101 Ways To Save The Internet

captain igor writes "Wired news is running an editorial detailing 101 ways to save the Internet from spammers, crackers and smothering regulation. What does do Slashdot readers think of these suggestions, and what other options should be considered to keep the Internet from falling to evil forces?"

Comments

Re:getting rid of spammers

[tomhudson]

Or we could make it a goal in 2004 to each get a throw-away address, and reply to every single spam we receive. This way, the spammers will spend so much time looking through our bogus replies that the "legit" replies to their spam will be lost in the background noise.

The current tactic of ignoring spam "in the hope it will go away" just helps raise the spammers' signal-to-noise ratio when they look at their replies. If they had to go through a million bogus replies to get the 10 that are stupid enough to really want their crap, they'll become unprofitable quickly.

Re:getting rid of spammers

[October_30th]

The current tactic of ignoring spam "in the hope it will go away"

Well, why not crack down on it on multiple fronts. Target the morons buying into spam by advertisements showing how stupid it is and create an effective, international anti-spam effort.

Stopping spam, popups, etc.

[Animats]

• Define adware, spyware, etc. as "computer intrusions" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Require European-style "explicit, separate permission" for installs of such things as public policy, so they can't hide "permission" in some vague EULA.
• Get Visa International to require that any site that accepts credit cards must have a digital certificate that gives the identity of the merchant, including their true name, DUNS number, and primary banking relationship. Any credit card site that doesn't do this gets their transactions reversed as soon as someone reports them to Visa. That will make it easy to follow the money.
• Enforce the new Federal spam law. It's weak, but it's something. A few high profile raids and arrests will do it.
• Lobby the FTC on the details of the "do not spam" list. Insist that opt-out by domain be supported. Insist that mail service providers that don't opt out their customers be required to disclose this in ads.

Stop blocking spammers, block companies

[KalvinB]

I was getting a dozen or so spam a day. I started filtering based on the links in the e-mail (which can't be obfuscated or they don't work) and now I find myself checking my mail server just to make sure it's actually working.

Spammers like to use images because that gets them past filters based on words. But images take up a large amount of bandwidth. 25 million messages sent with a 25KB image will take 667GB of transfer. So I simply filter out the domain that's hosting that image.

If you look at spam, spammers use affiliate programs. So although you're getting spam from hundreds or thousands of spammers, there are only a handful of domains they're wanting you to click on or are linking images from.

So you can try to block those thousands of spammers or you can block that handful of domains they're linking to.

And since I'm only filtering links that only spammers use, it's 100% effective and 100% accurate.

Nobody I know is going to be sending me e-mails with a link to www.2004hosting.org but dozens of spammers have and now that I've filtered it, dozens are trying and failing regardless of who they are. So I've effectivly blocked dozens of spammers by filtering a single company.

Lots of spammers also use common click-thru sites to claim their commission. By blocking that handful of domains I've just blocked thousands of spammers.

I now get a spam maybe once every few days and I simply VNC into my server and block the domain used to host the image and I'll never get a spam from any spammer who's using that domain to host their ad pics.

Simple. Effective. I also block mail domains as possible because there is no silver bullet. You have to attack on as many fronts as you can. I've just found blocking companies to be the best out of the bunch. But it's litter and every little measure helps.

Ben