I had to go visit the Microsoft campus today as part of my job: we were coordinating a continuing legal education session (MSFT were hosting and presenting). I had often seen the campus outlined on a map as if it were a small town, as in the lower map on the linked page but that’s actually a good description. You drive in and are confronted with markers to the different buildings as if you were in a town. Our hosts never thought to tell us we needed a map . . . .
We had to get to Bldg 9 (central to the upper map) from the orange freeway at the left side of the map and while the buildings may have been numbered sequentially as they were built, that ordering is not useful now: a map would have helped. I would suspect there are people who have worked there for years and never get to all or even a lot of the buildings . . . . .
A casual work atmosphere, to be sure, and very collegial/clubby from what I saw. The folks who hosted us don’t work in that building and I have no idea what goes on there: the X-Box in the lobby *may* have been a clue, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
The talk itself was a little wooly in parts, as a company very used to getting its own way on its terms finds itself as one of the world’s largest ISPs during the spam crisis. One interesting factoid: since the beginning of 2003, spam has increased 18% *per month*, effectively doubling every 5 months.
There was some talk about Bayesian filtering in future versions of exchange and other techniques — whitelists, reverse DNS lookups for MX records — and even dropping mail altogether whose authenticity was not verifiable. The telcos and the post office can’t do that, but ISPs are not common carriers so their allegiance is to their customers.
What was vaguely alluded to — under the term “open relays” — was how the prevalence of broadband, coupled with unsecured PCs, can make spam easier to send. Between viruses that raid outlook address books and worms that access unsecured ports, a constellation of unsecured systems on reasonably high-speed networks offers a nice opportunity for enterprising spammers.
I’ve even been offered, through spam, a chance to earn a little money by providing an offshore open relay. It was suggested I might get some complaints and would need to be ready to deal with them . . . .
No thanks.