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."
He’s thought of that already, and seems to have his case made. RTFA.
RD: If I were taking over an account that was created by a human being who actually cared to contribute to my forums, yes that would be illegal.
FIP: Are you concerned about the possible legal consequences of your actions?
RD: Here is the reasoning I use, and I know that a lot of people argue it.
Especially now that I have a few dedicated forums whose only reason for existing is that they capture the login credentials of forum spammers, my feeling is that they're not people, they're robots. Xrumer [a forum spamming software] is a 100% automated process. The human has to set up the email address where the responses get sent for things like confirming your account by clicking on a link, but everything after that is done by the software. No human being is harmed by what I do, only a piece of software. If they cared, they would pay attention to the fact that these accounts are getting taken over very regularly by me. They don't. They just set up new accounts and start over.
It's hard to feel "bad" about taking these accounts over. All I can tell you is that I have never taken over any account that was not very obviously being solely used repeatedly to auto-register to forums. In fact by the time I get to them it's obvious that the spammer only set them up from 1 - 6 days prior to me taking it over. There are no human-written messages in any of these accounts. I certainly would not have gone so public with this activity if there had been. Only purely automated messaging has ever been present in any of these, and I have enough hard data to back that up.
Basically he claims that since a robot registered the e-mail accounts, you aren’t infringing on any person’s rights.
I doubt that it’d fly, actually, but who knows.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Bad karma? Rush to fast? Increase karma size with v1agral! Bomb woman womb and be king! Souper special deal at RealFarmacee.cm!
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.
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.