Evil Idea (NOT evil -- counter-measures!)

[r.shepherd]

David Wilson wrote:
> I was looking at Sloane's database, and noticed he had to replace
> all the @'s in e-addys with (AT)'s to thwart the spammers.  Thinking
> about this gave me an evil idea.  What if there was a CGI script that
> generated an endless stream of random but plausible-looking e-mail
> links?  What happens when a harvestbot happens upon that script?

This seems like an interesting way to provide decoys or counter-measures.

It reminds me of similar thoughts I had pertaining to telephone numbers
several years ago:  One side effect of more people using more telephones
to make more phone calls is that -- as the telephone number "space"
becomes more crowded -- the odds of misdialed (long distance, billable even)
numbers actually contacting someone increases.  ...and then there are the
telemarketers' auto-dialers...

My suggestion was to increase the length of telephone numbers.  At the cost
of dialing a few more digits there would be fewer people getting bothered by
someone transposing, say, two digits or some telemarketer dialing just
555-nnnn for all nnnn.  If we weren't also trying to thwart or at least slow
down the auto-dialer case, one could also just add a check-digit (whose
algorithm everyone would eventually figure out) at the end of each phone
number so that telephones themselves (without having to consult a database/
central office of valid phone numbers) could reject many/most of the merely
misdialed numbers.

There's a lot of inertia in the telecommunications industry because of the
complexity of the software and the size of the "installed base", so my ideas
weren't met with much enthusiasm.  (I'd also go so far as to suggest that
the telecommunications industry may has at least some vested interest in
serving the very telemarketers that so annoy many of us.).

Rick