[ale] Webcrawlers can harvest ALE Archive E-mail Addresses

[Greg Sabino Mullane]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


Jim Popovitch wrote:
> Ahhh, the signs of newbieness in spring.  ;-)

Ummm..yeah, whatever. Ad hominem attacks seem out of place here,
especially such a non-relevant one.

> Dude, things that can be obfuscated can also be un-obfuscated.  Again,
> there is NOTHING (short of elimination) that you can do to prevent an
> email address, on a public archive, from being harvested.

So that means nothing should be done? You do what you can, now what
you are sure will be 100% effective. Just because a spammer *may*
be able (and willing) to de-obfuscate a page does not mean that they
all will every time. Hence, instituting this is very likely to reduce your
total amount of spam. That's the goal of all spam fighting measures.
Nobody is arguing that obfuscation is a totally effective solution
that can never be thwarted.

A simple obfuscation would certainly help the original poster out,
because their email is only unobfuscated in the ale archives, and a
"bare" email address is going to receive more spam than an obfuscated
one.

"Geoffrey" wrote:
> If someone want's to put the code together, I'm sure Chris would
> consider using it.  But don't waste your time writing code that's
> going to translate foo at bar.com to foo "at" bar dot com....

Shall we send a memo to the many pieces of software out there that
already do this? How about the archive that is linked to from the main
ale mailing list page? (see the footer of every post). Again, it's a
matter of low-hanging fruit for the spammers and doing what you can
as a publisher of other people's email addresses. Adding obfuscation
won't make the spam problem any worse, and has the potential to make
things much better.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg at turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200502102238
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
 
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
 
iD8DBQFCDDYYvJuQZxSWSsgRAizOAKCZLeK40Ra+GgqpLh2pB1mv3ZaY5ACgoSEg
ka7R5pVmxCsM+Z8Gw8SqqVk=
=NzF+
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----