Vernon Schryver wrote:
I think a mechanism similar to DCC could be good. We need a way for
lots of sensors to dump information into the collection network. We
need a way to decide what summaries of the data are useful. And we need
a way to extract the data without compromising privacy. (e.g., report
SHA1 hashes of addresses rather than addresses themselves.)
...
I think I'm qualified to comment on that idea. The short version of
my take is "great in theory but nearly hopeless in practice."
OK.
The hopeless part is that in practice it is extremely difficult to
build a network large enough to collect enough data to be other than
a muddy pile of annecdotes.
Well, this is a research group; we consider blue-sky ideas. If most
people start seeing the level of spam that striker.ottawa.on.ca does,
there will be huge incentive to collaborate.
The DCC is more than 2 years old, but it
still sees at most single-digit percentages of all mail in the network
and perhaps less.
I'm not sure that you need a much higher percentage than that. If
your sensors are well-dispersed, a couple of percent should be pretty
representative, or at least enough to start detecting trends.
Even in the skewed population that does use the DCC, there is evidence
that making generalizations is very hard. There is 3X difference in
spam load per user depending on organization type judging from
http://www.dcc-servers.net/dcc/graphs/comp-rates
Yes, I see that also among my customers. But we're looking for trends
across the whole Internet.
[...]
Consider the dangers of being able to
ask whether the system has seen a message with a sender of the hash of
"Bill Gates" and at recipeint of the hash of "Steve Jobs" today.
You probably only want hashes of IP addresses, not e-mail addresses.
If the DCC collected not only message hashes, but also the number of
different IPs from which those messages originated, I bet we'd see
some interesting data.
--
David.
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