Name and Shame Spam Senders With OpenBSD 166
Peter N. M. Hansteen writes "Once you've identified spam senders, OpenBSD provides all the tools you need to take one step further: exporting their addresses and publishing the evidence. You can even trap them yourself using known bad addresses. It's easy, fun and good netizenship."
Re:Hmmm? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wouldn't that require beating a million computers into a million cubes to take down their bot net? Perhaps hammering their toes would be better.
Re:"netizenship" (Score:3, Insightful)
How can we be expected to take someone seriously when they invent more bullshit.
Easy, fun... (Score:5, Insightful)
They can call it easy, fun, and good netizenship... But I say they're just putting a friendly face on vigilanteism.
From a technical perspective this isn't that different from other collaborative filtering systems (though since the listing criteria is based on secondary sources, it's going to be susceptible to confirmation bias and other sampling errors, so this isn't likely to be a good one). I take big issue with the naming, though: Other collaborative filters say that "This machine is listed because it met these criteria", which you then make your own decisions on.
It crosses a line when you're saying they should be "shamed", especially when you're not taking extensive precautions to make sure you're not listing innocents.
Re:Form response (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoosh.
That form is older than I am, and it still works perfectly.
That's a really bad idea (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to "name and shame" someone, you need to be 100% sure you got the right person. E-Mail is such a vague and diverse system that you really need to know your network technologies to be able to find who's spamming you with any certainty. There's no automatism which can do it for you. Besides, you don't want to turn into one of those bitter and overzealous anti-spammer types, do you? Work with people who operate or host compromised computers which send spam, improve your spam classification systems, get on with your life.
Shame!? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the point of trying to *shame* a spammer? You can't shame someone who has no shame.
Naming them is pointless, too. "Oh, hey, I found out it's a guy named Viktor in the Ukraine sending me all this spam!" Now what?
Re:Form response (Score:5, Insightful)
mark poster as redundant [..] you must work in some kind of public service office pushing paper to think a form is a good way to express an opinion.
On the contrary. The fact that someone's argument can be criticised and/or refuted via such standardised means (*) shows that it fails in one or more now well-defined areas that previous "solutions" have exhibited and should have been considered this time round. And/or that this is merely an inadvertant repackaging of an older idea.
The slightly tongue-in-cheek form makes the point well, and far from being longwinded is shorthand compared to having a tedious and pointless rehash of previous discussions.
(*) As another poster mentioned, this "form" has been around for ages.
Re:Not Really (Score:4, Insightful)
Shaw received a three-month suspended sentence for disorderly conduct, a $345 fine in restitution and a year-long restraining order barring her from the Comcast office.
I assure you that if I could get away with that kind of punishment I'd do the same thing! Only I'd use a bat instead.
Asking for trouble (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the article is about grey listing. That's nearly suicidal for most mail server administrators. When I tried it, it did make a difference.
Of course, while it is working..........
Executive A, "This guy just sent me a contract 60 seconds ago. I keep clicking the damn send/receive button but it's not coming in. Are you a fucking moron or something? What the HELL is going on?!!"
Either paranoia, or people trying to send email with attachments to each other while *on the phone*, makes grey listing a huge hassle for the administrator. You just can't force a delay in email of 10 or 20 minutes for most users. The pitch forks and torches come out.
Once you do use it, you cannot control the duration of the delay either. The other mail server has its own settings on how often it retries mail as well. So yours is set to 3, theirs is set to 20. The delay is 20.
I also find it hard to believe that the spammers have not figured this out. It's not like they are stupid. They try very hard to deliver their payloads. It would be trivial to update their software to retry messages that receive those codes.
Oh, and if you have high volume get ready to drain some resources. Keeping track of thousands and thousands of IP addresses in a grey list to determine which one can communicate at what point is resource intensive.
Re:I go with the unpopular GP comment (Score:5, Insightful)
Currently, nothing. If somebody ever does come up with something that will, it will spell the end of spam. I'm not holding my breath.
Re:Form response (Score:4, Insightful)
As Bill Gates and others have noticed previously, a very obvious solution to the whole spam and e-mail viruses problem would involve removing just one single line from this form:
( ) Sending email should be free
Though it is next to atrocious to admit for anyone who's using e-mail now, setting a $$$ cost to each message sent is probably the only way both first-level spammers and owners of infected machines would be forced to go off-line. This doesn't necessarily mean establishing a central authority - ISPs could simply analyze sent traffic.
But a "solution" like that will dramatically change the nature of Internet. It's really tough come up with a working solution that's not worse than the problem.
But... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Really is spam that big of a problem anymore?
For people who actually run email servers the fact that 99% of their traffic is spam is a problem, yes.
Re:Form response (Score:5, Insightful)
As Bill Gates and others have noticed previously, a very obvious solution to the whole spam and e-mail viruses problem would involve removing just one single line from this form:
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
Re:One nice feature... (Score:1, Insightful)
Unfortunately these days all you are wasting is 1 computers bw of someone who doesnt care enough or know enough about what is going on in there computer.
Never underestimate the power of 500k in computers all sending at once. So even if you are wasting time on every connection say making it take 30 seconds to complete a transaction. The effective BW of the the bot is still 500k every 30 seconds. Not shabby... That is 1.4 billion a day.
While it is only marginally satisfying. But you are really just wasting your own bandwidth.
Re:Form response (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, if email gets replaced by some other messaging system, it very easily could eliminate spam. The sole reason email spam can't be taken care of with a technological solution is that the infrastructure changes would be too massive and you couldn't get 100% opt-in for any new scheme by such a large number of players.
If SMTP were replaced by something else entirely, that whole problem goes away and you can design proper security into the protocol. All you really need is a protocol that enforces end-to-end authentication (and possibly encryption) and requires that every host involved in the transaction except for client machines sign every message that passes through and include a public key in their DNS record that can verify that signature. This would completely eliminate any possibility of endpoint forging, which would mean that spammers would have to keep registering domains to get new non-blocked source domains. Eliminate domain tasting, and those new domains = $$$ that the spammers would have to pay... frequently... all without introducing any per-message costs. If you take it one step further and require an SSL cert (not self-signed), that action by itself would be pretty much be the end of bulk spam as we know it, but would have the advantage of not harming legitimate business-to-user communication, email discussion lists, etc. like a per-message cost would.
Such a change would radically alter the balance of power in the spam wars. It would ensure that a spammer, once identified, could be trivially blocked, and would make it much harder and more expensive for the spammer to recover from such blocking. Unfortunately, while it would be possible to retrofit this onto SMTP, that compatibility with legacy systems would ultimately make it a waste of effort to do so; spammers would merely continue using the legacy compatibility mode to deliver the spam. It really has to be a clean break from SMTP for this to work and gain any traction whatsoever, and has to be 100% spam-free by design from day one.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really is pollution that big of a problem anymore? Ever since I've switched to BigAssFilter air conditioning system, all of the pollution has been filtered out of my home.
Re:Hmmm? (Score:3, Insightful)
Couldn't we do both?
Re:Hmmm? (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I think this point is important enough that 'fighting' spam shouldn't outright over-rule it. There are already many ways of fighting spam that don't require limiting peoples ability to 'speak':
1/ Using someone's computer without their permission is a criminal act (thus covering the use of Zombie networks).
2/ Using your own computers to serve spam email is costly due to the rate at which you'll have your nodes detected and blocked.
3/ Sites that offer referral payments can start requiring more identification when setting up accounts, leading to more chance people breaking the conditions not to use spam email could be caught.
Ultimately spam can be dealt with perfectly well without having to ban any form of message. Computers generating spam can have internet access limited to just anti-virus sites until they stop sending, the people controlling zombie boxes can be prosecuted for computer misuse and sites offering referrals to spammers can be blocked by an ISP controlled organisation.