Re: FWD (SPAM) Solve your woman problems forever

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Jul 16 2003 - 05:18:45 MDT

  • Next message: Harvey Newstrom: "(no subject)"

    On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 03:57:17AM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
    >
    > 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.

    The URL included above also has a HTML-based scheme using characters
    (writing e for 'e'), which has the benefit that cut and paste still
    works.

    > This does however tend to make nonfunctional one of the more useful
    > features of the HTML protocol (i.e. the "mailto:" capability).

    I don't know; using mailto:e&#... seems to produce correct email
    addresses. But if this practice gets widespread the spammers will of
    course adapt, and we must then use a nonstandard way.

    -- 
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
    asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
    GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
    


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