Special Interest Group on CRAP

Thoughts by Kevin McCurley
Not affiliated with ACM. They have their own crap.

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Entries Tagged as 'security'

The birthday of spam

May 2nd, 2008 ·

Sadly, today is the 30th birthday of spam. I seem to remember that you should never trust anyone over 30.
Email providers are largely distinguished today by their ability to accurately filter out spam. There is a huge of amount of absolute crap that is sent, but most of this is easy to handle. [...]

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Tags: The internet · security

When hackers have offspring

March 27th, 2008 ·

Disclaimer: this is unrelated to my own child (I think)
I recently came across the following cartoon, which is a joke that is so obscure that few people will get it (you need to know what sql injection attacks are). Still, if Frank Zappa could name his daughter “Moon Unit” (sister of Dweezil), and David [...]

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Tags: Amusements · security

PageRank as economic utility function

February 28th, 2008 ·

I’ve written in the past about the interpretation of the PageRank probability distribution as an economic utility function. Recall that one interpretation is PageRank(url) = probability that a random surfer arrives at the url. This can be used to estimating monetary value for advertising on the page, because it is correlated to the [...]

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Tags: Research · The internet · security