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."

Comments

Until they farm harvesting out to zombies...

[PornMaster]

When they farm out the harvesting work to zombies, it'll make this rather useless, no?

Friggin' No Good Lawyers!

[mekkab]

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!!

This would be a bad thing (I am not a lawyer).

[Sheetrock]

Even ignoring any possible First Amendment issues (which can be done if we discuss this hypothetically occuring only in other countries) imagine what kinds of doors are opened when you permit automatic sight-unseen licensing to take effect on material on the WWW?

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.

Re:Where is the Mafia when you need them?

[Zocalo]

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.