Wednesday, May 07, 2003

Spam fighter: Cloudmark's Spamnet software uses a Napster-like community peer-to-peer network to help weed out spam. Using a clever system of collaborative filtering and trust ratings, once someone else marks an item as spam, it's removed from the inboxes of all subscribers, while preserving the privacy of legitimate e-mail. This seems like a very promising idea -- utilizing the positive network effect of the internet to fight spam.