Again I will say that there is no technology quick fix to an accountability
problem. It's not the fault of the ISP if a user personally decides to spam.
However, it's the ISPs responsibility to ban that user from using the service
in a malicious way. Simply passing it off saying "I get too many requests!" is
a lame excuse. Web mail is a bad thing too and I'll tell you why. If you allow
anyone to signup for an e-mail address online (and I'm targeting services like
hotmail, etc. here) then you promote spam because you don't take the steps to
regulate users using your service. You should take the appropriate steps to ban
malicious users and charge them with an offence if there is such a law for it.
You have to stop spam at the source. ISPs have to be accountable for the
service they provide, users have to realize that they can get into serious
trouble with the law, they should also have to sign an agreement so that they
know about the terms of use. Terms of use displayed on web!
sites like hotmail, etc. are useless because how many people do you think
actually read those and abide by them? Accountability is the root of spam...
"stanislav shalunov" <shalunov(_at_)internet2(_dot_)edu> 08/16/02 02:11PM
Frank Solensky <fsolensky(_at_)premonitia(_dot_)com> writes:
Just posted on slashdot: a Bayesian approach to the problem that reports
to have rates of 0.5% on false positives and 0% false negative:
http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
Nice short-term approach.
Unfortunately, easily defeated with just appending (perhaps as an HTML
comment) a long innocent-looking fragment (e.g., a 30KB piece from a
random book).
Further, in its *present* form, where unfamiliar words are given 0.2
spam probability, easily defeated by just adding a lot of randomly
generated `words' like 9nscS9Ft, iuiF0kKw, 6AycPEbU, nsUdjGeP, etc.
Given enough of these, the Bayesian probability formula will declare
even a piece of mail that consists of a sales pitch for a pornographic
web site have a probability of being spam that is arbitrarily close to
0.2.
--
Stanislav Shalunov http://www.internet2.edu/~shalunov/
"Which one is worse? Both are worse." -- V. I. Lenin