[Beowulf] Apologies for the spam/virus yesterday

[Bill Broadley]

> Are you suggesting, gasp, parallel processing on a cluster of biological 
> processors<grin>?

*chuckle*

> More to the point, what software or process will be used for spreading the 
> workload?  It has to be delay tolerant, error correcting, self 
> authenticating, and probably something else too.

Dspam is basically statistical SPAM protection.  With a large corpus of
beowulf traffic, and a large corpus of spam the large majority of email
should be instantly (under a second) categorized into the right category
(spam or ham).

People have reported HIGHER accuracy with dspam than humans, I can't
vouch for levels this high personally (yet), but errors of 2 in 22,787
and 1 in 7000 have been reported.  I can personally attest to a big
improvement over spamassassin though.

It supports a passworded web based interface for reviewing the quarantined
messages.  From there messages can be deleted or retrained as ham and
forwarded.

So in an ideal case:
* many less messages require human intervention
* the remaining load could be spread across volunteers
* the system adapts over time to new spam (via retraining)
* latency from email to posting on the list would go from minutes to
  hours in the current case to seconds, unless it's quarantined.
* everyone keeps their beloved beowulf mailing list email based.

-- 
Bill Broadley
Computational Science and Engineering
UC Davis