January 2004
Monthly Archive
They beat me to it
Posted by phil on 07 Jan 2004 | Tagged as: Uncategorized
I came up with this idea some time last year.
Looks like someone’s already invented it …. Shame. I still want one, though.
The right way to fight spam
Posted by phil on 06 Jan 2004 | Tagged as: Uncategorized
Spam ticks me off, and I don’t even get any. It’s really just the idea that some people are sociopathic
enough to bring such annoyance upon other people and put a $10 billion strain on the economy.
I’m lucky enough to hide behind Biola’s excellent anti-spam filters, but the idea that such people
exist sickens me. There have been a lot of proposed solutions to spam problems, but apart from the classic,
effective Colt 1911 .45, none of them will really solve any problems.
The basic problem is that spam costs close to nothing to send. One prominent spammer was able to churn
out close to 16 million a day. Though no reasonable person would answer an ad for $30 sex-aid pills,
there are enough idiots out there to make it quite profitable. Run the numbers: for said spammer to make
$1000 in a single day, only one in 480,000 spams would have to generate a response. That’s about 0.000002%.
How can you fight something of that magnitude?
Then I stumbled upon WPoison. This works by fighting the
spammers at their source. They get their addresses to plauge from web searches. WPoison creates an infinite
number of fake email addresses for their harvester bots, giving the spammers loads and loads of false positives.
If enough sites adopt this strategy, spammers will be so overloaded with fake email addresses that they will
have an even harder time finding ones that will actually answer.
It’s not much, but it helps. I’m not sure how ethical DoS’ing spammers is, and until I get that
dilemma settled, this is good enough.