4 ms·

Every time someone break stuff to "fight spam" I can only conclude it is one of two things: on purpose unethical behavior, or incompetence.

• jxf 14y ago
  Kind of like how we break a lot of our legal system to "fight child pornography". Yes, they're both bad things, but fighting them cannot come at the cost of breaking otherwise perfectly legitimate and functional endeavors.
  • speeder 14y ago
    This might be also lots of overreaction. I've met two very intelligent women (That don't know each other) that for most things have very reasonable opinions. But throw "child abuse" and it is like telling a robot to hide in a corner in a round room, they just break and if they could they would pass laws about instantly killing suspects of child abuse. When I try to argue with them of how "x" or "y" is bad idea because of its side effects, they always reply: "I don't care, EVERYTHING is worth doing to protect children." And then I understand why so much politicians use "for the children" rhetoric when they want something.
    • guard-of-terra 14y ago
      Maybe they're compensating for not having children they want to have or not spending enough time with their own children. They redirect their frustration by wanting to punish "child abusers" when the source of this fictional abuse is in their head. I guess that's what happen. The room is round, but their upbringing tells them to stand in a corner.
      • ceejayoz 14y ago
        Maybe they're space aliens, while we're wildly speculating.
        • guard-of-terra 14y ago
          Do you prefer "they're stupid and dangerous" answer? Because it's either this or that.
          • waterlesscloud 14y ago
            Or perhaps they were abused as children. Or know someone who was. Or they were afraid of all the big adults when they were children. Or. Or. Or. There's lots of other possibilities.
            • guard-of-terra 14y ago
              That's not less of a speculation.
          • ceejayoz 14y ago
            Well, that's a false dichotomy if I ever saw one. I prefer "well intentioned but misguided", "worked up by a sensationalist media that obscures the fact that kids are safer than in the 'idyllic' 1950s", etc. theories.
            • guard-of-terra 14y ago
              "well intentioned but misguided" equals "stupid and dangerous" once you shave off the bullshit. At least in this case. It's a textbook case, exactly like the one in South Park Uncut.
      • gbog 14y ago
        You're wrong but I upvoted your comment.
• endtime 14y ago
  If only Google would hire you, I'm sure you could solve all our spam problems (including the one I work on) in an ethical and competent way. :) Sometimes there are different classes of users with conflicting interests, and no algorithm or ML model or abundance of good intent can resolve them.
  • harshreality 14y ago
    I thought SOP for mitigating IM spam was to require user confirmation before delivering the suspect IMs? Google doesn't have to perfectly solve the spam identification problem in order to make IM usable without rejecting all remote messages. Why won't this work: - Allow IMs if the sender's address is anywhere in the recipient's contact list, or in a separate IM-specific whitelist (see next point). - Have a separate IM whitelist that supports user@domain or @domain for special circumstances. - Automatically add any foreign outgoing-IM recipient either as a new contact in the sender's contacts (if an IM field is added) or in the separate IM whitelist, so return IM from the same address is guaranteed. - Have a list of unconfirmed senders from the last N hours/days (after which they expire and are dropped), with a web-based interface... (clarification) notifications of these requests would NOT push through to the Google user's IM interface. - Optionally reply to unknown senders: "You are not a confirmed sender of this recipient. Contact recip OOB to ensure future delivery." - Optionally add an IM field to google contacts, for instances where a remote address doesn't function as an email address.
    • enjo 14y ago
      The requests themselves are spam. In the last couple of months I was seeing an increasing frequency in "lisaxxxhotone wants to chat with you" requests. I always ignore them..but it's a very annoying problem. You can simply ask for user confirmation, you're bothering me about something I really don't want to deal with.
      • deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
    • endtime 14y ago