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Showing messages 1 through 8 of 8.

• glad to see someone else thinking about this.
  2004-03-26 13:03:03  slightlyoff [Reply | View]
  
  
  The threat model here is pretty trivial to figure out. I expect spammers are already working on tools. I've been thinking about the problem for a little while as well:
  
  http://alex.netwindows.org/2004_03_01_archive.html#107844120624798230
  http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg03275.html
  
  Unfortunantly, it doesn't look like anyone is listening.
• glad to see someone else thinking about this.
  2004-03-26 13:07:02  Marc Hedlund [Reply | View]
  
  
  Great references, thanks for posting them. You've got better examples than the ones I imagined.
  
  -Marc

• I don't get it
  2004-03-25 21:55:03  aristotle [Reply | View]
  
  
  With RSS feeds, content doesn't come to me unless I explicit have it fetched by subscribing to a feed. But unlike Usenet, I don't subscribe to a public forum; content comes from a single author, or a fixed group of them.
  
  I don't really see why webbugs would be much of a concern, either. Webbugged mail comes to its recipient unrequested; webbugged feeds are explicitly polled by the reader. There isn't much to gain from webbugs beyond the information you already have.
  
  Sure, the content might come with ads. That's about as far as things can go.

• Different than ads on mailing lists?
  2004-03-25 07:06:45  David Sklar [Reply | View]
  
  
  How is this significantly different from ads on a one-to-many mailing list?
  
  I am on a bunch of mailing lists where all the posts come from one person distributing links, articles of interest, etc.
  
  If that person injected enough ads into the message stream to be annoying, I would unsubscribe from the list.
  
  Same thing with an ad-infested RSS feed. If it becomes annoying, you don't read the feed anymore.
  

• Branded XML Readers
  2004-03-24 16:05:25  charlwood [Reply | View]
  
  
  I have found that a lot of marketers are getting fed up with declining open and click rates with their opt-in email newsletters, and are now turning to RSS or Atom feeds for a solution.
  
  I recently have developed a branded XML reader which allows publishers to preload feeds and even brand my reader as their own. I have had lots of interest already... http://www.charlwood.com/tristana/publishers.
  
  I think that quality B2B websites appreciate the need to guarantee that their content gets through to viewers who want to receive it, and XML is one of the only ways left to guarantee content delivery, assuming a live Net connection.

• Safeguards against Blog Spam
  2004-03-24 11:21:48  serat [Reply | View]
  
  
  For my blog aggregator display, I use RegEx to strip HTML tags out of the text from blogs before they are displayed to avoid scripting.
  
  I also have a http referer display where I show which pages linked to my blog. I find that very often the referer was a link to a p0rn site or some other mass marketing site. I maintain a list of these unwanted referers (which actually have no link or other association to my blog), and then filter the referers through the list before displaying them.
  
  Steven Erat
  TalkingTree.com

• Report abuse
  2004-03-24 03:36:27  manish_jethani [Reply | View]
  
  
  For aggregator services, you can report abuse to them. They can blacklist those feeds that exhibit this kind of spam behaviour.

• only one thing will stop spammers
  2004-03-24 02:37:31  jwenting [Reply | View]
  
  
  and that's a negative business incentive.
  In other words, as long as it's less costly to spam than the probable income (however low, remember email spam is profitable from as few as one in a hundred thousand responses!) they'll continue to spam.
  
  The only way I see to stem the flow is to incur a cost to sending traffic.
  In the case of email it may be too late, and maybe for RSS also by now however yound it is.
  Some sort of mechanism would have to be found by which the sender pays the receiver for each sent item. When the receiver is also a sender himself it could be set up so that the ballance is automatically calculated in order to prevent a huge number of microtransactions (this seems the most likely thing that could possibly work for email if enough ISPs cooperate).
  Non-paid feeds would still be available, but use at your own risk.
  If the sender pays that does several things:
  1) it makes him more likely to vigorously check his systems for exploits that spammers could use to spam through him
  2) it makes him think twice about spamming himself
  3) it makes him think twice about posting trivialities.
  
  All would reduce the amount of garbage sent.