How To Get Websites To Ban Sign-ups From Gmail.com Accounts 175
An anonymous reader writes "Paul Tyma describes a simple, elegant, and hilarious method that Mailinator (hypothetically, of course) used to mess around with people who scraped its webpages in order to block its alternate domains. Quoting: 'Remember all that script-detecting code from the anti-abuse system? Well, what if I put that in here too, I thought. Let's "detect" when a script is hitting our weensy alternate-domain page. ... And what if after about 30 page hits from the same script (or so), stop displaying actual alternate domains and start sprinkling in some other things. Hmm... but what other things? I know — how about "gmail.com". Or, um, "hotmail.com". Or maybe, "yahoo.com."'"
Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Makes no fucking sense. A/C's bitcoin post above makes more sense.
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I figured you were trying to be funny, but I went and reread both of them and you're right, the bticoin post is a lot easier to follow.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Informative)
The Bitcoin post just looks dumb; phony Bitcoins? doesn't exist; they're cryptographically signed, the whole post is ridiculous. The article, on the other hand, is very simple, if you know what Mailinator is.
Basically, it's a free webmail with no registration, no password, no security whatsoever: just send an e-mail to testaddress@mailinator.com, go to mailinator.com, and tell it you want to see the e-mails for "testaddress".
So if you go to some website and it wants your e-mail address so that it can spam you, you put in a mailinator address instead. But then the website gets wise to this and tells you that you're not allowed to put mailinator addresses in the e-mail field when you register. So Mailinator constantly creates new domains that work identically, and gives you a handful of them when you visit the site. Websites got wise to that too, and had scripts that automatically checked Mailinator and automatically blacklisted all the domains it listed.
Well, hypothetically speaking, if Mailinator's server detected that it was being accessed by a script, it could list whatever domains it wanted (google? yahoo? hotmail?) and the script would dumbly blacklist them. Result: now you can't sign up for $shitty_web_registration_account using your $real_Gmail_address, what the fuck?
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Result: now you can't sign up for $shitty_web_registration_account using your $real_Gmail_address, what the fuck?
A few web sites, such as Pocket Heaven, have been seen to block signups using free webmail providers such as hotmail.com, gmail.com, and yahoo.com. They want people to sign up using e-mail addresses at an ISP's domain.
Re:Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a common fear of small service operators - one user commits a crime, and the investigators may just sieze the entire server and the backups to be sure they get everything of use to them.
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Maybe. I can tell you from experience that it will entirely depend on the investigator.
That moron from the FBI will be infamous forever for his rampant stupidity in destroying hundreds of businesses by taking every server in the entire data center.
If the investigator is reasonable, and you are performing services on behalf of another company or user, you can calmly explain that seizure is not required. That the investigator is far better off using you as an expert to get the information they need instead
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We all know that WPA2 can be cracked in under 15 minutes with the right resources and the most wireless security is akin to a wet paper towel to anybody that possesses to tools and knowledge.
Only TKIP can be easily attacked. I'm not aware on any known vulnerabilities in WPA2 with CCMP (AES), and that has been a standard for 4 years now.
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It's easy to get the encrypted key. Not necessarily so easy to break the encryption. But sometimes people get lucky.
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Encryption is vulnerable in two ways (I am not touching Quantum encryption here):
1) Brute force. All encryption basically works by having such a large number of possible keys that to brute force it would take years, if not life times. A simple dial combo lock could be brute forced in a week with a robot. Depends on the number of values on the dial, but last time I checked there were only 275k approx unique combinations. A robot would probably get the right one if it were checking one every 3 seconds or
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Encryption is vulnerable in two ways
3) Rubberhose (or, in some jurisdictions, legal) cryptanalysis. An unscrupulous third party will always get at your data if they deem it valuable enough.
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All encryption basically works by having such a large number of possible keys that to brute force it would take years, if not life times.
Your scale is way off - measuring this in "universe lifetimes" would be much more accurate.
I remain wholly unconvinced that any of the encryption algorithms today will stand up over time to have no weaknesses found.
It would require some pretty revolutionary math advances to do so. And the odds are not exactly in your favor so far - RSA is, what, over 30 years old now, and the central idea is still as secure as ever.
Another point is that a "weakness" in cryptography really only means "faster than bruteforce"; it doesn't mean "fast enough to be practical". So if it takes 1 billion years instead of 10, it's a "weakness", but for pr
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With respect, your scale is way off. It hardly matters what algorithm you are speaking of either. 60th order permutations? 100th order permutations? Leaving Quantum computing aside, I would think it would be hubris to claim that in the lifetime of a universe that a sentient race could not construct a machine capable of exploring that many permutations within a viable time frame.
Sure, 60th order sounds like a lot. However, if we were both in 1960 and I told you that in 2011 you can purchase as a consumer
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With respect, your scale is way off. It hardly matters what algorithm you are speaking of either. 60th order permutations? 100th order permutations? Leaving Quantum computing aside, I would think it would be hubris to claim that in the lifetime of a universe that a sentient race could not construct a machine capable of exploring that many permutations within a viable time frame.
Again, mind the scale. The number of atoms in the observable universe is only 10^80.
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TKIP is all you need.
By default 99% of all wireless and router manufacturers default to TKIP and AES when you choose WPA2 in the management screen. You actually need to choose just AES, if it offers it all. Additionally, I have found that leaving out TKIP causes more complaints because somebody's shiny POS can't negotiate correctly and when IT stands its grounds they are usually seen as inflexible, jerks, and not team players.
Hence, TKIP is practically everywhere right now. I don't think WPA2 is that muc
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By default 99% of all wireless and router manufacturers default to TKIP and AES when you choose WPA2 in the management screen.
It seems to be changing. My wireless router - which came from the ISP, no less - had CCMP enabled out of the box. So far I haven't found a device that couldn't connect to it, either.
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So if you have even a halfway-reasonable plan that would eliminate the need for outright seizure, they are duty-bound to listen to it.
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LOL
I'll take your word for it. However, that moron in the FBI may have been duty bound to listen, but obviously was the agent known as the "Fucking Retard" by the IT staff that has to take care of him at his office. We all know who they are at our offices we have been at don't we? :)
Duty bound is great.... when the agent is smart enough to understand that not every thing with a blinking light on it in the building needs to be transferred and processed into evidence.
I think the reason why the people I ment
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They want people to sign up using e-mail addresses at an ISP's domain.
It's been a few years since I last got an e-mail address from an ISP...
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I think you should be offered a job as a /. editor. I actually understand it now, thanks!
Re:Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks AC. Why the fuck couldn't TFS had just said this? Your summary makes more sense than TFS, TFA, or the Bitcoin BS post.
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The Bitcoin post just looks dumb; phony Bitcoins? doesn't exist; they're cryptographically signed, the whole post is ridiculous.
Think of BitCoins as money that is impossible to forge, and MtGox as essentially a bank. The "phony bitcoins" refers to a database entry on MtGox that said that one account had a large number of cash that never really existed in the first place. In theory all the database entries should sum up to the total amount of cash at MtGox, but in this case nothing stopped it.
As for Mailinator, couldn't one write a script that sent to a random email address at a particular domain e.g. adflas2343872938743@gmail.com an
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Unless the server is implementing grey-listing, and will tell you the address is unavailable the first time.
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The Bitcoin post just looks dumb; phony Bitcoins? doesn't exist; they're cryptographically signed, the whole post is ridiculous.
Actually it is possible. Mt. Gox keeps the amount of bitcoin in a member's database--much like a bank where your account balance is nothing more than a number in a database. If someone compromised Mt. Gox's database they could potentially increase the amount of bitcoin the database says their account contains. Then the malicious user could transfer the bitcoins to their own wallet essentially stealing the the bitcoin from Mt. Gox.
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There are so many temporary email address sites now, the smaller ones seem to fall through the cracks. I'd mention them but then they'd get slashdotted....
Re:Summary (Score:4, Informative)
The short story: "Mailinator is a free, disposable email service". Some site operators wants to block people with this service from registering. There's a way of listing all the domains used by Mailinator (by generating a bunch of new throwaway addresses?). Mailinator in turn has a way to detect when a script is trying to go through this list.
The amazing idea is to detect when a script is scraping this list, and feed it bogus data like "gmail.com".
Re:Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
It baffles me that people still require email addresses for random account signups. Either people are going to provide their email address, or they're not. Make it required and they'll just feed you a fake/disposable one, or not make an account at all. How about you treat your (potential) users with some respect and just make the email optional? That's what Game! [wittyrpg.com] does and it works well.
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Whenever I see a site that bars free email addresses from sign ups, I interpret that as them not wanting my business. I've learned from past experience not to use an ISP email address as the don't let you keep it when you change ISPs. Likewise for school email and anything which I have to maintain something in order to keep. I'll log in periodically to maintain an account, but that's it.
Services that require one of those special addresses aren't doing themselves any favors.
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I completely agree. Gmail IS my email address. Stop me from using it, and I don't have another. Oh, I use qwest... and I think I have a hotmail address through them? Morons.
Re:Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ok, I have more than one. Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail... but Gmail is what I use as my email box. I have had it since I got an invite early on. I have had it longer than any ISP I have ever used. I DO own a few domains, but don't actually use them for email explicitly. From time to time. So, I could get around restrictions, but, if they don't let me use Gmail or maybe Hotmail, I won't use their service. I have yet to find any service online that was SO pressing, that I would work at getting another email a
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Besides, that feature of gmail is so well known, I have a hard time believing any buyer and seller of email lists doesn't run 'sed s/\+.*@gmail.com/gmail.com/' over his list to dodge those filters.
I'm a long way from convicned. Looking at the addresses at my domain that receive spam, it seems most lists are curated with the attention to detail of a distracted 7 year old with ADHD. The number of times I see mail to addresses that would be valid if the first character hadn't been omitted, or have part of the address repeated ('julesules@mydomain'), or take two separate addresses and combine them ('julesmydomainpostmaster@mydomain'), it just seems to me nobody actually cares what's on those lists.
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The IT staff read your emails.
- A school IT worker.
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The moment I required email addresses was the moment I got focused by some stupid Russian botters and spammed with new accounts.
Blocking gmail is used to block competitors (Score:4, Insightful)
My friends run into this a lot when signing up for free seminars. The idea is to prevent employees of their competiors from attending their events. Competitor domains are blocked (obviously) but also well known ISP's and free web mail services like Gmail because a employee of a competitor can easily hide there. The whole process is quite leaky though. There are just too many domains to check. If you have a personal domain or even a lesser known ISP, they let you in rather than trying to figure out what or who you are.
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Maybe I don't understand who these free seminars are for, put perhaps a whitelist would suite them better than a blacklist?
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Maybe I don't understand who these free seminars are for, put perhaps a whitelist would suite them better than a blacklist?
There is no definitive listing of potential customers. A white listing would likely only serve to limit the seminars to existing customers and that would defeat much of the purpose of holding the seminars.
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"It baffles me that people still require email addresses for random account signups. Either people are going to provide their email address, or they're not. Make it required and they'll just feed you a fake/disposable one, or not make an account at all."
Then you aren't serious about using their service, so why the hell should they care?
The fact is that for legitimate businesses, the email registration is not for them so much as it is for the customer: there has to be a way to consistently identify that customer as an individual. It doesn't matter what name is on the email account, but if you have control over that account you are assumed to be the individual who signed up that account.
It's not a perfect system, and lots of companies augment it with v
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Welcome to the internet. (Score:2)
Also:
* Type /sign for your IRC star-chart reading
* Type +++ for your 1200 baud modem speed doubler
Also, since you're new to the club I'd like to offer you a leech account on our private warez site - use your existing login name and password when you ftp to 127.0.0.1
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Also:
* Type /sign for your IRC star-chart reading
* Type +++ for your 1200 baud modem speed doubler
Also, since you're new to the club I'd like to offer you a leech account on our private warez site - use your existing login name and password when you ftp to 127.0.0.1
Quit giving away my warez hosting site! I told you to keep that a secret.
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Too late, he already posted the public IP address. I'm hacking it as we speak, C:\ is already deleted, and D:\ is about halfCARRIER LOST
SNR (Score:5, Informative)
The signal to noise ratio on that blog post was so low.. Here's the TLDR:
When you detect that someone is scraping your site, and you'd prefer that they didn't, start feeding them bad data in a way that they won't notice. The dataset that you've poisoned will then have side-effects that the scrapers wouldn't have expected.
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I wondered why they don't just use a captcha.
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"Hypothetical situation" (Score:2)
FTFA - "What, in our completely and totally hypothetical situation, would that do?"
I find it more interesting he doesn't have any scrapers as he did before. Hell, I am still amazed mailonater isn't band when some sites still don't take Hotmail or yahoo addresses still.
I'm Sorry But That's Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
The scrapers would just remove gmail.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, all .edu and .gov domains, and leave in aol.com. Website owners probably know that most of their traffic comes from relatively few domains so as long as those are not banned, they ought to be okay. The people who were incorrectly banned would just complain and then the website owners can judge the domains one by one.
Re:I'm Sorry But That's Ridiculous (Score:4)
It's even easier than that. Simply maintain a white list as well as a black list. If the domain scraped is on the white list, don't put it on the black list. Problem solved.
This guy is proposing a half-assed idea to foil an issue that scarely exists, and easily circumvented with 30 seconds thought. Really, it's just embarrassing he's crowing about it in his blog.
email validation (Score:2)
Translation (Score:5, Informative)
Prior knowledge required to know what the summary is talking about:
-Mailinator is a disposable email address service for people that don't like giving their email address to strangers
-There are people who have issues with allowing someone to sign up for and use your service with a disposable email account
-People started banning Mailinator off the bat
-Mailinator's creator responds by creating alternate domains the email address can use to evade the standard Mailinator ban, displaying them for the public when they visit the Mailinator page at a rate of one domain per visit
-People create scripts to collect these alternate domains for various purposes (mostly for banning)
-Mailinator describes how it could mess with these people to remain useful to its users by detecting rapid page requests and serving random domains in response.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
etc...
Therein lies the rub.
TFA missing one little thing (Score:3, Interesting)
WTF is mailinator and why, in the first place, would I want to find out about its other domains and then ban them?
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Spamgourmet, better in every way (Score:2)
spamgourmet.com is a much better site for generating thousands of fake email address, although not as fun as mailinator. You can forward them all to your real email address, and then turn them off individually as they are compromised.
Spamgourmet.com also has a whole range of alternative names. I, for example, use mamber.net for the domain name of the addresses I generate. Visit the site, you'll get a laugh.
So, how does spamgourmet prevent one person from getting a complete list of all alternate names? E
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You don't need the list of domains. The (comparatively tiny) list of MX machines will do...
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I use Sneakemail.com, which pretty much does the same thing. Only problem is that they're no longer a freemium service, pay-only now but still reasonably cheap.
Silly scrapers.... (Score:2)
Anyone who scrapes the list for alternate domains is supremely dumb. It's far easier to get a list of the small number of MX records. When we wanted to ban mailinator, we just banned any domain with an MX record that matched an IP address in the mailinator MX pool. Even if he uses a few different MX records for different domains, you'd only need a small list of domains to cover all the MX machines.
Dear Soulskill (Score:2)
Apparently Kdawson has hacked your account, please secure it immediately.
What a plan... (Score:2)
Cause people would never write an exception for gmail/yahoo/hotmail etc. That has to be the biggest waste of time reading an article on here for a while. Did this guy post this himself?
I love the comments on the site calling him a genius, I hope they aren't working in IT :p
Worth the read (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, you have to both know what Mailinator is and how it uses alternate domains for the summary to make any sort of sense. I didn't know either, but I am glad I read the article, because it is pretty funny.
TL;DR:
* Mailinator is a throw-away email service, and some sites want users to provide "real" email address and thus try to ban use of mailinator.
* To combat this Mailinator has a bunch of alternate domain names that all resolve to the same server.
* It displays them to users at it's website one at a time, chosen randomly.
* Blockers tried to scrape the Mailinator website to get the full list of domain.
* If a scraper is detected they could instead be fed other domains like gmail.com, which would cause the scrapper to block email from those domains as well.
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Have you thought about submitting that story? Cause it sure beats the topic at hand.
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Except that being vunerable to counterfeiting is one of the (maybe very few) problems that Bitcoins don't have.
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Interesting post, but a point of inaccuracy:
The hacker was able to create 2 million counterfeit BTC by manipulating the company's trading database after gaining access to a compromised administrator account on June 19
No, the hacker didn't create any counterfeit BTC. He only convinced Mt Gox that he had given them 2 million BTC to hold in escrow for him when in fact he hadn't. Which is a very different thing: the former would indicate a flaw in the entire system, whereas the latter is an isolated event that screwed up a single trader and has no real implications for other BTC users.
Re:He sounds like a douche... (Score:5, Insightful)
shrug.. none of my business I suppose since I haven't heard of him, but I would be furious if I got that kind of response from an "anti-spam" company when asking them to stop spamming me.
How does Mailinator spam anybody? They don't send any email, just receive it. And they don't facilitate forum spam any more than any other free email service.
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You appear to be missing the entire point. Mailinator does not send out emails. Mailinator provides throwaway email addresses for you to use for signups. It is read-only, not write-only. It is impossible to spam someone via Mailinator.
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Re:He sounds like a douche... (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, it makes it a lot harder for bulletin boards and companies to sell spamable addresses.
I used to use unique email adresses for each site I signed up on; turns out spammers got my email from some quite reputable companies.
Unless you expect to actually need to communicate through email with whatever site you're signing up to; use a fake email adress.
Ban IP addresses? (Score:2)
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Can you manually find the IP address based on the domain name part specified in an e-mail address?
If you can, then so can a webserver.
maybe not Re:Wouldn't that be fraud? (Score:2)
Isn't this hypothetical situation just fraud?
Maybe not - he put the randomizer into a standalone URL, which just returns some text.
(Try it a few times, and do a view page source: http://mailinator.com/randomdomain.jsp [mailinator.com] )
The "clever" part is that it just returns some text, nothing labeled as an "alternate domain".
The URL suggests it is some random domain; it doesn't say anything about alternate or mainstream.
The text might be a domain.
It might be a pie recipe.
*shrug*
Anyway, his main page uses that standalone URL and labels that page labels the re
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I understand the iframe trick perfectly, thank you. I also understand it won't stand up in the court of law. If this defense actually worked then authors of libel and hate speech can just put each of their words in a separate iframe and claim they hosted a dictionary.
Next question - who would prosecute? :-)
Scraping websites is prosecutable now? I wonder how Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are staying above the law then.
I have no problem with him presenting false information. That's still constitutionally protected free speech.
I ha
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Except, he's not impersonating them. He never offers to receive mail for them, he merely suggests that a (hypothetical) user (who accesses the generator in ways that no real user would) use a Gmail or Yahoo account for whatever.
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According to his blog, this exact statement would appear on the main page to everyone (not just the scripts): "Email sent to an alternate domain goes to Mailinator too! Here is one such alternate domain: gmail.com". I personally don't think that's suggesting an alternative email service. I think that's claiming his service also covers the domain gmail.com, which is false.
I said "everyone" because he posted two hypothetical questions from his legitimate users, so he's fully aware of the confusions he will ca
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Let me give you a hint, he can 'suggest' things and hypotheticals ... and when he goes to court, no one will give a shit how he 'pretended' he wasn't living in reality.
Trying to word it in such a way that you pretend you didn't do it, but its clear to everyone you did, won't actually get you anywhere legally.
Contrary to popular belief, lawyers are actually smarter than you or the idiot who is 'suggesting' things think, and judges wouldn't let this sort of silly bullshit last for more than a few seconds in a
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I read the whole article, and it still doesn't answer my question above.
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Your alternate domain list displayed 'gmail.com'!
Hi Fred, no it doesn't. Just reloaded the homepage 10 times, nothing like that. all the best.
or I bet another would be like:
Yahoo.com? What is this some kind of joke?
Sorry, did you mean to email this to Carol Bartz? Not sure what you're talking about.
The article says some of his genuine users will notice the erroneous on the main page.
No scraper is stupid enough to just load http://mailinator.com/randomdomain.jsp [mailinator.com]
They'll load http://mailinator.com/ [mailinator.com] discard the main iframe, and then parse the randomdomain.jsp iframe.
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They'll load http://mailinator.com/ [mailinator.com] discard the main iframe, and then parse the randomdomain.jsp iframe.
...and if they hit it more than x times per second/minute/whatever, they could still get the posioned results.
Personally, I'd be ass enough to display ";DROP DATABASE *;" for a fake alternate domain as one of the commenters on TFA had mentioned, just to see if anyone complained.
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Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/327/ [xkcd.com]
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If I cared this is the scenario I envision:
Seems like he's on the losin
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Well, yes and no. After all, how many site admins actually give a damn about it in the first place, and how would you find enough compatriots who not only did, but would be willing to expose their own operations and help you out?
Eventually, you'd get sick of having to weed/script out not only the obvious legit domains, but others like comcast.net, att.com, frontier.net, verizon.net, and a whole raft of regional and smaller ISP (and corporate!) domains globally that he could add to the fakes list. After all,
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Why would I have to weed out "legit" domains? I'd only be hitting his page once a day. He's going to detect that as a scraper? Twenty or thirty site admins, hitting the mailinator front page at random, but realistic, times once every one to two days, sending proper headers, requesting all the linked material from the page -- that's going to show up as scraping? In a month you could feasibly burn 300 - 450 domains.
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In a month you could feasibly burn 300 - 450 domains.
...each week he could take two hours out and have 500 domains racked up from a scripted list - many registrars do let you do 'em in bulk.
Even scripted, you're doing it the hard way, and slowly. You're also only focusing on *one* service (Mailinator), out of potentially hundreds.
So, err, what part of your countermeasure plan actually makes sense?
Maintaining this kind of blacklist is part of running the site.
If you were paid to do SMTP administration for a living, I'd agree. If you're being paid to help run a larger website (and not do it by yourself), I'd also agree. T
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Nobody would download the main page. They'd load the direct page setting the appropriate 'referrer' header to seem as it is being loaded by the main page. There's no magic way to tell if the page is being loaded in a frame or not.
Loading a full HTML renderer to load the iframe inside the normal page is complete overkill.
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There's no magic way to tell if the page is being loaded in a frame or not.
Yea, except ... you know ... see if theres been a recent request from the same browser session for the main page. You're right its not magic, its actually really simple, and its not even new. The very same thing was once used for various silly things like authing SMTP send without logging into the SMTP server by allowing sends from IP for a few minutes after seeing a POP3 connection.
Its basic SPAM prevention really, LOTS of popular sites do this exact sort of thing, including gmail and yahoo for webmail a
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OK, so you do a request for the main page first, pipe the data to /dev/null and then request the domains page.
My point is that you wouldn't be loading the domains page as an iframe (which implies having a real HTML engine).
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Yea, except ... you know ... see if theres been a recent request from the same browser session for the main page.
Except there's no reliable way to detect if two requests are in the same browser session. Drop a cookie? Enough poeple disable them that you're going to piss people off by requiring them (particularly when your target market is people paranoid about privacy, which is what mailinator does). Require same address? There are ISPs out there who feed requests through a load balanced cluster of proxy servers, so the same person's requests can come from different addresses from second to second. Besides, what
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Make the main page a script with uncacheable results and give out unique session IDs in the URL. Then you have the most reliable way of tracking browser sessions with no user cooperation required. Actually, I see that Mailinator uses a Java servlet container and most containers such as Tomcat have a very, very robust session management built in and using it is straightforward.
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Why would the scraper runner email him? Why would he even both replying to these people who want to ban his service?
It only makes sense for him to answer a confused legitimate user.
Also there was no garbage data. This is all a hypothetical situation. So we have no evidence of scrapers actually falling for this silly trap.
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And, hypothetically speaking if you had code that would sneak in these non-alternate-domains in the page they weren't supposed to accessing anyway, when would be the best time to set it into action?
Well, those scripts ran at many different times, but just after midnight seemed like a popular time-slot.
If such code existed, making it active Sunday morning from Midnight to 2am seems nice. I mean heck, if my website stopped accepting signups from "gmail.com" on some Sunday morning, I'm sure I'd be downright chipper to hop into the office and find out why.
Boy. If all that stuff happened - I wonder what kind of email conversations I'd have on that Sunday afternoon? I bet they'd be like:
The people who are banning his service are emailing him because they want to know why their automated scripts, which scrape his pages, are reporting that "gmail.com" should be banned.
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Your claim 3 is wrong because of 2 reasons:
He predicted that some of his real users will notice the error when viewing the home page:
Your alternate domain list displayed 'gmail.com'!
Hi Fred, no it doesn't. Just reloaded the homepage 10 times, nothing like that. all the best.
or I bet another would be like:
Yahoo.com? What is this some kind of joke?
Sorry, did you mean to email this to Carol Bartz? Not sure what you're talking about.
Reason 2 is that scraper writers aren't stupid. They won't just load the second page knowing it's an obvious trap. They will load the main page like a regular user, and then parse the small iframe.
Re: (Score:2)
Your claim 3 is wrong because of 2 reasons:
He predicted that some of his real users will notice the error when viewing the home page:
Your alternate domain list displayed 'gmail.com'! Hi Fred, no it doesn't. Just reloaded the homepage 10 times, nothing like that. all the best.
No, you misunderstand. His point is that "Fred" would say this "Your alternate domain list displayed 'gmail.com'!" based on the fact it came up in the scraper's results. He then directs "Fred" to look at the homepage and verify for himself that it actually never comes up. You see?
Reason 2 is that scraper writers aren't stupid. They won't just load the second page knowing it's an obvious trap. They will load the main page like a regular user, and then parse the small iframe.
Ah, and here I thought the owner of the mailinator.com domain had access to the server statistics that would tell him how people accessed his site. But obviously you're the person with that access, right?
Re: (Score:2)
Why would the scraper writer ( or people buying the scraper's results) email him?
Why would he reply to the scraper writer?
Remember, these people want to ban his service. It doesn't make any sense for them to be emailing him or for him to email them back. So it follows that "Fred" must be a legitimate user confused about gmail.com appearing on his page for a few hours and then never appearing again.
Re: (Score:2)
No, your english comprehension failed.
No, he predicted that the people who run the scrapers would be suggesting to him that his website displayed "gmail.com -- not real users, but scraper-owners pretending to be real users.