Re: spam alert - tealaden.com


Scott Dorsey wrote:
What makes you think so? We are posting to 7,000 Usenet servers around
the world, of which Google is only one. They can be (and often are)
scraped off from any one of them.

Actually the "captcha" system is easy to break... it just takes a lot of
time and people. There are places where time and people are cheap and
network bandwidth is plentiful. But for the most part, because the Google
interface is so slow and clunky, it would probably be easier for them to
scrape them off of a Usenet service that does NNTP somewhere rather than
bother. Even so, there are some of the list-providers that serve spammers
who do have armies of folks compiling manual lists.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

I have access to a number of forensic and investigative tools. I work
as a network administrator and a security expert. I also have friends
and direct ties to Carnegie Mellon (CERT) and a number of other
internet monitoring and security groups.

When I pulled the email server and relay info and did some digging I
could see headers that were malformed and included information from
Google Newsgroups itself in them. If these were scraped from usenet
they would not have this information. I also ran some of our addresses
against current email lists for sale and trade and a few of them were
not present, but were people who posted in this thread about receiving
emails. That would mean that these were not purchased but gathered. So
back to my original statement. Either someone was sitting and hand
capturing them, or they were cracking Google's Captcha system and
targetting just tea groups on Google.

I'm well aware of what it takes to crack a captcha system, and they are
generally pretty easy... however, you are underestimating Google's
system. It is a cycling system, so if someone did crack it even for a
short while that is noteworthy and of interest to me and others. I
don't imagine a small tea vendor did this themselves so that would mean
that some tool or service is available for sale to do this if indeed it
is the case. My guess is still that they hand harvested them.

I'm not sure what your intentions are, if you are trying to claim I am
somehow falsifying information or making things up then you are sorely
mistaken. I dig into some of the things I see on this NG because it is
a personal interest of mine, and I am happy that at least some piece of
the internet is not so tainted as the rest. If I can do anything to
keep it that way, I do. It is a tea newsgroup, so I don't get
super-technical here... I come here to escape that and it is also why I
am not such a technical tea enthusiast, I get enough of that in my
everyday life. I don't even really care to spend my time on here
discussing technical matters of any sort... there are plenty of other
forums for that which I have no time or interest in.

- Dominic

.

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