From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Jul 16 2003 - 04:57:17 MDT
On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> Yes, but that would only solve the problem of changing email addresses.
> One major cause of spam is spambots trawling the net for email
> addresses, so giving them the new one would be a mistake
> (http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.pdf). It has to be
> properly mungled, preferably without confusing people too much.
The best solution I think I've seen for this "thus far" is
to mangle the address with an image within it. For example
making the "@" a gif generally fools the address harvesting
bots but still allows humans to get the message.
This does however tend to make nonfunctional one of the more useful
features of the HTML protocol (i.e. the "mailto:" capability).
But if that is the price we have to pay to defeat the spammers
until better protocols and laws can be developed -- so be it.
(An interesting idea would be to promote everyone "creatively"
modifying their email addresses such that intelligent people
can decode them but bots cannot. As Spike points out this
will drive the evolution of bot intelligence -- but there are
more of us than there are of them (and our aggregate CPU
capacity still significantly exceeds theirs).
Perhaps we will need to get to the point of randomly altering
our email addresses and communicating them to "trusted" users
(akin in some respects to the way that spread spectrum communication
works) while "novel" communications will have to hurdle multiple
verification protocols to get our attention.
Robert
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