As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, spam is OUT OF HAND, and getting worse. Here’s a NYT story about Yahoo’s recent decision to run the old switcheroo on user privacy preferences.

If you are registered with Yahoo as a client, you recieved a notification email sometime in the past couple days concerning the change. Missed it? Me too. ALL THAT SPAM kinda made it tough to find.

Not to worry, though: one of the Napster geeks is busy working on a way to apply our collective ability to recognize spam for what is, and apply that in the aggregate at the network level!

It’s an interesting way to apply peer-to-peer decision making to a real problem in day-to-day life. Here’s a link to a New Scientist story about it. I first saw this one, um, someone’s blog, but forget where. THey use word “probabilistic” a bunch, which amused me.

Folsom, we’re on your side!