People forget that a lot of the information pre-web was somewhat pricey, and especially anything routed through a telco. The web drove prices to zero, which has had some bad effects and many very good ones.
It listed like 2 dozen spam control schemes that had been proposed that failed, mostly for social reasons.
If I had the link, I would have simply posted it as the reply.
<https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt>
Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam...
I spent such a long time searching for it, including using LLMs. And yet you were able to take my misleading clues and find it.
Hadn't twigged that Cory seems to be a principle source/reference these days. I think I first saw this on Slashdot back in the day.
Mind, I'm strongly in favour of what you're advocating, in theory. And I'm well aware that failing to accomplish this will make the Web far less useful for everyone. But the fundamental challenge remains difficult.
edit: added version
To answer one potential criticism, it's true that in some sense, blocking and so on for social reasons is not good and is in some theoretical sense arguably harmful for the overall web ecology. On the other hand, the current unchecked situation itself is also deeply harmful for the overall web ecology and it's only going to get worse if we do nothing, with more and more things effectively driven off the open web. We only get to pick the poison here.
(From TFA.)
I use a forum. The operator decided to block almost every IP range associated with a data center. The problem is that more people are using VPNs due to the spread of geo restrictions, local laws like age verification, etc. And so now I need to disable my VPN - assuming I'm using one - just to access the site.
In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a good number of techies who were in control of the infrastructure and believed that as long as you don't mess with other people's toys, you should be allowed to roam freely online. But even then, this wasn't the universal consensus. You would still get shown the door for certain behaviors on the Usenet or on web forums. And many ISPs would still drop you for hard porn, gore, or piracy.
But today, the consensus is that tech companies are the guardians of morality. You can get deplatformed quite easily from all the major platforms just for saying things that others disagree with. Your private files in the cloud (and sometimes on the device) get scanned for contraband. Search engines and LLMs are carefully engineered to never say or encourage the wrong things, and to flag certain things for human review. You'd be hard-pressed to find an online platform or a Western ISP that doesn't bow to social pressures.
All IPs are allocated to CIDR blocks and Autonomous Systems, the latter identified by their Autonomous System Number (ASN). It's reasonably straightforward and tractable to track good/bad behaviour by either, and (thanks to the Law of Large Numbers and Power Laws), there's virtually always a very small number of absolutely horribly-misbehaved blocks from which a large fraction of abuse originates. Moreover, at sufficiently fine detail, it's possible to identify both friendly and hostile address spaces, permitting carve-outs for the former and scaled response against the latter.
The second part of this approach is that defences need not be all-or-nothing, universal, and/or unscaled. A netblock with a few bad actors might be subject to a slight performance penalty. A netblock with no non-hostile traffic could be blocked entirely (or tarpitted or otherwise subject to negative performance impacts). And of course, reputation data can be shared, as a broader view (one which, say, a large CDN or monitoring service might have) is going to provide both earlier warning and greater detail of where hostile activity originates. And individual instances of good behaviour could be excepted from broader blocks.
Ultimately, connectivity providers, whether of data centres or residential / organisational / mobile Internet services, should be encouraged to police their own outbound traffic and take actions themselves in the event of identified abusive behaviour. (That's been a long-standing dream of mine, it's ... stubbornly refused realisation.)
No doubt this is effective at achieving the political goal it aims to achieve.
My one-sentence summary is: "Stop accepting rude behavior from crawlers, AI agents, closed-source-browsers, and greedy mega-platforms or else they metastasize and ruin everything."
I prefer “That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.”
>So I've come to feel that if something like the current web is to be preserved, we need to take action not merely when technical problems arise but also when the social consensus is violated.
The guy seems an over worrier. The web/internet has had people being idiots from the start and continues well on 30+ years on. One of it's main strengths is you can put up a site with whatever on it without needing to be checked for fitting with the social consensus.
ACCount37•3mo ago
Let's keep them on a steady diet of 403 pages and 99 cyclic captchas a day. And see how that changes their tune.