[extropy-chat] technological equilibrium

Adrian Tymes wingcat at pacbell.net
Fri Jul 16 05:59:58 UTC 2004


--- Spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:
> Something in your comment made me think of one skill
> we have all developed in the past 10 years: we have
> gotten damn good at recognizing spam.  We are waaay
> fast at that, we can do it in a second.

Hmm.  You know, you're right...and that could apply
to part of why we're faster today: we quickly
recognize junk and move past it, even in face to face
communications.

> The spammers may soon write a script
> which
> will go thru the archives of chat groups, bite out a
> chunk of text, paste it into a fake message, then
> append 
> their advertisement onto the end, then send the
> message 
> to all those on the chat group.  

Which chunk we would have seen before, and recognize
as being taken out of context unless the chunk started
at some logical point.  (I doubt spammers would be
smart enough to, say, program their scripts to so much
as recognize the start of a sentence in the near
future.  Merely starting on whitespace, so as to start
on a whole word rather than in the middle of one,
would be about their limit.)

BTW...you meant this as in something that looks like
a response to the message, right?  (Else we would have
yet more ways to recognize and filter it.)  The
response part would have to be original, and likely
make little sense given current trends.

But I think the biggest safety factor is that message
lists with archives aren't really spammers' targets.
They target individuals.  Finding message archives on
the Web is work, and spamming is all about avoiding
honest work.

(Of course, some chat groups already make their
archives for list members only, with the subscription
software sending out a password to subscribers which
they can use at a Web site to access the archives.
Which further degrades the utility of this attack to
spammers.)



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