I repeat myself, but only Chuq seems to have noticed the other post. >>>>> "John" == John Morton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
John> This depends on just how temporary your 'solution' turns out John> to be, and it's level of complexity and usability. I don't John> think anyone has really advocate any really kludgy hacks so John> far. AFAICT both the trivial /. style obfuscation and the image style obfuscation are kludges because they ignore the statistical nature of harvesting. This works in two ways. First, since addresses are typically repeated but obfuscated in different ways, the probability that a given address gets harvested is much higher than the probability that any given obfuscated instance gets cracked. Second, you don't need to get 100% recognition, you don't even need to get 10% recognition, as long as you can process the bytes as fast as they come off the wire _and_ the number of harvested new addresses per megabyte is high enough. There is a third, "equilibrium" problem with obfuscation. Image obfuscation has the serious drawback that it looks "provably secure" if you don't think about it carefully. If this encourages lots more people to post real addresses, the value of the harvest rises proportionately and thus obfuscation decreases achieved security. I conclude that if obfuscated archives give a reasonable number of addresses per megabyte, and those addresses are drawn from a population that is not represented in other sources, spammers _will_ find cheap and dirty ways to achieve recognition, and then they will compete to improve it. People have seriously advocated obfuscation, especially images. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Don't ask how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software. _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers