I have been enjoying the http://www.spywareinfo.com/ site. It has a monthly newsletter and lots of great privacy information.
INCLUDING:
Campaign to stop spambots: The Harvester Project. What they want you to do is create bogus pages with lots of bogus email address on them. then when the programs that harvest the email addresses from the web find your bogus page, they grab all your fake email addresses. This supposedly decreases the value of the spammers lists. He has a list of sites who are participating. (Can't the spammers just collect this list of sites and tell their spambots to ignore them?) He advises placing a noindex command in robots.txt so that legitimate search engines don't harvest the info. (and maybe so they don't punish you by delisting your site) I like this idea. I like the idea of raising the cost of entry into the spamming business. Everything we do to frustrate spammers makes it more expensive to run a spam business. My one question is: Won't this method just generate even more traffic? I know the emails will get bounced, but won't that bouncing be a lot of traffic if the project takes off? WPoison takes this a step further and tries to trap the spider in a maze of constantly regenerating bogus pages with thousands of email addresses on them.
11:40:17 PM
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