[OT] Spam FIREWALL software

["Kang , Joseph S." <jo...@netex.com>]

Heard about this via /. and followed my nose to the Univ. of Queensland site
for the official press release.

http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.phtml?article=5833

Revolutionary spam firewall
Monday , 23 August 2004


The email spam nightmare could be halted in cyberspace by a groundbreaking
firewall developed at The University of Queensland.

The new technology is the only true spam firewall in existence, according to
co-developer Matthew Sullivan.

"Existing anti-spam software filters out spam whereas ours puts up a
firewall, stopping all email traffic and only allowing real mail through,"
said Mr Sullivan.

"In addition, our technology is accurate and fast. We recently completed a
successful trial of a key layer of the spam firewall and it processed the
emails at 90 messages per second, misclassifying only one out of 25,000
emails."

"It turned out that the software was even better than us, picking up spam
we'd incorrectly classified as legitimate emails."

A Specialist Systems Programmer at The University of Queensland, Mr Sullivan
worked on the spam firewall concept largely in his spare time, only coming
together this year to work on the project with Guy Di Mattina, a recent UQ
Engineering honours graduate, and Dr Kevin Gates, a UQ mathematics lecturer.

Pivotal to the trio's spam firewall is the unique method of using a Support
Vector Machine (SVM) to categorise emails. The only anti-spam software that
analyses emails as a whole picture, rather than based solely on components
such as key words or phrases, said Mr Sullivan.