update the feature plan!

[Gary Greene]

On Wednesday 21 January 2009 11:31:48 pm Josef Spillner wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 22. Januar 2009 01:01:02 schrieb Oswald Buddenhagen:
> > of course. do you think that address harvesting bots subscribe to lists
> > and wait for addresses to trickle in when they can get so many
> > addresses by simply recursing over a few web pages within seconds? to me
> > this seems a bit uneconomical.
>
> I have the suspicion (although no proof) that some of today's bots do
> subscribe to mailing lists. There were some spam mails sent to moderated
> lists including freedesktop.org with subscription just minutes before. It
> would be rather uneconomical to do this by hand instead of just
> www-mechanising (Perl slang) something within two hours. My fears that this
> phenomenon would become more widespread have so far been unfounded, though.
>
> However, given that most of the suggestions in this thread were totally
> useless either and can easily be circumvented with using khtml's
> comfortable DOM representation of any entity scrambling and ECMAscript
> workarounds, I suggest moving this discussion to a KDE infrastructure list
> and coming up with a real solution (e.g. user directory) or not discussing
> it further. Spam is annoying, wrong solutions against spam are even more
> annoying.
>
> Josef

Actually, I can confirm that this _does_ occur. I used to be on the mailing 
list for Linuxconf, which got bombarded by spam. After talking with the list 
admin, we discovered a number of accounts subscribed that a) had never posted
b) had account names that could easily have been randomly generated. And 
honestly it's not hard to generate seemingly "real" looking account names in 
a scripting language like Perl, et al. Additionally, a fair number captcha 
systems can be scripted around too, sadly.

-- 
Gary L. Greene, Jr.
Sent from: peorth.local
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