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Comp.lang.c is now full of spam

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Re: Comp.lang.c is now full of spam

#41

Post by mschuster91 »

delfinom wrote: post #31
b112 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, I think AI will force a complete de-anonymization of the internet. No accounts without government ID, no connectivity without it either, open access points illegal, and so on. Governments and police would love this, and with AI, spam (as you elude to) is going to rise to a new level. And there are already issues, with most of the net's citizens, unable to detect fraudulent posts. Countries have already had civ…

Until you know, mass data breaches of said government ID from corporate systems and those AI bots now just use said ID

Not if done right. Everyone's ID card/drivers license (for the USA) gets an RFID smartcard with a cryptoprocessor and secure storage. Upon first activation (during production) it is seeded with the personal data of the person (name, personal identifier e.g. SSN), generates its own rsa4096/ec keypair, provides the public key to the interface, and gets a certificate signed by a government root CA back.

Upon an attempt to log in at a service (using a phone with a companion app), a nonce signed accompanied by a certificate signed by the government root CA gets signed by the private key on card, and that as well as the signed personal data gets provided to the requesting service.

Re: Comp.lang.c is now full of spam

#42

Post by folmar »

skrause wrote: post #24
deodar wrote: post #20

This may be due to moderator inaction. I moderate an Apache project mailing list and the amount of spam it receives on on some days is silly. However thanks to the good work done by the ASF infra team it takes very little effort from ML moderators to keep the spam from reaching subscribers.

Usenet works differently. Moderated groups are their own category and quite rare. Every post to them has to be pre-approved. The large majority of groups (including comp.lang.c) are unmoderated. "Moderator inaction" isn't a thing here because moderation isn't even technically possible.

A few groups will run a cancel-bot on most blatant spam though, which is a slightly practical solution although not quite in the spirit of Usenet. And acceptance of cancel messages downstream will vary a lot.

Re: Comp.lang.c is now full of spam

#43

Post by Kwpolska »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #36

Every year Google Groups still exists as a product I'm a little more astonished. It's been years and years since the company cared enough about it to put any effort into it. The data degrades every year, it gets spammed, the Usenet portion of it makes no sense vs. the mailing list portion. And yet it persists.

I've read somewhere that Google extensively uses mailing lists internally. They’re probably using the same codebase for their internal mailing lists, and the storage costs effectively nothing to them.

Re: Comp.lang.c is now full of spam

#44

Post by magicalhippo »

I really, really miss newsgroups.

HN has some of the flavor of discussing technical stuff with experts and amateurs chiming in. But everything here is geared towards news, so the longer, deeper discussions are missing.

Perhaps I'm just getting old though.

Re: Comp.lang.c is now full of spam

#46

Post by passion__desire »

Etheryte wrote: post #40

The sad thing is, clearly Google already has the tools to solve this problem, they deal with spam on a massive scale in Gmail and using the same approaches here should be fairly straightforward.

For that to happen, someone inside Google has to care.

Re: Comp.lang.c is now full of spam

#47

Post by n0zmer »

Kwpolska wrote: post #43
NelsonMinar wrote: post #36

Every year Google Groups still exists as a product I'm a little more astonished. It's been years and years since the company cared enough about it to put any effort into it. The data degrades every year, it gets spammed, the Usenet portion of it makes no sense vs. the mailing list portion. And yet it persists.

I've read somewhere that Google extensively uses mailing lists internally. They’re probably using the same codebase for their internal mailing lists, and the storage costs effectively nothing to them.

Googler here. You are correct. Internally google groups are the easiest way to create adhoc project groups and support / announce lists. We have everything from music related lists, to stuff like vim/emacs user groups

Re: Comp.lang.c is now full of spam

#48

Post by fmajid »

praptak wrote: post #14
baz00 wrote: post #2

Google stewardship in action. Can we even go back to Usenet without Google Groups?

No. I mean technically yes but this wouldn't solve the actual problem: mass human communication at scale. Usenet was a decent shot at this problem but it lost to other solutions. Yes, all the current solutions are pretty bad but they aren't worse than Usenet. In particular Usenet had zero spam protection, Google stewardship or not.

I’m old enough to remember the original Canter and Siegel spam, and yes, it was on Usenet. What amazes me is that in 2023 people still launch social networks where spam prevention is not at the center.

Re: Comp.lang.c is now full of spam

#49

Post by jmclnx »

baz00 wrote: post #2

Google stewardship in action. Can we even go back to Usenet without Google Groups?

Google Groups is not USENET, it is irrelevant as far as USENET goes. Google Groups only access USENET.

Do a search for Free USENET and many will come up with instructions how to access without Google Groups.

Re: Comp.lang.c is now full of spam

#50

Post by rewmie »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #36

Every year Google Groups still exists as a product I'm a little more astonished. It's been years and years since the company cared enough about it to put any effort into it. The data degrades every year, it gets spammed, the Usenet portion of it makes no sense vs. the mailing list portion. And yet it persists.

> And yet it persists.

That's a great point, and I would add that when Google launched Google Groups, there was this widespread concern that Google would abuse it to kill Usenet and force users to switch to its own walled garden.

Since then, Google already tried and failed to launch a couple of social networks, but Usenet is still around.

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