http://www.ieee-boston.org/society_on_social_implications.htm#dec19
Subject: "Spam: Technology and Policy for Control of Unsolicited
Electronic Communications"
Speakers: Jeff Schiller and Richard M. Smith
Location: MIT Room 4-231, Date: Thursday, 12/19/2002, Time: 6:30 PM
Sponsors: Joint meeting of the IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Society for
Social Implication of Technology Society and the Greater Boston
Chapter of the ACM
Abstract: Email is clearly the Internet's "killer app" -- now a daily
experience for most computer users, and a necessity for business
communications -- but the amount of unsolicited e-mail, or "spam", is
exploding. The Radicati Group, a market research group in Palo Alto,
Calif., estimated earlier this year that 32 percent of the 7.3 billion
e-mail messages sent each day were unsolicited commercial messages. In
addition to its burden on users who must sort and delete it, as well
as corporate IT servers and ISPs who must transport it, spam mail is
one of the greatest computer security threats due to HTML content and
virus-laden attachments.
The US Congress passed legislation forbidding unsolicited electronic
communication soon after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Chinese student
uprising, which showed that automatic fax transmission could seriously
cripple official government fax communications -- but to date forms of
communications other than fax are excluded from this control. With
many sources of spam email outside the US, it's questionable whether
US legislation and international policy controls could be effective.
Can technology solutions control the flood of spam? How do email
addresses enter spam mail lists from browsers, and by address
"sniffing", and how can users prevent this? Are filtering methods
effective, when based solely on information in headers? When body
content is inspected is it correspondingly privacy violated -- should
any privacy at all be expected? How is the spam-filtering problem
similar to the address "sniffing" problem? How is it similar to
surveillance of email and other electronic data transmission on the
public Internet? What software and hardware technologies are being
developed to support message surveillance and filtering? What
technology and policy directions are available to protect both privacy
and security of communications?
The speakers at this meeting bring understanding of both technical and
policy issues, and practical experience in network security and spam
control. They will review of these issues and open a forum for
discussion.
Biographies: Jeffrey I. Schiller is the network manager for
MIT. He is also a Security Architect for MIT's Information Technology
Architecture Group (ITAG). He is a founding member of the Internet
Privacy Coalition and is the Area Director for Security on the
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), the steering group for the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Richard M. Smith is an Internet consultant based in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. He works primarily with the media, policy makers, and
law enforcement to interpret Internet technologies. He has more 25
years of experience in the computer software field. He is also the
former president of Phar Lap Software and the former Chief Technology
Officer of the Privacy Foundation.
This meeting is free and open to the public. A no-host dinner follows.
For more information, contact (for CS) Archie Blondin at 617-856-1909
or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or (for SIT) Alex Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
(617) 504-8761, or consult <http://www.ieee-boston.org> or
<http://messageweb.net/ieee-sit-boston>.
-Vik
--
Vik P. Solem [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hacko Ergo Sum
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