TarProxy Creates Tar Pit... For Spammers

agravaine writes "I ran across TarProxy, which, IMHO, is one of the cleverest spammer-handling ideas I've seen yet. The gist: Early detection of incoming spam [using the statistical techniques pioneered on the client side] could be used to create an artificial scarcity of bandwidth experienced only by spammers." This project hasn't gone very far yet, but essentially is slows SMTP requests to suspected spammers. If this really works, and is installed on enough of the net, it could work. 144 spam so far today. Anything would be an improvement. CT Yup, it's a dupe. There wasn't anything better to post at 9am on a sunday, so you can just bitch about me instead ;)

Comments

Deja Vu

[BorgDrone]

Anyone else get a bit of a deja vu feeling reading this newspost ?

But he asked for it...

[Anonymous Coward]

From CmdrTaco's journal entry 2/18/03

Course in 2 full hours, not a single user emailed me. It's quite different then say, 3 years ago where every story I posted resulted in a few dozen emails in my box. I guess its a credit to the comment system that users have figured out that they can interact better online & with each other then by emailing me directly. But that said, we have a third of a million readers. Not one of them thought 'Hey, maybe I should tell Rob a dupe was posted'?

And then he goes on to say that subscribers should check for dupes, since they're paying customers and all.

Re:Can we soon have a new category...

[Anonymous Coward]

You yourself are 'duping', really... take note:

Deja Vu (Score:3, Informative)
by BorgDrone (64343) on Sunday March 02, @09:17AM (#5418282)
(http://slashdot.org/) Anyone else get a bit of a deja vu feeling reading this newspost ? [ Reply to This ]

Re:Deja Vu (Score:5, Funny)
by baptiste (256004) on Sunday March 02, @09:26AM (#5418318)
(http://baptiste.us/ | Last Journal: Monday April 01, @11:27AM)
Maybe we can use statistical techniques on the client side to help the editors avoid duplicate stories.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
o Re:Deja Vu by $$$exy Gwen Stefani (Score:1) Sunday March 02, @09:44AM
* Re:Deja Vu by AndroidCat (Score:1) Sunday March 02, @09:55AM
* 3 replies beneath your current threshold.

Dup (Score:1, Redundant)
by baptiste (256004) on Sunday March 02, @09:17AM (#5418284)
(http://baptiste.us/ | Last Journal: Monday April 01, @11:27AM) Read about it a couple days ago! [ Reply to This ] Yet Another... (Score:2)
by Motherfucking Shit (636021) on Sunday March 02, @09:19AM (#5418289) Duplicate Slashdot Story. [slashdot.org]

How 'bout some changes to Slashcode so that story submissions containing URLs from past stories are flagged as "HEY, PROLLY A DUPE!" to the editors... [ Reply to This ]

* Re:Yet Another... by bwalling (Score:1) Sunday March 02, @09:36AM
* Re:Yet Another... by crawling_chaos (Score:2) Sunday March 02, @09:53AM

Another similar project... (Score:5, Funny)
by jdreed1024 (443938) on Sunday March 02, @09:21AM (#5418299) I came across another similar project on Friday. I think a have a link to it somewhere...

Ah, here it is. Using Statistics to Cause Spammers Pain [slashdot.org]. Posted on some website named slashdot.org. It also called itself TarProxy and .... oh ... uh .... never mind.

[ Reply to This ]

* Re:Another similar project... by brejc8 (Score:2) Sunday March 02, @09:47AM
* God, why do people care about duplicate stories? by Featureless (Score:2) Sunday March 02, @09:57AM
o Re:God, why do people care about duplicate stories by cowmix (Score:2) Sunday March 02, @10:27AM
* 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

How hard would it be to read through the first four or five comments to realize that your .02 isn't worth posting...

Re:Spammers could put time limit on SMTP connectio

[Mike Schiraldi]

Additionally, almost all spam goes through an open relay -- the spammers almost never talk directly to the final mailserver. So TarProxy isn't hurting the spammers so much as the open relay sysadmins. The open relay sysadmins, seeing their mail servers slow down and run out of disk space, will either take the time to figure out what's going on (and hopefully solve the problem by securing their server), or do nothing and have their server hammered to the point where it can barely spam anymore.