RE: Drop Dynamic Querying - It only benefits Spammers these days

On Monday, January 23, 2007 Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> Could you shed some light on your thoughts?
>
> They seem somehow blackboxed just now :)

	Yeah, I'd be very interested to hear these thoughts too, Sam :-)

	Or maybe not. Maybe they are secret thoughts. Anyway, forgive
me for jumping into this discussion two months late, but that is not
because I was not paying attention, but rather because I was thinking.
And the result of all this thinking is that the spam fight is hopeless
without the PeerGuardian plugin - maybe together with some kind of a
content filter.

	Let's backtrack a little. For many years, spam was not a serious
problem, because it would not replicate. Who'd store it on his machine?
So the spam content was always present, but was not much of a problem,
because it comprised just a small share of all content in the network.

	The situation changed when people started to deploy the
specialized high-performance servers to inject the massive amounts
of fake content into the system. It probably started with the various
attempts to destroy the P2P nets with pollution, but now it is more of
a commercial endeavour, with people like P2Pads and Skyrider using
high-performance methods to deliver lots and lots of spam. (And even
claiming that they've got a novel business model. Yeah, right. Ever
got an anatomy enlargement e-mail offer?)

	So the spam comes in two forms: from their machines and through
poor souls who were duped into downloading this crap and now are the
rebroadcasters. I'd say that the first channel is more serious (that
is, it produces lots and lots of new spamming content in virtually
unlimited quantities). Fortunately, it is also easier to break: it
is hard to constantly move a massive server farm from one IP range
to another, so I think that the PeerGuardian plugin can take care
of it.

	The second part (killing the spam that is already present) is
trickier, but once the inflow of this crap is limited, maybe Credence
or something like that can help (right now it must be basically useless,
because the spamming farm can mutate its content all the time). Heck,
maybe with the spam farms blocked by the PeerGuardian from the majority
of the network nodes, the usual natural selection process would be
enough to bring the spamming problem into reasonable bounds. After
all, any node that sees a result from the blocked IP range can kill
it, so hopefully much of the spam can be blocked by a small percentage
of nodes having such a plugin. (Though direct replies do complicate
things, of course.) Maybe having a PeerGuardian plugin should be a
requirement for at least every Ultrapeer?

	Anyway, the rebroadcasters lack one very important quality:
they can no longer create the artificial spam file name and stuff
it as a result into every request coming through them. I'd guess
that most of the spam is generated by the spam farms, and taking
them out should lower the spam volume a lot. We should do it first,
see what happens, and go from there.

	And the beauty of this situation is that this spamming problem
is capable of giving a huge boost to the PeerGuardian development -
from a privacy protection service (which is not something that many
people are worried about), it becomes a spam-fighting service, which
is something that everyone is aware of. Everyone sees spam, and is
totally sick and tired of it. With a few donations from the servent
vendors and from the community, PeerGuardian might really become a
major spam-fighting service and a household word.

	Of course, this integration with PeerGuardian requires not
only blocking the connections to the blacklisted IPs (as it is
normally done), but it should also include the filtering of the
result list on every node for these same IPs. Every node should
remove the spam results once it sees them. And since it also
includes the displaying (requestor) node, such an integration
should bring immediate benefits to the node user - he should stop
seeing many spam results at once. So the upgrade to the servent
version that takes such a plugin should be a snap - the users will
stand in line for it.

	The PeerGuardian scalability should be carefully controlled,
of course - but that is not anything unsurmountable.

	If I'd work for P2P spammers, my next step would be to move my
operation to the individual users' machines and to the machines that
are controlled by the bots, but I dunno... First, these machines are
as easily to identify by the PeerGuardian, and second, the P2P spam
operators are currently trying to position themselves as legitimate
businessmen. I'm not sure how willing they would be to shift to the
networks of bots controlled by the Trojans from Nigeria-based control
center. They are carefully avoiding even the very word 'spam' in their
press releases lest they be confused with universally hated e-mail
spammers. Utilizing the same shady methods as Viagra pushers do might
not look good for the public and for investors.

	Sam, did you guys try integrating PeerGuardian or some analog
into the system? What was the result? To put it shortly, why do P2P
nets still have spam? What is the hole in my reasoning? Or maybe you
are already shipping this thing, and I simply missed it? In this
case, I want a premium version of it, right now. And never mind my
Java allergy - a spamless servent is worth waiting twenty seconds
for its launch :-)

	Best wishes -
	Oso.
	24 Mar 2007.



-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf
Of Arne Babenhauserheide
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2007 11:25 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [the_gdf] Drop Dynamic Querying - It only benefits Spammers
these days

Could you shed some light on your thoughts?

They seem somehow blackboxed just now :)

I know that LimeWire is the biggest player in the GNet at the moment,
but
LimeWire can only reach a certain kind of users, so there are quite a
lot of
niches for other programs, and I for my part want to see Gnutella a
vivid
community which evolves ever further into the most efficient p2p
network.

And I believe, that this can only happen, if different developers
with a lot
of different ideas and ways of thinking work together.

And aside from that, a heterogenous network is far harder to
attack :)

So: What's your thoughts till now?


Besides: Why don't you use the description of Gnutella from
http://gnufu.net
on the LimeWire pages? They are intended to be used :)
If it's licensing problems, you just need to ask me to get a
differently
licensed version (of the parts I wrote, which is most of the texts).

Best wishes,
Arne


El Martes, 23 de Enero de 2007 21:11, Sam Berlin escribió:
> We are actively looking into the spam problem, Arne, and intend to
> address it effectively.
>
> Sam


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

--- End forwarded message ---