Re: {human}{OT} marking messages as non-spam???

Janis Papanagnou <Janis_Papanag...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Kent Paul Dolan wrote:

Repeated subject: {human}{OT} marking messages as
non-spam???

maybe a brief change of habit while this
deluge is ongoing?

Do you expect that spamming to continue for long?

Yes, it has been ongoing for months that I've
noticed, as an attack against newsgroup sci.crypt

Every response carelessly posted to this spam
without correcting the Newsgroups line ends up
_only_ in sci.crypt, which has had tens of thousands
of such responses end up there so far, out of
newsgroups all over the web.

That is the design goal and intenton of this spam.

The amount of postings per time and their size[*]
seems to indicate some automatic scripting at the
spammers side.

Yep, the output is from a random text writing tool
called a "travesty generator", that posts nonsense
very close in statistical properties to real
language use, and such a generator, named there
"dissociated press" is built into the wildly popular
(with computer geeks) GNU emacs text editor, which
editor is scriptable (and in fact can be used in
place of a usual operating system command line
interface), so it's not hard to script what is being
run, it takes about as much intelligence as a caged
bird displays when attacking its reflection.

http://www.answers.com/topic/dissociated-press-computer-jargon?cat=technology

[*] I haven't inspected the contents of any of
those postings, they are too apparent SPAM to
bother; currently.

I did, just to see if there were some easy
commonalities to exploit in ignoring them, but
Google Groups makes them trivial to avoid anyway, so
I gave up after a while.

I suggest starting each subject line with
{human}
for a while, to allow positive filtering.

I don't think that solves anything. It requires
the burden of changing habits of all honest
posters,

Yep, just like spammed email has forced all of us to
put some form of spam filter between us and the
universe, this may make us work harder than we'd
like, too. The planet Earth contains an abundance of
sociopaths, the 'Net attracts them like flies to a
dung heap.

and a concerted change of the behaviour again once
the spamming stopped.

Nah, it can just dribble away slowly. Killfile users
who reject everything not beginning with {human}
will soon enough notice their view of the newsgroup
going empty as others see no further need for the
prefix.

Ignoring it seems to me to be the best at the
moment.

That's a personal decision.

In case it continues, is there any chance to ban
him from the net by his ISP (or is the spammer
hiding by some means)?

The spammer is hiding by many, many means, see
below.

just a thought.

The spammer is (via a spambot):

changing user IDs from posting to posting

frequently stealing user-IDs from the same newsgroup
where the spam is displayed, so the names _look_
real

changing anonymous posting servers from posting to
posting

forging news article "Path" header lines

forging news article "Approved" header lines, even
in unmoderated newsgroups where Approved lines are
ignored

posting "travesty generator" output, probably
impossible to catch with a Bayesian spam filter tool

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_spam_filtering

almost certainly _not_ humanly reading the target
newsgroups, or any responses there, _at all_ (so
yelling back is useless, and mostly just trashes
sci.crypt), and may in fact _never_ have read the
target newsgroups; this problem is very widespread
across Usenet just now.

xanthian.


.

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