Re: Idiot spam attack on sci.lang

On Feb 1, 1:59 pm, António Marques <m...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Franz Gnaedinger wrote:
On Jan 31, 8:16 pm, António Marques <m...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Franz Gnaedinger wrote:
Imagine that a criminal could flood a bank with counterfeit money,
and do so in the name and using the accounts of the regular customers
- that bank would have a real problem.
Imagine that real money didn't have security features to distinguish it
from counterfeit money. That's exactly the situation Google is in.
Google is your bank - but it isn't your Central European Bank, it
doesn't control the currency, it can only store it. There is nothing
Google can do.

Google could discern between Peter T. Daniels the genuine
and Peter T. Daniels the fake. You saw the fake message
in his name yesterday, in another thread, even I thought it
was a message by the real Peter.

No, it couldn't. Computers aren't so intelligent yet so as to be able to
tell correct content from bogus. And if the fake content tries to mimic
legitimate content, then they probably never will. Think of it for a
second - there may just be *no difference* between them. If I choose to
pick a message from yours, change a word, and take care to spoof the
origin, how can anyone ever tell the difference?

What computers may be able to do is to filter out messages coming from
suspicious servers, or with obviously incorrect content (e.g.
"$%#%&$#%), or cross-posted to an unacceptably high number of groups, etc.

Now some providers have anti-spam filters which are able to determine
when a message is *likely* spam. But those filters are very fallible,
both marking as spam messages which are not, and failing to mark
messages which are, so they can't be fully depended on.

Keeping away the spam is one thing, separating fake posters
from real posters is another thing.

It's the exact same thing - but, if anything, it's easier to spot spam
because it conforms to certain patterns.

Google must solve their problem, the steps they took until now are
not sufficient. One step they took was closing the account - note
well: the free account that runs under the name of profile - of the
MI5Vic... spammer.
But they didn't close anything. They just don't offer anymore the
possibility to look up MI5Vic's 'profile'. Google doesn't run profiles -
when you ask to see someone's profile, it just runs a search for that
person's e-mail, and offers you a page with the results. It's just the
same as when you look up 'hamburger' in a web search, and it gives you a
list of the pages which mention hamburgers.

If you find an old message by the MI5Vic... spammer and
look up his profile, Google says the account has been banned
(their words, both "account" and "banned"), and there is no
profile available.

That's linguistic sugar for 'We don't do archive searches for
mi5vic@...'. They're unintentionally fooling you into thinking they have
this sort of mega-profile-engine. They do not.

Posted via a free Usenet account fromhttp://www.teranews.com

A free Usenet account - so you have an account at teranews?
what does this mean?

It means I once paid $3.95 so that teranews would give me a username and
password with which I can connect to their news server to read and send
messages. Of course, all that matters is 'connect to their news server
to read and send messages'. Nothing to do with identities, profiles, or
the like. You can mimic my identity anytime you like, teranews have
nothing to do with it.

In case you wonder why I use teranews at all, it's because:

1. I can't stand using newsgroups with anything other than a news reader
program.

2. My internet provider only allows me to connect to their news server
using their own connection, which means only at home.

3. My internet provider's news service is trash, mostly because it's
flooded by people who only use binaries.* newsgroups to download porn
and the server administrators don't have the cleverness to separate
binaries from text newsgroups. They'd just need to dedicate one single
server to text, that would be more than enough, but they can't be
bothered. They're stupid. That's the way of monopolies.

4. Third-party news providers usually cater to binary users also, which
means they don't have (please someone inform me if they do) pricings for
people who just want to use text (in case it wasn't clear before, text
uses almost no resources at all when compared to binaries). Their
pricings are usually per-month or amount of gigabytes, whichever comes
first, which is completely inadequate for me (both in price and number
of times I'd have to perform payments). But teranews does have this
special offering of (limited but enough for me) service for a one-off
fee, and that's what I got.

5. No, I'm not happy with them, but as per (4) I have not yet found an
alternative.

Thanks for the long reply. Please consider that I am a computer
moron, and as such I got only a part of it. Maybe I must conjure
a drastic example. Also as a user of teranews you got a profile
in Google. What would you say if a fake Antonio Marques flooded
your profile with fake messages that suggest you, Antonio Marques,
are considering Heil Hickup the greatest politician ever, and _Mein
Krampf_ the Bible of our time? (name and book title slightly altered
in order not to attract a certain sort of people via a search engine)
.