From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Oct 02 2002 - 00:13:05 MDT
On Tue, Oct 01, 2002 at 10:33:56PM -0700, Ross A. Finlayson wrote:
> Spam arrives from many fake and undeliverable e-mail addresses, yet it's
> remarkably homogenous.
>
> Spam: monopoly?
http://www.cluelessmailers.org/spamdemic/mapfullsize3.html
It could be Zipf's law: the major spammers spam so much that you tend to
get many copies of their mail, while the number of spams falls as
1/r^k as a function of rank.
I think one way of dealing with spam is to salt their databases. See
http://orjan.nada.kth.se/members/byebye.html for an example of a script,
which generates a page that looks nice to a webcrawler, contains mailto:
links and links to more interesting pages filled with more addresses.
Having a database with a lot of useless addresses might not deter a
spammer, but if honeypots like this become common and diverse the number
of real addresses in the databases might become too small to be worth it,
and the small but finite costs of mega-spamming would make the practice
less lucrative.
In my planned third installment of my sf roleplaying trilogy, the Big
Disaster/singularity that occurs in the late 2060's will be known as the
"Spamocalypse". The combination of wild AI, oceans of nanotechnology and
unsolicited mail is a frightening combination.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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