Re:Google Wave and Spam
by jgrahamc on Thursday October 01, 2009 @05:44AM
(#854615)
The situation is slightly different within a social network (such as Facebook) where a single entity controls the entire experience.
Facebook controls who can sign up, the removal of users, the rate at which messages are sent, who is visible to who, etc. This is not the case for a decentralized system like Google Wave.
There's nothing stopping me from creating my own Wave server and starting to communicate with the other servers in the network. This is analogous to the situation with SMTP today where anyone can run an SMTP server and communicate with anyone else.
You can certainly whitelist known hosts such as gmail.com, but unless you are willing to ignore all non-whitelisted hosts then you will still have a problem as spammers bring on Wave servers on their botnets.
Facebook controls who can sign up, the removal of users, the rate at which messages are sent, who is visible to who, etc. This is not the case for a decentralized system like Google Wave.
There's nothing stopping me from creating my own Wave server and starting to communicate with the other servers in the network. This is analogous to the situation with SMTP today where anyone can run an SMTP server and communicate with anyone else.
You can certainly whitelist known hosts such as gmail.com, but unless you are willing to ignore all non-whitelisted hosts then you will still have a problem as spammers bring on Wave servers on their botnets.