Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Anti-spam for goose

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

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On Sat, 2020-05-23 at 07:20 +1200, Kent Fredric wrote:
> On Thu, 21 May 2020 10:47:07 +0200
> Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> > Other ideas
> > ===========
> > Do you have any other ideas on how we could resolve this?
> 
> And a question I'd like to revisit, because nobody responded to it:
> 
> - What are the incentives a would-be spammer has to spam this service.
> 
> Services that see spam *typically* have a definable objective.
> 
> *Typically* it revolves around the ability to submit /arbitrary text/,
> which allows them to hawk something, and this becomes a profit motive.
> 
> If we implement data validation so that there's no way for them to
> profit off what they spam, seems likely they'll be less motivated to
> develop the necessary circumvention tools. ( as in, we shouldn't accept
> arbitrary CAT/PN pairs as being valid until something can confirm those
> pairs exist in reality )
> 
> There may be people trying to jack the data up, but ... it seems a less
> worthy target.
> 
> So it seems the largest risk isn't so much "spam", but "denial of
> service", or "data pollution".

I've meant 'spam' as 'undesired submissions'.  You seem to have used
a very narrow definition of 'spam' to argue into reaching the same
problem under different name.

Let's put it like this.  This thing starts working.  Package X is
broken, and we see that almost nobody is using it.  We remove that
package.  Now somebody is angry.  He submits a lot of fake data to
render the service useless so that we don't make any future decisions
based on it.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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