« Chinese Send Second Crew into Orbit | Main | Assumptions, Victory in Iraq, and Strategy »

October 14, 2005

Meta Solutions

There's a lot of discussion of spam this week, of various kinds. Charles has been battling spammers in referrer logs, as has Aubrey. Then there is the solution to fax spam. I've recently spent quite a bit of time tweaking the anti-spam filters under MT3.2 (they're pretty good at this point, with only a very small number of false positives and an acceptable number of false negatives) as well as the .htaccess (for referrer spam protection) and my daily additions to the ipchains (that blocks an IP from even connecting). It occurs to me that we're putting obscene amounts of hours of productive people's time into fighting people abusing the Internet's mechanisms for their own (minimal) gain. (Really, just what is referral spam supposed to accomplish on the vast majority of sites that don't post their referral logs???)

What is needed here is a meta solution, a way to step outside the current problem and solve it at a higher level. Now, it would be nice to just shoot the offenders, since they obviously add nothing to human existence, but sadly, many of the offenders are in countries that would not take kindly to us shooting their citizens (generally, I suspect, because it usurps their prerogatives).

But there's another way: take it a level higher. If you get spammed from xx.xxx.yy.zz, ban everything from xx.xxx.yy.*. If that does not do it, ban everything from xx.xxx.*.*. Eventually, you'd be able to totally eliminate spam. It would not take more than 254 rules. (Of course, that would block everyone everywhere, but hey, it would fix the problem.)

For some reason, I keep coming back to the "just shoot them" solution, though.

Posted by jeff at October 14, 2005 11:54 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.caerdroia.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/536

Comments

Posted by: Aubrey Turner at October 18, 2005 8:27 AM