111–120 of 231 posts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951917 DonHopkins on Nov 14, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: The NHS's 1.2M employees are trapped in a 'reply-a... Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative…
I do a similar thing with web crawlers that do not respect the robots.txt https://github.com/cl-test-grid/cl-test-grid/blob/873b2fa978... I don't know if this snippet is really effective, can be improved a little, especially that I noticed a couple of new crawlers that ignore `User-agent: * Disallow: /path` in robots.txt, and do not fix that even after reported.
I'll look into implementing this, nice tip :) archive.org is the worst offender for me; not only do they ignore robots.txt, there is absolutely no way to get something removed once they archived it (despite the data including accidentally leaked PII for example - which can cause actual harm to someone).
This reminds me of a trick a friend used to do: he'd collect the email addresses of spammers who'd targeted and put them into file on his website. Not sure whether that worked or not, but it's fun to imagine that it did.
The text on his contact page literally start with "warning: if you want to pay me to put something on my site your email address will be leaked on this page". Funny how many people won't read any content of a website but still want to pay in order to put content on them :P
I run marketing email databases. This is cute, but it doesn't actually do anything in most systems - either the employees all already get the marketing emails or there is a system-wide rule to suppress against the email domain. If you actually want to (potentially) break something, try submitting some obscure characters or malformed html into some fields. Blank spaces in emails can particularly be a nuisance. And if…
I would also recommend naming yourself Viagra, Cialis or CBD.
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Then you get a group of people panicked about the panic who start replying all saying please stop replying all to this email, and then people replying to them to point out how they are just making the problem worse...
Or a few people have autoreplies that they are out of the office...
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Something similar happened (multiple times?) when I worked at AWS when someone decided to send a mass email to literally the entire company and people inevitably reply-all enough to clog the system and bring it to its knees. Many confused people were replying "UNSUBSCRIBE" (again, to the whole company) as if it would take them off
Then you get a group of people panicked about the panic who start replying all saying please stop replying all to this email, and then people replying to them to point out how they are just making the problem worse...
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These types of addresses are actually used by corporate anti-spam software and they are called "honeypots". The idea being you setup a inbox with no public email address and report any IP Addresses sending it emails. There is no legitimate reason someone should be emailing these addresses, so it's an obvious flag that someone is being naughty.
There are plenty of legit reasons to be mailing some of those addresses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951917 DonHopkins on Nov 14, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: The NHS's 1.2M employees are trapped in a 'reply-a... Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative…
A fun aside is the article on wikipedia [1] begins with Jordan Hubbard and ends with Epic:
[0] https://linustechtips.com/topic/1435395-epic-games-github-em...