On 2008-07-15 13:51 +0900 (Tue), Greg Conquest wrote:
> For what it's worth, I prefer to keep my front door open and unlocked.
I presume this is some sort of attempt at a parallel with not munging
e-mail addresses on web pages.
To make it complete, remember that, no matter what sort of locks, bars,
grates and everything else you have securing your front door, if your
house is missing an entire back wall, leaving it open to the world,
there's not much point.
I suppose a closer parallel is the idea of locking the barn door after
the horses have left. Once the spammers have your address, they have
it. You can obfuscate it as much as you like on web pages after that,
or even remove it completely, but it makes no difference since, having
the address already, they don't care if they can read it from web pages
or not. At that point you're just making it inconvenient for legitimate
users to contact you.
> Munging addresses in any discussion group is to be expected. If you,
> Curtis, want to host discussion groups that don't bother munging, go
> for it. You'll see the quality of posters that results.
1. It's to be expected by you. Personally, I expect one would do a
proper security analysis and not do it.
2. I have hosted these sorts of discussion groups for, oh, something
like fifteen years now, and I've seen a very high quality of posters. If
anything, it's gone down since this whole munging idea came out, though
that's actually not causal.
3. My name is "Curt," not "Curtis."
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@starling-software.com> +81 90 7737 2974
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com
Received on Tue Jul 15 10:14:50 2008