Re: My Gnutella spam reduction idea revised

Hello!

just_courtney_girl wrote:
> I just rejoned under a new address.  In a post
> sometime back, I came up with a spam reduction
> idea.  I had an idea for eliminating junk hits.
> The problem is the On-The_Fly spam generators
> that take the Gnutella search string and
> create files with the search strings in the
> name.
[snipped]
> Now lets say I searched for voic trainin:
> 
> voic_trainin_install.exe
> voic trainin porn video.avi
> voic trainin xxx.mpg
> voice training - control breath and tone.mp3
> [crack] voic trainin.zip
> voic trainin sales affiliate program.doc
> xxx voic trainin.mpeg
> 
> Now, do you tell which is the intended result
> and which is the spam?

You are just forcing the spammers to become more sophisticated, and, 
IMHO, it takes no more than a few lines of code for a spammer to defeat 
your spam defense algorithm. Simply, the spammer just passively modifies 
QueryHits, which has even better effect, from the spammer's view point: 
(a) you can not say in any similar way to your algorithm that the Hits 
are spam, since they are produced from a legitimate peer (b) the spammer 
does not need to care if Hits from legitimate peers travel faster than 
her own Hits to the original querier, since she just altered the 
original Hits with her own spam IPs.

I am against in using naive algos in order to defeat trivial spammers, 
since you are just forcing them to become even more clever. Today the 
majority of Gnutella users can filter on their own spam results, because 
spam is easily spotted using the human eye. Tomorrow, if spammers employ 
techniques like the ones I mentioned above, the spam will become much 
much more serious issue...

Regards,
-- 
Elias Athanasopoulos
Distributed Computing Systems (DCS)
Institute of Computer Science (ICS/FORTH)
Heraklion, Crete

A bug can become a feature by documenting it.