On Mar 31 2006, Chris Lewis wrote:
whatever the incentive. So claiming incentive as an argument for the
success of dnsbls won't (and really shouldn't) sway standards committees.
You're missing the intent. The intent is to show that our FP statistics
have pretty strong validity, full stop. In that, it should sway those
wanting such statistics as proof/disproof of the success of DNSBLs.
But in terms of arguments, a generic success is canceled out by a generic
failure. You need to qualify your success claim with a domain of applicability
which covers your users but is narrow enough to not cover cases where
others might legitimately claim failure.
The author of the draft isn't the only one who claims to have been
bitten by dnsbls, there are plenty of rants on the net, e.g.
http://paulgraham.com/spamhausblacklist.html
While that doesn't make their claims of failure statistically
significant, it means that your counterclaim of strong success of
dnsbls will necessarily be treated very skeptically, unless you can
explain where in the email usage pattern your results apply, ie how
can your claim be true and also the church claim be true simultaneously?
What's a plausible distinguishing feature? Quality of blacklist,
type of user, ... ?
Even if you don't accept the transferance of such numbers to other
environments, it still demonstrates proof of the effectiveness of DNSBLs
in at least some environments.
I think the environment matters. I accept your claim, and I accept other
people's claims. Ideally I want to reconcile the opposing viewpoints.
It simply isn't possible to generate statistical accuracy in this field.
Spam/Ham collections large enough to be useful can't be generated
timely enough to give accurate measures of real-time reputation systems.
I'm not convinced it can't be. The NIST TREC people
(http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/spam/) are interested in this very
kind of problem, so it's at least "on the radar", whether it will
ultimately be successful or not.
--
Laird Breyer.
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