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AOL Blocking Spammers' Web Sites

Posted by Hemos on from the fighting-the-good-fight dept.

Nuclear Elephant writes "According to this article, AOL has decided to take a fresh approach to fighting spam and is now blocking the spammer's web address. The philosophy is, if the customers can't visit spammers sites, spammers will not be able to make any money. On a side note, I suggested this concept about six months ago but nobody thought ISPs would adopt it. Now perhaps we can get a group like NANOG interested in sponsoring a blacklist for spammer addresses?"

3 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. New Denial of Service Attack by werdna · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Want to shut down a competitor? Send spam pointing to their website, and cut them off from AOL.

  2. Solution Problematic by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: -1, Redundant

    There is an obvious problem with this solution: false posititives. If I send out a lot of spam that links to my competitor's website, I could get AOL to block access to that site. Since I can send email that cannot reliably be traced, there is no way to distinguish real spam from fake spam. Tracability is at the heart of the problem; if the sender could be identified reliably, victims of spam would have a court case against spammers who violate anti-spam laws.

    There are methods that allow identification of the sender. One example is public key cryptographic signatures as employed by PGP.

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  3. Bad solution by Dan+East · · Score: 1, Redundant

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=97313&cid=8317 030

    All a spammer has to do is send spam on the behalf of companies that are not their customers and there would be no way to know which merchants should be prosecuted. Spammers muddy the water as much as possible - that is their entire means of survival.

    Dan East

    --
    Better known as 318230.