000 CPU cycles to process each post (200,000 cycles per
byte.) Use ONE 2.4 GHz Xeon. That is 10,000 seconds, or less than two
hours of CPU time at $1.00 US. Hmm, doesn't seem to be that much of a
resource sink... I'll bet that a couple machine equivalents could implement
a bayesian filter across ALL of the posts to microsoft.public.* . 

-- 
Phil Weldon, pweldonatmindjumpdotcom
For communication,
replace "at" with the 'at sign'
replace "mindjump" with "mindspring."
replace "dot" with "."
"Veronica Loell" lista@nakawe.se wrote in message
news:ezLUkleuDHA.2072@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
> Bill Sanderson wrote / skrev:
>
> > "Veronica Loell" <lista@nakawe.se> wrote in message
> > news:%237ZhlebuDHA.1596@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
> >
> >>If they simply combined it with whether there was an attachment the
> >>problem would be solved (as long as people dont send html-format emails
> >>of course ;-))
> >>
> >
> >
> > That's what I meant about the filters not being very smart.  I really
know
> > nothing about them but suspect that given the volume of data being
filtered,
> > the likelyhood of more sophisticated decision making such as you suggest
> > isn't very high.  This surely isn't a thought that has escaped the
myriad
> > minds at Microsoft that have been looking at this problem--they aren't
dumb,
> > but what they have at hand which can handle the magnitude of data
involve
> > may be.
> >
> >
>
> Well, the level of sofistication of determining whether something has an
> attachment is not exactly mindblowing. But I don't expect it to be
> implemented. Do you seriously believe that a myriad of minds at
> microsoft has thought about this problem? If they had, with the
> resources they have they could surely come up with something that at
> least works, one would hope...
>

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