[R] UNSOLITED E_MAILS: Integrate R data-analysis projects wi

[Douglas Bates]

Usually a captcha is used to prevent creation of email accounts for
use by spammers.  (There was an interesting article recently on
whether the Gmail captcha scheme had been broken so that spammers
could create masses of gmail accounts.  The general conclusion is that
the capcha scheme is intact but spammers hire people in low-wage
countries to manually respond to the captcha challenge.)

What Ted has suggested and what I am confident is the case is that
email addresses of posters were obtained from list archives or
something like that.  I know for a fact that the R Foundation is not
selling any email lists. The idea that R Core has engaged in a
nefarious money-making scheme of spending more than a decade
developing high-quality open source software, providing support,
enhancements, conferences, email lists, etc. so they could "cash out"
by selling a mailing list for a modest amount of money seems, well,
unlikely.

If email addresses are being extracted from the archives then the only
place a captcha would help is when viewing the archives.  Requiring
everyone to submit the solution to a captcha before retrieving a
message from the archives would be tedious and make the archives
essentially useless.  Besides, all that is required is for one person
to legitimately subscribe to the lists and run their own filters on
the incoming email to extract the addresses of posters.  My guess is
that Ben Hinchliffe or someone else at Bluereference.com is already
subscribed.

The best way to discourage such questionable practices is not to
patronize organizations that use them.

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 7:48 AM, Doran, Harold <HDoran at air.org> wrote:
> Can a CAPTCHA be implemented as a prevenative measure
>
>
>  > -----Original Message-----
>  > From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org
>  > [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of
>  > Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk
>
>
> > Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 7:33 AM
>  > To: Gorden T Jemwa
>  > Cc: r-help at r-project.org
>  > Subject: Re: [R] UNSOLITED E_MAILS: Integrate R data-analysis
>  > projects wi
>  >
>  > On 18-Mar-08 12:08:44, Gorden T Jemwa wrote:
>  > > Dear R Admins,
>  > >
>  > > I received an unsolicited e-mail from BlueInference as an R
>  > user. Does
>  > > it mean that R that our e-mails (and  names) is sharing it's user
>  > > database with third parties without our consent? Or perhaps the
>  > > BlueInference guys are using an e-mail address miner to get our
>  > > contact details?
>  > > [SNIP]
>  > > Dear Gorden Jemwa,
>  > >
>  > > As a fellow R user, I am sure you agree with me that R is a
>  > dear gift
>  > > from the R-project community that should enjoy broad use.
>  > > [...]
>  > > Ben Hinchliffe
>  > > Inference Evangelist
>  > > BlueReference, Inc.
>  > > ben.hinchliffe at bluereference.com
>  >
>  > It would not be difficult to mine a database of email
>  > addresses from the R-help archives. Each month's postings can
>  > be downloaded as a .gz file. Each posting in the resulting
>  > unzipped .txt file has a line of the form
>  >
>  >   From: user.name at email.domain
>  >
>  > and all that's then needed is to replace " at " with "@", and
>  > you have the email address.
>  >
>  > On a Unix system, a quick 'grep | sed' would do the job in a second!
>  >
>  > In this case, the spam was clearly carefully targeted at R
>  > users, so quite possibly they took a bit more trouble over it
>  > (to the point of extracting full names as well).
>  >
>  > I can't see the R people deliberately sharing their database,
>  > and the list of subscribed email addresses is accessible only
>  > to the list owners. So it seems much more likely that the
>  > publicly readable archives have been mined along the lines I
>  > suggest above.
>  >
>  > Best wishes,
>  > Ted.
>  >
>  > --------------------------------------------------------------------
>  > E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk>
>  > Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
>  > Date: 18-Mar-08                                       Time: 12:32:30
>  > ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
>  >
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>  > PLEASE do read the posting guide
>  > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>  > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>  >
>
>  ______________________________________________
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>  PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>  and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>