Fight Spam With Spam
from the another-idea... dept
With all the talk these days about how to fight spam, here's an idea I hadn't heard before. This guy wants to build automated software that would let people spam back the spammer - though, not really. What the software would do is go to the website advertised in the spam and then fill the order sheet with bogus entries, thus clogging the spammers database... Or, at least, that's the theory. The problem, of course, is that the spammers themselves usually aren't the ones selling the product - so they don't notice at all (though, it might make their customers think twice about spamming). Second, not all (and I would guess very few) spammers actually have a website on which you can order. Most are simply trying to harvest more email addresses to sell to other spammers, or to promote some stock, or to send people to a porn site. Actual spam for actual products is becoming more rare. Finally, I'm sure the spammers would quickly figure out a way to work around such an annoyance, so doing this would merely slow a few of them down for a few days, but do little to solve the real problem.
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there's a way.
a simple self-relading frameset can generate thousands of hits on any site mentioned in a spam that gets through your spam defenses.
this isnt rocket-science! ... but it needs an easy centrally coordinating mechanism to punish abusers by generating painfully expensive traffic spikes for these crooks.
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