Slashdot Mirror
New Attacks on Spam
AttackOfTheDictionaries writes "Project Honey Pot started operating back in November. The Project provides its participants with a script that generates fake webpages with unique honeypot email addresses. The end result is that Project Honey Pot can connect email harvesters' IP addresses with the spam received by those honeypot email addresses. Which is pretty nifty, but left some people asking how that would help legal attacks on spam. Well, it seems that some lawyer over at SecurityFocus has an answer."
When they farm out the harvesting work to zombies, it'll make this rather useless, no?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
So wait, the spider/e-mail harvester's access of your web pages are illicit, YET the license on those pages is now binding? Including paying fees and agreeing to be sued?
If this isn't an abuse of our legal system, then honestly, I don't know what is!!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Here's a hint: website indexing as we know it will be completely destroyed the instant site owners can claim complete discretion about how their website information is used even though the websites are publically disclosed. Any automated webcrawling process could potentially subject the person running it to liability. Which means any future indexing will have to be vetted by hand.
I could be misinterpreting this, but I think it would be very bad news to allow websites to bind people to contracts they aren't able to read or understand (even if we have a similar horrendous system for end-users of software). It's one thing to write a law restricting such behavior on a general basis, or specifying some way for people to opt-out of information collecting with a robots file, but even that is subject to confusion.
Technical answers are needed for technical problems.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Businesses are driven by business decisions. If you want an ISP that will fight spam, then you have to stop giving money to your ISP that doesn't fight spam.
The reality is that while it would be nice if other people did everything for us, many times you have to take matters into your own hands.
I've often thought about this too. My main concern is it's too easy for any individual to successfully attack a company by simply spending just a few bucks to have a spammer send out some bogus spam ads.
And what makes you think the Mafia isn't involved in actually sending the spam in the first place? Take a step back and look at the kinds of technical and organisational infrastructures that are used in spamming. We have address harvesting, botnets and the worms and malware to generate them, scams, counterfeiting of goods, moving goods (pills) from one country to another, hosting of services in countries all over the world. Oh, and much of this illegal too, and not just under legislation like CAN-SPAM. If that's not organized crime, then I don't know what is.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I smell BS in this article.
I mean, according to this, that means that someone could put a fancy legal document under a manhole cover saying "if you drive over this manhole, you agree to such and such".
It's about the same thing - you never saw the agreement, so how could you have ever agreed to it? Surely they can't argue that a software program can enter into a legally binding agreement on its own - that would open up a whole other can of worms.
Address harvesting is illegal in some jurisdictions. If you're running a honeypot in that jurisdiction, and you can prove someone harvested an email address from you using the honeypot, it makes no difference whether they agreed to your license. They broke the law. If you go after them, you can nail them.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.