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Always want to fill out the old https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt form with these ideas. Like the open world / clo

by th0ma5 8y ago

Always want to fill out the old https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt form with these ideas. Like the open world / closed world AI problem.

roel_v 8y ago
It's been 20 years and it doesn't stop being funny. I'm afraid I'm a 12 year old boy in the body of a 40 year old :(
ComputerGuru 8y ago
It's still spot-on today, except perhaps s/Microsoft/Google/g (fully-encrypted Gmail comes to mind).
raverbashing 8y ago
But then again, email spam has been solved for the most part That list is kinda defeatist and misses the fact that no solution needs to work 100% of the time
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  We have paid for that in features though. You can’t really use your home connection as a mail server anymore, for instance.
- bkor 8y ago
  > But then again, email spam has been solved for the most part Only if you use one of the big email providers or if you pay to route it via some antispam system. If you don't and play around with e.g. Postfix and spamassassin then you'll notice more than enough spam.
  - pwg 8y ago
    If you use Postfix and CRM114 (http://crm114.sourceforge.net/ http://crm114.sourceforge.net/) you can achieve equivalent or better spam filtering than the "big email providers". I get maybe 1 spam every six months that leaks through. I simply add it to the crm114 filter as "this should be spam" and then no spam again for another six months or so.
atoav 8y ago
It might seem odd to north americans, but I never received a single robo call my entire life. I received one spam call in the last 10 years, and the guy exused himself when I told him what he is doing is illegal. This feels a bit like “weapon laws won’t solve anything” and “social healthcare can’t ever work”. So either Europe is living in an weird strand of alternate reality, or maybe some problems _are_ solvable if you really want to.
- concerned_user 8y ago
  Europe has stricter regulations. When I worked in a company 8 years ago that were sending sms to customers with text like - your order is ready, please come pick up, etc. And we used company name instead of number as sms allowed that, only 8 letters but was enough for us, but around that time we suddenly weren't able to do that anymore and company we used to send sms through said that some laws were passed and we must use one of the numbers registered to us and that's it. I think that explains why it is much harder to do robocalls in some parts of europe at least.
  - rutthenut 8y ago
    That was never a law - you were probably just caught up with an interpretation by the service provider.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- bewo001 8y ago
  It's a regulation problem, not a technical one. In Germany --and probably in other EU countries--, the telco must make sure that a caller is authorized to use a certain number as origin. STIR just shifts that responsibility to some other entity. If a call originates from an untrusted network, you remove the number or indicate that it is user-provided and probably fake. It would help if phones would properly display the difference (P-Asserted-Id present or not).
  - 8y ago
Spoom 8y ago
I was just thinking about that. Your article advocates a (X) technical solution to robocalling. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (X) Requires too much cooperation from telephone service providers Specifically, your plan fails to account for (X) Extreme profitability of robocalling Furthermore, this is what I think about you: (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
- alphabetter 8y ago
  1) The FCC is threatening all kinds of hell for service providers that don't implement shaken/stir. AFAIK all the major US carriers are already committed to implement it. 2) Robocalling is probably not net profitable for the carriers. Much of it originates from abroad and much of it is associated with other kinds of fraud. Never mind the secondary impacts due to users deciding not to get phone lines if they are just going to receive spam.
tomjen3 8y ago
That thing effectively meant that you couldn't propose an actual solution to the SPAM problem that was fair for everybody, open source, etc. Instead Gmail went ahead and made one that is secret and hugely benefit them, people went to gmail because it actually worked, and yet some it is still linked to and considered a good thing.
- tatersolid 8y ago
  I get plenty of spam in my Gmail inbox. Their filtering isn’t magic or perfect. Worse, Gmail’s spam filter generates tons of false positives, and these are often the messages I want most: password resets, legit balance alerts from my bank.

by th0ma5 8y ago

Always want to fill out the old https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt form with these ideas. Like the open world / closed world AI problem.

roel_v 8y ago

It's been 20 years and it doesn't stop being funny. I'm afraid I'm a 12 year old boy in the body of a 40 year old :(

ComputerGuru 8y ago

It's still spot-on today, except perhaps s/Microsoft/Google/g (fully-encrypted Gmail comes to mind).

raverbashing 8y ago

But then again, email spam has been solved for the most part That list is kinda defeatist and misses the fact that no solution needs to work 100% of the time

tinus_hn 8y ago
We have paid for that in features though. You can’t really use your home connection as a mail server anymore, for instance.
bkor 8y ago
> But then again, email spam has been solved for the most part Only if you use one of the big email providers or if you pay to route it via some antispam system. If you don't and play around with e.g. Postfix and spamassassin then you'll notice more than enough spam.
- pwg 8y ago
  If you use Postfix and CRM114 (http://crm114.sourceforge.net/ http://crm114.sourceforge.net/) you can achieve equivalent or better spam filtering than the "big email providers". I get maybe 1 spam every six months that leaks through. I simply add it to the crm114 filter as "this should be spam" and then no spam again for another six months or so.

atoav 8y ago

It might seem odd to north americans, but I never received a single robo call my entire life. I received one spam call in the last 10 years, and the guy exused himself when I told him what he is doing is illegal. This feels a bit like “weapon laws won’t solve anything” and “social healthcare can’t ever work”. So either Europe is living in an weird strand of alternate reality, or maybe some problems _are_ solvable if you really want to.

concerned_user 8y ago
Europe has stricter regulations. When I worked in a company 8 years ago that were sending sms to customers with text like - your order is ready, please come pick up, etc. And we used company name instead of number as sms allowed that, only 8 letters but was enough for us, but around that time we suddenly weren't able to do that anymore and company we used to send sms through said that some laws were passed and we must use one of the numbers registered to us and that's it. I think that explains why it is much harder to do robocalls in some parts of europe at least.
- rutthenut 8y ago
  That was never a law - you were probably just caught up with an interpretation by the service provider.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
bewo001 8y ago
It's a regulation problem, not a technical one. In Germany --and probably in other EU countries--, the telco must make sure that a caller is authorized to use a certain number as origin. STIR just shifts that responsibility to some other entity. If a call originates from an untrusted network, you remove the number or indicate that it is user-provided and probably fake. It would help if phones would properly display the difference (P-Asserted-Id present or not).
- 8y ago

Spoom 8y ago

I was just thinking about that. Your article advocates a (X) technical solution to robocalling. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (X) Requires too much cooperation from telephone service providers Specifically, your plan fails to account for (X) Extreme profitability of robocalling Furthermore, this is what I think about you: (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

alphabetter 8y ago
1) The FCC is threatening all kinds of hell for service providers that don't implement shaken/stir. AFAIK all the major US carriers are already committed to implement it. 2) Robocalling is probably not net profitable for the carriers. Much of it originates from abroad and much of it is associated with other kinds of fraud. Never mind the secondary impacts due to users deciding not to get phone lines if they are just going to receive spam.

tomjen3 8y ago

That thing effectively meant that you couldn't propose an actual solution to the SPAM problem that was fair for everybody, open source, etc. Instead Gmail went ahead and made one that is secret and hugely benefit them, people went to gmail because it actually worked, and yet some it is still linked to and considered a good thing.

tatersolid 8y ago
I get plenty of spam in my Gmail inbox. Their filtering isn’t magic or perfect. Worse, Gmail’s spam filter generates tons of false positives, and these are often the messages I want most: password resets, legit balance alerts from my bank.