Microsoft's MSN said its e-mail services had blocked some incoming messages from rival Internet service providers earlier this week, after their networks were mistakenly banned as sources of junk mail.

The Redmond, Wash., company, which has nearly 120 million e-mail customers through its Hotmail and MSN Internet services, confirmed Friday it had wrongly placed a group of Internet protocol addresses from AOL Time Warner's RoadRunner broadband service and EarthLink on its "blocklist" of known spammers whose mail should be barred from customer in-boxes.

Once notified of the error by the two ISPs, MSN moved the IP addresses "over to a safe list immediately," according to a Microsoft spokeswoman.

InfoStructure News from Wired News - Net Gurus Rally Anti-Spam Forces.

Like Greek gods high atop Mount Olympus, the masters of the Internet have long been watching the spam wars. But this week they decided to step in and settle the fight -- once and for all.

The Internet Research Task Force, the closest thing the Internet has to a governing body for all matters technical, inaugurated the Anti-Spam Research Group this week to develop "a taxonomy of the (spam) problem and the proposed solutions."

[ ... ]

Because of its close ties to the Internet Research Task Force and the Internet Engineering Task Force, organizations whose influence extends to the realm of politicians and regulators, the ASRG has the power to crystallize the efforts of the anti-spam movement.

IRTF chairman Vern Paxson said his group's sponsorship confers on the ASRG the respect of a community of "fairly high-powered researchers."

IRTF - Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG).

The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) focuses on the problem of unwanted email messages, loosely referred to as spam. The scale, growth, and effect of spam on the Internet have generated considerable interest in addressing this problem. Once considered a nuisance, spam has grown to account for a large percentage of the mail volume on the Internet. This unwanted traffic stands to affect local networks, the infrastructure, and the way that people use email.

The definition of spam messages is not clear and is not consistent across different individuals or organizations. Therefore, we generalize the problem into "consent-based communication". This means that an individual or organization should be able to express consent or lack of consent for certain communication and have the architecture support those desires. Expressing consent is more straightforward on an individual basis; as the solution is moved closer to the source, it is more difficult to express a policy that satisfies all downstream receivers. The research group will investigate the feasibility of: (1) a single architecture that supports this and (2) a framework that allows different systems to be plugged in to provide different pieces of the solution.

"Network World Fusion" - IETF creates antispam research group.

Underscoring growing concern over spam, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has created an Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) that aims to put unsolicited commercial e-mail in its crosshairs by setting standards for spam detection and potential legislation.

"We decided to go ahead now because it's clear that spam has become a serious problem for organizations," ASRG Chair Paul Judge said Friday.

Judge, who is also the director of research and development at e-mail security firm CipherTrust, added that while there are a patchwork of spam-fighting tools already available, the industry has yet to take a systematic approach to the problem.

The antispam group will work within the organization' s Internet Research Task Force and will investigate whether a single architecture can be implemented that will allow e-mail receivers to express their consent and, more importantly, lack of consent for certain communications. This approach is due to the fact that everyone's definition of spam is different, the group said, making e-mail a consent-based communication.

LawMeme (Yale) - Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet.

A journalist attends the World Economic Forum and writes her friends an email about the experience. Two weeks later, that email is on the Web, people she's never met are correcting her spelling, and the journalist is vowing to go back to longhand.

Welcome to the world of accidental privacy spills. Compared with the problem of keeping personal email private, copyright and spam are easy. Full essay inside . . . .

Slashdot | Accidental Privacy Spills.

ahem writes "A journalist attends the World Economic forum, and writes an email to a few friends. It's a chatty, casual conference report. The conference is a gathering of the 5,000 most powerful people in the world. The report gives a breezy insight into how stuff gets done at that level, and what the concerns are that keep the world's leaders up at night. That email was intended only for the journalist's friends. That email winds up getting plastered all over the net. Here is a very interesting discussion of the implications of this "privacy spill." Make sure you read down to the Epilogue. Here is the email itself." --- The Lawmeme discussion is quite thoughtful and in-depth, very good reading.

Slashdot | Developers - Using Statistics to Cause Spammers Pain.

mlamb writes "Statistical mail classifiers like PopFile save time on the part of their users, but don't do anything to actively combat spam. I just published an article that suggests a way to use classifier output against a spammer while they're connected to your SMTP server, and I'm launching a project called TarProxy to implement it."

privacyactivism.org - September 5, 2002 - CAPPS - Backgrounder.

FOXNews.com - Feds to Begin Background Checks for Air Passengers.

WASHINGTON -- The government is getting ready to test a new risk-detection system that would check background information and assign a threat level to everyone who buys a ticket for a commercial flight.

The system, ordered by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks, will gather much more information on passengers. Delta Air Lines will try it out at three airports beginning next month, and a comprehensive system could be in place by the end of the year.

Transportation officials say a contractor will be picked soon to build the nationwide computer system, which will check such things as credit reports and bank account activity and compare passenger names with those on government watch lists.

Advocates say the system will weed out dangerous people while ensuring law-abiding citizens aren't given unnecessary scrutiny.

Critics see a potential for unconstitutional invasions of privacy and for database mix-ups that could lead to innocent people being branded security risks.

There also is concern that the government is developing the system without revealing how information will be gathered and how long it will be kept.

"We may be creating a massive surveillance system without public discussion," said Barry Steinhardt, an American Civil Liberties Union director.

Transportation officials say CAPPS II -- Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System -- will use databases that already operate in line with privacy laws and won't profile based on race, religion or ethnicity.

[ ... ]

Transportation Department spokesman Chet Lunner said a Federal Register notice about CAPPS II that said the background information will be stored for 50 years is inaccurate. He said such information will be held only for people deemed security risks.

Jay Stanley, an ACLU spokesman, was skeptical.

"When it says in print, 50 years, we'd like to see something else in print to counter that," he said.

Slashdot | CAPPS II Trials Begin in March.

corporal_clegg writes "According to this story on FoxNews, in March Delta Airlines will begin using a federal database that incorporates credit history and bank records in an effort to identify potential security threats. The federal system - CAPPS II (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System) - will assign a "threat level" to passengers based upon information in the database and other criteria, such as whether the individual is on government watch lists. 'CAPPS II will collect data and rate each passenger's risk potential according to a three-color system: green, yellow, red. When travelers check in, their names will be punched into the system and the boarding passes encrypted with the ranking.' The scary thing is that no one really knows which databases the government will use or how long the records will remain. Slashdot covered this story in September 2002, and it now seems that the first airline is ready to give it a try. In addition to the links in the previous Slashdot article, a good background on CAPPS II can be found here." --- Actually, the last story we did on passenger profiling was just a week or two ago.