Slashdot Mirror
Spammers Hit Wireless Phones
Fishstick writes, "This article at the Washington Post tells about the new spammer's frontier: wireless short messaging. Apparently, the e-mail address of certain wireless service provider's subscribers can be easily derived from the phone number, making life easy for the spammer who wants to "reach out and touch someone" with their special gift of canned luncheon meat. " My spam e-mail is now about 25% of my e-mail. Thank God for filters (they also work nicely on boring press releases ;)
So, I went searching and found www.iwantspam.com - for those of you who actually *WANT* spam, I figure this is the place to go. 8)
After about the 30th message he'd turn off his phone, thinking it was a funny prank since he sent out all that spam. After the 3000th message on his pager and cell phone, he'd think it wasn't funny and be looking for the people who are doing it, only to find there bouncing the messages off anonymous STMP servers. After his voicemail system is clogged, his inbox and snail mail box is full of mail and as soon as he turns his phone on he gets stupid messages like "You too can earn lots of money: visit us on www.SomeStupidSiteSellingSomethingToScrewYouWith.c om" Then he'd understand why people are ready to toss him feet first into the maw... Pissed techie who gets harassed by stupid spam stuff daily...
With luck, they'll spam congressional staffers enough to p*ss them off and FINALLY pass legislation to eliminate this foul and pervasive practice.
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Believe it or not, it does, because we also pay you to surf. So if you want NO SPAM, FREE MAGAZINES, AND MONTHLY CHECKS FOR SURFING THE WEB , just visit the SpamKillers Inc. website. You can e-mail me if you have any questions.
Many GSM phones can only store a hand full
of messages. Once full, no further messages
can get through. This could have
very serious consequences if you rely
on this service for important information.
My Telco had the cheak to spam me recently
(Eircell http://www.eircell.ie)... which
annoyed me very much.
Put your fears to rest. If they say they'll refund the charges, just be patient. Once things get out of hand (and they will) you will just have to spend four hours on the phone getting refunds for each message. Trust me, the PHBs then at your cell phone company will care when all their customer service phone takers, customers, etc start bitching about it. When it'a one-message-a-day thing, it takes 30 seconds to clear up, they consider that an acceptable level. When they have to pay their operators $6/hr and they only take 5 calls all day, they get pissed. :)
So I just got my Apex MP3 player (I guess it does DVD and other stuff too) and started playing with it. I pop in a CD and set it to random play. Then I head back to my desk to see what's new on Slashdot. What comes up on the player but none other than Weird Al's classic Spam song. Then I see what the ol' browser has loaded and wouldn't you know it. This article.
My guess is Andover is broadcasting some secret signal to the player. How else could this have happened?
Yup, spam does us as many favors as a teacher shooting herself and blaming a 19-year-old man does for school security. We live in a crazy time in this country, where if you claim you do whatever for some "good," you will be accepted and likely praised. So this guys says it's for our own good. Sure thing.
__
I just finished reading this thread, then picked up the latest issue of Computers@Home (in India) and found this article in it - makes good reading once you get past the initial India-specific stuff. I especially liked the statement "Most Spammers are stupid". ;-)
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
Yeah, no problems until someone clones your phone and makes an 8 hour call to Afghanistan. There's nothing like sending your credentials in the clear! Sure, you can do things like forcing yourself to enter a PIN before making a call, but hell, it's a phone, and it's supposed to be convenient.
Within a metropolitan area, digital service kicks the crap out of analog service. Outside the city, analog is best, because, duh, analog is all that's out there. But you won't get full 3 watt broadcasting from a handset, which is what's necessary for a good analog connection.
My cellular provider (BT Cellnet) just gave me an email address I didn't ask for, which converts incoming mail to SMS messages. They'll charge me every time I accept messages that way, and not just 1 or 2 pence. Hopefully I can tell them to cancel the address. If not, then I'm really going to vent at them when someone spams me this way.
Well, it's certainly good to know that you won't be one of any new hires they make.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
2) the aforementioned submission page also has a running total of oh, about 300 sumissions. Slashdot posts maybe 10 stories a day max. I think _that_ explains why so many people's sumissions never get posted.
:)
---
This isn't directly spamming the cell phone, it's spamming cell phones that can recieve alphanumeric internet email. So the spammer isn't paying anything, because it's just going to an email address.
It's a really nice to be able to recieve email pages, so it's not a viable solution to just turn that feature off.
What I'm hoping is that this will clue people into the fact that they're paying for other people's spam. It's not clear to most people that when they pay their ISP bill each month, that part of that goes to pay for the extra robust mail server that their ISP has to run to handle all the extra email that some spammer has just blasted at it. But if people start having to pay directly for each spam page they receive (without the spammer paying anything more than for a temporary ISP account) they're going to be more likely to get uppity and bring it up to their representitives to make some laws prohibiting or restricting it.
What I'd like to see is spammers have to pay a per unit price to every ISP they send messages to. I'd tolerate spam if I knew it was going toward making my ISP bill cheaper, but as it stands, it goes toward making it more expensive, and I can't stand that.
Other people built that reputation, not me. I showed up the moderation system for 1 month. The idea caught on. Now I'm the poster-child for anyone who thinks slashdot has moderation problems. I haven't done anything like it in 4-6 months.. yet the misconception persists.
Marx thinks so. Ayn Rand doesn't. Depends on who you talk to. I think it will eventually die by virtue of the split between the rich and the poor. Without a middle class this country would quickly turn on itself and civil war would erupt. But.. so long as we keep the average american stocked with SUVs and big screen TVs... we'll be OK.
There is ZERO (as in NO) incentive to get more than about 50 karma points. Please stop buying into the trolls who reply to *every* post I make calling me a karma whore. It's sad to see someone who's as intelligent as you are being suckered like that.
Every damn time somebody moderates me up I get somebody crying "karma whore!" Is this some kind of sick revenge because I proved slashdot wasn't perfect? That it had flaws? That is sad.
What's worse, it's apparently not true anymore that you're judged by what you say.. and more on who you are. Really depressing from a group that considers themselves to be enlightened with technology. I would have hoped the gender/age/social biases present in society would not have carried over to a purely online forum. How dissapointing that it has.. and how many people fall for such simple traps like this.
I suspect not... since they have no way of knowing that the call to a land line would end up redirected to a cell phone.
I suspect, to ensure they don't try to call you on your cell phone, that telemarketer's auto dialers are aware of the blocks of phone numbers used by cell phone companies. That's how they obey this restriction.
They have no way of knowing that you've forwarded your calls, so I suspect that, under the law, you can't hold them responsible for the call. Of course, if you tell them that this is your cell phone, and say that your home phone is always forwarded...
Depends, I think. My cell phone give me 10 free per month, then $0.10 thereafter. Then again, I've got the lowest service offering from my cell carrier. The high-cost ones throw in more e-mails (as well as more airtime, etc. which is what you really care about).
I agree with others. Hopefully, this is crossing the line enough that the morons in Washington (and other country's capitals where spam is an issue) will wake up and fix the issue.
Hopefully, they won't actually start calling (oops, direct marketing) you on your cel phone. I rarely answer my phone at home for this very reason.
Actually, in the US, this is illegal. Anyone attempting to solicite you via your cell phone is liable for $500/per incident. See The restrictions telephone solicitation act over at the great Junkbusters site. Very interesting stuff.
I can't see why the e-mail spam of cell phone users should be treated any different than the actual phone call solicitation. Hopefully, Congress will wake up and realize that we need restictions on what a company can do to try to sell it's crap to you.
My telco (USWest) spams me all the time via the phone. They're always calling me wanting to sell me caller id, or call waiting caller id when I don't even have call waiting. One time, I got called 4 times within 20 minutes about the exact same offer, and told them "no" every time.
The latest call from them was them wanting to sell me privacy products to screen out unsolicited phone calls. I asked them if it would screen USWest out too, but I guess I was a bit too optomistic.
-BThe most common message just has to be along the lines of "Dump ANDN" (did I mention that it hit an all-time low today?) or "Short all Linux-related stocks." Oh wait, if that were the case, the subtitle would've read "from the MAKE-MONEY-REALLY-REALLY-REALLY-FAST dept.!" :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
The shell account idea is good, but would cost more than just putting up with downloading the spam - those things don't come cheap, at least not compared to free (basic) dial-up access. This is what the majority of providers in the UK offer - they make their money by taking a slice of the call charges we pay, and so probably aren't that worried about "the odd bit of spam here and there"...
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Trolls like to annoy people...
:)
Spammers like to make contact with lots of people
I prepose a service to Spammers and Trolls a like.
A website with contact information for known spammers so trolls can talk to them about hot grits or the like.
Muahahaha
Go for it peoples
I don't actually exist.
If you go to their web site you will find that their email is listed as:
info@plugout.com
Wouldn't it be funny if someone were to go around the Web and sign them up for a few hundred MLM newslists, and porno-pics-in-your-mailbox sites?
Once this address starts getting around maybe Rudy(the CEO of Plugout) will change his mind about how he feels about Spam.
A text message is functionally indistinguishable from a page
And if you've got a GOOD lawyer, he or she might even be able to argue that spamming is functionally indistinguishable from telemarketing: they're both trying to sell something by going through a list of people and contacting each person on that list.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
BTW, a successful capitalist model is predicated on the growth of markets. Remove growth from the equation and the whole thing starts to look pretty bleak. Of course, when the culture in the Petri dish suffocates on its own waste products at the same time it runs out of food, that could be construed as bleak, too.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
What controls are there to prevent people from injecting legitimate businesses' 800 numbers into the system?
--
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Please stop buying into the trolls who reply to *every* post I make calling me a karma whore.
:-)
Heh. You just get called a karma whore, I get Vogon poetry quoted at me. If it's any consolation, you're mentioned there, too
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
because of CALEA the firms know where your cell phone is (if turned on and future ones won't turn off totally 8^( )
I would like to see a cell phone (or any other device, actually) that will able to transmit my location after I disconnect its battery.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
To make a long story short, someone broke into the machine and was autogenerating consecutive addresses to spam every cellphone on that provider's network with an SMS message inivitng them to visit some site. Since the e-mail address of the gateway is <phone number>@provider.si that was very easy to do.
The only comfort is that the messages can only be 160 characters long, and there's no HTML. I hate HTML spams.
Duct tape + WD40 => DevOps
This has always been one of my minor fears:
Since most pager companies now allow you to send messages via an e-mail message, and since most companies have 'blocks' of phone numbers that are tied to both the 800 number of the pager, and the e-mail address, it would be relativly trivial to create a bulk e-mail SPAMer that could flood several of the 'major' providers.
(I started to shudder most over this when I was working on a project to make a generic Pager Client for a friend that could send e-mail to any pager via either an E-mail address, a web-site, or a phone (last resort). I actually abandond the project halfway through since if I finished it I would have want to put it on the web as a neat bit of code, but I could see too much potential for abuse in it... and unfortunately I had another project that was way cooler that I decided to work on first )
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Think of it as one big pyrimid scheme.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Okay, now we've got cell phone spamming. Imagine what will happen when people "network" their house? Forget the 5cR1p+ k1DD135. Imagine:
You go to your microwave. On the display it says "Why don't you cook a delicious X brand microwaveable lasagna?", which happens to be in your networked freezer, which happens to know what you just bought because you scanned your grocery savers' card at the store (and through the magic of "tight networked integration", the grocery stores and your fridge and cupboards talk to each other). A coupon spits out of the microwave advertising the latest X brand lasagna, begging you to shop and compare. You go to your fridge and get a happy "Wouldn't you like a refreshing Ice Cold Coke right now?" and when you close the door you hear a "Remember, you're almost out of Dairy Fresh Eggs, the Only Eggs for Me!" Combined with the scat analyzer in the can, the fridge, microwave, and stove can conspire to get you to eat healthier.
Hmm.
I bet I can get venture funding for this.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
What's so special about it?
Here in Finland there used to be some "adult entertainment companies" that sent SMS spam. Somehow they managed to ban it, which was nice. I can't recall by whom the business was stopped, the authorities or the telecoms.
This happened far over a year ago if not two.
spamming is functionally indistinguishable from telemarketing
That doesn't help anyone, since telemarketing is legal.
they're both trying to sell something by going through a list of people and contacting each person on that list
Except telemarketing is specifically defined as involving a phone number for addressing and receipt via a telephone device. Spam involves neither. You would first have to argue that an email address is the same as a phone number, and then argue that your email mailbox is a phone.
If you take text messaging and compare it, with either a dull or a fine comb, to alphanumeric paging, I think you will find that they are just different packaging of the same technology and service.
--
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
From a brief look at MsgTo's site, it looks as if it only works if all your correspondents use HTML in their mail client. That's because they send them a gif with a message saying "click on the word 'brown' in this picture" to see if they are a machine or not. I don't know about you, but of the, what? five, six? email systems that I use regularly, only one is even capable of displaying HTML and that has it turned off.
Steve Davies
I use Netscape, 4.6ish.
Quick and dirty filter method: Just set up one so that anything which does not have your exact address in the "To:" line goes directly to trash. I've been operating with this for a month or two...works quite well. I've been skimming my trash files and I've not yet spotted anything in there that I needed to read.
Good luck.
What did you say earlier about getting a huge karma because you always write what is politically correct? This is another one in your series of politically correct, content-free postings.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Rudy Temiz (PLUGOUT2-DOM)
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tel.
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-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I don't know about the prices of AT&Ts Services. Here in Switzerland receiving SMS is free. My Provider (Diax) offers me an E-Mail to SMS gateway. I can have it set to @mobile.diax.ch (or so) or I can configure it to .mobile@mobile.diax.ch. The receiving of E-mail via SMS costs 20 Rp. (15 cents) per SMS. By the use of individual usernames you can protect yourself from spam just as good as with any other e-mail-adress. I think, that's one way to go.
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
> I've been getting answering machine spam at home, lately. No, I don't mean telemarketers.
/not/ discarded, but redialed (usually within 20 minutes or so). So if you ever wonder why your phone keeps ringing and there's no one there, you got a p-dialer call.
Actually, you do mean telemarketers. What you suffer from, my friend, is something horrific and frightening in the telemarketing business -- it's known as the "predictive dialer". What it does is selects four to six numbers at once, dials them, and waits for one person to pick up. When that first number picks up, it cuts that line directly in to the live telemarketer's handset, while the other calls are disconnected.
Which is annoying to begin with, because the other five calls are
This is bad in and of itself, but the worst part of it is that companies decide, hey, why should I waste time calling these people back? So the five calls that don't go directly to a TM will get dropped into the recording queue. And the companies get around the fact that it's blatantly illegal by offering an option to speak with a live person, which doesn't mean a thing when the recording is talking to an answering machine.
How do I know this? *hangs head in shame* Don't ask, please don't ask. It was long ago (not really) and it was for money (a lot of money), and I'm much better now.
I'm planning to send myself a message then dispute the bill on the grounds I never entered into a contractual agreement to paying for incoming messages, to try to get the message across I'm not happy. I'l be writing to the telecoms regulator
They'd probably argue that you have agreed to this, assuming you have a contractual phone. i.e. can you dispute reverse charge calls being added to your bill?
Someone mentioned caller id on mobiles. All uk networks and AFAIK all european networks provide call-id for no extra charge in the basic phone service.
However try and get the same operators to provide ACR, which they have been obliged to by law since the 1st of March....
The spam that's the hardest to stop is the spam from your provider itself.
They might promise all the security in the world, but they'll still feel free to send you messages about their special offers.
insignificant sig
Spam is tolerated on email because it is unmetered; telemarketers are tolerated because you do not pay for the call.
OTOH, you don't receive (legally atleast) junk on your fax machine since it would cost you in terms of paper etc. By the same rule that telemarketers should not call cell phones, spam should be banned from cell phones.
Does anybody have legal background on this?
Atleast in the US, it is only a matter of time before a spammer gets sued and it all stops.
Also: remember when everybody made fun of the law that required spammers to add "ADV:" at the start of an email message?? Half the spam I get now starts with ADV: and has made life a lot easier!! Anybody else notice this??
While were on the topic, check out TCS SMS Gateway that lets you send text messages to almost any cell phone regardless of wireless provider! Comes in pretty handy when you want to make sure someone gets a message but you're not sure you want to talk to them.
cool.. tell me more abt. tcs.. where is your email address??
Hell hath no fury like a cellphone customer spammed. Nuff said.
Has there ever been a case of violence against spammers because of spam? The infamous Spamford Wallace is said to have feared attack, but I don't know of any actual harm done to spammers.
Pour l'encourager les autres
We could register spam-the-spammers.org, and use it to co-ordinate our efforts.
Excellent idea. Count me in if you're ready to do it.
One other thing while we're on the subject:
When junk mailers send you mail with "return postage paid" envelopes, seal the envelopes (empty) and drop them in the mail. It'll cost them to have the envelopes sent and decrease the cost-effectiveness of junkmailing people.
Just got around to reading this quarter's issue of 2600. There is an interesting article about getting 'revenge' on spammers. Titled: Make Spammers Work For You
:(
So far, this is the only interesting article
--
it's a sig, wtf?
A friend of a pal o'mine recieved one of these junk pages - got pissed off. He just happened to work at a medium sized ISP - he set a bank of 50 modems to dial the pager spammers 1-800 number inceasently for 2 days. The spammer company seemed to dissapear after that:)
"Uhmmm this might sound a little paranoid but, I want shielded twistedpair. I figure if I wear a tinfoil hat, my data s
HELL YA! :)
The only thing that will deter this is a "national" database of spammers for ISPs to consult when creating an account. In most cases, there's very little, if anything, preventing someone from creating a new account seconds after having one canceled. I don't know of any ISPs who keep a list of people they've canceled. And the few that do don't have it tied to the automated account sign-up system.
Maybe a clearing house of Names, addresses, and CC#'s of the deadbeat SOBs sending out the spam would make a dent? (Yes, I'm including the bill to information as well. Go ahead, send your SPAM... people need CC#'s for p0rn!)
Well, you could always resort to the sort of sledge hammer approach a friend of mine does... he's got a procmail filter rule that trashes everything that doesn't contain a vaild (expected) "To:" field. Of course, you need access to filter your mail at the server side. Any sendmail based system should be able to provide this with ease -- there's even an m4 macro for procmail local mail delivery. (I used to hate that, but I now live by it.)
It does stipulate designated pager numbers. However, I don't think TCPA will apply as there was no phone call -- it was e-mailed to your phone. [Damn those loopholes!]
The past 2 months haven't been bad, but in the past 6-8 months there has been quite a rise in the amount of spam sent to my Sprint PCS phone. Apparently the spammers have found an easy way to target a very large group of phones for the same provider without having to target individual numbers. Sprint PCS email addresses are simply xxxxxxxxxx@messaging.sprintpcs.com, where the x's are your phone number with area code. Fortunately Sprint does have some filtering tools at their management web page as it's not possible to filter at the handset, but the tools are somewhat limited. It's also possible to get rid of email messaging entirely on your account, but obviously there are legit uses for it.
except for the email doesnt go anywhere because the reply to is fake
Personally i mind everything. I believe i have the right to be left alone. If i didn't say you can't communicate with me, i don't want you to. Personally i think anykind of junkmail/spam should be dealt with like so: you mail me once, i should be provided with some way to tell you to fuck off. If you mail me again, i can put you out of buiness, or take everything you own. Ah that would be nice. :)
Please tell me what the sticker is and how it works? I'd like to get one :)
(they also work nicely on boring press releases ;)
I guess that explains why so many ppl's submissions never get posted...
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
On a related note... I've been getting answering machine spam at home, lately. No, I don't mean telemarketers. I mean software that dials you up during the day (while you're presumably at work), waits for the beep, and plays a recording onto your machine for you to listen to when you play your messages at night. grrr....
Its such a problem becouse of its amount.. I get targeted for LOTS of spam.. on a good day I only recive 20 spam messages... on a bad day my email box is filled untill it starts bounceing email.. I could sit there and "unsubscribe" to the spam all day and still would get more.. Ive tryed spamcop to kill the accounts.. and have done so.. but they keep growing back. I had to abandon that email acount becouse of it. spaming is a BIG problem.
Remembering BT always
Result: SPAM! Spam doesn't cost much money. And, like toxic dumping in international waters, it's easier to let someone else deal with cleaning up the mess - and cheaper.
Well, it doesn't cost the sender of the spam anymore than he or she is paying for their ISP (dial-up/cable modem/DSL/etc.). The true cost of spam is extra bandwidth ISPs and backbone providers have to set up in order to prevent their networks being flooded, the extra mail admins who have to sort through all the bounce logs that a typical spam run generates, and the time of the customer service representatives who have to deal with customers who are begging for relief.
What's needed is education. Marketers have to realize that spam == theft and is an amoral and unethical means of doing business. I'm not the type to advocate government intervention but since this involves theft of property, I believe laws are also needed to allow ISPs and consumers to recoup damages from spammers.
As for cell phones, I personally don't own one (and would never want to) but if someone spammed it when I knew I was being charged for it, I'd be plenty torqued.
ISP's are not going to touch this issue. You'll have to install something like this.
Haha.. Like the one yesterday about Linux Mall's Vender growing.. I have no Idea why i'm ranked up there with you Rob with those releases.
-Ellis of Geeknews.com
After the recent article about IDcide, several of us at work have been using it. We seem to be in general agreement that our volume of spam has decreased. Is this coincidence? Has anyone else noticed a decline? -Flu
"Couple of BITS? Try dozens of e-mails a week. Have you ever set up a brand new AOL or Hotmail account, and just let it sit there, without using that e-mail address or publishing it anywhere? You can end up with dozens, if not
hundreds of pieces of mail a month in those accounts, and all you ever have to do is open your inbox and check it once in a while. "
I set up a mailandnews account that I never sent the address of to anyone. I never got one piece of spam that I didn't specifically ask for.
"Also, if you ever take a laptop on the road, even with a good modem, you're going to start getting pretty annoyed with those 'couple of bits' of junk e-mail when you dial in through a hotel PBX and get, at best, a 30K connection,
then have to pull all that crap through along with the two or three pieces of real e-mail that you want to read. "
A problem. Yes I think tat would be it. That's why you can select the messages you want to download with most IMAP clients.
"And yes, junk mail in real life is annoying, because 1) I have to sort through all of it to make sure I want it, and 2) it's a waste of natural resources. "
Ahh. My mailbox is boring and I usually like the fact that I can get some mail that I didn't/hadn't thought of before. Over the internet it's just stupid. Bulk mailers at least have to think about what they do.
"Now, did you really mean that, or was that the kind of reaction you were trolling for? "
I doubt he was trolling. I largely share the same opinion. But that's because I usually have means of making sure that the messages don't do anything horrible.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Yes, replying to my own post, but I just thought about this:
If you ever get spammed by a brick and motar place and you have some free time, go visit the store. Ask them about the product in the ad. Get a demonstration. Ask tons of questions, "Will it work with my current widget?" "What if I upgrade my widget?" "Can it do this?" "What better models are there?" "What can they do above this model?"
And then when you get bored, tell him, "You've spammed me. You wasted my resources and time. Now that I've wasted yours, I hope you'll not spam again."
If it was a product you were truly interested in, you now have all the info about it so you can just walk into another store and get one.
I say this would only work for a brick and motar, but I suppose a startup spamming company couldn't copy and paste e-mail if you asked very rare questions.
This news is just another way of seeing how far back the American market is in mobiles.
In Finland this SMS-spam phenomenon happened about two years ago, when people started to get oddly hot messages offering phone-sex services in regulation free countries.
What happened? A huge outcry followed by stricter regulation and apparently some filtering at the MSP-level.
-mjpk
Actually it went like this:
Reporter: What do you think of Western Civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
On this topic Edward Abbey said that "growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
That is an excellent tactic. Especially when spammers have toll free phone numbers. I call them up and yell as loud as I can asking them to stop sending me spam. Then I call again and repeat for a few times.
For the spammers that don't have toll free numbers, I use ThinkLink.com. They had a promotion a while back that gave you 200 free minutes of long distance as long as you dialed thru the ThinkLink system. I put it too good use with more verbal harassment of spammers.
Sometimes, violence or the threat of violence, *is* the answer.
Rangers Lead the Way!
Did anything come of charging spammers spamming to (normal) email accounts come to anything? Can it be implemented for this?
http://harridanic.com
In answer to your 2nd point, the spammers don't care much whether you give them business. 1 reply out of 1000 emails is probably good.
As for starting your second account, it's all good until someone decides to send you and everyone they know a forwarded joke. You know the ones, they have approximately 1k of headers that consist of everyone's email addresses at the top, with at least 3 lines saying "forwarded message attached". So now you have all these email addresses and someone else she sent it to is going to forward it and not be decent enough to trim and....And those "you got a special offer from %s" messages that they like to send you, as soon as you click on the link you get mail for life.
.. I could sit there and "unsubscribe" to the spam all day and still would get more..
DON'T DO THAT!!!!! Sorry for the shouting...but dude, when you click on the link and give them your email address so they can "unsubscribe" you, you've just verified for them that it is indeed a working email address. Why send you more crap if you don't want it? To be petty maybe, or to sell lists of 'verified' good email addresses...
Congressmen don't care about E-Mail, they don't even read theirs. Of course they won't care about spam.
However...
What is one thing that every congressman owns? Yes, a cell phone.
If the see how abusive the spamming can be, perhaps this will help them pass legislation concerning all E-mail spam, and in a SENSIBLE manner. Yes, I'm probably too optomistic, but I see it as a worthwhile shot that this can get the ball rolling faster.
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
1. When a 'few extra bits' becomes 30+ e-mails a day 2. When you really like to use some kind of notifier to play a sound when you receive mail, but can't anymore because of the massive amounts of e-mail you receive that isn't just to you. 3. Because EVERY piece of junk e-mail I receive would NEVER get business from me, so it wastes their time as well as my time. (Hey Penny Stocks, Teenage Love Chains, Pyramid Schemes, Cable TV Descramblers, Home-Based Businesses, Merchant Accounts, and oh yeah, Porn Sites: I HAVE NO USE FOR YOUR PRODUCT!) It became so annoying that I started a new address that I use just for family, so now all that junk mail doesn't even get checked! Sure, you could argue that now that I have a 'junk mail' account, it should be o.k. for them to send it there, but it NEVER GETS READ! What is the point of them sending it? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH! John -all this junk-mail and junk-food makes me want to take a junk-shit
And once again the US is way out of date when it comes to cellphones. =) I got my first cellphone spam back in 1997, along with most Finnish cellphone owners at the time. (And it was a dial-a-porn ad!) Predictably, the public was outraged and the company responsible for the spam was promptly slapped with a massive fine. And I haven't had a cellphone spam since...
Anyway, there are a few crucial differences between Internet spam and cellphone spam. First of all, sending cellphone spam costs, even with bulk delivery agreements it's close to 10 cents per message here in Finland. This alone limits the set of possible spammers a lot. Second, enforcement of any anti-spamming law is much easier: the phone company can very easily figure out what number is sending the spam, and obtaining a fake number is considerably harder than obtaining a fake account (and illegal too!). Forging SMS headers and obfuscating your tracks is also next to impossible.
So basically, for cellphone spam the advertiser pays the cost and is held responsible for their actions. There simply isn't much scope for abuse here.
Cheers,
-j.
If I don't want junk snail mail I don't get any. I just put a sticker on my mail box and lo and behold: no more junk mail.
It isn't the same with my email, I can't stop the spam coming in. Here at the university I am constantly online, this means that if I get an email my computer does a little bleep. I can't help myself but to stop and see what I've got. (Okay Okay, it is just a little frm command, but still). So this spam may not cost me money, but it does interrupt my work. (I don't mind being interrupted by a mail from a friend)
On a side note, junk mail can sometimes be interresting, but I have never ever recieved interresting spam.
Dunno if it would work in the US. But here in Holland you can get standard stickers wich can say:
YES YES (junk mail and free local newspapers)
NO YES (You get free newspapers, no junkmail)
NO NO (you guessed it, you get neither).
I think people are obliged by law to adhere to your wishes on this matter. The amazing thing is that it actually works, maybe because more than half the mailboxes have a sticker.
Well, they started to send me spam using my own address as the sender. Of course, this is bullshit, but if I bought those 50000 email addresses for just 49.99, then I surely wrote (na, too stupid) - bought a script that manipulates the sender address.
Sure, you can trace back to the sending domain, but that one is bogus too since it's either the recipient's own domain or something like foobar.org or msn.com where spam filters usually don't suspect anything.
So, the only working spam filtering method would be to trace the sender domain's IP address and ask DNS if that address really shows up in the sending domain's MX records. This would, of course, exclude all well-meaning but nonetheless non-registered MTAs...sigh.
Use The Source, Luke!
Similarly, when my home phone is forwarded to my cell (as in, if I'm online - gotta love Call Forward Busy!), are telemarketers in violation of the TCPA? I bet so, because I always tell 'em "You've reached me on my cellphone." Rarely does the conversation go on for more than 5 more seconds: "Oh, I'm sorry sir."
As an aside, when the day comes (shortly) and I no longer have a landline, am I automagically exempted from telemarketing for the same reason as above?
yeah, but is this still true when they called my landline which was (at the time of their telemarketing call) forwarded to my cell?
Of course you can't stop spammers from sending to thousands of email addresses, but the service provider has the responsibility and the ability to control this.
My employer sells software that takes incoming email and sends it to wireless networks. Included in that are spamproofing techniques, such as banning everything from an IP, a domain, etc. We also can allow specified IPs/domains to send as much as they want, exempt from spam checking.
Plug aside, you need to call your service providers and insist that they fix this. It is *THEIR* problem. If they refuse to do anything about it, switch.
"Honey, it's not working out; I think we should make our relationship open-source."
Analog is easier to implement, but less efficient than digital at transmitting the same voice quality. Digital will transmit intelligible speech in conditions where analog would just plain fall apart. (But when digital reaches its limits, it degrades rapidly.)
Because of digital's higher initial cost but low per-user cost, service providers can provide the same services more cheaply to users using digital in urban areas. But it takes a while to work out to less populated areas, thus your less-than-seamless coverage.
Whaddya want? They could have stuck with analog and just plain run out of bandwidth in the cities. Prices would rise, or quality would go to hell. Or they could switch to digital and serve more customers more cheaply.
If digital cell phones hadn't come along, people would be standing around on their analog jobbies, yelling "WHAT? WHAT?". Only it would be more expensive, and there would be less of'em.
Think, no, really think hard about the meaning of this fall back feature and why it it's never implemented the other way around (analog with digital fallback).
I don't think there's any great conspiracy here. Analog is still more prevalent than digital. If you had it set up the other way around, you'd almost never "fall back" to digital. So you may as well set it to analog-only--which you can do.
The good side is that if the souce was from our network or downstream, we could turndown their service.
Off subject slightly;
Why voicespam has not been taken care of is for poor reasons. What the TelCos could do is offer a service where after you hang up, you can press a certain code into the phone. The last number dialing into your location will be tagged as an undesirable solicitation. After a certain number is hit within a system for a particular number, the TelCo can have the right to shut down service or monitor the line.
The TelCos will not do this, unfortunately. They make money from the phone calls. Last month I got a flyer from US West offering a new service for voicespam blocking.
The ways of doing this would not be very expensive. All you would need is some knowlegde of the phone system and C. All the program would do is call each number on the system consectutivly and send the ad. I don't think this would be very hard --Mel is my hero
Somewhere in Scandinavia, this has actually been offered as a service. I'm not sure whether this included cellphones, but it was a free calling service, which interrupted your phonecalls for commercial messages at a set interval. And there seem to be people that actually want to do this.
Same is the case with commercial television. I hate commercials, so my viewing habits are limited to PayTV and DVD. I don't mind to pay for content if that means I'll be kept away from being TV-spammed.
On other news, I've heard of an ISP which was planning to offer flat-fee calls in the Netherlands if you agreed to use their proprietary client software which continuously spammed you with the banners of their choice. Again, people will probably read the word "FREE" and go for it.
Perhaps we're the problem? Perhaps we lack the gene for "enjoying to be bombarded with retarded, repetitive messages that try to convince us to buy crappy stuff"?
Pi
Most Dutch cellular providers have a deal with gin.nl for just about the same service, only that one is opt-in. Unsollicited opt-out services are the worst. Yuck.
Pi
I would like to see a cell phone that will be able to transmit my location after I use it to smash the face of the manager of the afforementioned burger giant. If I find one, I'll use it to smash the entire burger joint afterwards.
PiI can tell you why its a problem! Because every time my mother gets porn spam, she freaks out and calls me. That makes it....almost every day.
Not fun.
Yes, it does. My last contract was for a Danish mobile phone operator. I wrote the email to SMS gateway they use. The amount of spam traffic running through the GSM networks was astounding. Watching my logs was interesting.
You get the idea. These are things people subscribed to, then add in the pr0n adverts and the volume was quite large.
I might be mistaken, but I think subscribers at my company paid 10kroner per message. (about US$1.13) I don't know, my phone was free while I was on contract.
I haven't gotten a phone since I came back to the US. The PCS market here is so far behind the times compared to the GSM systems running everywhere else.
Dunno about PSI, but SpewSpewNet has a reputation for spam-friendliness. Whatever. UUnet does not tolerate spammers. They cut off more spammers in a month than most ISP have normal customers. UUnet shuts off spammers as soon as they are found. What you fail to comprehend is that UUnet has numerous resellers of their POPs and a spammer can jump from reseller XYZ to reseller ABC to reseller MNO and they all come from '*.da.uu.net'. This make it look as if UUnet is letting a spammer stay on for a long period of time, but they get killed within a day in reality. Most anti-spammers refuse to see this and are more than happy to continue moaning that 'SpewSpewNet' is spam friendly.
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Will there be a service that we can call to report this, like there is with e-mail? Will we be able to find out who these people are and prosecute them?
I think maybe it would be a better idea just to have the cell phone co. clean their act up a bit to prevent it in the first place...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Where are the moderator points when I need them?
The cure for 1933 is 1917.
Another idea that I have implemented on my own server is to have several "spam attractor" addresses. If an e-mail hits one of these addresses, the from-address from the SMTP-envelope automatically goes on a spam block list, and everyone that is not a spam attractor becomes 550 for that sender.
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
Ethics. You're in it to fuck over the spammers.
whats the deal with spam anyway, do the people sending out the spam make a profit or what? Filters are great things, but they don't always work, be it varying origins or some that filter by subject, but thats only maybe 50% effective.
Also what about the damn chain mail, are people really all that stupid. AND for anyone lame enough to do it, HOTMAIL IS NOT GOING TO SEND ONE EMAIL TO ONE PERSON, AND EXPECT THEM TO FWD IT OUT TO ALL THEY KNOW USING HOTMAIL TO KEEP THEIR ACCOUNTS OPEN.
sorry, just a little rant, i've recieved so much spam today i could open a resteraunt.
*/end rant/*
I've had two SMS Spams from Phone companies, one from my network and one from my email->sms gateway (a different UK mobile network)
It had to happen sooner or later. So far it's not too intrusive. Let's hope it stays that way.
A rabidly environmentalist friend back in college used this trick to protest the old type of spam, business reply cards littering the landscape:
1) Box up a cement-block.
2) Tape the "postage paid" business reply card to the box.
3) Laugh it up as you imagine the postage bill.
I guess the digital equivalent would be a DoS attack... which I DO NOT support (indeed my visceral reaction to that event calls to mind the caning of that delinquent in Singapore a few years ago). Kind of makes me think about the contradictions in my value system.
For starters, much of the increased capacity for PCS (be it TDMA, CDMA, or GSM) comes from the smaller cell size, owing to the higher frequency (1900 MHz) / smaller wavelength of PCS. However, propagation at 1900 MHz is less favorable than at 900 -- more shadows and reflections/fading. Wideband FM would sound much, much worse than the PCS technologies in the same spectrum band.
The reason that PCS is cheaper is simple supply-and-demand economics. Sadly, the decision to have three incompatible PCS technologies (done to keep the European manufacturers out of the US market, in retailation for Europe having done the same a decade earlier) means that PCS coverage will probably never be as extensive as AMPS, at least until we see tri-technology phones, or the marketplace kills off two of the three.
-=paulf
...-.-
Okay, do these spammers not realize that they are hurting their reputation more than they are promoting it by sending so many unsolicited emails? I mean if I were to get an email advertising something I had some interest in but they constantly sent unsolicited emails I would get more annoyed with them than anything. And now spam to wireless email services. Doesn't that cost alot for the wireless subscriber? Oh well...
It's a service that uses the headers to track the probable spammer and sends e-mail to relevant abuse address.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
usworst does stop some of them with its service but they dont stop the 'life insurance' and the 'new uswest service' calls we get frequently in phoenix, az. I called uswest and cussed at the service rep for half an hour about paying to be protected from unwanted phone calls when they still call my number... I got a nice letter from them the other day apoligizing =)
I was just wondering what people thought about putting spammers out of business by driving their 800 number costs through the roof with a multitude of spurious phone calls. - (Jamming their lines might be an interesting side effect if there were enough participants.)
...preventing spam... @mac.com
I wouldn't mind writing (and running) a script that would call a list of 800 numbers repeatedly, all night long, whilst I'm sleeping. -- Doing this alone is pointless, if thousands of people do this it might impact the profits generated from spam.
Comments? Legal Issues? Interest?
--
Aaron
ahg@
--Aaron Greenberg
I don't see what all the fuss is about... I never get spam in my primary email account. Here is how I do it... I have two accounts (more actually but for this argument two) when ever I register for something or order something I use the account in this letter... if I REALLY wanna talk to the individual or company then and only then do I give them the other address....and if I need a registration code (yes I actually register software, who hasn't been using Winzip long enough to feel guilty about not paying the guy) then I go to this account and check it out and delete all the other stuff... the way I see it if AOHELL doesn't want to do anything about spam anymore then it serves them right to have to deal with the back log.... and just for the record I got more spam on AOHELL than I have ever gotten from a normally ISP. I am sure there are programs that allow you to capture screen names in a chat room to spam with....
"I don't code the things you use, I make the code your things use better."®
URGENT!!!
Sprint just announced today that there is a new virus out that is being spread around digital PCS phones. If you open the text message entitled "Hi it's Mom!" on your text message enabled cell phone, your phone will blow up just like your home computer processor can. To protect your friends, forward this to everyone you know with a cell phone.
To verify these details check out the weekly world news....
It's bad enough on ICQ...
SDG
"The truth has a million faces, but there is only one truth."
Hermann Hesse
I'm certain to be flamed to cinders for this, but I was able to solve the "autodialer spam" problem with a Microsoft app; specifically, Microsoft Phone. I've set my message box such that you have to press '5' to leave a message. If they don't, it disconnects.
Does anyone know of some decent telephony software for Linux, BTW?
Annnnyways... My cell phone is an older cell one phone and doens't have messaging capibility. Does the messaging capibility come in a plan at a flat rate or do you get say 50 free messages, and pay for the rest? I've never even thought about picking it up before...
------- What exactly is real?
Junk snail mail does provide a useful service, though. The post office does not require your mailperson to check your mailbox for outgoing mail. If there is no mail to be delivered to your box, the mailperson will often skip it without looking for outgoing mail. The junk snail mail get the mailperson to check my mailbox for outgoing mail every day, so the occasional time I have outgoing mail it gets picked up the same day I place it in the box.
Junk email does not provide that same benefit, because my mail server pushes the mail out for delivery without waiting for incoming mail. Therefore, junk email is unnecessary. And, for all the other reasons already posted, it is a huge waste of my time and resources.
Edward Burr
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
I set up a mailandnews account that I never sent the address of to anyone. I never got one piece of spam that I didn't specifically ask for.
If you never give your address out, then what good is it? If you are a sarariman and use your email as a method of contact, naturally the address miners are going to find it and spam you. It is inevitable.
I had a waveamerica.com address I used as a spam receptacle, but I can no longer access it for some reason.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
Try spamcop.net instead... it works very well and you're not selling your soul to one telemarketer to get rid of another.
-Earthling
-Earthling
"I'm sorry, I had to; the irony was just too thick."
Not really. sms is not metered (at least for my provider, on imcoming messages). it doesn't really consume any battery power (only nominally more than leaving it on). this is not using voice channels of the phone which eat up a lot more power than the digital control channels. short messages are delivered to a PCS handset much in the same way a text pager works. The only argument I could see is that your sms data buffer might fill up with spam and your business-critical messages might not get delivered until you clear out the junk. this isn't really any different from filling your voice answering machine up with pre-recorded adverts (but I think that *is* illegal, isn't it?)
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
>This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who
and let's not forget...
"she's got HUGE.... tracts of land!"
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Ok - I had an idea about a perverse way of blocking spam, and wonder if anyone is interested. Basically, it relies on you having multiple e-mail addresses which are forewarded to the same account.
If you make sure that any spam mail list that happens to have your name on it has at least 2 or 3 of your other e-mail addresses, then you can filter out any messages that arrive, duplicated, to more than one of your addresses.
This means that you can deliberately try to get on as many junk mail lists as possible, as long as you make it on to the list several times. If it worked, it would mean that you could reply to junk mail to try and get yourself taken off a list, safe in the knowledge that, as long as your from: or reply-to: address was different from the address to which the original e-mail was sent, even if your name were appended to the list, you would receive no more junk mail. You could even reply with a message along the lines of "put me on your list, please, I love junk mail" in your replies. The harder the spammers try to collect your addresses, the more likely they will get filtered out.
Apart from the increase in net traffic, and the possibility that the spammers might cotton on to the fact and try to weed out duplicate addresses, or send non-identical spam to the addresses on the list, can anyone see any flaws in this.
Of course, if it went wrong at some point ... :)
yan
It would be nice. I may be ungeeky to dislike theses things, but I dislike wireless nonetheless. Or rather, I dislike most wireless users. Why? Because most of time they annoy me by yelling the many facts of their lives in bus, ringing their phone in cinemas, parasiting my walkman, etc.
From my point of view, such a device would be essentially useful for peoples -medics, cops, firemen- who really may need to be reached in situation where each second is important. Most talks I heard seems to be extremely vain.
Oh, maybe you didn't experience such troubles in the US. In this case, forgive me this post and think that peoples are suffering from cellular in other countries. Maybe each american wireless chat is really helpful for society, and american chatters take care not to upset other peoples. Such a wonderful country! Such wonderful folks! How lucky you are! It's hard to believe.
sigmentation fault
Anyways if you are in a metropolitan area sprint pcs works well,
:)
..and are indoors.
Seriously, I work in downtown St. Louis, on the 15th floor of a building, in a window office, and signal quality here is very poor on my Sprint phone. At home, still in the smack middle of the St. Louis metro area (though on the western extreme of the city proper), the phone is all but unusable indoors.
I miss my Nokia with AT&T Wireless. Too bad their St. Louis service plans are horribly more expensive with horribly less coverage than what I was used to in Texas.
This is already being done (sort of).
;-)
I belong to a pyramid-scheme mailing group (instead of a proper listserv) that distributes 1-800 (toll-free) numbers gleaned from spam email.
We call those 1-800 numbers from pay phones and walk away; hopefully, we stay on hold for a long time. That's why is really good to call after business hours.
Whee!
We also use BCCs to distribute the mail, and anybody can inject at their upstream or downstream points, but nobody knows more people on their list than they send to, and the one person who sends to them. (Kind of like the Maquis
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Is that like browsing /. at +2?
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
For security I use an SMS gateway that requires the subject of the email message being sent to contain a username and password for gateway authentication ... prehaps this is something which all SMS gateway carriers need to look at to prevent the progression of unsolicited commercial mail onto these devices.
Thanks for the info.
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
Hopefully, they won't actually start calling (oops, direct marketing) you on your cel phone. I rarely answer my phone at home for this very reason.
Imagine in the future when everything is 'net enabled. Specific types of spam can be sent to different appliances:
food items to the fridge and stove
shows to watch to the tv
what kind of toilet paper to buy to the toilet
brands of tires and gas to your car
The annoyance possibilities are enless. Long live the free market.
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
I personally don't have a problem with a couple of bits of extra E-mail a week.. I do however have a problem with a couple of Megs of extra E-mail a week on a slow dial-up. If I get one 'special offer' -fine. But when I get the same 'special offer' 6 or 8 times a day on all of my E-mail accounts.. How 'special' can it be?
The same is true for paper junk- Sure I dont mind one flyer coming through the mail slot, but If I got 27 copies of the same flyer, you can bet I'd be pissed.
I know that repetition is the marketers friend, but it sure ain't mine.
---
air and light and time and space
Could this fall under the "Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991". Even though it is a text message it, did go to a phone. The act does have provisions against telemarketing of pagers and it provides a right of action for up to $500. www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/fcc.html Here is what the act prevents: a.No person may 1.Initiate any telephone call using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice, iii.To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service B.an action to recover for actual monetary loss from such a violation, or to receive up to $500 in damages for each such violation, whichever is greater, or
http://www.windmeadow.com/
The mobile operators (Sprint, Nextel, ...) have much more control over what a wireless web user receives than an ISP does over a 'wired' web user.
An interesting precedent will be set in the near future. The precedent will revolve around the question of whether or not users will tolerate unsolicited ads from the wireless operators.
Perhaps a free ad-supported model will evolve along side a pay ad-free model (similar to current ISP organization). It will be interesting to watch it play out.
Does any spammer really believe that someone reads those crappy mails? If Id get my hands on a spammer I would crush him like a WORM!
The way marketing folk gather data disturbs me. If you took this practice to it's extreme, what could companies do with your personal information then? Monitoring my phone calls, my computer use... hey, some of these are already happening.
Oh yeah, Orwell had some things to say about this over 50 years ago. I'm afraid I already know the end result.
The essential purpose for spam in the eyes of corporate spammers...(as I see it), is trying to catch the consumer when they are relaxed and in the comfort of their own homes. They envision some wanker checkin out his email, unwinding after a day @ werk, havin a smoke...whatever... And then...in the midst of his tranquility...he is hit with a mesage... BUY MY ________ ITZ BETTER THAN THEIR ______ BECAUSE:_________________ Complete with flashy fonts, graphic elements and catch phrases that personify an image the wanker can relate to. The thing is, we're so bombarded by stimulii online that their efforts are entirely wasted on us. So in short...yes spam is annoying, but you can block it. Our ultimate victory would result from juz ignoring it.
TH3 L@t3X Pr0gr@mm3r...G0d3ss of 0p3n-s0ur(3.
Actually, it may depend a lot on the wording of the TCPA itself. Assuming the link that I posted above does contain actual text from the law, it seems to use "Telephone Call" and "Telephone Message" interchangeably. Technically, since as you mentioned, the e-mail comes over the data channel, it may not be a call. However, it seems as if it could be classified as a "Telephone Message", since it contained coherent content(well, as much as spam does anyway) and was delivered on a telephone.
IANAL, so take the following with a grain of salt: This may give another legal defense against SPAM if it does hold up. If your mailbox is forwarded to your cell phone, do the spammers then automatically violate the TCPA? Even if it isn't, does the potential make it fall under TCPA?
Sprint and other providers have requested location base advertising ablility. In other words, because of CALEA the firms know where your cell phone is (if turned on and future ones won't turn off totally 8^( ) within half a block or so. This makes location based messaging real. Example you drive by a burger joint and they offer an instant discount on your favorite burger (yes that would be known) if you just turn in now. Or you are a gambler and ... or a drinker and the bars just won't let go..... What an addiction promoting society!!! Gotta love it! A sucker born every min was not enough!@!!!!!
Well, that's the difference. I should never have to pay to receive stuff I don't want and didn't ask for. Get it?
Most digital phones will do "analog fallback". Analog usage costs more per minute. Anyone care to explain why? I'll tell you. BECAUSE ANALOG WORKS BETTER. Think, no, really think hard about the meaning of this fall back feature and why it it's never implemented the other way around (analog with digital fallback).
Digital phone channels are narrower than analog narrow band FM channels (originally spaced 30KHz apart). This allows digital telco's to cram more users into a given spectrum space (helping *them* sell more phones, not helping *you* communicate). Of course, thar be a great whackin' trade off to pony up for the extra channels. Narrower bands means analog won't work. So they digitize the voice and then compress the hell out of it. So if reception is garbled in the least, NOTHING gets through. The analog fallback actually happens back down in the 800MHz band and not in the PCS band where there's no room for analog.
Badly scratched records can still be listened to and comprehended through all the scratchy hissing and popping. Badly scratched CDs... don't play at all. But unlike home audio, getting the message through is more important than 0.00000001% THD when it comes to cell phones. What digital user here whines about the voice quality of his analog wired voice lines at home?
Someone sent out a message to a large portion of Nextel customers around here that said something to the effect that your account balance hasn't been paid and your service will be cut off shortly.
It was actually kind of funny. If I'm going to get annoying messages, I'd prefer them to at least be funny instead of commercial spam.
Face it, it just isn't cost effective to manage shell accounts anymore for such a small subset of customers, especially given the numerous shell providers out there. Yes, it sucks that those who want shells from their ISP can't get them, but it also sucks when the ISP has to manage a shell server for roughly 5-10% of their customer base. Considering that those shell servers are most often the servers that are abused by script kiddies and hackers (not crackers), it's in the better interests of the company to not have one period.
You don't need a shell server to do procmail-like filtering. It's very easy for an ISP to write up a simple web-based utility for its customers that will allow them to perform the same type of e-mail management (and that's a system that everyone can use).
I got an E-Mail from a spammer the other day, and you know what they were advertising? They were selling E-Mail addresses. They boasted somewhere around 500,000 "VALID E-MAIL ADDRESSES!"
That's about 60% of the spam I get. Makes you wonder how much business those spammers actually get if the only people they get to promote are ... themselves.
What we're seeing now is that the economy is getting "tapped out" - we're using all of our resources to their fullest - people, capital, land, entreprenuership - it's all there, and in use. So companies are fighting with each other now because we're running out of available resources. Whether it's for employees or customers.
Result: SPAM! Spam doesn't cost much money. And, like toxic dumping in international waters, it's easier to let someone else deal with cleaning up the mess - and cheaper.
Suprise... welcome to the /downside/ of global capitalism.
Private Citizen looks useful, but I'm hoping that the new service I signed up for from US Worst, er US West will stop some of my annoying phone calls.
I've been able to strip out most of my IMAP e-mail spam by setting up "Rules" in Outlook to dump the stuff as it comes in.
What would be REALLY useful in an e-mail app would be an equivalent of the RBL for mail clients. You update your spam file daily, and anything from those known spam avenues is automatically deleted or moved into a "Spam?" folder or such. It'd need to be a universal format, something that Netscape/Outlook/Eudora could use, as well as the folks who like Pine/Elm/mail whatever.
My roomies and I receive about 3 Telemarketing calls a day, so yesterday I signed up for an option where anyone who would normally show up on caller-id as "Unavailable" or "Out of area" is prompted to speak their name and press a tone to connect to us. The phone then rings with a unique sound, and we hear their message, and are given the choice to take or deny their call. I'm betting most telemarketers won't even get that far, as they'll be unable to do the necessary button-pushing to enter their name, since the systems are highly automated.
Anyone have any experience with this?
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Couple of BITS? Try dozens of e-mails a week. Have you ever set up a brand new AOL or Hotmail account, and just let it sit there, without using that e-mail address or publishing it anywhere? You can end up with dozens, if not hundreds of pieces of mail a month in those accounts, and all you ever have to do is open your inbox and check it once in a while.
Also, if you ever take a laptop on the road, even with a good modem, you're going to start getting pretty annoyed with those 'couple of bits' of junk e-mail when you dial in through a hotel PBX and get, at best, a 30K connection, then have to pull all that crap through along with the two or three pieces of real e-mail that you want to read.
And yes, junk mail in real life is annoying, because 1) I have to sort through all of it to make sure I want it, and 2) it's a waste of natural resources.
Now, did you really mean that, or was that the kind of reaction you were trolling for?
But down at the bottom, under the "gee, we all hate spam" rhetoric, the real reason MsgTo.com exists ... is as a conduit for targetted marketing.
I'd be more impressed if there was an option to pay cash for the service, instead of handing over my eyeballs. Ad-supported services are not "free".
The only argument I could see is that your sms data buffer might fill up with spam and your /would/ drain the batteries (not to mention being unimaginably annoying). I presume that if one had the phone muted this wouldn't happen, but really. that's annoying.
business-critical messages might not get delivered until you clear out the junk
Which is what I was saying. But your battery point is well taken, I refuse to own a cell phone so I'm no expert, or even particularly knowledgeable. However, this particular spam made the phones make sounds (similar to the battery-dying chirp), which I could imagine
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
My once great ISP, Interlog, wrote a procmail script for filtering email at the shell level. It's beautiful! It came pre-configured for a certain number of domains or addresses, and if you got another SPAM through your account, all you had to do was go into the shell and edit the .spamrc file.
Then Interlog got assimilated by PSINet, and one of the first things to go was the 10M of disk space (now 5M), then the UNIX shell. All us regular Interlog customers got up in arms and complained mightily to the PSINet dorks, and for now, the shell is still there.
While I didn't use the shell a lot, that was one of the best things about it. Now most ISPs don't even offer shell access where once it was commonplace. Grr...
Now I just have to worry about getting spammed on my 2 other accounts.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
If they have an 800 number, call them repeatedly and waste their time.
This is a bad idea, as you could then be liable for harrassment.
However, calling once is OK. So your aim is to make that single call as long as possible. Tell them why spamming is wrong. Tell them how much spam costs other people. Give them an example of what spam is like. Read them the classifieds from an old edition of your local paper (they must be out of date ads that are not placed by you to dodge telemarketing laws, of course). Read them other bits of the paper. Move on to magazine articles. Explain in detail why proper alignment and collimation of a Newtonian reflecting telescope is essential to get good images of the night sky. Read them the DeCSS source code. When your voice gets tired, leave the phone next to the stereo so you can let them have a sample of your music tastes or your favourite radio station.
Basically, your aim is to make that call very expensive.
I understand that many spammer 1800 numbers go to automated systems that give a recorded message and then hang up. Try pressing 0 on your phone to see if that interrupts the message; if it does, then you might be able to prevent the phone from hanging up. Then you can start emptying that spammer's bank account with your fourteen-hour phone call.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
It is not going to be effective at blocking all spam, and here's why. I have received duplicate spams a number of times from the same source, and what I often see when this happens is that the spams are slightly different.
Examples:
The body of the message might be mangled so that they are slightly different, so that a straight comparison between the message bodies will think that they're different.
The forged "From:" address might be different each time, so filtering on that won't work.
The Subject will also be mangled so it's different.
However, almost all spam that I have received recently has one or more of three defining characteristics that identifies it as spam:
* A web site address.
* A US-style telephone number (for example, 1-800-555-7726).
* An American address that ends in a state abbreviation and a zip code.
If it also contains "S.1618" in the message, then it's almost certainly spam. (If you've received spam, you'll recognise this as a bogus reference to an American bill that was defeated. Quoting this bill implies that the spammer has a right to send you the crap.)
More on web addresses: spammers usually obfuscate their web site addresses in their spams. The obfuscation is distinctive enough in style to make an effective spam filter.
Examples are URL's with the "@" sign somewhere in them, HTML-style %xx escaping of alphanumeric characters, or a URL that begins with a number like 3141592653. Often, you'll see all these methods mixed together in a futile attempt at obfuscation. If your filter sees a URL like this, the message is almost certainly spam and may be discarded.
90% of all spam that I receive comes from one of two classes of IP addresses: addresses that are on the MAPS DUL (Dialup User List) or on a list of open relays such as ORBS. Block all SMTP connections from these sources, and you'll block 90% of your spam.
Of the remaining 10%, you can stop 90% of that if you filter the message by searching the body of the message for addresses, telephone numbers and obfuscated web site addresses. Your filter might not be perfect, so it might not stop all of it.
Do both of these, and you'll stop 99% of your spam.
Here's another idea I've had that may or may not work. It's based on using the bogus From addresses that the spammer uses against them. If you validate those addresses as the mail arrives, then you can block the mail if the address named in the From header doesn't exist.
Here's how the SMTP might look.
host1 sending to host2 (host1 is a spammer)
host1: HELO
host2: response
host1: MAIL FROM: bogususer@host3
ok, so now you validate "bogususer@host3". Start SMTP with host3:
host2: HELO
host3: response
host2: MAIL FROM: postmaster@host2
host3: response
host2: RCPT TO:bogususer@host3
host3: response that tells if user exists
host2: QUIT
host3: response.
(VRFY is now disabled on many hosts so it cannot be used to validate a user.)
Now we continue our original SMTP session. If the user exists, we continue with the SMTP session as normal. If the user does not exist, we assume that "bogususer@host3" is a forgery and terminate the SMTP connection.
host2: error (to host 1)
(close connection)
There's probably problems with this method, but I don't see anything wrong with it as a verification tool. It will probably stop another 90% of the spam.
Basically, the battle against spam is finding a series of methods that each stop 90% of spam. This is a 90% rule that I have discovered. Three different 90% filters applied successively will stop 99.9% of all spam that reaches them, thus reducing your spam considerably.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
I was out somewhere and pretty busy and my cellphone beeped. I jumped to check it and discovered it was a spam message advertising some cellphone accessory store. If I get another unsolicited message I'm complaining to my provider and if I get a third I'm cancelling the service. Why? I carry my cellphone for calls I either need or want to get. I expect an infinite signal to noise ratio. This is why I pay for the service.
Someone has already mentioned that we pay for unsolicited email while the sender pays for snail mail. This extends beyond the purely financial, however. I read email in my leisure time and deleting a few messages that my filters missed isn't a very big deal. It beats killing trees to annoy me. But cellphones and pagers are carried to make an individual accessible during non-leisure time. In a sense, they are a doorway through which we allow our privacy to be invaded in exchange for very specific benefits. While I might find junk email annoying, getting junk messages while I'm eating dinner at a restaurant, in a meeting, at a movie, or driving my car, makes me downright hostile. It violates the very purpose of the device by introducing noise into a stream that should be all signal, and disrupts our private time in the process.
Another person replied to this thread by saying that no spam would be sent if it didn't generate any sales, so we should all boycott spam. I think that we all probably already boycott spam. I can truthfully say that unsolicited email, telephone calls, and web banners have never solicited so much as an instant of my attention. There are, however, and will always be a percentage of the population that DO respond to this type of marketing. Since it's free to do, even a 1% response rate makes it a worthwhile pursuit, especially since a single email can be sent to millions of people.
Do I favor anti-spam legislation? You bet. Say whatever you want, just don't force me to listen. In the short-term, telco's should become aware of this problem and install filtering software. If they don't and I continue to get spam pages I WILL cancel my service. It's that important to me. I don't want to adjust, I want my privacy.
I have used MsgTo for about a year now and I have never had a single SPAM mail show up in my Inbox! Sure, there are some other features that would be awesome, but for the pure SPAM scrubbing utility of it, there is nothing better.
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
why not?
Many states are considering banning the usage of cell phone while driving claiming that it is very dangerous and has been the cause for many accidents. In some states these type of laws have actually passed.
So, with some much precedents in place, how hard would it be to sue plugout.com saying that their spam email caused a car accident (or some related thing you might be able to sue about) ?
I know it might a stretch - it's just an idea. Generally speaking I am not as "sue happy" as most americans, but I have just about had it with email spam, spma that comes through ICQ, direct marketers that call me DAILY or come to my door, and now... "instant cell phone spam messaging".
It has to stop.
Just a short note: If you are using Linux (oh, let's be politically correct, make that any flavor of unix), you always have access to the mail server. Most distributions include sendmail or qmail, trough which you can define filtering rules.
If you have a POP3 account you can get your mail to your local machine by using fetchmail, which (if I recall correctly), includes spam-filtering options.
2 links:
Linux Mail users howto
Linux Mail administrators HOWTO
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
I could not believe it when my text message alarm went off and it was a SPAM for term life insurance.
It prompted me to write a very annoyed entry on DaBuzz.net.
If you want to feel my pain, go check it out.
You set the IQ level for calls and messages you want to accept.
Why don't some enterprising hackers trace spam back to its source, find out the names of the executives of the spam company, and publicly post their names, phone numbers, mailing and email addresses? Everyone who recieves spam can politely call them once (at 3am or whenever is convenient) and ask them to stop spamming. There's nothing illegal about that, and spammers will quickly get the message (or go nuts). We could register spam-the-spammers.org, and use it to co-ordinate our efforts. Simple, quick (except for a few volunteers who do the actual tracing), legal, and very satisfying.
The reason SPAM is rampant, at least on UU.NET, is that it is the largest supplier of residential, permanent internet connections, i.e. xDLS. So now you have many amateurs running computers full time on the internet. Now with the growth of linux and the naive nature of amateurs you have unprotected SMTP servers just sitting out there for the SPAMers to find! And for the fact that the spammers can get a Linux box pre configured with Sendmail, RedHat 5.x and 6.x, and spam from a dial-up connection from something like NetZero. You don't pay for the SPAM and you don't pay for the internet connection!
This, kinda, happened to me... I was a linux newbie. I installed RedHat Linux 5.1 on my PC. My PC was on a cable modem. Anybody with a little knowledge could have used my server for SPAM. Now I have a decent firewall protecting my server and ONLY the ports that I need are open. I use ssh instead of telnet...
Until security is implemented by the ISPs and tighter regulation on SPAM it will be something all us netzins will have to put up with.
A little off topic but while on the subject of SPAM here is a neat little trick for auto responders...
Reply to an auto responder with your reply-to address of that auto responder. If the person who set it up forgot to deny mail to its self you'll have one busy auto responder.
Or if the person who set up the auto responder was smart and set it up to not send mail to its self send an e-mail to the auto responder with the reply to address of another auto responder and watch them duke it out.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
Dunno about PSI, but SpewSpewNet has a reputation for spam-friendliness. They were subjected to the Usenet Death Penalty in August 1997, and responded with legal threats, obfuscation, and just about everything else except a committment to fix the problem. They eventually put a stronger policy in place, but establishing a policy is not equivalent to enforcing it.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I just got a paging cell a few weeks ago so that I could monitor our work systems 24/7. About 4 days after I got the phone, I got spammed.
It's to bad the spam ended: "For more information, call". and just ended there. If I had got the call at 3am instead of 5pm, I would have been bloody furious. Maybe they expected me to respond, but I can't see the actual address on this cell...
Otherwise, the cell contractors have an opportunity here to extort payment for blocking or caller ID services.
Caller ID services are VERY commonly included along with cell-phone packages at no extra charge, mainly because you can (if you're over your free time or whatever) pay per call you answer.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
What's the best way of filtering SPAM mail if you _don't_ have access to the server? Which mail reader programs have the most advanced filtering options? Any general tips for spam filtering? And if I need to "RTFM", which manual should I read? :)
-Ted
I received many such emails -- then they stopped :-).
For other people, you might want to look into the Art of Lart. It's a great document specifying how to deal with spam, who's reponsible, and various counter measures.
My usual policy is to trace out any ISPs reponsible -- wether they are the providers for the originator, or they are a "Reflector" open relay. I also mail any service listed in the email. abuse@, postmaster@, webmaster@, and manager@ cluster-emails tend to get noticed. Add to that the usual fun of calling their 1-888 numbers, and you have a recipe for revenge.
Speaking of which, I was recently spammed by these nutrional people selling pill which cure snoring. 1-888-688-6354 -- it's a laugh.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Ok considering you get billed massive quantities of money for all this is there an effective means of prosecuting the people who send you things like this? Unmetered net access makes traditional e-mail solicitation almost harmless. However you cold theoretically screw you favorite target with all sorts of crap and make him pay. Quite nasty.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
That's unfortunate that the pricing structure is set up that way.
Have you ever seen someone telnet to the POP3 port and scan the subject lines of the emails by typing in POP commands ?
They can get enough information to filter spam without downloading the whole email.
It would seem that the key would be making it easy to use and setup with your account -- as a plugin to the Netscape mail handler, perhaps.
True. But I really don't think it's very likely that a hit and run spammer will sue me for harrassment. They're sending unsolicited adverts, with forged headers, and abusing someone else's server. Would they really want all of their contact information laid out in court documents? They'd be sitting ducks for counter-suits and other fun.
More so the handshaking involved when your cell phone gets a message. (or whatever, it seems like the transmitter is busy when I get a SMS too)
But you're right. 5h talk and 50h standby is an absolute minimun nowadays. I charge my two years old Motorola every third day and it is almost never off. A new Nokia or Ericsson could last a week.
Worse is the fact that if I'm abroad *I* pay for the international charge. The sender just pays for a domestic call.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Responded AT&T customer Ryan, "They're not doing me any favors by soliciting me over my cell phone."
Because the boom in cell phone usage is recent, this is the time to demand a ban on cell phone solicitation. If you thought solicitations over the home phone were/are such APITA, what more could a company want than to expect you to jump every time the cell rings with an "important" call? Otherwise, the cell contractors have an opportunity here to extort payment for blocking or caller ID services.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
LoL I have a phone that works just like that that.
:)
5555555555@messaging.sprintpcs.com Viola.. email to my phone.
A 100 character message. I was like what happens of I begin receiving large amounts of unsolicited emails. They said to file a customer service complaint etc and the charges could be taken care of.
That comforted me some but it is and was still a slight fear of mine that I will turn on my phone to find 200 messages over my limit or something and then.. guess what 10 cents a pop. That puts me out about 20 dollars, So its not a LOT of cash.. But it did unerve me a little to think that can happen.
However the service IE customer-sprint has always been good and they are very responsive with all of my questions, I spent like 40 minutes with one of there developer stalking about HDML!! LOL.
Anyways if you are in a metropolitan area sprint pcs works well, If you are in the middle of no where.... Forget it.
Well my point is im not afraid at least with my current provider (until they prove me wrong
Jeremy
So what's the next move? this kind of situation:
You talk with your girlfriend on the phone and all of a sudden: -Please don't hang up. Your conversation will resume after this short message: Today on EBay - golf clubs starting auction starting at $1!...
(meanwhile on the other side:)
-Please don't hang up. Your conversation will resume after this short message: Tampax! Because you've got too business in your hands!...
? FUCK THIS.
THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!
You can't handle the truth.
For only $29.95 a month and a $74.95 activation fee plus $299.46 installation and a $14.95 adapter (Net weight 4lbs. 2 oz Adapter sold separately), we will remove your name from our mailing lists. No more stupid messages like the one you are reading now.
Please call 1-900-StopSpam for more information.
Thank you.
kwsNI
Unfortunately, I don't think so since it is a text message and not a voice call. This technically isn't telephone service, but short messaging delivered to a PCS handset. It doesn't use the voice channels, it uses the data signalling channel to deliver text messages. If the TCPA covered text pagers (which I didn't think it did) then you might have a case, tho.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
>However, this particular spam made the phones make sounds (similar to the battery-dying chirp), which I could imagine /would/ drain the batteries
Yes, this would only nominally drain the battery. Nothing compared to the current that needs to be drawn for actual voice com. Battery tech these days in handheld phones is pretty advanced. Day-long standby is the norm now. Plus, you can set the sms alert to silent if it bothers you.
Someone made a comment at lunch that was pretty interesting, though. If you get a phone from your employer so they can get hold of you in an emergency and you rely on the sms alert to let you know that something is going on, getting a constant barrage of spam messages really interferes with that. If you get lax in responding to sms chirps because 90% of the time it is just junk, that would really defeat the purpose of low-latency wireless communication. You just end up ignoring it and when all hell really does break loose, you don't jump out of your skin and check your message right away because you are so sick of 'false alarms'.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
As another poster mentioned, this isn't a "call". Just because a device is capable of features X and Y does not necessarily mean laws about X usage apply to feature Y.
It's like trying to apply the same "cell phone" laws to Palm Pilots with telephony, or your PC with its own modem.
And then what happens with people that set up cellphone aliases.. e.g. jondoe@cellphone.example.com which redirects to 5105551234@whatever. Are the senders responsible for the legal implications of spamming a cellphone then? How could they know?
Of course, spamming sucks one way or the other, and if I had my way, it would all be banned entirely..
This is why gun control is a bad idea.....an Ithaca pump or a Colt .45 1911A1 is the best answer to spam.
Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaah ah ah ah.
Fucking spammers.
Latest spam story that happened to me: a French company (I hardly ever get any French spam) spammed thousands of webmaster@*.fr ... including a few dozen of domains for which *I* am the webmaster. Guess what that company sold? INTERNET TRAINING! That's right! I called them and insulted them and abused them. AAaaah. I felt better.
Spam wastes time, bandwidth and the energy expended in filtering the junk out.
Spam on your cellphone considering the rates charged for time used is even worse.
Everyone agrees to this. Why can't there be some sort of law passed to prohibit this sort of nonsense? I thought that the fax spam law that says if it costs the person getting the fax money that it could be prohibited. Why is it taking lawmakers so looong to react?
ACK
The major reason spam is a problem, is that it pushes the costs onto the recipient and the recipients ISP.
You thinkjust cos you have 1 or 2 email spams a day, big deal, hit delete.
Now think of this from an ISPs standpoint, you have 500k+ users. You have joe schmoe spammer, who decideds to spam every conceivable name in the dictionary @ispa.com, he forges user@ispb.com as the sender of the spam, and he sends the spam through open relay in godknowswhere.co.ko (makes tracing difficult)
Now, thje scenario is set.
1) ispa.com has just recieved those 2 or 3 spams for 500k+ users, and needs to store all of the messages, means increased mail server space and bandwitdth since that email did not come in once for all the users, but 500k+ times.
2) all of the bounce backs that are generated by user unknown get sent back to user@ispb.com (and I have seen spam runs generate millions of bounces and literallty destroy a small ISP's mail servers and bandwidth).
Who pays for all this, you can damn well bet the ISP is going to put the cost onto the user for better equip when it comes tmie to upgrade.
Spam is bad, there is no reason for emailing someoen somethign they did not request, and if I had it my way, I would have every single ISP that has an open relay server blocked completely at the router level at all the backbones. no traffic gets through, but hey, I have no control so oh well.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Where would I get all my porn?
;-)
Where would I find out about donating sperm?
How else would I make $5000 a week for surfing the web?
spam has its uses
Thanks to the informative link that sqlrob provided:
(iii) to any telephone number assigned to a paging service,
cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service,
or other radio common carrier service, or any service for
which the called party is charged for the call;
I certainly get charged for a text message I receive. Someone noted that this section also covers pager numbers. I say this:
I get charged for the message;
The message is sent via my phone number;
A text message is functionally indistinguishable from a page (which is, I imagine, elsewhere defined broad enough to allow this interpretation);
and I receive the message via a telephone device.
Therefore, the action is in violation.
If my lawyer can't argue that, he's fired.
--
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Yes, the SMS services of GSM used to be free, back when it was almost unused and there were no gateways from the internet. I once had an almost continuous stream of messages going back and forth between a few phones as a security service, probably sent 39K messages total in 3 months. Remember the TCP over email tunnel? I had just started coding an IP over SMS driver for linux when SMS charges started. But now almost all GSM providers charge for SMS, and especially SMS email gateway functions, either for a fixed number per month or per message.
Belgacom and Proximus have anti-spam features in place on their internet --> SMS gateways, and are starting to block thousands of messages per day from spammers. They both block all messages from UUNET and AOL and a few other well known spam relays, and don't even bother to look for legitimate messages from there. There are hundreds of 'trigger' mailboxes of dead numbers that nobody should be sending messages to, which is a good method of stopping spam pretty quickly before the customer service lines start to light up.
France telecom (itineris) have no such protection measures in place except for extremely rude and untrained front line customer reps. But the SMS service is now an opt-in pay up front service, so very few mailboxes are actually enabled. But for those who have the email --> SMS gateway paid for, expect a few spam messages per week. This is outlawed in france, but there is no enforcement because france telecom refuses to track down the sources. Most of the french spam comes from within france, and is for french businesses, so it wouldn't be very hard to find them and make a few examples.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Well, in the UK, people have to pay for local phone calls, so they have to pay to get spam regardless of their internet connection fees.
:)
Even now, not everybody has unlimited internet for a fixed price.
Similarly, it is illegal for people to send spam faxes because the recipient has to pay for them (paper and ink, at the very least).
Besides, haven't you ever felt the thrill of seeing "you have new mail" and then been disappointed to see that it's just "make $$$ fast"?
-Zuff
In previous slashdot spam discussions www.privatecitizen.com has been recommended as an excellent guard against unwanted phone and snail mail advertisements. I don't use it ( I see using the court system to go after these people as only slightly less objectionable than using the legislature), but perhaps someone who does can comment on it's effectiveness and whether it would guard against cell phone mail spam ? It seems that privatecitizen depends on being able to distribute a list to known advertisers, and I think that many spammers ( wireless and regular ) are much more fly-by-night types.
Several times in this thread Europeans have jumped in saying that they have to pay to download spam because of non-free local calls. But it is technically possible to make a good spam defense even without having to download the entire spam:
- Get a shell account and read your mail on the server, downloading only what is displayed to you. Of course, you pay for the connection while you stare at messages and compose them, so you might look into something more sophisticated, such as . . .
- Get a shell account and split the spam with procmail or the equivalent (on the server), and set up something like fetchmail to only get the important stuff, plus a log file of all the headers/subjects of the spam, just in case an important one slipped through the filter and you want to actually look at it. Or . . .
- Have a program that talks directly to a POP server once you are connected, that downloads just the headers and subjects, starts downloading everything obviously not spam in the background while presenting you with a list of of everything so you can select things to download and read and things to delete unread.
Why haven't European (or American, for that matter) ISPs already provided this as a service to differentiate them from their competitors ? Why haven't any of the free software people provided the same, just as they provided junkbuster ?I suspect it is because annoyance at spam is not as widespread as a vocal minority would have us believe. It is just not that big a problem in the larger scheme of things. Otherwise someone would have already written the program I listed last above and they would be making money going to ISPs and integrating it with the little custom windows dialers and email clients.
Web banner ads are more annoying and take up time right when you are trying to actually do something (look at a web page), so fairly effective filters came out quickly. But I suspect that most people also stay on longer than necessary just to download their mail, because they briefly check the slashdot headlines for example, and their mail can download in the unused bandwidth while they browse.
I am afraid that we will let government regulation do it's usual heavy-handed solution that will only stop 50% of the problem anyway, rather than picking a technical solution which involves less emotionally gratifying yelling (and slashdot posts) and would solve 80% or 90% of the problem. If non-download filters were common and the default on ISP services, response rates to spam would drop.
There was this stupid school or something which kept sending me email, almost every other day saying "NEED DEGREES FAST LIKE TODAY".
Obviously they were using false email addresses and there was no point trying to get the providers to disbar them because I doubt they intended to use any of those addresses again.
However, they had a phone number in there which you were supposed to use to reach them. I called that number and at the tone, yelled out a tirade of abuse and insults ending with a threat to call the police if the emails didn't stop.
The emails stopped. I hadn't left my name or anything so, assuming I wasn't the only person they were spamming, I guess they stopped spamming everyone.
The point of my story is that most of these spammers have to provide you a way to get back to them if they are selling something. That is what you should target to get back at them, not the email address they are sending from. If it's a website, get the provider who provides a link to that website to turn them off. Hurt them where they think the advertising will help and make the spamming pointless
Mmmm.. Donuts
Very few wireless service providers give you an unlimited number of messages for free. Most of them cap it at 250 or 500 per billing cycle. After that they charge you a few cents per message. And what happens when the cellphone companies start offering a lower cost text messaging service that charges per message?
This is along the same reason that europeans hate spam so much. In Europe even local calls are billed by the minute, so every email spam they get takes time to download which they are then billed for.
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
Rudy Temiz, the company's 22-year-old president, said yesterday afternoon that he didn't plan to repeat the exercise but expressed no remorse either, saying that the marketing technique had generated "quite a few" sales.
This is what encourages spamming. People need to be educated that they should not purchase anything from spammers, even if it's a product that wasn't advertised to you. If they offer you something that's a really good deal, be wary. These companies are usually fly-by-night or startups that may not be around in a few months.
As the owner of a vibrating pager, and of a few pairs of those boxer shorts with the pocket in the crotch, I have to say that I don't object to being spammed in this way anything like as much as normal spam. Just not when I'm trying to put my contact lenses in, OK?
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I got an E-Mail from a spammer the other day, and you know what they were advertising? They were selling E-Mail addresses. They boasted somewhere around 500,000 "VALID E-MAIL ADDRESSES!"
Now, you can be *anywhere*, and get a chirp -- SPAM CALLING. It's infuriating. Thank goodness I don't have a cell phone - I despise them....but I can feel for those who will be affected by this crap. (What gets me, is that almost everyone who can do anything about spam is so blasé about it. They just don't care.)
On an unrelated-yet-related side note, what do ISPs actually DO about reported spam? I've noticed that 85-90% of my Spam can be traced back to either PSI.NET or UU.NET. Of course, I forward the mail to ABUSE@xxx.yyy, and they send me the standard "We've recieved your complaint, blah blah blah" and "We have taken action against those responsible, blah blah blah", but it just KEEPS COMING IN from those addresses. Not everyone on those services is a Spammer, so I can assume 2 things:
If they terminate the spammer's account, they have no problem giving the spammer another one.
OR
They really *aren't* taking any action whatsoever.
In either case, I can only guess that these services (as are any others that do the same thing) are Spammer-Friendly. That makes me Sick.
Oh, I've also noticed that AOL has changed their abuse structure. Just for your information, AOL no longer accepts Spam complaints at abuse@aol.com. The NEW address to send SPAM complaints to is: tosemail1@aol.com.
(AOL never gets back to me. They must hate acknowledging that something is WRONG in their perfect service.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
because this will get spam laws accepted, challenged, and cemented a LOT faster than the current process. Why? cell phone access is metered, battery-limited, and often business-critical. "Sorry, I didn't get your voicemail about the system being down because all the spam ran my battery down". Right. That'd go over like a ton of bricks--and get the spammers sued for liability and lost earnings.
We should make sure that the laws that come out of this (and there WILL be laws, just as there WILL be cell-spam now that it's possible) also cover other forms of spam, including email and direct-mail.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Email addresses are irrelevant, unless the spammers are stupid enough to give you a valid reply address (like "write to sales@idiot.com for a catalog!"). The name of the game in spam-busting is the Received: headers.
Track the spam back to the SMTP server it was sent from. Do a WHOIS on that domain. Email the listed sysadmin, as well as abuse@that_domain.com and explain how open relays are just like letting spammers steal their money. Also:
Do I take spam-busting too seriously? Hell yes. But I've inflicted a lot of damage on dozens of spammers, and gotten a few dozen open relays shut. Every little bit helps.
The point is: snail junkmailers pay for their junk. Spammers make others pay for their junk. And the fact that emails are so much cheaper just means that if spammers were not being fought, we'd quickly end up with 99% of all email traffic being spam, effectively destroying emails as a medium of communication.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
The people that got these messages may be in luck, to the tune of $500 USD. The TCPA bans automated calling of cell phones . It certainly seems as if this falls under this umbrella. I would certainly like to see this prosecuted.