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Researchers Claim "Effectively Perfect" Spam Blocking Discovery
A team of computer scientists from the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA are claiming to have found an "effectively perfect" method for blocking spam. The new system deciphers the templates a botnet is using to create spam and then teaches filters what to look for. "The system ... works by exploiting a trick that spammers use to defeat email filters. As spam is churned out, subtle changes are typically incorporated into the messages to confound spam filters. Each message is generated from a template that specifies the message content and how it should be varied. The team reasoned that analyzing such messages could reveal the template that created them. And since the spam template describes the entire range of the emails a bot will send, possessing it might provide a watertight method of blocking spam from that bot."
Err, what if I, as a corporation, blew out a spam that effectively incorporated a template unique to that which my largest competitor uses in their newsletters or customer communiques (or at least close enough to get my competitor blacklisted far and wide)?
(it would take a shedload of doing, but certainly not impossible, and if it could be done, would make for one hell of a cheap and easy DoS).
Heuristics is great and all, but go too deeply, and I can see it opening up a small but pretty scary can of worms.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Not in the same level of detail; but, when your business model is spamming, you inevitably end up sending thousands of samples to loads of ill-vetted email addresses, some fraction of which are either being operated as spamtraps, or are in the possession of users annoyed enough to forward samples on.
Your algorithms can, and often do, remain secret(unless one of your black-hat buddies cracks one of your cracked machines); but you'd be a lousy spammer indeed if the results of your technique weren't widely available.
I agree with nearly everything you've said, but I don't consider the invention of strong AI by spammers to be a "win". Previously, I've argued that individual rights aren't related to human genetics, but rather to the organism's sapience. In other words, roaches have more rights than yeast cells (but not much more), cats have more rights than roaches, cetaceans/hominids/humans/"strong AI" have more rights than cats.
Allowing spammers to create beings who should be treated as citizens but are actually used as slave labor is wrong. Note that I'm specifically referring to strong AI; weak AI wouldn't qualify as sapient under most definitions.
how about the spammers using fragments from Gutenberg books ? Or fragments from blog posts ? ... What is spam, after all ? I am trying hard to send David Horowitz the the spam bin, but then the guy manages to get out of it after a while ... I have tried unsubscribing, tried "spam"-ing him, even tried to beg him to let my mailbox live peacefully ... for me it's spam, for him it is enlightening the dumb masses and the work of his life ...