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 ;)
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
The service provider in question, AT&T Wireless PCS, doesn't charge a per-use fee for incoming sms. Yah, if you were charged per use, it would be ugly. This is more annoying than expensive, tho.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
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.