Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Using a Sandbox To Deal With Spambots?
shellster_dude writes "Slashdot is certainly no stranger to the problem of spam bots. While blocking a spam bot may seem like the best solution, it is likely that the spammer will simply re-register with a different name. While trying to solve this dilemma on my own forums, I had an epiphany. What if, instead of blocking a spam bot, I could mark a spammer, and then hide all their comments from everyone else? The spammer could continue to go their merry way, spamming to their heart's content. When they visit the forum, they see their spam comments correctly placed in the threads, but their comments would only be visible to them. Thus, an effective sandbox which would prevent them from registering a new user once they had been 'blocked.' Are any other Slashdotters familiar with this technique? Does any software currently use this technique?"
Seems like it would be easy enough to work around with a second bot that checks to make sure spam is getting through.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
What makes you think that they will stop just because their account doesn't get closed?
They will not notice the efficacy of their spam, they will just keep signing up and spamming. And you'll play whack-a-mole trying to put all their accounts into sandboxes.
Just how often does a spammer go back to see if his comment posted or not, or if his email got through? Rarely. Spam works on the basis of mass volume. Put a billion adverts on a billion websites and your sales will increase somehow. And the price of those adverts is next to zero after the first few thousand.
It won't work, but it will make a lot of hassle for you, from storage to filtering to just plain bandwidth if you have a thousand spammers realising they can auto-sign-up and spam you endlessly.
It's like running a "honeypot". You'll gather lots of data at great expense and resources. But you won't stop the spam.
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) 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
(X) 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
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) 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
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) 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
( ) 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:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) 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!
Feels like apples to oranges a bit. You weren't a spammer, they just disagreed with you and provided a hostile environment for expressing your views, which would discourage any normal person from participating. A spammer probably wouldn't care about the shadow ban if they discovered it and would just create a new account if they felt that the target was valuable enough.
Congratulations are the most inappropriate use of lmgtfy ever. It was neither an easily derivable search term the article poster could have used themselves without prior knowledge nor was it in fact, the use case that the poster was talking about.
There is no memory shortage. yes I have heard of XFCE. Go away.
Interesting. However, I don't think you'd be attracting many new users when they see 90% spam on your forums.
And it's also not apples and oranges because spammers aren't people...they are bots.
That's often true, but not 100%. I have basically two classes of spammer on my own forum. The bots are easy to detect with some clever coding (hint: bots only read HTML) but the human-driven spammers usually get through, only to be quickly banned. The bot attempts outnumber the human attempts by about 100 to 1, but the humans are far more likely to be successful.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.