Comments on: Spammers Harnessing Web Mail Servers – Gmail & Yahoo! Throttled

By: gbiondo

gbiondo — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 10:19:10 +0000

I want to assume that the MTA is properly installed and implemented – after all, we are speaking of Y! and G.

Spam is indeed a long time debated phenomenon, and nothing new can be said – but let’s focus on a couple of factors:

a) A spammer is theoretically forced by spam filters to use heavily his new/stolen/whatever account just for a small amount of time – usually only once. If you want to model it mathematically, you can think about it as the Dirac delta function: its value is always 0, except on the origin, in which it tends to +inf. It’s chiefly an impulse.

b) Let’s assume that a normal user does not forward the same message to 1000 people – the exceptions to this assumption can be treated as they are: exceptions!

Given these basic considerations, maybe the best way to act is on the MTA, maybe implementing anti-impulse controls. This is not a holistic solution by itself, indeed, and introduces also other kind of problems, such as exceptions handling, but it can help mitigating the phenomenon.

By: fever

fever — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:44:41 +0000

Well put.

Give the people an enemy and i mean really point the finger at a particular group and you will get the people to willingly give up almost anything to rid themselves of the “threat”. It has been done time and time again.

By: zupakomputer

zupakomputer — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:10:06 +0000

It stands to reason: they’re flipsides of one another.

One half of their brain wants to control other people, the other half of their brain is the opposite of that – the disrupter, the spammer, the abuser.

They flip-flop between those dynamics to control the normal people, who are only wanting to get on with life, quietly and without any fuss.

It’s always the same tried old drama with them: divide and rule, divide and rule.

I say ’square and compass’ to all the divide-and-rulers.

By: fever

fever — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 03:38:12 +0000

i think you got it right zupakomputer it would be a great way to reduce internet freedoms also. make the internet full of spammers and take away all of the freedoms in order to catch them.

By: zupakomputer

zupakomputer — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:05:26 +0000

Sounds like another ploy to ensure that free anonymous e-mail accounts become fewer and fewer; same thing was done to many a discussion forum a few years back.
There were loads of high-profile forums that allowed posts to be made without needing an account – they all began being abused by disrupters and spammers in exactly the same manner (eg – using other people’s handles and replying abuse to loads of threads, posting the same messages over and over again), and the only way those running the boards knew how to cope with it was to enforce verified accounts – so now if you want to use those places you’re stuck with one username and all that census-taker crapola.

imdb is one of the worst of all – they got bought over by Amazon when all that bs was going down, and now you need a credit card or mobile phone number to get a fricking discussion board account there.

The ‘powers that be’ don’t like people being able to hold anonymous communications; they want them all to be rank and filed and stuck with the one name / ID.

The spam scams are just part of that usual tactic – organised disruption leading to privacy crackdowns. Nobody needs spam mail to remind them where to get porn online; if you want porn you can find it easy no problem. Ditto for gambling and those types of meds the spam mails all advertise.

By: fever

fever — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:39:52 +0000

It was only a matter of time before someone figured out how do do it. there is no security system that is safe against time, it is the one true adversary.

By: Morgan Storey

Morgan Storey — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:20:17 +0000

You only need to look at Jdownloader to see a working ai Captcha in action. It gets about 90% of them then you can farm the rest off to manual labor, or another one I heard of is just repost the captcha image to a porn site asking users to verify they are human before entering, or posting it to a game that loads one via the bot.

By: Ian Kemmish

Ian Kemmish — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:53:38 +0000

Given the well-publicised inability of 118118’s Indian operatives to understand even simple allusions, maybe the answer is to replace captchas with simple but culturally-localised quiz questions — the sort that win you a few quid on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” for example.