A New Tool In The Spam War

A New Tool In The Spam War
Ethan Preston, 2005-01-12

Arbitration is part of the next wave of security measures, and can be effective against spammers who illegally harvest email addresses from a honeypot on your website.

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A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-13
Anonymous (2 replies)

Does this imply i can earn money from every owner of a bot(e.g. google) with this sort of contracts?

Thanks in advance for any useful answer.

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A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-15
Anonymous (1 replies)

Hum... I don't think so. Google will never use the e-mail addresses it might find in its exploration of your site.
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A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-18
Dmitriy M

Ligitimate search engines also tend to follow the robots.txt and such files.

Hmm... while google might not use your email address for spamming purposes; if it appears on google, a spam bot might try to use google itself to find addresses, which in fact might even be more efficient than manually ...

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A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-24
Anonymous

And would white text on a white background be binding? Squashing spamers is great but in an enviornment like the web the idea that simply transversing a public site could create a binding legal contract with no more than a 'click' is ridiculous. ...

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A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-14
Anonymous

> Does this imply i can earn money from every owner of a bot(e.g. google) with this sort of contracts?

> Thanks in advance for any useful answer.
No. Google won't send you an e-mail....

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A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-14
Anonymous

Identifying a particular IP and blocking it would mean locking out plain end-users infected with bots/malware (which is used to harvest e-mail addresses and send e-mail)...

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Do I see a hole in this? 2005-01-14
Tom Haddon (1 replies)

Someone let me know if I'm totally off track here, but surely the spammers' bots could simply be set up to ignore pages that display a legally binding document like this. The text has, by definition to follow a certain format, and so all the spammers need to do is program their bots to avoid these....

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Do I see a hole in this? 2005-01-19
Anonymous (1 replies)

Not knowing (or ignoring) the law is by no means protecting you from consequenses ;)...

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Re: Do I see a hole in this? 2005-10-03
Anonymous

absolutely - ignorance of the law typically catches more criminals than you might imagine!...

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A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-14
Zik

Under Australian law a spider program is not a legal entity in the same way that a person is and therefore can't enter into contracts under the law. Hence the operator of the program is not bound by the license unless they're explicitly aware that their program is entering into license agreements on...

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A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-15
Anonymous

What stops spammers from rewriting their harvester to check for 'contract' or 'license' on the page, and just skip the honeypot email address?
It seems too easy to circumvent.. although it may catch a bunch who don't care enough or aren't hard core. 50/50...

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Re: A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-15
Robin Green (1 replies)

A cunning plan, very cunning... with only one tiny flaw.

It is highly implausible that any jurisdiction would accept an "agreement" between a human and a piece of software that attempts to exhaustively follows links. Dumb-as-rocks software certainly cannot meaningfully agree to anything. Even mor...

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Re: A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-17
Anonymous

You are bound by contracts after you sign them, even if you don't read them. If you sent your 10 year-old child to run your store, knowing the child would probably sign a number of contracts during the day, you would be bound to those contracts even though you didn't read them and the child is too y...

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Enforceability of Web-Wrap Agreements 2005-01-15
Anonymous

The enforceability of web-wrap agreements varies across jurisdictions. The question is whether conspicuous notice of the terms is sufficient to bind the visitor as opposed to proactive acceptance of the terms by the visitor. See http://gsulaw.gsu.edu/lawand/papers/su03/darden_thorpe/.

Absent a f...

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A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-18
Anonymous

Is it just me or does it seem like a dangerous legal precedent is being set here? I mean, TOS agreements in general have a history of being fairly lame with all manner of shady nonsense couched in legalese being crammed under the hood. It just seems like this whole license model thing opens the door...

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A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-18
Anonymous

I am totally in favor of socking it to spammers; they are scum. Contracts require a "meeting of the minds" and I'm unclear how you accomplish that when you are dealing with a robot. I can't wait to see how this fairs in court. Next home-based biz craze will be honeypot sites.......

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Issues in reliability 2005-01-19
Cohen

Err.. perhaps I don't just get it but isn't the whole concept of time-stamp comparison totally unreliable?

I mean, if a malicious web crawler happens to find one of these honeypots, why would anyone assume that it immediately sends spam to the given address?

What if it collects the addresses i...

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so all an spammer needs to do... 2005-01-19
Bipin Gautam <visitbipin.@hotmail.com>

is, run a webpage through a html2txt converter and compare the result obtained from raw html. moreover, the spammer script could ignore the emailID with font size too small and based on results obtained and differences distinguish between a honeypot OR a victim website?...

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Cross contamination = reasonable doubt 2005-01-24
Zaferus (1 replies)

I'm no laywer (my disclaimer) but consider this likely scenario:

On you web site you get (for instance) 6 different bot harvesters collecting this 'special' E-mail address over the period of two weeks.

After week three you start getting spams directed at this E-mail address - all from IP's/sou...

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Cross contamination = reasonable doubt 2005-01-25
Anonymous

If I understand correctly the website dynamically generates the e-mail addresses for each IP connection. Therefore the only place where a particular address will be seen is from that particular IP address. So there's no way that the same e-mail address will be generated for two different connections...

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A New Tool In The Spam War 2005-01-24
Anonymous

it just moves the problem to new area. new trojan - spam cooperation doesn't use www/newsroom searching. when you stop all trojan/warm/backdoors they (spammers) will find new way.
the only solution is to make spamming expensive (business solution).
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A New Tool In The Spam War 2007-05-28
Anonymous

Do you know what "paragraph" means? They make a document much easier to read....

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