Ted Leung on the air : Paul Graham: Filters that Fight Back

Ted Leung on the air
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Sun, 10 Aug 2003

I hopped over to Paul Graham's site in (vain) hopes of seeing something about Arc. Instead I found his new article on antispam filters, Filters that Fight Back. Basically the idea is to turn spam messages into a Denial of Service attack against spammers by making spam filters pound any URL's embedded in messages determined to be spam. I love it. I wonder how long it will take for someone to write a Thunderbird extension to do this.

[00:35] | [computers/internet/mail] | # | TB | F | G | 2 Comments |

Via Ted Leung I see that there's some thought to responding to spam by issuing what amounts to a DOS attack on the urls embedded in a spam:

As I mentioned in Will Filters Kill Spam?, following all the urls in a spam would have an amusing side-effect. If popular email clients did this in order to filter spam, the spammer's servers would take a serious pounding. The more I think about this, the better an idea it seems. This isn't just amusing
Posted by Trackback from Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants at Sun Aug 10 08:26:38 2003

Wouldn't work. Spammers would just just sprinkle the urls, phone numbers, and email addresses of innocent parties into their spam and then the good folks running the agressive filters would immediately back off. Worse yet evil dudes would leverage the agressive filters of good people to do bad things.

Now maybe a scheme were I politely acknowledge every email I recieve; discarding those for which the acknowledgement doesn't go thru. Problem with that is that invades my privacy to generate such acknowledgements.
Posted by Ben at Sun Aug 10 09:55:05 2003

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