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

Any protocol-level ideas will be published here.  So far we have the OOBv3
proposal.

Any limewire-specific measures will be discussed in limewire-specific
places. ( http://limewire.org )

On 24 Mar 2007 13:52:50 -0700, Serguei Osokine <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>   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] <the_gdf%40yahoogroups.com> [mailto:
> [email protected] <the_gdf%40yahoogroups.com>]On Behalf
> Of Arne Babenhauserheide
> Sent: Monday, January 23, 2007 11:25 PM
> To: [email protected] <the_gdf%40yahoogroups.com>
> 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 ---
>
>  
>


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