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Aaron Parecki

  • Day 90: Person-tags for OwnYourSwarm Checkins #100DaysOfIndieWeb

    Today I added support for person-tags and mentioning users to OwnYourSwarm. If you tag someone in your Swarm checkin (e.g. tap the + icon and find them in the list), then it will be converted to a person-tag in the h-entry. In addition, any usernames you mention in the text of your checkin will cause the content to be sent to your Micropub endpoint as HTML, including hyperlinks for the names of people mentioned.
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    like 2 mentions
    #100daysofindieweb #ownyourswarm #checkins
  • Aaron Parecki
    If your unsubscribe link asks me to type my email address before it unsubscribes me, I'm marking your email as spam.
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    likes 1 repost 8 replies
    #email #spam
  • Aaron Gustafson https://twitter.com/AaronGustafson   •   Aug 18
    For example: http://wp.zitaio.tk/habrahabr-tip-256669 was returned in one of the sets of results. It doesn’t respond.
    Aaron Parecki
    @AaronGustafson what the...? Are you using the pingback endpoint too? That looks like a spam URL, and it's also not in the database anymore!
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    3 replies
  • Aaron Parecki
    Some select quotes from this fantastic post by someone who used to work on the Gmail anti-spam systems.
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    like
    #spam #vouch #indieweb
  • Aaron Parecki
    > Another approach would be to allow cross-signing - an entity with good reputation can temporarily countersign mail to give it a reputational boost and trigger cross-propagation of reputations. That entity could employ whatever techniques they liked to verify the senders legitimacy.
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    #spam #vouch
  • Aaron Parecki
    > When you have central control everything becomes a million times easier because you can change anything at any time. You can terminate accounts and control signups. If you don't have central control,
    you have to rely exclusively on inbound filtering and have to just suck it up when spammers try to find ways around your defences.
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    #spam
  • Aaron Parecki
    > All major webmail and social services force users to perform phone verification if they trip an abuse filter. This sends a random code via SMS or voice call to a phone number and verifies the user can receive it. It works because phone numbers are a resource that have a cost associated with them, yet~all users have one.
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    #spam
  • Aaron Parecki
    > Gmail was hit especially hard by this because early on Paul Buchheit (the creator) decided not to include the client IP address in email headers. This was either a win for user privacy or a blatant violation of the RFCs, depending on who you asked. It also turned Gmail into the worlds biggest anonymous remailer...
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    #spam
  • Aaron Parecki
    > The reputation system was generalised to calculate reputations over *features* of messages beyond just sending domain. A message feature can be, for example, a list of the domains found in clickable hyperlinks. Links would turn out to be a critical battleground that would be extensively fought over in the years ahead.
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    #spam
  • Aaron Parecki
    > Eventually it had to be replaced with an online system that recalculates scores on the fly. This system is a tremendously impressive piece of engineering - it's basically a global, real time peer to peer learning system. There are no masters. The filter is distributed throughout the world and can tolerate the loss of multiple datacenters.

    > I don't want to think about how you'd build one of these outside a highly controlled environment, it was enough of a headache even in the proprietary/centralised setting ....
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    #spam
  • Aaron Parecki
    > The new definition of spam is "whatever our users say spam is", a definition that cannot be argued with and is simultaneously crisp enough to implement, yet vague enough to adapt to whatever spammers come up with.
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    #spam
  • Aaron Parecki
    Now reading https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780.html to get some ideas for https://indieweb.org/spam

    > I worked at Google for about 7.5 years. For about 4.5 of those I worked on the Gmail abuse team, which is very tightly linked with the spam team (they use the same software, share the same on-call rotations etc).
    Portland, Oregon
    7 replies
    #indieweb #spam
  • Francis Hwang https://twitter.com/fhwang   •   Aug 1
    Has anyone suggested a decentralized protocol that would solve the spam problem we saw with pingbacks? (Is this possible?)
    Aaron Parecki
    @fhwang Vouch is an extension to Webmention (successor to Pingback) meant to address the spam issue: http://indieweb.org/vouch
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    #vouch #webmention
  • Robert Scoble - I noticed that a few people keep asking about... (www.facebook.com)
    I noticed that a few people keep asking about whether one social network or service or another will be a good competitor to Facebook. They simply don't do any critical thinking and I find I just don't have time anymore to consider these claims. Here's a hint: let's say your new social thing is hot. Well, then it'll need bigger datacenters than Facebook has. Now, how is your new hot thing going to get, say, $4 billion to build said datacenters? Not to mention that Facebook has thousands of engineers, most of whom are paid more than $100,000 a year. You think your new thing is gonna be able to take on Facebook? Ask Google how that all worked out. Yeah, I know you can use Cloud Computing, but you ready for Instagram's AWS bills? Even Facebook is looking at those with a fine tooth comb now (they are in the millions, I hear, every month, and that number is old). And, how are you gonna get your logo on every taco truck in the world? Medium right now is burning my phone up with notifications. So, how is your service going to filter out the crap? (Hint: filtering REQUIRES you to share something about yourself. In other words your system MUST gather private info about you). I just turned off Medium because the notifications no longer are mostly of interesting things said by interesting people. How is your service going to make money? Oh, really, you aren't going to have advertising? That's nice. So you are gonna get a billion people to quit using Facebook and move over to your thing and, say, pay $10 a month like I pay for Spotify? I don't think so! Finally, how is your service going to get the best content developers onto it? A friend of mine buys advertising for Kia. She just paid a famous Instagram user $50,000 for ONE PHOTO that had their car in the background. So you think that Instagram VIP is gonna move over to your service that pays a few cents per 1,000 views? You are nuts. Until you can figure those things out, leave me alone. Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, NextDoor and Twitter are in the power seat. Don't bother me until you have a REAL alternative. Thanks. Finally, I won't even mention these new things by name. Why? I only hate things I respect. Why? Because I know at least 10% of you disagree with everything I write or video. You are here just to hear the other side from where you are. So if I hate on something those things get a nice audience for free. I won't do that anymore. Have a great weekend! That all said, I joined WeChat this week and have hundreds of messages already (although Messenger is better here, and has far less spam). So you want to compete? Go to a market that matters, like China or India. But keep in mind that Mark Zuckerberg already is focused on those two markets too. Translation: if you know how to code why don't you do something else with your skills?
    #facebook
  • Stefan Magdalinski http://www.aheadrobot.com
    @kevinmarks @twitter but that won't drive spam^H^H^H^Hengagement
  • Rob Pegoraro http://robpegoraro.com/about
    The XOXO organizers found a nifty solution to hashtag spam: a @SlackHQ channel that collects the non-junk tweets under that hashtag.
  • Aaron Parecki
    @tarr11 ah yeah I've seen that one before. It's a spam wordpress blog that pulls new articles from hackernews. It actually sent you a pingback. You can remove the pingback tag and still receive webmentions for now. Of course that isn't really solving the spam problem, just putting it off until later. See http://indiewebcamp.com/vouch for some thoughts on preventing the expected upcoming webmention spam.
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    1 mention
  • Aaron Parecki
    @tarr11 Whoa really? What spam did you get? I haven't seen any webmention spam yet other than pingback spam
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    2 replies
  • Aaron Parecki
    Unexpected benefit of the Twitter "Popular in your network" email flood: finding old accounts I created in 2008 that I forgot about
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    likes
    #twitter #spam
  • Aaron Parecki
    from:("popular in your network") -> delete #twitter #spam
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    like 1 reply
    #twitter #spam