Re: can we fight the spam?

On Mon, 24 Mar 2008, Ross A. Finlayson wrote:
William Elliot wrote:

Ross, for many like OP, I'd like to put together a report on what news
servers and what news readers are needed and where to find them, so they
can set themselves up with a functional news group interface that will
allow them to filter out spam, keyword by keyword, or like more and more
who are fed up with Google groups, simply block all posts from Google
groups. Are you willing to help?

I don't know if a keyword block would work because some of the spams are
innocuous in the vocabulary.

It does to a significant extent and occassionally it has to be refreshed.
Block 'movie', 'hardcore', 'paypal', etc and lots of it will go away.

I was surprised to find the other day that there are as many regular
posters to sci.math as spammers that use Google groups to post. So,
blocking all Google groups posts would inconvenience the many regular
posters who use those, and their readers.

That is a problem. Many of the non-spam Googlers are jibber gabbers
anyway who won't be missed along with their gibberish math. Here's a
stragety some have used. First mark all Google posts with a delete mark.
This will help to distinguish potential crankiness and find the serios
Google posters. They can be unmarked and their address noted into the
filter as addresses to unmark. Then perform the magic delete word, and
poof, cans of spam are ruined. After finding the serious posters over
some time, the whole thing can be automated so all Google posters are
blocked except for a dozen or a half dozen hand picked sci.math posters.

A large amount of effort goes into controlling spam on usenet already.
While that may be so, and it is largely effective and justified and no
important political messages are censored, as far as I know, only junk
porn and cheap goods and schemes marketing spam, the threat of false
positives is a key concern in the liberal and by default permissive
attitude towards classification as spam.

The spammers out of Google groups have wreaked spam devastation over on
the unmoderated groups of Google's non-usenet groups.

That's why there's a growing movement to block all Google posts.

If Google blocked out spammers, determined by some natural analysis on
how their posts were off-topic and nonspecialized, that would solve the
problem of spam from Google groups (until spammers went on-topic,
shudder). Where Google groups won't delete (cancel) posts through their
domain, many other usenet servers will, but Google takes no action on
them.

I think Google will eventually take action because there is the thread
of "Usenet Death Penalty" as UUnet got in the 90's, for not doing
something about spam.

Google is too big not to get it's way.

You might find more sharing your views on http://improve-usenet.org/ .
I think that it would be better to get Google groups to control spam
than to give up usenet groups to the spammers.

They won't. They like it the way they did it as it get's more subscribers
and more subscribers = more money.

Now I have just sent 1000 complaints to Google groups about the spams,
Google's representatives said in an article of March 11 that they were
working on a way to control the spam.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=information+week+google+spam

As that'll take as long as it will for US cars to average 32.5 miles to
the gallon or for coal fired coal plants to clean up their act, in the
mean time I'd like to give a report on how to avoid Google spam by using
real news servers and readers. This I want to have ready to reply to
those who lament about Google spam. Namely, immediate self help is on the
way.

While you're at it, tell them to clean up their act. There is no excuse
for internal Google formating statements to be inserted into replies and
there's no excuse for changing hex 20 20 into hex 20 A0 when they quote.
What happens is that <space space> gets quoted as <space> + graphic
character. It's very annoying when presenting math in good style with
equations indented and on seperate lines.

So, this too shall pass.

Constipation is a shitty past time. ;-)

This would be the best of all worlds if it weren't for religion,
Microsoft and Google. Oh, should I have included Bush?
.