[Rd] Spam to R-* list posters

[Spencer Graves]

On 2018-04-19 09:40, Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>> Serguei Sokol <sokol at insa-toulouse.fr>
>>>>>>      on Thu, 19 Apr 2018 13:29:54 +0200 writes:
>   [...............]
>
>      > Thanks Tomas for this detailed explanation.
>
>      > I would like also to signal a problem with the list. It must be
>      > corrupted in some way because beside the Tomas'  response I've got five
>      > or six (so far) dating spam. All of them coming from two emails:
>      > Kristina Oliynik <kristinaoliynik604324 at kw.taluss.com> and
>      > Samantha Smith <samanthasmith317260 at kw.fefty.com>.
>
>
> Well, that's the current ones for you.  They change over time,
> and in my experience you get about 10--20 (about once per hour;
> on purpose not exactly every 60 minutes) and then it stops.
>
> I've replied to the thread  "Hacked" on R-help yesterday:
>    https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2018-April/452423.html
>
> This has started ca 2 weeks ago on R-help already, and today
> we've learned that even  R-SIG-Mixed-Models  is affected.
>
> I think I don't see them anymore at all because my spam filters have adapted.
>
> Note that
>
> 1. This is *NOT* from regular mailing list subscribers, and none
>     of these spam come via the R mailing list servers.
>
> 2. It's still a huge pain and disreputable to the R lists of course.
>
> 3. I had hoped we could wait and see it go away, but I may be wrong.
>
> 4. We have re-started discussing what could be done.
>
>     One drastic measure would make mailing list usage
>     *less* attractive by "munging" all poster's e-mail addresses.
>
> -----
>
> For now use your mail providers spam filters to quickly get rid
> of this. .. or more interestingly and clearly less legally: use R to
> write "mail bombs".  Write an R function sending ca 10 e-mails per
> hour randomly to that address   ... ;-)  I did something like
> that (with a shell script, not R) at the end of last millennium
> when I was younger and the internet was a much much smaller
> space than now...


       What about implementing "Mailhide", described in the Wikipedia 
article on "reCAPTCHA"?


       '[F]or example, "mailme at example.com" would be converted to 
"mai... at example.com". The visitor would then click on the "..." and 
solve the CAPTCHA in order to obtain the full email address. One can 
also edit the pop-up code so that none of the address is visible.' 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA)


       Of course, this is easier for me to suggest, because I'm not in a 
position to actually implement it ;-)


       Spencer Graves


p.s.  I wish again to express my deep appreciation to Martin and the 
other members of the R Core team who have invested so much time and 
creativity into making The R Project for Statistical Computing the 
incredible service it is today.  A good portion of humanity lives better 
today, because of problems that would not otherwise have been addressed 
as well as they have been without some important analysis done with R.

> Martin
>
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