Slashdot Mirror
One Man's Fight Against Forum Spam
JWSmythe writes "Free Internet Press has an interview with 'Random Digilante,' an anonymous hacker who has been taking over forum spammers' email accounts, and notifying forum operators to delete those accounts. It looks like his reasoning is sound, and his methods are safe, where he won't hurt any real users."
No matter your reason, it's illegal to access other peoples email accounts without their permission. Even more so when you disable the accounts.
If you do what you want based on what you feel is right, we might just not have any laws at all. There is a reason why the laws are created by the society as whole and not a single person or a group with single interest.
Not really and Slashdot really highlights it because far too often people who disagree with the poster will mod that post down for no other reason other than that.
/. doesn't have much spam is because there is no market, how many people on Slashdot would want to buy P3n15 3nh@nc3rz?
The reason why
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
As someone who deals with forum spam on a daily basis, I'm rather surprised at how intelligent the spambots are becoming.
Of course there's always the blatant, obvious spam (99% of which are video encoding tools for iPad, iPhone, etc). But I've recognized two other types of very covert spambots.
First one will take fragments of sentences from previous posts in the topic and regurgitate them. At first glance it seems on topic, but closer inspection reveals the post doesn't make sense and is just portions of others' posts.
The second type uses a database of sentences harvested from other websites, and attempts to post a sentence that matches keywords in that topic. Usually I can spot those because they aren't exactly on topic to the thread. I've also seen these modify various throw-away words, like adjectives and articles, so the sentence isn't an exact copy of the original source.
Now the key thing with both of these kinds of spambots is that they do not include any links initially. A couple weeks after posting they come back and change their signature, which results in spam links appearing under all of their previous posts.
I've also noticed that the vast majority of spambots use yahoo.com email addresses, so yahoo's captcha must be weaker than gmail / hotmail.
Now on the topic of this story, I don't quite understand. The forums I moderate have a few spambot accounts created daily (using recaptcha and custom implemented captcha). So it's not like there's just a couple spambot accounts causing all the trouble. Over the course of a month it around a hundred different accounts. So I don't see how this hacker is helping anything going after accounts one at a time manually.
Better known as 318230.
You really believe that the reason that slashdot wouldn't have spam if people were able to post spam on slashdot and have it reach more than a few eyeballs?
Anyway, slashdots system isn't perfect, and is designed to do more than kill spam. Regardless I think it works fairly well for what it does.
For eliminating spam in forums and comments, all you need to do is this:
Give the readers the ability to mark comments as spam with one click, and, as long as the reader has a decent history of not abusing the priviledge, the message will disappear immediately.
This isn't that hard, but to do it well isn't trivial either. Probably best done by a company like Disqus where it is their business.
There would need to be some checks and balances, where a person can get reported for erroneously marking something as spam. The system needs to be scalable, so that the admin of the forum doesn't have to deal with much, as all the work is done by users, and there is a checks and balances system to determine how much to trust users.
The nice thing is that over time it reduces the incentive to bother spamming the forums, since (typically) the first person who sees a message, eliminates it. Also, on a system like disqus, where you have a global identity with some history, it could be smarter about how prominent to make posts if the person has no history of posting without being marked as spam.
Let me know if you find a good karma system. I have been on /. for years, have never posted anything remotely spammy, have attempted to participate in discussions... so why is my karma set at "bad"? I have no idea what, if anything, I can do about that and because of it my comments never appear in any discussion threads. It is likely nobody will ever see this unless, as you say, they dig through the low rated posts.
Not that I'm bitter.
And that action should go through the boxes in the correct order without skipping any. Jumping right to the 'ammo' box isn't the right way to do things in a lawful society.
Soap, ballot, jury, ammo: Ballot and jury fail unless the parties have substantial assets in the same jurisdiction. So I don't see anything wrong with skipping to ammo against judgment-proof spammers.
Actually, it wouldn't help to email him to unsubscribe. He's not the one sending you email. He just sets up a vacation message on a spambot's email account. In effect, you're sending yourself email when you autorespond to a spambot with an autoresponder. The best suggestion is the one above, to set up a filter to autodelete any random digilante emails if you don't want them. It's not like he's changing or obfuscating them to outwit your spam filters. What I'd like to know is whether he can confirm his assertion that once a forum has instituted a strong password requirement -- so even the initial attempt at registration fails -- that forum is removed from Xrumer's preloaded list of forum URLs. If so, the reduction in bandwidth ought to make that a much better strategy than permitting registrations and subsequently deleting/sandboxing the bots.