Mapping the Spam

demaria writes "The folks at cluelessmailers.org have made a map of spam. It shows the relationships among spammers and other entities (legitimate or not), including organizations that track spam, advertises with, shares addresses, emails through, and all sorts of other data. I can't imagine how hard it was to put this together, it looks like a giant circuit design layout, but shows just how big and interwoven the spam problem is."

Comments

Re:Good job /.!

[cetan]

Well, I'm happy to give up some bandwidth for these guys, it's a cool map. Here's a mirror.

http://www.cetan.com/mirrors/spammap.html

No need to mod me up, I'm not a karma whore.

mirror, mirror, on the wall

[tedtimmons]

This site was pretty slow to respond- probably because the gif on that page is about 1MB.

So I've mirrored it.

-ted

Re:Good job /.!

[DustMagnet]

So why didn't you provide a link like this overview or like this smaller version or even a google cache.

It seems to me, that you comment is really extra lame.

Re:Spam problem

[Zeinfeld]

Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications.

He did no such thing. Shannon's law demonstrates that the information bearing capacity of a communication line is limited by the signal to noise ratio.

It is quite amusing to see how such basic observations are transmorgaphied by the game of Internet chinese whispers.

Spam will be addressed as a problem as soon as the pain barrier becomes high enough. With PKI it is possible to identify an email sender by means of a digital signature. The current problem being that there is no good way to locate public keys bound to email addresses. There is a lot of good work going on in this area, in particular the W3C XKMS group recently discussed a working draft that describes a mechanism for accessing public keys via DNS SRC records.

So under this system what would happen is that when you get email from them the email client would scan your address book to see if they were on your approved sender's list. This would probably include the individuals you know (Cmdr. Taco etc.) and also whole domains (ai.mit.edu) you might trust. if the mail is not in the list it goes into the 'low priority' pile.

There are email clients that do this at the moment but the spammers are using counter measures, such as scanning email list archives and sending out SPAM with fake sender addresses taken from the archive. With PKI and a means of determining whether the person actually has a public key or not this type of filtering becomes much more robust. Incidentally the mechanism does not require S/MIME to work, it can also be used with PGP.

To deploy the solution all we need to do is to persuade email client writers to support XKMS register and locate functions and ISPs to provide XKMS services along with their existing SMTP server. Oh yes and finish the XKMS spec I guess.