How Alice and Bob got telephone/SMS spam on their Moko.

[Tilman Baumann]

Heikki Sørum wrote:

> 	This could at least be mitigated by _not_ using different
> spamtags and by defaulting the Moko's behavior to only display warnings
> rather than silently ignore. In addition they contact list in Bob's and
> Alice's could work as a whitelist. Any other suggestions on how to
> combat Mallory?

A reputation/karma system combined with probability ratings might help a 
bit.
A central trusted list like dns blacklist would probably not work, 
because checking reports would be unsolicited calls for the checked 
number and it would produce cost.
Therefore the only method would be some kind of social network thing.
People could be trusted when they submit data that other persons have 
also reported. A extended check could check for unrelated clouds, like 
multiple persons reporting the same data.
A cloud of reports bound together by multiple persons reporting the same 
thing could become more trusted when the same people also reported 
sigificantly to other clouds...

But i think spam fighting methods could be added later when the systems 
becomes a targed.
What i mean is, not having a working spam fighting mechanism yet must 
not mean that we should not start building this system.

I know people working in a social media platform, and they got along 
with implementing their spam fighting techniques later, and they tested 
multiple methods to solve this problem and are constantly changing it still.


But i'm sure a system like 'i trust someone because i trust that one 
because i trust...' (you get the idea...) would be the answer.
In my eyes, trust should be calculated automaticly, not by manually 
defining trust (like pgp). Using the system could improve it.
I have better things to do with my life than managing trust relations 
for my spam filter...


And by the way. Spamassassin (or better something 'lighter') for sms 
sounds like a really really good idea...


Just my 2 Eurocents
  Tilman


PS: This calls for a interception API on the phone. Fighting spam would 
not be the only thing that would be nice to hook into these events.
Configurable ringtones for different people, programmable ringtones and 
so on come to mind.
Is there anything there yet? Or planned?