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Name and Shame Spam Senders With OpenBSD
Peter N. M. Hansteen writes "Once you've identified spam senders, OpenBSD provides all the tools you need to take one step further: exporting their addresses and publishing the evidence. You can even trap them yourself using known bad addresses. It's easy, fun and good netizenship."
...NO!
Wouldn't it be more fun to go to their house and either serve them with a civil suit for a $Million+ or just beat their computer into a cube with a sledge hammer?
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I agree the vast majority of email sent to "known bad" addresses will be sent by spambots, and that'll probably be the exclusive source for never-published addresses. But in the case where they publish these known-bad addresses on a page that they hope spambots will index, it seems blacklisting based on them is vulnerable to abuse. If I want to get some server blacklisted, and I have any sort of access to send mail from it, I can just send mail to the known-bad addresses. For example, good way for mischievous students to cause mayhem by getting their university's mail servers blacklisted.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sorry, I'd never claim citizenship on the internet, after all, who'd want to live in a place that was almost entierly composed of porn?
Oh wait...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I think someone tried the latter approach already and it didn't end up helping her much
while(1){sig.get()}
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) 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
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) 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
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(X) 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
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) 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
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) 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
(X) 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:
(X) 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
(X) 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:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) 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!
They can call it easy, fun, and good netizenship... But I say they're just putting a friendly face on vigilanteism.
From a technical perspective this isn't that different from other collaborative filtering systems (though since the listing criteria is based on secondary sources, it's going to be susceptible to confirmation bias and other sampling errors, so this isn't likely to be a good one). I take big issue with the naming, though: Other collaborative filters say that "This machine is listed because it met these criteria", which you then make your own decisions on.
It crosses a line when you're saying they should be "shamed", especially when you're not taking extensive precautions to make sure you're not listing innocents.
Really is spam that big of a problem anymore? Ever since I've switched to Gmail all my spam has been blocked by it or blocked by a simple mail filter. Now then again, I don't give my real e-mail address to everyone and their brother, but individual spam blockers have come a long, long ways.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
What's the point of trying to *shame* a spammer? You can't shame someone who has no shame.
Naming them is pointless, too. "Oh, hey, I found out it's a guy named Viktor in the Ukraine sending me all this spam!" Now what?
I could be misreading, but I think he's using the IP of the server that actually connects to his server and attempts to deliver mail, not the IP reported in the mail headers.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You forgot a couple of his aliases:
dmcbride@sco.com
bgates@gatesfoundation.org
steveb@microsoft.com
jackpeace@comcast.net
Most of the article is about grey listing. That's nearly suicidal for most mail server administrators. When I tried it, it did make a difference.
Of course, while it is working..........
Executive A, "This guy just sent me a contract 60 seconds ago. I keep clicking the damn send/receive button but it's not coming in. Are you a fucking moron or something? What the HELL is going on?!!"
Either paranoia, or people trying to send email with attachments to each other while *on the phone*, makes grey listing a huge hassle for the administrator. You just can't force a delay in email of 10 or 20 minutes for most users. The pitch forks and torches come out.
Once you do use it, you cannot control the duration of the delay either. The other mail server has its own settings on how often it retries mail as well. So yours is set to 3, theirs is set to 20. The delay is 20.
I also find it hard to believe that the spammers have not figured this out. It's not like they are stupid. They try very hard to deliver their payloads. It would be trivial to update their software to retry messages that receive those codes.
Oh, and if you have high volume get ready to drain some resources. Keeping track of thousands and thousands of IP addresses in a grey list to determine which one can communicate at what point is resource intensive.
Currently, nothing. If somebody ever does come up with something that will, it will spell the end of spam. I'm not holding my breath.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
... is it good Nietzscheanship?