Slashdot Mirror
Using Email Networks as P2P Spam Filters
Oscar Boykin writes "New Scientist is running a story on using the social network in email as a P2P network.
The idea is that email networks have structure that is conducive to a type of search called percolation search . This means email clients could query the social network of email users to filter spam.
This story is based on a preprint available."
The authors propose that their system have access to inbound and outbound contacts. For trusted email accounts, that might work. But what about email accounts that people may want to creat to sheild their identity (political dissidents, whistleblowers). They would have to live outside of the spam protection network and would, I assume, be seed accounts for spammers.
Am I missing something in this analysis?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Since switching to Thunderbird, I get nearly no spam...maybe one or two per day. I like fancy stuff, but when simple works, go with it!
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
...Now the RIAA's going to sue me for getting spam.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Imagine the potential for harm if I infiltrated a social network and then identified my enemies as spammers, either deliberately or because I or the software agent I use was somehow tricked into doing so.
Social network-based spam-detection is a part of, not a total, solution, and its limits need to be recognized.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Granted, I just skimmed the article, but isn't this exactly how Razor works? (simplified) Communities of people flag messages, senders, etc. as spam, and the mail server (or in my case, spamassassin) compares the messages to the community spam archive for matches before delivery.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
In Korea, only old people get P2P spam.
Actually, I think we should find a way to attach the same stigma to spam customers that we do to the spammers. Why do spam customers not have to go to jail? They're as much the problem as the spammers.
I can see something like having all the spam customers' names published online, so you google for "spam" and "lheal" and up pops my list of purchases. The other spammers then get a very clean list of people to spam. Over time, the net would be segregated into those who like spam and those who don't.
Yeah, unworkable idea, but so are all the others.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.