Politics

silpheed
10/6/07

That title came from a spam email that I just received. Last week this site got no less than 40 spam comments per day, and I cracked the shits. Yesterday I sat down and wrote tougher anti-spam rules, along with a page to keep track of who these scum are. That page is just to stroke my ego a little, I feel humbled to be attracting such a global and automated audience. This system has been in place for half a day and already has recorded over a hundred (failed) comment spam attempts.

When I used to work on a helpdesk, people would never shut up asking for us "to do something about all the spam". I sympathise, but there's really not much hope of a technological solution. Printing a real flyer costs maybe a few cents, and a few cents more to deliver to a real mailbox. Creating a spam email is free and costs a small fraction of a cent in inconvenienced electrons to send to thousands of people. Hell, even delivery is free if the spam is sent from a virus-plagued computer. I've put this post on spam in the Politics category because spam isn't a technical issue, it's an economic issue.

It's also an arms race; Anti spam products look for certain words like "viagra" or "OEM software", spammers simply misspell them. Anti-spam products introduce Bayesian filters, spammers start using real though unrelated sentences. Anti-spam products scan images for spam content, spammers craft special images to confuse machines but are still readable to humans.

But hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Last year AOL and Yahoo set up a service where spammers could pay to have their emails avoid AOL's or Yahoo's spam filter. ISPs allowing commercial mail through is nothing new, but advertisers previously never had the ability to buy that privilege. This really gets my Nigerian goat. ISPs are the only part of this sad cycle that have some power to stop this shit, and here they are finding ways to profit from it. Advertisers won't step in because using spam is too cheap to ignore. Governments won't step in because spam is an international problem, any measures they put in place would be ineffective against the majority of spammers who are overseas.

Now I'm upset. I'm going to go lie down and have a herbal tea.

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venettacornercorner

SPAM :D <33

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