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."
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.
So, just as an analogy, if the police decided to stop enforcing laws against auto theft, you believe it would be wrong for others to do so. I don't think that holds water. What this guys is doing is indeed illegal, but not immoral; when our government is unwilling or unable to enforce or prosecute laws it becomes incumbent upon non-sanctioned individuals to protect society by doing so. The simple fact is that the government is not able to even begin to scratch the sheer volume of spam, nor is it interested in going after spammers unless it can wrench a large settlement and some headlines out of the deal. If we wish to preserve the Internet as a medium for the exchange of ideas, some of us must take action to protect it from those who exploit it at a very real, monetary cost to innocent people.
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.
Well, his other point was, who’s going to complain? the robot?
Chances are the human operator doesn’t even know what happened to the account, the robot just flags it as deactivated and asks the human to feed it more accounts. They probably don’t have any way of telling that somebody hacked the account and closed it vs. e-mailing the e-mail provider and having it shut down properly.
Of course the main question (in my mind, at least) is why spammers are registering forum accounts with the same password they used to register the junk e-mail account that they’re registering under...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.