If the "crash the clickthrough" module is included in, e.g., SpamAssassin as an option, it will be easy to have tens of thousands of people clicking through. Of course there will be antibot countermeasures, but antibot countermeasures will likely reduce the utility of the original spam by placing barriers to the average user.
The random-email-address attacks were perhaps not properly thought through. I gave up generating bounce messages to spammers when my ISP sysadmin told me that these bounce in turn, which create more work for him.
The other hobby horse I ride on the antispam crusade is moving the fight to the analog domain. Flood the spammer with data that has to be sorted by analog means: phone calls, letters. The spammer then has to differentiate, manually, between real user data and fake data. This quickly reduces his profit margin towards zero. I saw a tool on the net that does this: the tool fills out spammer's forms with random but realistic data.
Remember the folks who played that Nigeria scammer for laughs? Imagine if there were a modified Eliza variant to that engaged each of these spammers... they'd have to spend days trying to sort through the real answers from he fake ones. If they received 100,000 realistic responses they'd never be able to find the real suckers.
The way to fight the RIAA is not to send them email; that's processed, sorted, and dumped in the digital realm. It's to call them on the telphone, politely, to complain about their policies. Ten thousand calls a day to them -- and their lawyers -- may not change their minds but will certainly get their attention.
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Re: Agreed, but slightly missing the point
Date: 2003-11-24 10:38 am (UTC)The random-email-address attacks were perhaps not properly thought through. I gave up generating bounce messages to spammers when my ISP sysadmin told me that these bounce in turn, which create more work for him.
The other hobby horse I ride on the antispam crusade is moving the fight to the analog domain. Flood the spammer with data that has to be sorted by analog means: phone calls, letters. The spammer then has to differentiate, manually, between real user data and fake data. This quickly reduces his profit margin towards zero. I saw a tool on the net that does this: the tool fills out spammer's forms with random but realistic data.
Remember the folks who played that Nigeria scammer for laughs? Imagine if there were a modified Eliza variant to that engaged each of these spammers... they'd have to spend days trying to sort through the real answers from he fake ones. If they received 100,000 realistic responses they'd never be able to find the real suckers.
The way to fight the RIAA is not to send them email; that's processed, sorted, and dumped in the digital realm. It's to call them on the telphone, politely, to complain about their policies. Ten thousand calls a day to them -- and their lawyers -- may not change their minds but will certainly get their attention.