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Newbie/Basic Questions

Legal warning seems obvious

Author: K.Yee (21 Nov 04 5:21pm)

I'm signed up and have a working honey pot. Thanks for your work on this project!

I'm curious about the honey pot page. Every honey pot page has a very obvious legal warning on it. I see that you've obfuscated the source code by inserting comments and other invisible bits, but these are all things that can be easily removed automatically by a simple script. Isn't the warning an easy way for a spammer to detect and avoid honey pots?

Re: Legal warning seems obvious

Author: M.Prince (21 Nov 04 5:49pm)

If you look at the code, de-obfuscating the legal text would require assembling a fairly complex piece of HTML. While it is certainly possible, I think it's harder than your post implies. The processing time and power quickly becomes prohibitive for harvesters if they need to do this for every webpage they visit.

Moreover, we can tweak the legal text fairly substantially in subsequent generations of the script and even completely override it remotely and on a case-by-case/visitor-by-visitor basis if we discover harvesters are filtering on it. Again, as I've said in other posts you've made, as long as we've got spammers adjusting to us, as opposed to us adjusting to spammers, then we're on the good side of this arms race.