On Wednesday 11 February 2004 22:00, Robert Ferney wrote: > Legislation has so far shown to be ineffective in controlling the > net. Let's neither assume that it will be in the future, nor expect > it to be. We have the freedom of speech here on the net in an > unprecedented level. Let's not now expect some legislative body to > now restrict that.
Well, I think that legislation has been ineffective because we have never bothered to write it. When I started fighting spam in 1996, I too believed that spam would have trivial, technological fixes. I don't think that anymore. Currently, some of our best brains are spending their time on it, and while they can claim to be quite successful, it does little to slow the amount of junk that's being sent, and I'd rather see them working on something more of greater value to mankind... > I believe that the original WIKI has had some similar problems. Undoubtedly. > One of the solutions is to implement a simple rollback so that the > users can revert to the pre-graffiti version easily. This would > include IP tracking for the changes, so the reversion would back up, > or atleast have the possibility of backing up prior to all the > changes made by that IP address. > It is not nearly as attractive to the graffiti kiddies if their spam > can be easily removed. Hasn't helped a lot against e-mail spammers. Their websites are also easily removed and their messages are successfully filtered. > Another possibility would be to have accounts as a method of signing > the changes. This does have the controversial effect of excluding > anyone who does not wish to make an account, or those that would > prefer to remain anonymous. This has both pros and cons. Definately. > Another possible deterrent would be to display the time and IP > address of the last changes with the signature(s) if they were > available. The idea here is that the script kiddies would not wish to > have their identity or IP address known. tends to wierd them out. It is not script kiddies we are up against. It's spammers. They don't care about things like that, they have zombies to protect their identities. At least, I think it is an issue that we have to deal with now. Spammers tend to come up everywhere, and allthough I see NANAEites congratulate themselves everything they've done, yet the fact remains that we've been very unsuccessful in combatting spam to this date. Allthough I use SpamAssassin with great success (0.1% false negatives), very few have numbers like that. I think that the same thinking we have employed to combat e-mail spam should not be employed to combat wiki-spam, I think it will fail. I have a little more confidence in the courts, to tell the difference between exercise of free speech, from a porn-peddler who destroys a wiki by posting his advertisements there. At least in Norwegian courts, I don't think it is a real freedom of expression issue. (BTW; here in Norway, we have laws against spam, and while they have some shortcomings, I have received a total of 10 Norwegian spams). But, I guess this is widely OT, but we can discuss this offline, I guess. Best, Kjetil -- Kjetil Kjernsmo Astrophysicist/IT Consultant/Skeptic/Ski-orienteer/Orienteer/Mountaineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/ OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
