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Many spammers have dubious backgrounds. Eddy Marin, for instance, has a history of cocaine trafficing, amoung other things.

More info on Eddy here and a picture here.

Bottom line, even if they pay the taxes, you can't trust where the money came from. Rule # 1 - Spammers Lie.

A lot of spammers are based in unfriendly countries and are very difficult to sue.

Not true. The vast majority of spammers are based in the US.

THOSE bastards????

Well, thanks to his spamming operation suddenly bombarding me with piles of messages at my work address, I've gone to the effort of completely firewalling his netblock from my mailservers. Along with several other spamhaus-listed netblocks. So, to all of you OTHER spammers who can no longer get to the servers at work, you can blame "Allied Marketing Promotions" for getting you cut off completely.

It was odd, over the last weekend I suddenly started getting about 20 "Allied Marketing Promotions" emails every day, and it annoyed me enough to just cut them off completely. (Having gone through the trouble of configuring my home server to use the Spamhaus blocklist, it already rejects them, thankfully.

Rule 1: Spammers lie Take a look at a few of his quotes here

The article about him from the BBC is what scares me. "We are very excited [about the new CAN-SPAM law]," said Scott Richter, the president of OptInRealBig, an e-mail marketing firm in Westminster, Colo. "All of our clients had been worried about the California law. In the last two hours we have been booking a lot of orders for January."
This guy is the kind of guy that would piss in your pool. Now that he's got the internet, he gets to piss on millions of people at a time.

AngryPeopleRule

"I'm not going to argue that there isn't one person in forty million who didn't subscribe," Richter says. "But we document where the addresses come from, and when people complain, we remove them from our list. What people don't understand is that the Internet isn't free. I make my money by signing you up at my Web site, getting your information, and using that information to figure out what you like."

Here we see a prime example of self-delusion and self-righteousness substituting for morality. Right, the Internet isn't free. But I didn't realize that I was paying Scott Richter to get online--I thought I was paying Verizon for DSL service.

It is entertaining to see how much these people hate Steve Linford though.

It's really simple folks: if what you are doing is legit, why do you have to forge your headers? Why do you have to hide behind false email addresses? If it is legit, why do you have such a hard time getting legitimate ISPs to sell you bandwidth? Figure it out.

Spamhaus.org rates him as the nation's (world's?) #4 spammer.

Spamhaus.org rates him as the nation's (world's?) #4 spammer.

I think laws can be helpful, provided they are not, well, clueless. As for CAN-SPAM, the best part is outlawing the use of deceptive headers. Now pill pushers and mortgage brokers (who are almost always located in the U.S.) can be prosecuted if they forge headers. If they don't forge headers, then ISPs can blacklist their source much more effectively.

The more common blacklists (at least the ones I use) are Spamhaus , Sorbs, and NJABL. I don't think those are going down anytime soon, with the work they have done to distribute their hosts.

I completely agree that ISPs (and any business that has computers connected to the Internet) should block egress port 25 traffic. I have rallied this point for quite some time, and it has proven to be quite unpopular:

• ISP's need to block egress port 25!!
• Good news!
• What about port 25?

If any newspaper is interested in the list of people most likely to benefit from the actions of this virus, and most likely to have been involved in writing it, there is a list available here

A while ago, I made a SpamAssassin patch which resolves any URL found within an email and tests the resulting IP addresses against blacklists which are otherwise used to block unwanted email. A lot of Chinese bulletproof servers' IP addresses are listed on the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) and/or SPEWS as well as on certain *.blackholes.us lists.

IMHO a better method would be to use the WHOIS information for a given domain name to match it to other spamming domains. I used to maintain the largest list of Alan Ralsky's spamming domains. My list was enormous. Alan had a bad habit (good for us anti-spammers though) of using identical or very similar WHOIS information in each of his spamming domains. This was the case with probably 90% of his spamming domains. He frequently used the same nameservers as well. I think a crafty programmer could come up with a way to use a Bayesian filter to identify spam by the WHOIS records of the domains in a given message that's been marked as spam. This would be a worthwhile project to me. Best of luck.

I think it means very little that the worm launches an attack against SCO. The primary purpose of this worm, like the Mimails that preceded it, is the wide-spread distribution of a zombie network for the purpose of propagating spam. You see, spammers hire programmers to do this coding for them (read up a bit on Mimail and spam) in order to help their spam biz. While the hired programmer was at it, he probably threw in the SCO bit for shits and giggles. Or maybe he's a younger programmer and just kind of immature. Either way, the spammers (the people commissioning the construction of the worm) don't care.

To me this sounds like the most likely scenario -- remember that spam and viruses are linked. The SCO thing is just throwing people off track.

The spammers ARE the virus writers nowadays. http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=13

Government action isn't the answer to any internet-related problem

Spam is not just an 'internet-related' problem, it's a social problem, which primarily uses the internet for transport. And government action is pretty much how we deal with social problems.

this legislation will have little, if any, impact outside the national borders of the country passing the legislation

Which, considering that 85% of all spam originates from one country, means that if that country passes (and enforces) appropriate legislation, they will pretty much solve the spam problem, no?

Relying on the government to 'fix' internet problems is an outmoded way of thinking.

Relying on technology to 'fix' social problems is an outmoded way of thinking.

General Wesley Clark wants to be the President of USA, brands SPAM as terrorism, outlines a plan to use 1% of US military budget (~$4 billion) to combat this disease. In cooperation with military, expert groups and Spamhaus project individuals who send most of the spam are identified, tracked down, prisoned, put to trial and executed. All that with full online video feed coverage. Those spammers that are not USA residents will have mysterious "accidents", breaks malfunctioning, poisonous food etc.

Spammers don't understand that what they are doing is wrong, so just punish them with extreme prejudice - that being death.

Too extreme? Yeah, like you've got a better plan...

The solution is to have every idiot spammer forced to swallow all their v1agra, strap them to their "bodily enhancement products" for a few months and wreck their finances by sinking their money into every pump and dump scam plugged by email.

Ultimately the usefulness of email itself is being destroyed (hands up anyone who would bother with an inbox receiving 1,000+ junk emails a day) and everyone is having to pay (in terms of higher bandwidth fees) for unwanted and wasteful email traffic.

Oh, Mr Anonymous Coward, by "mature, sensible people who don't destroy the email system", are you talking about shining examples like Ronnie Scelson, Alan Ralksy and Juan Garavaglia (Super Zonda)? Sounds like you too are a likely candidate for the ROKSO list (if not already on it).

The solution is to have every idiot spammer forced to swallow all their v1agra, strap them to their "bodily enhancement products" for a few months and wreck their finances by sinking their money into every pump and dump scam plugged by email.

Ultimately the usefulness of email itself is being destroyed (hands up anyone who would bother with an inbox receiving 1,000+ junk emails a day) and everyone is having to pay (in terms of higher bandwidth fees) for unwanted and wasteful email traffic.

Oh, Mr Anonymous Coward, by "mature, sensible people who don't destroy the email system", are you talking about shining examples like Ronnie Scelson, Alan Ralksy and Juan Garavaglia (Super Zonda)? Sounds like you too are a likely candidate for the ROKSO list (if not already on it).

The solution is to have every idiot spammer forced to swallow all their v1agra, strap them to their "bodily enhancement products" for a few months and wreck their finances by sinking their money into every pump and dump scam plugged by email.

Ultimately the usefulness of email itself is being destroyed (hands up anyone who would bother with an inbox receiving 1,000+ junk emails a day) and everyone is having to pay (in terms of higher bandwidth fees) for unwanted and wasteful email traffic.

Oh, Mr Anonymous Coward, by "mature, sensible people who don't destroy the email system", are you talking about shining examples like Ronnie Scelson, Alan Ralksy and Juan Garavaglia (Super Zonda)? Sounds like you too are a likely candidate for the ROKSO list (if not already on it).

This is a perfect example of why you should never just arbitrarily block email because it comes from an IP on a list. Instead, programs like SpamAssassin are useful because they use blocklists as a factor, one among many, in determining whether to treat a message as "spam".

The problem with just using SpamAssassin is that it's very CPU-intensive. And when the spam's already got onto your mailserver, has already cost you in storage space and bandwidth.

SpamAssassin is good as a second (or third) line of defense, but an RBL is much cheaper from the CPU/bandwidth/storage perspective - hence one or more RBLs is preferable as a first line of defense.

The cool thing about RBLs is the wide selection. Are you happy to block confirmed open relays? No worries. Do you want to block all of South Korea, as you never recieve legit mail from there? No worries. Do you want to block known and thoroughly reprehensible spam gangs that have been booted off three or more ISPs? No worries.

And of course there's a variety of other blocklists, all with their own published criteria and standards. No one says which ones you have to use. No one says you have to use any of them.

But the major point is, if you're a target of a blocklist, there's a reason for it (assuming the list admins didn't make a mistake, which does happen very occasionally). And there are always ways you can deal with the listing, ranging from ignoring it to smarthosting email to changing your mailserver IP.

SPEWS are absolutely consistent with their listing criteria, and always have been. If you're not a spammer and you've been included in a netblock listed by SPEWS in Level 1, it is always after your ISP has been repeatedly warned and they've done nothing about the problem spammer.

A SPEWS listing always starts with individual IPs. Beyond that point, it's the ISP's problem.

...Spammers are more plentiful than rats...

I suppose it's good in a way that the above statement isn't true. According to spamhaus, about 90% of all spam is due to just 200 operations. It wouldn't take too many prison cells to hold all of them.

Personally, I feel giving the spammers a year in jail and giving their cell mate a steady supply of v1agra would be a fitting punishment.

Some say I must be on the verge of losing my sanity, some say the IDP wouldn't work, most of you say that there would simply be too much collateral damage.

You're all correct, of course (except the guy who threatened with a lawsuit. He can go play in traffic). My point still stands though, we have to come up with something new as nothing so far has worked. The worthless and scumsucking social rejects commonly known as spammers are ruining email and costing the rest of us a lot of money.

I run several email servers, for various sites and companies, but let me use my own server as an example here. I host about 20 domains on it, mostly vanity domains for friends, but also a couple of small mom-and-pop type businesses. That server is currently rejecting close to 100,000 SPAM messages per month on the frontend (through the use of DNSBLs). On the backend SpamAssassin identifies another 3,000 or so per month.

Anyone see a problem with this picture? A small server like this having to fight off over 100K SPAM messages every month? This is insane and yes, I am losing both patience and sanity. The problem is only getting worse too, only back in October the rate was 75K messages per month. That's a 33% increase in SPAM in two months! A look at my daily logs since the new year tells me it's still increasing. This means I'm going to have to upgrade the hardware on my email gateway yet again in not too long.

I. Have. Had. Enough.

Note: I've been patient. I've been constantly upgrading defenses for years, keeping track of which DNSBLs work and which have closed down, tuning SpamAssassin and trying out various bayesian filters etc. All the while I've been waiting for lawmakers to realize that this is a big problem and that it is a global problem. I've been thinking that technology probably isn't the best way to deal with this, as at its core it's a social (or is that sociological?) problem.

As many have said before me, this is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons. A small group of socially irresponsible people are abusing a common good, in the process ruining it, all in the name of making a quick buck.

How does society protect itself from people like that in other contexts? With laws. We reject, we ostracize and we punish. In civilized society we leave the punishment to law enforcement. In the case of SPAM many countries have passed laws against it, but there are really only a handful of countries that "count" and those countries have been less than vigilant in their fight against SPAM so far. I'm talking about China and Korea of course, as well as Brazil and Argentina. These countries may not originate all the SPAM out there, but they sure do host a lot of spammers and relay a lot of SPAM.

But most of all I'm talking about the US of A, simply because a whole lot of the SPAM relayed through those other countries originates in the US. I've held on to my sanity, clutching at the hopes of impending legislation with teeth. For a while there really was hope, several states passed good laws. And then came CAN-SPAM.

Now what? The volume of SPAM is not going down, even if CAN-SPAM was enforced to the letter. I'd still have scumbags out there trying to steal my bandwidth and server resources. To all of you complaining that blacklists (and the IDP) are evil, why is this so hard to understand? The spammers are stealing my resources, period! Yes, I have voluntarily connected my network to the Internet, but I have never asked for this deluge of electronic sewage!

I want these anti-social misfits punished by society, I want the common good to prevail over the stupidity and greed of a few scam artists and I want this to happen in a civilized way (through laws and law enforcement).

If that doesn't happen we will have no recourse but to fall back on technology and in that case we

most spam does not come from the US!! Seriously. And the rest of the world can give a sh*t about the laws we pass. [..] Our laws will have no affect on the big fish.

The big fish are Americans.

Most of the spam does NOT come from the US.

It DOES. It's only RELAYED through foreign computers.

Professional American spammers set up boxes and rape relays outside of the US to avoid being linked with the originating IP of their spam.

Some of the best known spammers are known to have hired servers at Asian and Third World providers. And then there are the current waves of mail viruses that turn the victims' computers into spam relays, also with the primary intention of setting up a network of spam relays to hide the spam's origin.

But most of the professional spammers DO operate from Northern America. Look up the listings on Spamhaus.

(And yes, we in Europe have the same problem. There is a Swiss professional spammer who has set up his computers in South America and a German spam gang using computers in Holland and Eastern Europe. It's easy to hide your tracks that way. But the spam DOES originate in Switzerland and Germany, it's only RELAYED through other countries.)

most spammers are USA or canadian based

http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso

ain't truth a bitch

If in a month the FBI (under directions from the FTC) raided the homes of and arrested 100 out of the 200 people on the ROSKO list, I would put good money down that the ratio of email complying with the CAN-SPAM act would go up dramaticly. I really think the key would be taking their computers in a raid, because they are likely loaded with IP addresses of hacked computers, open relays, and perhaps even tools/viruses to hack computers.

get your head out the sand, blind patriot
http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso

This is exactly what many of the blacklists have been attempting for quite some time. Create collateral damage to put pressure on ISPs. It hasn't stopped spam, but it has put a lot of pressure on ISPs and caused spammers a lot of pain.

Fortunately, most people don't believe in harming innocent bystanders, and nowadays, most anti-spam filters are evaluted both on how few false positives as well as how much spam is remove.

But dropping packets, and not just discarding or rejecting email messages, is another completely different matter. A lot has been written about how the usefulness and degree of freedom of internet communication depends on backbone providers NOT giving preference to some types of packets over others. This is a huge fundamental issue, and you can find many slashdot "stores" that link to much writing on this important topic, mostly by Lessig.

The short story is that backbone providers dropping packets based on their source, destination, or content is a very dangerous matter than threatens the freedom of all internet communication.

Yeah, I know this is extreme and drastic, but what else is there?

You can't think of a good solution, so therefore an obviously very bad one is justified?

SPF records won't be effective,

SPF is designed to stop forgery, and if widely deployed, it probably will do that pretty effectively. Since the final design spec was frozen only 32 days ago, it's still a bit early to write SPF off as a failure.

laws don't do squat (a: because this is a global problem and b: because law enforcement haven't got the resources/motivation/whatever to enforce the laws anyway).

The CAN-SPAM law probably won't do much. But this is more a matter of the will (or lack thereof) of those who enacted it. Remember that both the house, senate and president are republican.... so a pro-business, anti-regulation stance is what one should expect.

Regarding those two points:

a: Most spammers are in the United States
b: laws can, if worded correctly, provide funding or other mechanisms for enforcement. Just because CAN-SPAM fails to do this doesn't mean a pro-regulation, anti-business law couldn't set asside funds and resources and lower the bar for enforcement.

I think you are incorrect in this assumption. spamhaus shows that, of the 200 or so top spammers (that create 90% of the spam) almost all are american or canadian based. They are also invariably advertising US goods and websites, priced in US dollars, from US-based companies, with the one exception of nigerian scammers. If America can get it's house in order, then the world spam problem will be massively reduced.

Admittedly, much of the spam is bounced off asian proxies, or trojaned windows boxes; but that just shows that american and european ISP's crackdown on open relays and spammers is having at least some effect.

What NEEDS to happen is
a) much greater action by american law enforcement for fraud by the sellers and spammers, along with prosecution of the other major offenses.
b) laws specifically drafted to make spam illegal, unless opt-in, with heavy penalties and again, strong enforcement.

Client side spam filters are a sticking-plaster on an amputated limb. They help filter your own mail, at the risk of false positives (which are increasing, given the increasing attempts by spammers to make their mail pass baynesian filters). They do nothing to reduce the massive load on the infrastructure caused by spammers.

Currently, this is a US problem that is affecting the world.

Most spammers are from overseas in non-cooperative countries (with the US).

There is evidence to the contrary.

the first thing we should do is put an end to zombied machines by getting everybody to secure their machines such that them being usable for spammers

Kinda hard to do when most people are running Windows and design decisions, rather than bugs, are what leave Windows users most vulnerable.

once a key exists and is verified, it is assumed to be valid and non-spam email?

Once a message is verified by the email client software as having been signed by the attached public key, it then checks the blacklist to see if that key belongs to a spammer. If it is blacklisted, it gets marked as spam and dealt with accordingly.

1) What is to stop these zombied machines from simply examining a system and making use of the email encryption scheme available? If a spammer got hold of somebody else's valid key and used it maliciously, the email would be accepted as valid. Also, how can the victim of such misuse prove it was a malicious spyware-type program or worm that sent itself to the world rather than them sitting at a computer?

Stolen private keys would be something I would classify as a usability problem. It has always been a potential risk when using public key encryption. To put the question into perspective though, I think OS X 10.3 would handle this quite gracefully. On OS X you have a keychain. You can decide what applications are allowed to access specific keys. When set up correctly, your private email key resides on your keychain and is only accessible by your keychain aware email client software (Mail.app). Trying to access it with any other software fails. So if along comes the worm du jour, the only way it is going to sign messages with your key is through Mail.app. Surely when you see Mail.app launch itself and begin sending ten thousand emails an hour, you will know something is up. Require a password before accessing the key and no message gets sent unless the spammer can beat that. Barrier after barrier exists to stop a determined spammer. If a spammer beats that kind of redundancy, you've got bigger problems than a blacklisted key that might cost a couple of bucks to replace.

2) If a service such as SpamCop is used to report keys that should be blacklisted, how long would wide public support exist if they had to prove themselves innocent if something went wrong? Remember, this isn't like an email address where I could get a new one for free and with fairly minimal hassle; this is something I paid money for, money that while it may be small, is still my money and I wouldn't take kindly to having it taken away from me. Especially if I really didn't do anything wrong.

In many cases, we know who the spammers are already. Blocking their spam is so extremely hard though because we are trying to block based on where, rather than who. Again though, this is a usability problem. It isn't something that is unsolvable. If Microsoft would put money into making their s/mime simple and bulletproof and widely used instead of blowing it on computational schemes... besides, if my key was compromised, I would worry more about who could now read my private messages.

Assuming everything worked great, might it not also work too great? What about legitimate businesses with opt-in email listing? How could they not be marked as spam in the system?

If I opted-in, why would I report it as spam? The blacklist would be fed by end users, and validated by the people who manage it.

And how do we feel about things we agree to even if we don't like? I am reminded of comments previous about spyware and how most of the time they basically say they're going to install it in your EULA. What if a spam clause is put in instead? Is this spam or not?

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck... :-) But you do bring up a good point. Assuming section 5c on page 163 of the EULA holds up in court... List managers have no idea what t

In storage and transmission costs alone, this is a fortune.

So what do we need? Harsher laws, of course. And stop saying they won't work already. The main spammers are known all we need to do is put, say, the top-50 away for life.

Sounds harsh? I don't think so. Spammers are committing a very serious, evil crime: Stealing from the commons.

Unfortunately, in our corporate dominated world, where things don't count unless they are property of someone and can be put on a quarterly report, that idea is mostly lost.
That doesn't change the facts. Spammers are stealing from all of us. A single spam mail might be petty theft, but it's petty theft times several million.

The law needs to recognize that spam is destroying a part of society, and adapt the sentences. Fuck fines. Put the notorious spammers away for a few decades, into a prison for serial-rapists and murderers. Make their cases extremely public. Make it clear that now that the top-50 list has been cleaned out, anyone aspiring to take one of those spots has a cell reserved already.

The facts:

Spamhaus SBL record

SPEWS record

This particular spammer (Patrick de Bruin) used IP-address 202.9.156.34 for a while, in Dishnet netspace.

*Get your own RC models of the Mars rovers for you and your child - great deal now...

Click Here To Order

Click Here to Opt Out

Actually, the biggest problem with SMTP is that there is no way to assure whom the mail is coming from, and thus there is no accountability.

Yet again the same "SMTP has no authentication" canard. Explain to me what this is.

If anonymity was not possible, then spammers would disapper because they'd be found and subjected to their own treatment back on them.

More cluelessness. Spammers are not anonymous and never have been anonymous. We know who they are and have known all along, the only reason they continue is that law enforcement doesn't give a shit about spam. In fact, now that the US has legalized spam with the you-can-spam act, we can expect it to increase further still.

The way to stop spam is to throw the spammers in jail. As long as the political will to do that is lacking, spam will continue to get worse.

The Terrorism Act 2000 has several requirements for a computer break-in to be considered a terrorist act. It must be "designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system" which would exclude some break-ins. For example, someone who just looked around would not be caught. DoS attacks are caught but the downloading of information may not be.

The act must also be "designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public" and be "for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause". This is going to exclude the huge majority of computer crimes. Even some political hacks will be excluded. For example, when al-Jazeera's website was hacked, it was for the purpose of advancing a political cause. It was not, however, for the purpose of influencing the government. It was for the purpose of influencing the public, but this is not enough; notice the different wording for acts aimed at the government, and acts aimed at the population.

The DDoS attack on spamhaus.org is an interesting case. It clearly satisfies the first part of the test, seriously disrupting an electronic system. It is probably intended to intimidate people who are involved in campaigning against spam. Is spam a political or ideological cause? I don't know; I suspect only the courts would be able to answer that.

Seems like his address can be found here

Scott Richter
1333 w 120th Ave suite 101
Westminster CO 80234
Srich10195@AOL.COM
303-5509828

OR

Richter, Scott srich10195@al.com
SaveRealBig
p.o.box 21316
denver, co 80221
usa
303-428-3600

99% of the spam I get is from outside the US

You must be VERY lucky then. According to the ROKSO list, most power-spammers are in the US, not outside...

The problem is that our current email system is flawed... one of the best solutions (or actually work-arounds) for the current protocol is obvious, and already being used by several major ISPs... opt-in for ALL email. I know a few people who do this (their server rejects email from all senders except those on an approved list) and it works very well for them, but the average Joe wants both convenience AND security for their email, so the hassle of having to "approve" folks is not worth it (apparently it's easier to weed the 30 or 40 legit emails out of the 100's of spam messages)

Face it, email, in its current incarnation, is inherently flawed. Until we actually change the way we implement and use email (perhaps even changing protocols) we will continue to have spam problems. Even Britain's "opt-in" version of anti-spam legislation has done little to curb the problem. The US "opt-out" version is even worse! When a prominent spammer is quoted as saying this 'anti'-spam legislation "makes my day", you KNOW it's a bad law!

I think that the problem needs to be tackled from a technical standpoint, rather than a legal one. If we were able to improve the system, legislation like this wouldn't be necessary!

Somebody should make a website listing all those numbers

• Register of Known Spam Operations
• SPEWS (spammers hate that site so much, it's not funny... well actually it is :)

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2003/Dec-14 -Sun-2003/news/22615610.html

from ROKSO, Bill Wagggoner

Anyone with a little technical know-how and $1,000 for a computer and some e-mail addresses can become a spammer -- and with jobs hard to come by, many do.

I don't know about most people, but isn't this business model just too too tempting ? The act of spamming, by whatever name, is here to stay. And the fact of the matter is that when the Big Boys move in they will edge out the small time spammers. United States set to Legalize Spamming on 1 January 2004 http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=150 Spam by Any Other name will not sound so Odius.

Frankly, I hear the same thing about how much crap there is on TV - but is anyone really doing anything about reducing the crap on it today ? Why because it is the Big Five or Six Companies that control it ....

As Fox sees it, she is no different from those who barrage mailboxes with catalogs from Lands' End or Pottery Barn.

Here I do disagree. Land's End spends hundreds of thousands designing and illustrating it's catalogs so that they can entice the customer to buy. The spammers don't do any such thing, and their main goal is to design the messages so that it evades the spam filters - that is why the strange characters and mangled words ...

Someday, when the Big Companies start designing Spam with Mega-Budgets, and they can make the eye candy hypnotizing like it is on TV, I am sure few people will complain. I know many people who will spend hours watching nothing on TV, and occasionally complain about it - but then do nothing.

Diversion and Delusion is the Opium of the masses.

Wragg thinks the entertainment industry could offer bonuses to people who send a certain number of files on to friends. "It could be that you would earn reward points for the number of people you recommend a film to," he told New Scientist.

It sounds like Spamming to me. What else does a spammer do ? And who is your "friend" - anybody whom you send stuff to so that you can earn rewards ... ?

This is nothing but a concerted effort to monetize and eventually collect tax on spam by hijacking the legal system, redefining the mean of Spam, and redefining the meaning of Spammer ... Orwell would be turning in his grave with this new-speak.

After this United States set to Legalize Spamming on 1 January 2004 http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=150 this is just the next logical step. Spam Spam Spam ....

"It could be that you would earn reward points for the number of people you recommend a film to,"

Thank you very much. I have enough people recommending me porn, viagra, and what not .... The last thing I need is "friends" recommending me films (maybe porn films, and worse the trash music and films that the Big Labels are trying to peddle) ...

Except for the fact that he's the 8th worst spammer in the world, according to Spamhaus.

Ugh, I can't believe I lived in the same city as this guy....

The man arrested, Jeremy Jaynes (aka Gaven Stubberfield, and Jeremy James), was listed as the worlds 8th worst spammer on http://www.spamhaus.org/index.lasso. Spamhaus is a site that tracks the activity of spammers around the world. It also lists USA,China,And South Korea as the worst spamming countries.

Not very encouraging...

Already done: check out ROKSO.

When you talk about changing the economy of spam, you are talking about creating scarcity with regard to communication by taxing it. I couldn't disagree more with the suggestion that we must restrict communications in order to solve the spam problem.

The problem of spam is not caused by the freedom of email, any more than murder is caused by the availability of knives and other weapons. It is too easy for technically-minded people to see spam as a technical problem, which is to be solved by replacing the existing mail system with something more restrictive. However, the spam problem is not spontaneously generated by the mail system, just as knives do not go around murdering people. Spamming, like murder, is a human action that certain humans choose to engage in.

It is, of course, useful to use technology to make harmful actions more difficult. Locking up valuables makes theft more difficult; hiring bodyguards makes assassinations more difficult. However, we do not pretend that technology should make theft or murder impossible, or that the world should be transformed into a padded cell so that everyone is technologically prevented from doing anything wrong. Instead we deter and punish crime through education and law enforcement. Technology can reduce the likelihood and impact of harmful human actions, but we cannot use it as a replacement for social responses.

Regardless of whether particular legislatures have passed laws which specifically address spam, we recognize spamming as a lawless and criminal endeavor. Spammers co-opt the property of others against the will of the property owners. (Note that this is worse than simply using that property without permission.) Just as gangs protect their core unlawful enterprises with further crimes such as murdering rivals and bribing police, spammers have come to use cracking, viruses, and DDoS to protect their core activity. Structurally, spam is just like other sorts of lawless action which we see as the proper jurisdiction of law enforcement rather than technological kludgery.

There is no shortage of evidence, gathered from public sources and fully admissible in court, that particular spammers are engaged in criminal actions such as the above. Contrary to common belief, these spammers are not in "third-world nations"; they are in Western nations such as the USA, Canada, and the UK -- nations which have broadly functional legal systems, and nations whose Internet users are the chief recipients of spam as well. Volunteers have already carefully collected this information in the Registry of Known Spam Operations. What is needed is twofold: (1) Funding for law enforcement to go after the known criminal enterprises; (2) Further litigation by major victims of spam, such as large ISPs, against those who are victimizing them.

These guys

See http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso for their list of the top 200 spammers. I counted (once, quickly) by hand, and actually found 160 listings. Then I counted just the ones that were not based in the US. 30 entries from other places, and 130 from the US.

And I suspect that every spammer on the list, US based or not, is in favor of the "You Can Spam" law that they are trying to pass.

Bad news, pyros: of the 200-odd major spammers who account for 90%+ of the world's spam, most are US-based. They are only routing their... um... product... through offshore servers to avoid detection. See the ROKSO list at SpamHaus.org.