The spam war has only just begun.
The Internet still relies too much on socially responsible behavior, and therefore, it is vulnerable to abuse by those with no social conscience.
Last week, it was a distributed denial of service attack on the root DNS servers. The denial of service attack problem has still not been solved. Fortunately, researchers are working on the problem, and there may be a solution. [See Aggregate-Based Congestion Control.]
Now, there is a story about spamming referrer links in web server logs. [wired news] [slashdot.org] I know there are sophisticated web users who dislike the referrer links that browsers send to web sites. But most of those users don't understand the web log culture. In the web log culture, the referrer links provide a form of cross-pollination that makes web logs more interesting. Now, that culture has been shamelessly trampled on by abusive spammers. (For the record, I am in favor of a broad definition of the term spam. Until we come up with a better term for intrusive marketing, I am fine with using the term spam to denote it.)
This problem with the spamming of web site log files brings to mind the potential for a lot more abuse. For example, how about the potential for adding porno site links to guestbooks on personal home pages? How about other kinds of clever denial of service attacks?
The jury is still out on whether the Web will ultimately succumb to the Tragedy of the Commons.
Posted by Doug Sauder at October 28, 2002 09:54 AM