David Hooton wrote:
On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 15:27:52 +0200, Marc Kool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Jeff,
Jeff Chan wrote:
Doing a little preliminary checking of this particular dataset
leads me to wonder a little how appropirate it might be for
SURBLs. In particular I found over a hundred whitelist hits of
sites like aol.com, att.net, btopenworld.com, budweiser.com,
clara.net, cnet.com, comcast.net, he.net, lsu.edu, match.com,
mindspring.com, msn.com, rr.com, sina.com, texas.net, tripod.com,
umich.edu, victoriassecret.com, washington.edu, etc.:
http://spamcheck.freeapp.net/adult.domains.whitelist-hits
I did a quick check on a few domains and I do not share your conclusion.
# grep aol.com domains
adultaol.com
register.oscar.aol.com
sex-aol.com
sexonaol.com
usaol.com
register.oscar.aol.com is the server used by AOL messenger and ICQ to
login - how on earth does this count as an Adult Website, much less a
sex site?!!
In my browser, when I type http://register.oscar.aol.com
this is displayed:
AOL Instant Messenger is an adults-only service.
Click Here if you are 18 or older.
If you are under 18, click here to exit.
Seems 100% adult to me!
# grep att.net domains
adultonly.home.att.net
borderjumper.home.att.net
brookeb.home.att.net
chrisd054.home.att.net
dating.home.att.net
divinenews.home.att.net
lilcindy.home.att.net
livevids.home.att.net
livevids2.home.att.net
livevids3.home.att.net
livevids4.home.att.net
models.home.att.net
models2.home.att.net
personals.home.att.net
pvelasquez.home.att.net
sasha69.home.att.net
sex-ads.home.att.net
sexworld.home.att.net
xxxmovies.home.att.net
Ahh the plot thickens... Subdomains..
# grep -w au.com domains
aotoys.au.com
condoms.au.com
freeporn.au.com
hornytoad.au.com
muff.au.com
Still more..
So aol.com and att.net and au.com are not in the database and not blacklisted.
no subdomain of aol.com is in the blacklist.
What is register.oscar.aol.com if it isn't a subdomain?
You're right, it is a subdoamin of aol.com.
If AOL uses this server to register for ICQ and other non-adult stuff *AND*
use it to register for adult stuff AND the 'default mode' (i.e. use only the
subdomain
in the URL) is for adult only, they are asking for problems.
For au.com and att.net there are only adult subdomains in the blacklist. This is ok.
However SURBL's in general don't use subdomains, I've just run a test
on my personal SURBL and SpamCopURI doesn't currently look at
subdomains. I suspect because of the requirement for a lookup per
domain level which would obviously both make things inefficient and
also leave room for a denial of service.
Hmmm. I am afraid that spammers will abuse this property of SpamCopURI.
I assume that something went wrong when you verified the quality of the database.
I think the levels of understanding of what was in the DB and what
SURBL was able to do were what went wrong.
Given my very quick testing I think it would probably be worth giving
this data a try, we would most likely need to work out how to remove
the subdomained entries - the list is huge, and efficiency we can gain
by removing excess data would obviously be useful.
The data is somewhat preemptive - just because you have an adult
content website doesn't always mean you are spamming, in fact I'm sure
there are an awful lot of Adult sites which never spam.
I do however feel that there is a need for this kind of data, there
are a lot of organisations which have liability concerns if their
users recieve pornographic messages (schools) and many people who find
adult content offensive (churches etc).
This is what I stated in the original proposal: let's make a SURBL list
for adult-related URI's, not necessarily spammers.
I know that SURBL is meant to fight spam, but it is relatively easy to extend
with functionality to ban emails that refer to adult sites, that I think
SURBL is the place to do it instead of creating a new mechanism in SA.
I reckon let's give it a go for a while like we did 6dos - what's the
worst that can happen? We might get another SURBL - well more content
is always a good thing in that case :)
--
Regards,
David Hooton
-Marc
