[Spambayes] Two Stage Plan

Gary Robinson grobinson at transpose.com
Tue Dec 17 16:23:00 EST 2002


I want to suggest a two-stage plan to solve the spam problem. I'm not sure
if it makes sense, but it's interesting enough to me that I decided to share
it to see what other people think.

FIRST STAGE

Many of you are aware of the http://wecanstopspam.org idea, whereby:

--If a lot of real people use it in the sigs of real emails, spam filters
will get trained to see it as a very strong indicator of being legitimate.
Thus, it will have become a sort of "virtual whitelist". I see this as being
able to counteract, to some extent, the fact that spammers will be trying to
use words with no very spammy associations. Instead, this technique puts the
stress on "hammy" words, in particular this very hammy indicator.

--If the URL does become widely used and is accepted by filters, of course
spammers will want to include it too. But at that point, it will be popular
enough that filter authors will be motivated to make sure that only visible,
clickable versions of the URL are given a high hamminess value. So spammers
would have to, in effect, advertise the wecanstopspam.org website and
provide a convenient link.

--The URL would contain information about how to combat spam, as it does
now, but hopefully much better written and presented, as the site evolves
under community guidance. So spammers that include it will be helping their
targets to fight spam.

SECOND STAGE

The problem with all possibly foolproof anti-spam approaches, such as the
pay-to-spam approach, or the camram one (http://www.camram.org/), is that
there is a huge chicken-or-egg problem. The world really has to settle on
one solution and get a real critical mass of users in order for it to work.

Now, if in fact it gets to the point that spammers are sending the
http://wecanstopspam.org URL to millions of users a day (or even if it
doesn't, but millions of individuals are using it because the virtual
whitelist aspect), then there will be enormous power associated with the
wecanstopspam.org site.

That is, that site may then, all by itself, have the power to determine what
the world standard solution is by announcing it on the site. What will it
be? That would be determined by some sort of community process. Maybe online
voting, or maybe a conference where people would discuss and finally vote on
the solution. 

CONCLUSION

If:

--A compelling enough meme could be crafted that people would want to
include the URL in their sigs so that it would spread in a p2p viral
fashion, and

--It is in fact possible for filters to only give credit to the token when
it is visible and clickable,

then it seems to me that this could serve as a realistic means for solving
the chicken-and-egg problem, thereby creating a single dominant standard
with enough critical mass to actually work.

The basis for it is that it avoids the chicken-or-egg problem in the first
stage by leveraging existing spam technology. It can do that because the
substrate is already in place for the idea to get to critical mass, in the
form of existing adaptive spam filters such as Graham's. Then when it gets
to critical mass, spammers will want to co-opt the token, except that in the
act of doing that they give the wecanstopspam,org site enough power to
enable the world to agree on a foolproof solution.

Now, I realize the above may be crazy since I haven't thought about it for
that long. But I just thought it was perhaps interesting enough to be worth
sharing.

Feedback?


--Gary


-- 
Help your email get through while making life harder for spammers: use
http://wecanstopspam.org in your sig.

Gary Robinson
CEO
Transpose, LLC
grobinson@transpose.com
207-942-3463
http://www.transpose.com
http://radio.weblogs.com/0101454


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