This needs to send fake name address and bank account details when rerequested. That's where the threads would start to get more interesting.
Another idea is to send two spammers responses to each other.
Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time
151–160 of 188 posts
Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
The paper you're referring to is probably this one: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-... The same logic that favours using an opening gambit that scares off all but the most unworldly of people works against using bots for the followup conversation. You don't want to finally find someone that genuinely believes that a random central African stranger might want to split $138,400,000 with the…
"It's also probably a bit flattering to the average scammer to assume the flaws in their patter are a deliberate filter pattern though." It doesn't have to be deliberate. It probably evolved. If worse spelling and grammar work better than correct spelling and grammar, then even if no spammer ever consciously says "Ah, I need to make this crappier", the spams will evolve to be crappy. Moreover, while our brains in thi…
Occam's razor implies that if the people originating the scams mostly are based in central Africa (true) and display the specific crappy spelling patterns and linguistic quirks of many other moderately-educated central Africans using the internet for non-nefarious purposes (also true) one needn't assume that there's any particular process that leads people to write like their compatriots. Especially not when similar imperfections betray their attempts to masquerade as a Scottish widow selling their husband's canal boat or Australian trader that wants to buy your product if you'll send him the import tax.
I'm also little inclined towards scepticism there's much evolutionary optimization going on when the standard email scam format hasn't even adapted to get around now unbiquitous standard webmail spam filters, which are essentially orthogonal to the gullibility of the account owner.
Besides, wouldn't an evolutionary process that wasn't a conscious attempt to avoid generating false positives (or slavish copying by people that don't really analyse in much depth) tend to optimise for reusing the emails that generated more responses rather than less?
Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time
#153There is one major problem : the answers are sent immediatly after receiving the email. This is obviously suspicious, considering most of the mails require at least a few minutes of reading + time to write the mail. I guess adding a delay would improve the bot's credibility by a lot!
It actually has a random delay of 1-8 hours, which shows in the timestamp. It only sends the first email right away, because it presumably took you some time to forward it to Spamnesty.
What are you using for the event management? I wonder if using celery and rabbitmq or redis as the queue would help simplify things.
With it, you just schedule asynchronous tasks in the future ... you don't have to manage the event queue.
Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time
#154[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time
#155What happened to hashcash proposals to email protocols?
The problem: My chromebook is competing with the spammer's ASIC. What's the appropriate difficulty level?
Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time
#156I'm just waiting for someone to hook this sort of stuff to some kind of machine learning system, to learn and adapt and come up with new replies. And some 100 years hence we'll be explaining to kids that the singularity arose out of people's annoyance with spammers ;)
I think that this or something very similar was a plot point in Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Cannot find a good reference, but it was pretty entertaining.
Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time
#157Can't you connect it to a chatbot api?
Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time
#158I'm just waiting for someone to hook this sort of stuff to some kind of machine learning system, to learn and adapt and come up with new replies. And some 100 years hence we'll be explaining to kids that the singularity arose out of people's annoyance with spammers ;)
I think that this or something very similar was a plot point in Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Cannot find a good reference, but it was pretty entertaining.
The Artificial Inanity and bogons, yes.
Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can I get Lenny? :) That is awesome. These is how to use it: Transfer, conference, or forward your telemarketing calls to 1-347-514-7296 Can't wait to try this out.
Doesn't work on cell phones.
I've successfully added Lenny to spam calls on my iPhone.
Re: Show HN: Spamnesty: Waste spammers' time
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't work on cell phones.
I've always wondered why smartphone apps don't have better access to the telephone portion of the device. Why is it so difficult to do something as simple as recording calls? It would be neat if I could get apps to change my voice or encrypt the audio.
Well I thought that too, and just googled it and you know what, without actually trying it first, here is the link and it seems very simple.
http://www.howtogeek.com/194839/how-to-record-a-call-on-your...