[4696] in WWW Security List Archive
Use a Noise filter, not word filter? [was Re: UNDISCRIPE]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David W. Morris)
Thu Mar 6 15:42:53 1997
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 1997 10:08:55 -0800 (PST)
From: "David W. Morris" <dwm@xpasc.com>
To: www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
In-Reply-To: <970305074536.25206@mail04.mitre.org.0>
Errors-To: owner-www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
On Wed, 5 Mar 1997, John A. DeCarlo wrote:
> I have to admit I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I saw the Subject
> line show up in my e-mail notification. All the discussion of catching all
> variants of "unsubscribe" were rendered moot by this entry.
When I never intended to suggest that we could apriori determine all
possible mis-spellings in advance ... but once they were noted, they could
be added. (Except that some poor souls on this list seem to echo what
ever mis-spelling they see hoping it will work for them, I'd say this
variant could be ignored.)
Another possible filter ... instead of/in addition to looking for
variations of "unsubscribe", perhaps a simple noise filter would
help. Any post to the list containing fewer than 5 words would get the
helpful how to unsubscribe or make meaningful posts response. (Note: 5
is an arbitrary small number ... anything between 3 and 10 would probably
work.) I know, canned signatures would sometimes confound the issue but
from my often faulty memory, I'd say that > 50% of the flakey
"unsubscribe" requests are w/o such adornments. So if the number of
flakey requests is cut in half and all the noise in reply (such as
this ;-:) is also cut in 1/2 ...
Dave Morris
