From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Jul 12 2003 - 05:52:40 MDT
On Fri, 11 Jul 2003, Spike, responding to Terry's query wrote:
> The word lists would reduce the ratio of spam- filter words to total
> words, increasing the chance the messages could get thru.
Actually, there appear to be 2 strategies:
a) Add one or a few "random" letter combination word(s) to throw
off "checksum" filters on subject lines or message content.
(Interesting that the spam filters may have to "read" the messages -
wonder what the strict privacy advocates think of that...?)
b) Add lots of words (random or actual) to fullfill the good to bad
word "ratio" criteria Spike mentions.
Now, it looks like (a) can be defeated by a reasonably good grammar
checker. But attempting to deal with (b) looks difficult. The
Spammers will simply start copying large paragraphs from sites
like Project Guttenberg (http://promo.net/pg/) into the email
messages. What is a filter going to do -- hash all of the sentences
or paragraphs in the P.G. archive and scan the email message for
all of them? (Certainly would make Intel happy as they are going
to sell a lot of CPUs to the ISPs to support this amount of number
crunching...)
> Is this not a very real threat to the internet in general? If it turns
> out that spammers can defeat filters as long as they send a megabyte of
> nonsense with each sentence in their message, they will cheerfully do so.
Absolutely -- and the SPAMers are becoming more clever about "stealing"
both bandwidth and CPU cycles from the general internet. See:
NYT Reports Porn Spam Hijacking Network
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/11/133232&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=172Ÿ
pointing to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/11/technology/11HACK.html?pagewanted=print
One begins to wonder if spam-bots will become as plentiful as oceanic
bacteriophages... See:
All the World's a Phage
http://www.sciencenews.org/20030712/bob9.asp
[Phage appear to be present in quantities of ~50 million per milliliter
in seawater (or ~10^31 worldwide for those who are curious)].
Even if we enact very tough anti-SPAM laws (such as Michigan, e.g.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/07/2157215&mode=thread&tid=111&tid=123&tid=126&tid=99
or a national anti-SPAM measures - for status see:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/10/1442240&mode=thread&tid=103&tid=111&tid=126&tid=99
it isn't going to do much good if the source of the problem is
international (esp. if Russian Mob employed hackers are a significant
part of the problem).
> Since bandwidth is free, they could devour it with wild abandond.
Communications bandwidth *isn't* free. Its just that we have a hangover
from the dot-com exuberance (read Global Crossing...) that currently
makes it look almost free. And the human bandwidth is *definitely*
not free.
Forrester Research estimates the cost to U.S. businesses alone to
be in the neighborhood of $10 Billion/yr (hearing on Jul 7, 2003
of House Judiciary subcommittee on Anti-Spam Legislation).
The Washington Post on March 13, 2003 [1] discussed the fact that
SPAM has increased from 8% of email traffic in 2001 to 40% of email
traffic in 2002 with a doubling time of six months (which is likely
to be decreasing).
I wonder if Nick should add to his "existential risks" paper the
failure of technological civilizations due to being buried in
junk mail.
Robert
1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17754-2003Mar12
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