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Re: [Asrg] How about we do something about spam?

2007-02-01 10:17:39

On Jan 31, 2007, at 7:54 PM, Barry Shein wrote:

But I do believe that a more immediate goal of urging law enforcement
(et al) to better enforce existing laws (&c) regarding the creation
and operation of, e.g., zombie botnets is valuable without in any way
detracting from other efforts stated.

Technical solutions can coexist with law enforcement options. I just stumbled on the site running Project Honeypot <http:// www.projecthoneypot.org/about_us.php> that is analyzing data from web scrapers and spambots to help put together the case evidence for spammers harvesting addresses from web pages which is also a violation of existing laws (according to the site).

I was pushing for distributed collection of spamtrap data about 2.5 years ago. The primary goal was (is) to develop a fast blocklist to shutdown the spambots that were just emerging. I was told this idea was FUSSP directly by the inventor of the term and that it would never work. In my research last night I also found <http:// research.ciphertrust.com/index.php> that in part is doing precisely what I was proposing. I've grown to mistrust anti-spam expert and tend to think their primary goal is to enhance their worth by insuring the fight against spam continues.

After looking at some of my own posts from 2.5 years ago I could see how far we've progressed. Back then I was able to manually process all the spam that hit my inbox (with no pre-filtering by the ISP). Today I can barley scan the titles of the spam I get and I know there is lost legitimate mail due to the upstream filters.


I'm still pushing my idea because I still believe it can help reverse the current trend of more and more spam every year. Even though there is apparently a commercial implementation, the goals of [2.3.5. Avoid central administration] and [2.3.6. Don't impose commercial administration] can be better realized in a public system. I'm also not one that blindly sticks to an idea. I am more of a scientist and would be just as interested in how the idea fails as in seeing it succeed. But I'll demand to see data before changing my mind.

-- Dan Oetting



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