8 Apr 2003 Bram   » (Master)

Certs against Spam

The last technique I gave for back propogation has a serious flaw, but I think the criteria and general approach are good. Here's a much better algorithm:

  1. Compute a weight for each node. This is done by answering the question 'If I walk randomly along certifications, with probability x of stopping at each hop, which is the probability that I will stop at this node?' The stopping probability is parameterizable.

  2. Compute a weight of of spammerness of each node. To do this, for each node subdivide its weight among everyone it claims sent spam, and add up the claims of spammerness for each node. Then multiply by a fraction, say around 1/5. This fraction is parameterizable, and reflects a tradeoff between judiciousness of stopping spam versus difficulty of fraudulent censorship.

  3. Use spam values to neutralize weights. If a node has weight x and spam value x + y, then the node's weight becomes 0 and the remaining value y is used to neutralize the nodes which certified that one, possibly completely neutralizing them and requiring furthur back-propogation.

Mail is accepted from any node which there's a path to along certification edges over nodes which have weight greater than zero.

I've glossed over some details, but that covers all the important points. I'm very enamored of this approach. It's extremely untuitively compelling, and all the steps in it can be done or at least very well approximated in essentially linear time. It looks like we have an algorithm which really can expand to a global scale now.

Twisty Puzzles

Some posts by me to the twisty forum.

HTML

Web pages which make their hyperlinks non-underlined drive me absolutely batshit. I wish there was a browser option to always underline even when the page says not to.

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