Stochastic Ideations

Link: http://www.ceas.cc

The Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS) is coming up August 21-22. I've gone to this conference since the beginning, and so far as I know it's the only conference on the topic that is practical without being arm-wavy. Good stuff if you're in the business, and there's a lot of interesting work there. IIRC that's the first time I heard definitive research showing that CAPTCHAs have essentially been defeated (using algorithms, not presenting them to other humans), and that was at least three years ago. The rest of the world is just figuring that out.

Another good conference is the MIT Spam Conference. However, I don't find it as rigorous as CEAS. Unfortunately I managed to miss the MIT conference this year. Although I'm on leave and hence don't have a travel budget, I probably would have tried to go.

I've never had a blog before. In fact, friends even have bets riding on my never blogging, ever. But other friends are on my case to start a blog.

My reluctance is that I can't quite figure out why anyone would read the sort of entries that I would put in a blog. If I've got something major then I'll write a paper about it, which pretty much means that anything in a blog will be minor. And in fact, based on the blogs that I've read, most of them are so minor as to be trivial. But a few are very good; the entries are more like brief magazine articles. I've written a lot of articles, so perhaps I can pull off the same thing in a blog. We'll see....