Re: [syndication] RSS errors due to template mistakes

[Rick Bradley <roundeye@roundeye.net>]

* Bill Kearney (ml_yahoo@ideaspace.net) [030306 15:52]:
> One idea I've had is to ask them to embed foaf or pgp information in their feeds
> and/or websites.  This would let them expose only enough information to make it
> possible for people they already know/trust to send them info.  It's not
> foolproof, of course, but it'd be better than plain text listing of addresses.
> 
> I'd really like to instigate a process that would help solve this problem.  I'm
> open to suggestions.

This isn't directly implementable for this type of problem, but could be
made to be with a little effort:

When my local LUG [0] wanted to bring our mailing list archives online,
we had a big bikeshed discussion about spam-harvesting of mailing
addresses.  What we ultimately implemented was the replacement of email
addresses by images, which turned out to be easier and more CPU+space
efficient than we originally presumed.

For every email address in our hypermail archives (surprisingly easy to
detect with a simple regex, with message-ids being the only false
positives I'm aware (and those are trivial to exclude)) we substituted
an <img src="..."> pointing to a CGI which took an md5sum of the address
+ a secret (site) key and returned an ImageMagick-generated image of the
email address in question.  Of course, we cached the images in question
on the server for efficiency.

While I don't expect people to go for setting up this facility in
general (if they could set this up they could fix their RSS feeds just
as easily), a few places could offer the service (send a string and
we'll give you an md5sum tag which you can use to refer to an image for
that string) to people wanting to use it.  People could then list an
md5-image contact URL with their feeds.  People really wanting to
contact them would follow the URL and see the email address for the
contact.

We made our code available [1] under a BSD license so anyone can use it,
and we even documented the process of setting up full harvest-proof
hypermail archives. [2]

[0] Nashville Linux Users Group, http://nlug.org/
[1] See [2] below, and the "email protection" section of 
    http://nlug.org/code/nlug/
[2] http://nlug.org/story.php?content_id=26 and
    http://nlug.org/story.php?content_id=45

Rick
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