On Mon, Oct 06, 2003 at 05:07:31PM -0400, Antiphon wrote: > Wow, I didn't know that this list is also a newsgroup. Are saying then > that nothing should be done? That seems rather defeatist. Google Groups > makes some efforts with partial hex encoding (move your mouse over the > mailto links) and I believe they also take steps to limit large numbers of > requests. No google doesn´t do any encoding other than encoding the @ sign for a hyperlink but it then shows it in plain text as well. I looked at the source of the page, before posting about it. I don't know about the speed limitations though. Example: From: <a href=/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=author:antiphon99%40yahoo.ca+ target=_top>Antiphon</a> (<a href=mailto:antiphon99%40yahoo.ca>antiphon99@yahoo.ca</a>) Also do realize that the Debian mailing lists are archived at various other sites outside of Debian. I don't know if debian-kde is specifically but I do know that most of the others are. > Surely Debian could take up on some of this. Spam is something that will > never go away but it is something that can be reduced with the proper > effort, especially considering the fact that most spammers are not that > willing to work very hard. I run several different websites and munge the > addresses on them and get very little spam as a result, despite the fact > that they are quite popular. You seem to be mistaken that spammers don't work hard at harvesting addresses, you do realize there is a spam organization specialized in helping spammers with harvesting, right? It was on a internet news site recently (iirc linked by /.) You also seem to be mistaken that a change to all email addresses at debian.org would make a difference. Since one of the biggest mail archives, google groups doesn't obsfucate what will this buy us? Even if it was effective at the beginning it would require lots of cpu time, etc to accomplish. Then a month later the spammers will have already found how to harvest it and we would have to come up with another way to obsfucate them. Even the site you(?) mentioned earlier states the fact that the only type of obsfucation that is likely to work at all is the image smudging style which would take a lot more space, cpu time, and network bandwidth to implement as well. If you are getting that many viruses why isn't your ISP scanning its email? There are many utilities to do this including free software versions. Chris BTW - Also realize discussing this on debian-kde has no bearing whether something happens at all, since no one here has the ability to change how the mailing lists are archived. You would have to convince the debian mailing list or webmasters to change it, which is highly unlikely considering this same issue came up last month on debian-devel (iirc).
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