Re: [silk] Spammer attack

[José María Mateos]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 11:03:49AM +0530, Biju Chacko wrote:

I feel like *I'm* stuck in the 20th century because I still like mailing
lists. Recently when I tried to explain that for engineering discussions a
mailing list would be better than a slack channel I had to stop to explain
what a mailing list was. (!)


+1 for the love of mailing lists.

Email doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. Apparently, some 
people are beginning to wonder whether this is becoming a problem for 
open source projects:


https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/


Reading the article, there's this thing that bothers me:

As an example, my partner submitted a patch to OpenBSD a few weeks 
ago, and he had to set up an entirely new mail client which didn’t 
mangle his email message to HTML-ise or do other things to it, so he 
could even make that one patch. That’s a barrier to entry that’s 
pretty high for somebody who may want to be a first-time contributor.


So, what's the problem here? That open-source projects use e-mail or 
that e-mail is a tool and when used for technical purposes needs to be 
properly set up?


It turned out, though, that this time Outlook was not guilty. “I think 
it was actually Gmail that was a barrier. And he also couldn’t do it 
from Apple Mail. It is just that the modern mail client has 
intentionally moved towards HTML,” she said.


The modern e-mail client has intentionally moved towards HTML *and* 
towards not letting the user do whatever task is actually intended, 
apparently.


E-mail is simple to use. One only has to follow very old, 
well-established rules; see for instance points 2.3 and 2.4 here: 
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/mailing-list-faq/etiquette.html. 
The problem is that at some point someone thought it would be amazing to 
have animated gifs in the middle of your message and reply 'ok' to an 
entire thread from your phone. Everything went downhill from there.


/rant

Cheers,

--
José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.org

Re: [silk] Spammer attack

[Tomasz Rola]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 11:03:49AM +0530, Biju Chacko wrote:
> I feel like *I'm* stuck in the 20th century because I still like mailing
> lists. Recently when I tried to explain that for engineering discussions a
> mailing list would be better than a slack channel I had to stop to explain
> what a mailing list was. (!)

It does not matter where you come from, it matters where you are going.

> Email doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. Apparently, some people
> are beginning to wonder whether this is becoming a problem for open source
> projects:
> 
> https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/

The way I see it, lots of people talk about "deficiencies of email",
but they somehow manage to never mention deficiencies of software
which gave them this pitiful experiences.

Strange, no?

It is being said, never ascribe to malevolence what can be ascribed to
stupidity, so here we go: it takes lots of stupidity to deliver poorly
written email software, year after year (while having access to the
best developers in the world and insane heaps of money), when well
working software had been known for decades. And it is open source, so
all it would take was copy stuff and read the licence.

"Blame email" meme is nice excuse for incompetence, which everybody
(journalists, business folk) can easily memorize and repeat.

At least this is what I can deduce from multiple news on the internet,
read over some time.

This guy describes his point of view, based on his experience with
nasty client software:

https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2011/02/problem-isnt-email-its-microsoft.html

Almost ten years passed, and I do not think changes were for the
better. But I have never had much (if any) first hand expierience with
non-free MUAs. Only had to plow through multitude of discussion
threads broken and ripped apart by incompetent programs.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.  **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home**
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...  **
** **
** Tomasz Rola  mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **

Re: [silk] Spammer attack

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

  
  
  

It is trivially broken but well, let me enable it when I have some time 



--srs

  




On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 7:38 PM +0530, "Hari Selvarajan" 
 wrote:










> Some spammer seems to have discovered the mailman instance that runs
> silklist. I am getting ~50 new member requests per day which I am manually
> deleting. FML.
> 

Apparently[1] mailman, from around version 2.1.26, has Google reCAPTCHA 
support. Is enabling that an option? 

— Hari

[1] https://code.launchpad.net/~dsieborger/mailman/recaptcha/+merge/336782 

Re: [silk] Spammer attack

[Hari Selvarajan]

> Some spammer seems to have discovered the mailman instance that runs
> silklist. I am getting ~50 new member requests per day which I am manually
> deleting. FML.
> 

Apparently[1] mailman, from around version 2.1.26, has Google reCAPTCHA 
support. Is enabling that an option? 

— Hari

[1] https://code.launchpad.net/~dsieborger/mailman/recaptcha/+merge/336782 

Re: [silk] Spammer attack

[Tomasz Rola]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 05:25:32AM -0700, Thaths wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 8:57 PM Radhika, Y.  wrote:
> 
> > Time to go to Silk on FB, for me.
> >
> 
> Why? Are there no Russian disinformation bots there?

Well, if fake book is for communications exchange then drinking 95%
spirit is a spiritual improvement.

Whoever goes there should expect deletion of their content at random
points of time. Either by algorithm or by some /accident\... Some
words will be declared unpure. You did research whose description
involved those words. Too bad. You made a photo. Too bad. What you
mean, satire, caricature, what is that. Delete.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.  **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home**
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...  **
** **
** Tomasz Rola  mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **

Re: [silk] Spammer attack

[Tomasz Rola]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 08:34:05AM +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
> Some spammer seems to have discovered the mailman instance that runs
> silklist. I am getting ~50 new member requests per day which I am manually
> deleting. FML.

Udhay,

Can it be done so that mailman says: "thank you, now please go to this
page so-an-so and complete the form, please copy the string from the
subject of this email into relevant input box or else your message
will not be processed". The page sends another email to list owner,
again with said string in a subject. Now all that is still needed is
to process your inbox with a bit of willpower and a shell script. In a
simplest incarnation, the script will show the strings which happened
in "Subject" line twice.

I am pretty sure the b*ts will go away. Or rather, your work with them
will go away. Human made script beats human made b?t.

It should be relatively simple to set up in user *unfriendly*
environments, because they were engineered to help solving problems in
easy way (and provide tools for this). I have never done such thing
but I am hopeful. It should be possible even if you use
user*-*friendly solutions, but in such case I am unhopeful, all bets
are lost and I would expect much more work - unless someone already
made a solution, and it can be downloaded and used fer freeah.

Tools beat solutions, for each species who can use tools. Evolution vs
devolution.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.  **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home**
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...  **
** **
** Tomasz Rola  mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **

Re: [silk] Spammer attack

[Thaths]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2020, 8:57 PM Radhika, Y.  wrote:

> Time to go to Silk on FB, for me.
>

Why? Are there no Russian disinformation bots there?

Thaths


> On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 8:04 PM Udhay Shankar N  wrote:
>
> > Some spammer seems to have discovered the mailman instance that runs
> > silklist. I am getting ~50 new member requests per day which I am
> manually
> > deleting. FML.
> >
> > Udhay
> >
> > --
> >
> > ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
> >
>
>
> --
> *Translator/Owner*
> *AzulIndica Translations*
> *North Vancouver BC, Canada*
>

Re: [silk] Spammer attack

[Biju Chacko]

I feel like *I'm* stuck in the 20th century because I still like mailing
lists. Recently when I tried to explain that for engineering discussions a
mailing list would be better than a slack channel I had to stop to explain
what a mailing list was. (!)

Email doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. Apparently, some people
are beginning to wonder whether this is becoming a problem for open source
projects:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/

-- b

On Fri, 28 Aug 2020 at 10:20, Madhu Menon  wrote:

> Mailman is firmly stuck in the 20th century, unfortunately. Pity you can't
> throw a CAPTCHA or something else at it.
>
>
> >
> >
>

Re: [silk] Spammer attack

[Madhu Menon]

Mailman is firmly stuck in the 20th century, unfortunately. Pity you can't
throw a CAPTCHA or something else at it.


>
>

Re: [silk] Spammer attack

[Radhika, Y.]

Time to go to Silk on FB, for me.

On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 8:04 PM Udhay Shankar N  wrote:

> Some spammer seems to have discovered the mailman instance that runs
> silklist. I am getting ~50 new member requests per day which I am manually
> deleting. FML.
>
> Udhay
>
> --
>
> ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
>


-- 
*Translator/Owner*
*AzulIndica Translations*
*North Vancouver BC, Canada*

[silk] Spammer attack

[Udhay Shankar N]

Some spammer seems to have discovered the mailman instance that runs
silklist. I am getting ~50 new member requests per day which I am manually
deleting. FML.

Udhay

-- 

((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))