Slashdot Mirror
Verizon Clogged With Tons Of Spam
DoorFrame writes: "This story talks about how Verizon feels it has been the victim of a malicious assault in which they received millions of pieces of spam that have delayed the delivery of email along the old Bell Atlantic lines. It's said to affect 200,000 of its Internet customers on the East Coast who may have to wait hours for their emails to arrive. They're going through the process of clearing the backlog now."
Everybody has to obey the law - it's a simple and effective deterrant.
But that's exactly the problem. You don't have to obey the law. Making something illegal does not automatically put a stop to that activity. Look at laws regarding (in no particular order) guns, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, jaywalking, speeding, financial fraud, racial discrimination, minimum wages, food quality, etc. etc. etc.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Save time. Just poison the spammers.
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Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
Ever tried to call Verizon? I guarantee that they will get you to slam your phone against the wall in digust and hatred and make you throw yourself out of a tall building in the face of the futility of attempting to make any resemblance of an intelligent or meaningful contact with their mindless minions of overpaid unionist social leech drones.
My point is that if everybody calls the 800 number, everyone will commit suicide to escape the horrific determinist nightmare that is the Verizon phone tree.
Postage due on junk e-mail -- Spam costs Internet millions every month.5 04S0003
http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?INW19980
Some interesting info... For example:
- Uunet Technologies Inc., Fairfax, Va.: Uunet has a full-time staff of six doing what it calls "abuse investigations" of mass mail and spam complaints, according to Harris Schwartz, team leader for Internet abuse investigation at Uunet. The cost of employing the abuse investiagtors, plus several security investigators, amounts to $1 million a year. While this figure is large, it is relatively small in context, Mr. Schwartz said. An ISP as large as Uunet spends that much per day on network upgrades, he said.
- EarthLink Network Inc., Pasadena, Calif.: Spam accounts for about 3 percent of Earthlink's overall e-mail, a spokesman for this large ISP said. The figure is down significantly, he said, thanks to various spam-fighting measures. EarthLink has three people on staff who do nothing but handle spam. "The cost is pretty high," the spokesman said. An indication of how high is EarthLink's recent $2 million settlement in a lawsuit against Cyber Promotions Inc., Philadelphia. The basis for that amount was the damage done to EarthLink's profitability by the extra load and traffic caused by Cyber Promotions' spam.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
leave the webmaster out of it, it's the sales guys you want (most of them will fall for the make money fast scams and quit, disrupting revenue and stock prices)
sales@qwest.net
Oh, wait, you guys weren't bitching about Qwest.
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+&x
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Damn, I can't find my bookmark. I do know the pages containing the juciest bits of the pilfered documents are mirrored in lots of places.
are the pages at: Behind Enemy Lines - Premier Services Exposed the ones that you speak of?
Hotmail isn't all bad, I have an address that dates the pre-Microsoft days of Hotmail and I think I've recieved only once piece of spam ever in that mailbox. I hope it stays that way too, but I only use the account for signing up for websites that require an e-mail address anyway.
A spammer should only gets one chance on anyone. When I get spam the IP gets added to my blocked list and they're gone forever. When I check my mail the filters and IP blocking discards most of the messages and I'm only left with actual e-mail. Anyone can do this so I don't know why everyone is always complaining about it...
its called a transparent proxy. and if a business on dsl needs high bandwidth smtp, let them apply for usage and keep them on a strict TOS.
so anyone who's domain name doesn't match the ip it is coming from, just reject them. a quick way to stop spammers.
but this reply will fall on deaf ears anyway..
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Perhaps your school sucks as much as mine does. Any company can pay $10 to get a complete student roster, with e-mail address, telephone number, physical address, and demographic info.
e story.
If it's a public institution, they may not have a choice. Where I work, the state's open records act mandates release of gov't records as quickly as possible and charges what it'd cost the lowest-paid individual(s) qualified to assemble the info. I think they charge about $90 for the addresses/phone #s/email of students, faculty and staff.
There are a couple of exceptions: educational records (i.e., your report cards/ transcripts) and medical records. I've heard that you can request an exam a few days ahead of time if it's already been written, but that's about as likely as the automatic-four-oh-if-your-roommate-commits-suicid
What's interesting is that if you slag your boss in one of our "supervisor reviews" s/he can request it, get it and find out what you said, while if my dog gets the shits one night and I haul her to the vet clinic on campus, that's protected because it's a medical record. It makes me wonder how many of our state legislators could find the Capitol without assistance.
Go find your school president and kick him in the testicle.
Having said this, I second that emotion. I'm also sure ours has just the one, if that.
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Freeper Logic
Ever notice that if you reply to spam to be removed from their mailing list, that the message bounces back to you? Spammers often just disable mail accounts after sending you a message.
What I would propose is a sort of Handshaking for spam free e-mail. Three transactions would be required.
1) Sender sends the message.
2) Receiver sends back a small packet verifing receipt.
3) Sender sends back another small packet to verify that the receipt was recieved.
The important part is the 3rd phase. If the 3rd phase doesn't happen, mail gets sorted out in the user's spam folder.
It's not a perfect solution, but surely it would make it more difficult for spammers.
Sure would be sweet if we could poison the spam databases.
Weird. The ISP I work for also had troubles last Wednesday. I thought it was just us, but I guess a lot of companies were hit. Now I'm curious what happened.
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"insanity is a gift."
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"insanity is a gift."
And what about the ones that find a vulnerability, and then post a script to exploit it while giving the vendor just a few days or a week of notice? Let alone posting the script prior to notifying the vendor at all...
To me, tampering with a webserver is just as bad as tampering with a mail relay, but around here, (to paraphrase)it's: "the admin's fault if his web server's cracked, the script kiddie was just pointing out a weakness in the security of the site, oh but it's the spammers fault so we should lock them up and fine them and feed them to the alligators".
It's all one and the same. There shouldn't be different standards set depending on which port a hacker or cracker happens to connect to.
The lawsuit idea is not new. And it *IS* doable, but requires people to work together. And, a bit of software. For the Open Source community, comming up with software is easy. To work together, and be willing to spend $100 to take a spammer to small claims court, now THAT is hard.
The 'pecked to death by ducks' method is used by local religious groups, local community groups concerened about slum landlords or drugs and others.
I could not find a 'how to sue the local porn shop into non-existance' link, but I did find this part of the congressional record:
Link
Defendants are then compelled to settle for nuisance value. *smile* A spammer settling because of the nuisance they caused.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I don't understand why you keep repeating this. I've seen this same message four times now....
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"Look, dear, it's a crazy hairy scary man!"
Some spammers also randommly create account names and adds the one's that are real to their lists. But, Verison seems like a sheisty company.
- *Normality Is The Root of All Evil*
Just because you get spam on that account doesn't mean they are selling your address to spammers.
Any large company with a well-known domain name (aol.com, msn.com, home.com, hotmail.com, etc.) has so many damn e-mail addresses that some spamming programs use brute force to just guess addresses in that domain.
I would imagine that had your e-mail address been sold to a spam list or got there some other way, you would getting more spam than just "every now and then".
Unix is mysterious, and ancient, and strong. It's made of cast iron and the bones of heroic programmers of old -
Sheesh, cannot people be polite anymore?
Kodak wanted to sue Paul Simon for his song "Kodachrome", then they realized it was better PR to allow the free publicity to be left alone.
SPAM should be grateful.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
What you described sounds a lot like XNS. The software is all open source, although commericial service providers are needed to make it go. One of the service providers owns the key patents, but they have committed to royalty free use for their competitors.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
That's what I am wondering: So what? If Verizon thinks they are the only people that have to deal with spam in this world, they are sadly mistaken. I have had many accounts at Hotmail that became so pathetically bombarded every day that I quit checking them; I don't think that Verizon has much to complain about--they are not treated very diffrently when it comes to spammers. In addition, I don't think they have too much room to complain when they have so much spam coming from them...
Macx
Yeah, I like the Poison idea. Create several email addresses, get them subscribed to all the spammers you can, then everytime those email addresses get spammed, block that message & sending address globally. Prefereably implemented at the ISP level.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Remember Al Gore? At one time (8+ years ago) he tried floating a trial balloon of "government sponsered internet" ala what the internet USED to be before all this web-crap popped up.
Back when UseNet was the forum. And you had to have an acedemic reason to be on the Internet. And you knew that prep.ai.mit.edu had a good ftp site, and the new archie is how you hunted for a program.
This balloon, like government backed health care was rejected. What you see today is the result of that rejection years ago. So, what makes anyone believe a return to the old goverenment backed internet will happen?
If you *LIKE* the idea of the government stopping spam, then think about this. No need for any additional laws, just use the laws and methods that exist. And, instead of money going into the pockets of some goverenment body, it could end up in your pocket. Alas, you'd have to actually *WORK* to sue the spammers, and I doubht KTB will want to work.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
The only problem with regulating or banning UCE is that the spammers will just move overseas.
I suppose that if it was a crime for someone to send UCE and you could track out of country spam back to the US spammer then you could take action. But how would you get cooperation from the other government to do this?
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Before you flame me, try and look at it this way: Junk mail wastes trees, costs the USPS unnecessary money to sort and deliver, and creates unnecessary waste in our nation's landfills. Spam, on the other hand, wastes nothing other than a miniscule amount of bandwidth and the electrons required to transmit it.
When I am checking my mail, I can usually tell the spam from the real mail simply be reading the subject line, and all I have to do is hit delete. We should consider loosening restrictions on spam and focusing on creating new legislation to prevent junk mail.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I was going to post my logs from today, but I get "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted. Reason: Junk character post." Looks like Slashdot is filtering me.
Anyhow, just today, over the course of an hour, I got mail sent to: bill@waldo.net, scott@waldo.net, bob@waldo.net, paul@waldo.net, mark@waldo.net, brian@waldo.net, dan@waldo.net, steve@waldo.net, jeff@waldo.net, michael@waldo.net, peter@waldo.net, gary@waldo.net, eric@waldo.net, and rick@waldo.net, all by one user.
I get this all the time. Constantly. It's pretty crazy.
-Waldo
"Interesting", but who is going to *collect* these charges and how are they going to do it? Ask any A/R person (accounts receivable) how much more difficult it is to collect payments when the invoice is sent 1+ days late. Then ask them how difficult it'd be if you suddenly required long-time customers to *pay* for something they've always received for free.
Or, I just thought of this, what about differing fees according to the sender's country of origin? In Vietnam, I can buy a REAL can of Coke (who cares if the writing is Vietnamese, it's Coca-Cola!) for $0.02! What would the e-mail fee be there, $0.005 per e-mail? All these companies, scum-bags or not, would move their spamming operations to the poorest countries and virtually eliminate the effect of your idea -- who cares if it costs $50 to spam 10,000 targetted recipients???
Yeah, I remember how it is to be idealistic, but this idea just won't fly in the real world. Remember, there are a LOT of people out there sending spam. A variation on your idea, though, might be to simply have unlisted e-mail addresses. If you want your e-mail address to be unlisted (like a phone number) then all e-mail except from those in your addressbook file would be automatically refused. You could still have a spam account on Yahoo (or have a "trash" or "public" account for public use on your own server). You can really do this today if you have two e-mail accounts, one for the public and one "unlisted" one, but that's not perfect. You still need a way to ban unauthorized e-mails at the server level so the most important mails get through.
Well I walk out to my mail box once a day to find 90 percent of it is crap, does that count? :) Electric bill, that's crap.... car payment, that's crap too... credit card bill, dammit! Hello, what's this? A victoria's sercret catalog? Oooo jackpot!
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THe current ad-hoc mail system is just fine. Oh sure, it has spam, whatever.. but the good part is.. no central authority, no governing body. It's anarchy at it's best.
This is how freedoms are lost, you know. by saying 'x is being used in a way I don't approve of, we need a governing body'. Pretty soon, only those who are approved by that body can participate... etc.. etc..
What we need, really, is a new mail network (yes, network) that requires membership and performs some kind of filtering. This would be good.
Try here.
I wish. I'm a manager for the ISP's help desk. The admins tell us nothing, and they're clueless as hell to boot. I just had to explain to one of them what a corrupt mail (bad headers) spool looks like.
So it goes. Anyone else at an ISP or large site having trouble?
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
Of course there are some legitimate mailing lists that will also get redirected to your Junk folder by this, so you may want to create a filter to have those mailing lists go back into your Inbox.
They are called spam filters. They should get some. :-)
M$ stock dropped in 1/2 since last year. If you are a MCSE, you will be broke.
Afraid to name the company, eh?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I prefer abuse@verizon.com, or whatever the name of the company is. But I hold an extra grudge against the new Verizon, they are attempting to be worse than UUNET at the peak of their open mail relay fiasco.
/. until it makes it into some spammers mailing list. A single email address I posted on /. three years ago is still picking up 5-10 spams a week, the only email that goes to that honeypot.
Just by putting these email addresses on slashdot will generate 3-15 spams a day from harvesters. It takes about 3 days from the time a non-obfuscated email address gets posted on
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
It is usually very illegal. The headers are almost always forged in some way or another (at least the return address). Also, about 50% of it is done by bouncing through open SMTP servers (which is unauthorized use no matter how easy it is to do). The problem is most of the serious spammers either open accounts with stolen credit cards and/or run trojan horse scams to harvest account passwords from real users. In other words, it takes a serious amount of time and money to actually catch up with them (and of course the FBI is too busy prosecuting people for harmless pranks to take on real criminals who cause serious damage).
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Of course the real problem is the stupid idiots that respond to all the wonderful opporunaties they receive via e-mail. If just one idiot in a thousand responds that's more than plenty to keep the spam flowing.
One trick I've considered is to raise their cost of operation by mining all the spam I get from my hotmail account for 800 numbers and calling them from pay phones and wasting as much of their time as possible.
Oh, trust me. Verizon took 41 days to "certify" a line that they already certified twice beforehand. Though, in my area, it's a neccessary evil since there are no other options.
Damned monopolies.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
You obviously haven't lived in one place for very long or you wouldn't mention the Post Office as being a good regulator of junk mail. I get about twice as much junk paper as stuff I asked for (and I've asked form more than I can read completely). The Post Office ENCOURAGES junk mail: They make money on it!
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
I work for the company that makes verizon's email servers. I actually coded a few anti-spam techniques. Our servers can block mail user harvesters(try all email until they get good response) by banning IPs that unsuccesfully send too many email msgs. They could tighten relaying. if it's not done already. They could tie in third party spam servers... They could go nuts if they wanted to. We have a huge array of tools they could use which they don't seem to use. Adding IP's and domains is easy but more importantly it's fast. You can block >100,000 IP's and _still_ not drain CPU, I know cuz I coded the algorithms to store IPs ;-). There is no excuse other than Verizon not admin'ing their servers correctly. But hopefully this should change.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
YOU GOT IT
/.'s db. Yes, he making this page take longer to load. Yes, he's starting to piss you off (if he hasn't already.)
While I won't argue with the modding down of everything else this guy has posted (after his initial post,) I wonder if this one might've been done a bit too hastily.
Yes, he's wasting your bandwidth. Yes, he's wasting space in
But he does make a point. And AFAIK, he's not selling anything. Nor is he providing penisbird links.
I'm not sticking up for his method of doing this by any means, but I think the argument could be made that what he's done here is akin to the attempts of AdBusters; using the advertising of an idea to deflate or defeat advertising (of material concerns.)
As I said above, pissing people off isn't the best way to win hearts and minds, but sometimes its the only way to get attention. Cyclists where I live used to get together every Thursday during rush hour and intentionally slow traffic to draw attention to the need for alternative transportation. I got held up because of this, and I was pissed off, but I also understood why they were doing it. They knew they were angering people, but also realized that writing letters to the editor wouldn't do a damn bit of good, even if they were published.
I'm not equating this guy with any civil rights hero; I'd be a bit surprised if he'd had this strategy mapped out from the beginning. I simply find this post interesting from a rhetorical point of view, and wonder if anyone else does.
The reaction here closely resembles that to responses to spam; I can't decide if this means all unsolicited communicatons are bad, or just the commercial ones.
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Freeper Logic
This happens to my inbox all the time.
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Game over, 2000!
They weren't bitching about abuse@eli.net either. Of course you can be even more effective with complaints if you look up the contacts in the NSI database. For example, christian.andersen@VERIZON.COM or opsmgr@BELLATLANTIC.COM or accounting@IDNAMES.COM. of course, the ones that know what they are doing use roles, like hostmaster@ELI.NET, instead of a real person's e-mail address.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
what is the best way to block spam?? ukNutter
I know several people who had Verizon DSL and when they cancelled their service, they would still get billed. I had to order a stop payment so Verizon will stop billing me and stop stealing my money for their mediocre service.
Roadrunner service is pretty good.
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"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
Oh my god! It's a level 5 spam storm!
Think about this one: the providers charge others based on how much traffic they send and how much they receive and all. Then they sign a contract saying that x can send spam. Then they charge them for the bandwidth, and you for the bandwidth for something you don't want! Evil!
Well, now they know how those of us who've had a hotmail account for more than 5 seconds feel like.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
I get spam on my .edu accounts which amazes me because i am extra cautious not to use that anywhere online.
But the best solution i like is the yahoo bulk mail transfer. I dont even see that folder. I wish i coudl write a filter like that.
how small is infinity?
Don't be afraid to give your address out, give your keeper address to only those you trust and for everybody else take the "spam value" out of the addresses you give out, use our Sneakemail...
</shameless promotion>
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
You ain't see nothing yet, it's something you NEVA GONNA FORGET!
How would you like to walk out to your mailbox every fifteen minutes only to find ninety percent of the time you get crap. This is the way I feel about internet spam. It's not about which one is worse, they are both pointless, time wasting endeavours(to me atleas, for spammers it is probably a whole different viewpoint. It probably puts food on the table for them.)
Their ISP would collect them. If they didn't pay, they'd get their internet access turned off.
Then ask them how difficult it'd be if you suddenly required long-time customers to *pay* for something they've always received for free.
That's the point. Spammers would have to stop sending spam, which is something they've always been able to do for free. If they resist paying to send me e-mail, then they just won't be able to send me e-mail. Of course, non-spammers aren't going to care -- my friends know I'll hit the button that says I don't want their money.
Or, I just thought of this, what about differing fees according to the sender's country of origin?
Each ISP could set their own fee schedule. If you're in Vietnam, and do most of your e-mailing with other people in Vietnam, you're presumably all going to be on the same fee schedule. People in Vietnam who want to e-mail me can still e-mail me, and if they're not spammers, they can reasonably expect that I'll hit the "I don't want your money" button. This is a much better deal for them than having to put postage on a letter, in which case they're 100% certain of having to pay.
Let's also keep in mind that Joe Peasant in Vietnam doesn't even have access to a computer. For the 1% of the Vietnamese population that has access to a computer, 25 cents is not an unreasonable amount of money to risk on the off chance I'll be a jerk and accept it.
Find free books.
Sorry, my experience here comes from doing technical work for a medical advertising agency; their most basic stuff was four-color cards, going on to ridiculous 5- or 6-color brochures, which could be many dollars each. I didn't realize you could get a good mailer printed for so much less.
:-)
And of course, if you value your time at zero, then things look a lot cheaper. Wanna do some mailers for me, too?
Oh, but that's too mild a punishment for such a horrible offense. They should be forced to print out every spam sent and have to eat it. Upon completing this task, they should be inflicted with a million paper cuts and soaked in a brine until pickled.
These spammers should be archived for future reference... so would-be-spammers might think twice before shoving their crap down our throats and making us pay for it every step of the way.
You do have to pay for disposing junk snail mail...
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
I can almost guarantee that Verizon has not sold your e-mail address.
No, I don't work for them, but I work in the abuse department of a large ISP and have to deal with spam and spammers on a daily basis. Spammers generate random usernames, the switch domains (ie, if foo@example.com is real, they'll try foo@otherexample.com as well), they do dictionary type attacks directly to port 25 and record anything that doesn't return '550 User Unknown', and so on.
Being caught selling e-mail addresses would be a kiss of death worse than PSI's or AT&T's pink contracts. No mainstream ISP would risk it.
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Turn on, log in, burn out...
I was just having a chat with a friend the other day (whose company seems to get spammed randomly the same as hotmail does) about hot this may be a form of cyber-war. It would be great to have a discussion sometime about what level cyber war has reached at this point in time, and where people might think it is going ...
AT&T Wireless bought Cellular One, not GTE.
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the post office is all in favor of this. then they can regulate the charge of sending email, finally! and raise the price whenever they want, to boot. no more whining about losing profits because of email from them...
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
The question is whether they cause damage to innocent people. I doubt many people on Slashdot will say that a website hacker who steals credit card numbers and uses them to order merchandise, deserves protection. A hacker who finds a way to get through AOL's spam filter and posts it, is exposing a vulnerability. A hacker who uses that to send 10 million e-mails needs to be made an example of.
"SPAM uses huge amounts of bandwidth."
so do slashdot posts. i don't see anybody stopping...
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
A lot of people wonder if it's a bit unfair, but I've never met anyone who stayed on the RBL list for long and did not deserve to. So, Verizon, don't drop the ball and utilize the RBL!
I know I don't accept email from those blacklisted, and I certainly don't forward it- and if everyone did the same, the world would be a better place. </end cheesy sally struthers informerical>
-bugg
For a business, the entire cost of making and delivering even the simplest piece of bulk mail is over a buck. ---> This likely depends on the business. I send out just over 5000 flyers in the mail each month, and the total cost is $219 for printing and just under $500 for postage and whatnot. So that comes to about ten cents per item mailed, all costs included except for my time and since it's "my" time, that's "free" to me. That's a lot less than $1....
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I think all of the "millions of pieces of spam" were directed toward my email account. These days, it's hard to tell.
I've used tarpitting to reduce the flow of spam through my mailserver, and it seems to work pretty well. There are patches out there for QMail (awesome) that seem to do the trick. There are other various recipes and such for procmail that work well. If you're looking to poison their spamlists, take a look at sugarplum, a spamlist poisoner for webservers. On a totally unrelated note, but on the same vein (poisonbots), take a look at peachpit, a censorware spider trap.
(Shameless plug): ProcessTree - Put your idletime to use.
Okay, spam is bad, and we all hate when bad things happen to good people.. but Verizon is bad people. I don't have DSL access from them, but www.2600.com does. They have a special domain name just for verizon:
http://www.verizonreallysucks.com
Furry cows moo and decompress.
when you sign up for dsl use the service, dont use the email. use something like hotmail or yahoo. you can also setup filters in pine to block spam. ie dont read anything from *.verizon.com..
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Will I retire or break 10K?
every time you got a piece of spam you had to pay 32 cents for it?
Actually, $0.33, raising to $0.34 early next year.
Several hours? Mostly dial up? Yeah, right! I've got mail trickling in 2 to 4 DAYS late, and I'm a DSL customer
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I know this isn't revolutionary, but I've been mach happier since I started running my own mail server on my DSL line. I now create a new email address for each service I register for so I can keep track of who is spamming me.
BTW -- if you are ever in the job market, I suggest using this tactic with the job engines. It is *very* interesting to see which job sites actually get you responses from real companies vs recruiters vs job-related spam.
Evolution: love it or leave it
Even without per-minute charge, the receiver pays. Time spend dealing with spam can be much more expensive. A month ago I got 750 identical spam messages via one of the ISPs I use. After downloading and deleting about about 150 replicas, I gave up and called the ISP and have them delete the whole batch. The whole incident took over half an hour of my time during the busiest time of day, which, if it were done for most of my consulting clients, would have been worth $75 or more.
Penguins don't always have to play nice. The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
But an automated email plugin/add-on which can do all the lookups automatically and produce couple dozen of email complaints to the upstream ISPs for every spam they host or every email they blindly relay would force them to get rid of the spammer clients or fix their relays. Adding CC complaint to the Congress, FTC, spam promoting lobbies, etc. might also bring in some laws with teeth against the spammers.
(i'm LATE, i'm LATE..)
Well, like a reply post said the only way to do thi governmentally is through a LAWSUIT.
The principle applies though, are you trying to use the sovereignty of the government against the buying power of big corporations?
Get a strong enough anti-spam law and it will be seen as a barrier to interstate commerce.
And then the spammers go global.
Get a strong enough anti-spam law to block them?
Then you'll be accused of violating the rules of the World Trade Organization.
Goat sex free since 2001
Even if laws require the spammer to quit spamming you upon request, he says "fine", and the he SELLS your email address, which is now more valuable since you proved that someone reads mail there, to many more spammers, with whom you don't have any "no spam" requests filed with. So "complaining to them" actually makes them more money. The only proper solution is to block them at the router level with ipchains (in DENY mode, not REJECT, for force connections to wast the most time possible until they timeout).
The difference between junk mail in your post office mail box and spam in your email is that when someone sends you junk mail, they pay for the mailing, and you pay for nothing.
On the other hand, there are many people all over the world who pay for their internet access per minute or per byte or some other way (wireless especially). Then, the person getting the spam winds up paying for it. How would you like it if every time you got a piece of spam you had to pay 32 cents for it?
- Tony
// No comment
I think the body can anylise the situation and pass Laws or guidelines. Everybody has to obey the law - it's a simple and effective deterrant.
Trouble is, such a law would only be enforceable in the country it was passed in. Granted, the US probably generates more spam than any other country, but even if such a law were passed (and could be realistically enforced) it would be a temporary inconvenience... companies would simply hire foreign spam agencies to do their advertising. And realistic enforcement is impossible anyway... the government can't possibly deal with a significant number of the cases, and spammers would guess (rightly) that they'd probably get away with it. Even if they were caught, the fines would probably be beneath the notice of a company.
For example, current legislation requires that there be removal instructions at the bottom of spam messages if I'm not mistaken. I've never seen those instructions work, not even once. Usually the server that the removal account is supposed to be on either doesn't exist or doesn't recognize the username.
Huh???
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
Personnaly, I do not have spam problems. I owned the same email address for years now and I don't remember receiving an unsolicited message. Obviously, I keep my email address as secret as possible and I do not have a "spam dedicated"@hotmail.com address. I feel this kind of mail box is useless since you will have to read it anyway to make sure no important mail has been routed there.
The same thing apply for my "real" mail; it is not filled with loads of unwanted samples/tryouts/adds. Ok, maybe just a little bit of junk that has not been personally addressed but put in every citizen mailboxes of the small town I live in.
I realise that the Average Slashdotter is against Government interferance, and rightly, but in some instances it is better to have a government body, as I'm sure everyone agrees. Driving Licenses and Food Indpection agencies spring to mind.
I strongly agree with that, in theory. It would be nice if some agencies could punish or regulate spam. I consider spam to be a virus whose goal is to waste bandwith and people time. Based on that it may be possible to bring spammers to justice?
There's also ICQ spam; lot of people scan for online people to send them spam, often of the form of pr0n site advertisement. Same thing for IRC but it is not really a problem there since it is easy to get rid of 'em.
The better solutions would be to ensure that spammers don't make money out of spamming. I wonder if ipv6 would make life easier in tracking spammers?
--
delete free(system.gc);
Putting that disadvantage aside, and maybe even giving them the benefit of a doubt, they STILL suck.
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In the few spams I've gotten, any e-mail address seems like it is either one of the addresses on their list, or it is made up..
I've gotten different messages for the same product/scam/whatever, but they both list totally different reply addresses in the "to unsubscribe..." section.
The only relevent contact information is a 1-888 number that I don't want to call because I have no idea if I can be charged by calling that number.
Chances are, that's it. Compile Linux's 2.4.0's PPPoE support (as a module or built-in) instead and a pppd patched to support it. I know people that ran into this, and this is the fix.
Yeah - Salem's a pretty good town for DSL in general. Covad and Northpoint are both in the CO, the infrastructure is pretty good, and the Verizon techs here in town get along well with the CLEC people - you can't overstate the value of good relations at the technician level in getting services provisioned.
I've had DSL (Flashcom/Northpoint) for a year and a half now, and that service has been pretty good and the installation was smooth. I'm switching to XO (also with Northpoint) due to Flascom's meltdown - and that line, too, has gone really well thus far in the installation process. Wednesday is the scheduled turn-up, and we'll see then if it's as smooth as the last one for certain.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I put in an order for Earthlink DSL on or about June 10th and am STILL waiting for Verizon to get off of their stupid,slovenly, and grossly oversized posterior and 'certify' my phoneline (one of three that I have in my home in New York, Manhattan) so that Earthlink can activate my account... but here's the kicker: Earthlink says (and they swear it is true, after all the polite but insistent grilling I have done to Earthlink, I believe them) that Verizon claims that the reason Verizon has not done their job in certifying a clean copper pair for DSL on my phoneline is because there are three different companies that have a workorder on the particular phoneline that I wish to use for my Earthlink DSL account!!! Of course, I have placed ONE order for DSL and that is with Earthlink. Verizon? The worst and most incompetent damn telco... makes me pine for the old BellAtlantic days. GAWD.
Here in Virginia, the legislature recently passed a law banning "Unsolicited Commercial Email". UUnet appears to have taken someone to court under this statute. I think that this is a step in the right direction and that Virginia is in a unique position to help choke off the flow of spam as I'd guess that most AOL traffic goes through there but it won't fix things in the end. As many others have pointed out, spammers will move to other jurisdictions and then offshore. Along the same lines, the cat and mouse games between spammers and those who create filtering software will never end. I think the only way to stop this shit is to create something akin to an electric stamp. Think about it. The only other outfit that has to deal with this type of stuff is the Post Office and they keep it in check by making somebody pay to deliver it. Or course, I haven't a clue as to how you would go about this but it's a start.
Point taken. I actually called up the spam company but there wasnt anybody available and I didnt leave a message.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
Spam, on the other hand, wastes nothing other than a miniscule amount of bandwidth and the electrons required to transmit it.
The company whose site I am currently working on had not locked down their SMTP server correctly. A spammer proceeded to send thousands of emails through it, and in the process stalled the server.
The server was not used for the delivery of most email, but for a specialised subsection. It was 2 weeks before somebody noticed that we'd had no sign-ups to the specialised website.
So not only did I and a colleague waste a morning clearing the mess up and locking the machine down properly, but the company probably lost a fair bit of business because of the bad impression the potential customers got (we didn't answer them for a fortnight).
Yes, it is partly the company's fault for having an open SMTP relay exposed. But just cos it's there doesn't mean you can nick it and run away laughing.
IMHO spam costs more than snail-mail spam; it's just different people who pick up the tab.
Theft is theft.
---------------------------
'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
I'm beginning to wonder who they're buying their PPPoE servers from. Sympatico here in Ontario uses a single RADIUS server for each city, and when the thing goes down it stays down for hours, taking your connection with it.
:-P There's no reason they can't allocate IP addresses via DHCP and keep track of customers by their physical lines.
The whole time you get either unexpected authentication packets or nothing at all when attempting to connect.
PPPoE is a useless extra failure point. It's evil and must die.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
His windows machine couldn't connect either, as you can see had you read his post in its entirety.
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Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
They might not be as guilty as you say. There are
several ways to make a list of valid addresses, by
"brute-forcing" different letter combinations with
EXPN, VRFY, or MAIL FROM/RCPT TO.
(I work at an ISP, we see this from time to time)
SSM - Stig Sandbeck Mathisen Trust the Computer, the Computer is your Friend
http://www.verizonshouldspendmoretimefixingitsnetw orkandlessmoneyonlawyers.com/
.org, www.verizon-blows.com, .org.) and some not (www.verizondsl.com, www.goverizon.com). But I think the long one says it best.
2600 has that one, too. And in their Summer 2000 issue (Freedom Downtime), they have *TWO* whole pages of domain names owned by Verizon. Some derogatory (www.verizon-bites.com,
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Of course, if you are looking for an IT job in the UK, go to www.jobserve.com, as they get something around 70% of the online IT job ads in the country. And they link you directly to the agencies/companies that place the ads.
Of course, some agencies troll jobserve with ads for make-believe jobs, but that'll happen wherever you go.
~Cederic
ps: My only involvement with Jobserve is that I got my last two jobs through that site
Hmm, I believe UK law already has the ability to prosecute for unauthorised access and misuse of computers. And that's criminal prosecution, not civil.
Of course, if you have a website with no password and I access it, the CPS are going to laugh at you if you complain to them.
Then again, put a password on it, and if you can prove that it was me that accessed it, you've probably got a case and can probably get me sued.
Whether open mail relays are deemed publicly accessible and for the purpose of relaying mail is an interesting legal argument, which I am not qualified to answer.
~Cederic
Umm.. no offense, but haven't you ever heard of tagging the messages and hitting delete? Sort your mail by subject (assuming they were all the same subject since they were "identitical") and just mark them all and hit delete.
> Because it cost them time and money they get a tiny return on the efforts of thier spam.
You would think so, but in actual reality 90% of the people on the net are not techies like you and me. They are people like my last land-lady, a 60 year old women with an IQ of 95-105. Or like my brother's boss, owner of a plumbers shop, with an IQ of 90.
More than enough average people, enabling the smarter *ambitious* SOB'ing spammers to make a quarter million a year. Yes, that's right, a quarter a million. That's the numbers that were in the books of a famous southern US spammer and her husband, which were 'lifted' by an anti-spammer who penetrated their home network and copied a few hundred meg of their internal documents (along with some revealing 'home photos').
Damn, I can't find my bookmark. I do know the pages containing the juciest bits of the pilfered documents are mirrored in lots of places.
Yes, tons of spammers are not ingenious enough, persistent enough, nor *ambitious* enough, to make it work. But there are some who do. (Typically they do *spamming for hire*.) They are the ones that are going to be hard to kill. They are the ones that will survive as long as there are a few spam-friendly holes in the earth somewhere.
I hope someone uses your email in a forged header so you get all the bounced mail and unsubscribe messages.. The hatemail does not always go to the spammer.
The truth shall set you free!
My ISP provided account is not active (by me). I let them deal with emptying the trash as they and their distribution list are the only ones that fill it anyway. I use another server for may mail even though it is in another country. I am a full time road warrier.
The truth shall set you free!
I live in the northeast and I have a DSL connection threw verizon.
And yes I was affected by their email debacle.
What there not telling you is that.
Not only was there a slow down but also they had to dump a ton of email to clear out there server. I called their tech support Thu. After noticing I had not received any new email in over a day, not even spam (talk about a killer spam filter). Tech support told me that they were having problems (dugh) and that they were planning on dumping a large chunk of email in the server to clear the connection. They did not state that in their press release, I think it's lame not to tell people that their email was lost or never delivered.
Also they stated in the press release that only dial-up connections were affected. Again not true, I'm on a DSL.
By in large I have relatively few complaints with my service. My connection is always supafast, but then again I can open my window and throw a rock at the verizon building. I normally refrain from throwing rocks at my phone company, but if this happens more often I may have to reevaluate my rock throwing policy.
.........over
Oh please. They can drop T1's for weeks at a time with no valid explanation or reason (oops, we lost your circuit!)
Fuck Verizon.
I wish I could switch to another broadband company, but nothing else is available in my area.
<sarcasm>
So make "your area" a different area. Move to another area.
</sarcasm>
Will I retire or break 10K?
lets try some simple math
I send 1,000,000 spams
I get 1000 people buy my product or service
or I just get an honest interest in my biz
very small return rate but profitable
now if 1 percent of all 1,000,000 recipients of the spam
call this jerks 800 number you have just overloaded his system
with crap and he makes no money
because the legitimate biz is lost in the crap
http://Lenny.com
Junk email has several massive down-sides which tend to get ignored, especially in the US where Internet usage is unmetered. In most countries, Internet usage is metered, usually by the second. This means that people who receive junk email have to pay, directly, to receive it. If the call is long distance, or wireless, it can be a substantial amount of money. Enough to discourage use of email as a tool. The unpredictability of spam also means that most people are unwilling to do other things that would make email more useful. For instance, want your cellphone to alert you to incoming mail? If you have to pay for each notification, and 75% of those notifications would be MMF schemes, probably not.
Even if you're lucky enough to have an unmetered connection, spam costs your ISP in extra bandwidth charges, more time with the modems being tied up to serve unwanted emails to customers. The bandwidth argument can't be underestimated - spam is, by its nature, a peaky activity, that is an ISP receiving spam will find a mass of emails being sent in one go, rather than spread out eating up tiny, unnoticable, amounts of bandwidth at any point. And that means it's not just bandwidth at stake, it's your ISP's mailserver getting an event indistinguishable from a DoS attack.
Trees may not be cut down as a result of spam, but they're not saved by it either. And spam adds real costs to the provision of your Internet service. It reduces what you can do with email. And your Internet service suffers because of it.
Still want it?
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
They could institute severe civil and criminal penalties for unauthorized computer access (i.e., using an open mail relay without permission) and for fraudulent misrepresentation and damage to reputation (faking headers and addresses). That would take care of 90% of spam. Blacklists of ISPs that permit spamming would take care of most of the rest.
I'm surprised that more ISPs don't track down and sue spammers who fake headers. I'd gladly hunt and disembowel any slime who faked spam headers to look like it was coming from one of my domains. (I'd just go to small claims court, but someone like Verizon could put their stable of high-power lawyers to good use and crush the spamming bastards like the cockroaches they are.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The foreign company and government could also use the WTO to give the bitchslap to an ISP who blocked everything from the foreign spammers.
-perdida
Goat sex free since 2001
I have had Verizon online DSL for about a year now, and the support is absolutely nonexistent. Every week my line goes down at least once for about 10 hours at a time. Although the physical connection is fine and the modem handshakes, my PPPoE client recieves an endless stream of authorization packets. It simply cant finish authorizing me since the packets are in not in any sort of order. Every time I tried to get support, they told me they "cant support a Linux machine." Unfortunately for me, they didnt understand that it was not a problem with my operating system. Their lazy support staff saw "linux" and read it as "get out of jail free", and dumped me out of their support queue. After trying to convince them, I finally used a roomate's windows box to see if it miraculously worked when my linux box did not. Obviously, windows was also not able to connect. I called the support and explained this to them, and they said they'd get back to me. That was 4 weeks ago. Dont use verizon online dsl, they are definitely not nice folk.
I signed up one of my email accounts to loads of lists and newsletters, expecting to get masses of spam. I've had none.
Why?
Because I'm a hero. Yup, that's right - I am a fucking H E R O.
Wanna be a hero too? Then buy my new book, 'How to be a hero in ten easy steps!' It contains everything you need to get you onto the path to heroic-ness. Soon, girls will fling themselves at your feet and beg you to fuck them. Any day now. It will happen. It will.
Available in all good book stores.
I got DSL at my home in Salem, MA last month. I'm happy with it. There have been a couple times when I couldn't connect to the network right away but that's nothing compared to taking 40 hours to download my research on a 56k line. I haven't seen any more spam then when I was at mindspring.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
The First Rule of the Internet: Solve it Using Technology, Not The Law.
So your point is that the actual replies would be buried in the flood of non-replies... much like actual discussion here is being buried by the endless SPAMMING of this non-idea!
Heh, are there CP/M attacks too? Maybe an NT attack?
Sorry that just made me laugh...
Seriously, I get their own inhouse generated spam all the time. I got tired of checking for new messages and getting their ads.
Wonder how it feels when the shoe is in the other foot eh?
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Just make a -real- email address with the word spam in it. I have the address spamme@ever.mine.nu as my email address for slashdot, and it is a -real- email address. However, the harversters have [for the past several months, anyhow] ignored it completelt
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man sig
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
Shitty or not, I doubt even Verizon deserves this sort of assault. Spamming has really gotten out of control to reach this point. Still, it does make you wonder, what sort of organization would make a "malicious spam assault" rather then just using more conventional server-cracking forms.
Unlike dial-up where
Rough links do shake the darling buds of May, And DHCP's lease hath all too short a date (by 5 minutes on a long download usually)
Yeah, I like to say my email is root@127.0.0.1
Most web forms only check to see if it's in a proper TLD and contains an @ symbol. Local host is usually accepted.
This is why they should get filters, or atleast block some subnets... The problem with hotmail is that they don't let you block more then 250 spammers.
That'd probably result in the users who installed those pluggin's getting their accounts suspended. Spammers use email to advertise their products. A plug in as you described would simply create annoyance.
Here's how it would work. I tell my ISP to activate the money-based spamproofing system. Anybody who e-mails me for the first time is asked to agree that it costs them 25 cents per e-mail. (When I first activate the service, I can upload my e-mail address book so that my actual friends don't have to pay and never get the request to authorize the 25-cent micropayment.) If someone e-mails me and it's not spam, I click a button to say I don't want their money.
This solves the spam problem forever. We even have a micropayment infrastructre in place: PayPal. OK, PayPal has a lot of problems, such as being essentially incapacitated for the last month, but at least they take customers from a bunch of countries outside the U.S. now. One hopes they'll either add enough servers this xmas season or else that somebody will build a better alternative.
Find free books.
not fulltime job; just copy and paste to http://spamcop.net/ Been doing that for some time. Easy and painless.
Microserf: 18.5% slashdot corrupt
There are a few sites I visit daily where I get constant pop-up windows that are adds for verizon. Who are they to complain about unwanted adds.
As one of the people who was recently spammed by Verizon, I can only say that I applaud the people who spammed them right back.
It serves them right, and maybe next time they will think twice before sending out mass unsolicted commercial Email.
The plugin could even reuse the spammer's relays which passed the email to your mailbox. That way you double or triple their bandwidth load for every spam message they pass.
I got mail this morning on my Verizon account that was sent last Wednesday (5 days). Verizon makes this sound like it is something new, though; in reality their mail started having problems on November 20, and it hasn't recovered since. In addition, Verizon's NNTP server has been our of service more than in for the past 3 weeks. I'm not sure I believe that spam is the problem; it's just an excuse for their inability to operate an ISP competently.
Verizon's servers are spammer's heaven. Their mail servers are blacklisted by ORBS and I have often gotten connect errors when trying to send mail -- so their servers are probably not administered properly. That's why I keep my mail elsewhere. I have had severe DSL outages in the past with them -- not lately though.
Consider this, bunky:
Spam is considered legitimate. Say there's 500,000 spammers worldwide(a conservative number). Let's say 10% of them have your e-mail address on file. That's 5,000 spammers. Let's say that a further 10% of THOSE spammers spams on a daily basis(not an unreasonable figure).
That means that you, my friend, will receive 500 spam e-mails PER DAY. How are you going to deal with being deluged by 500 worthless e-mails daily? And that's a conservative number! Spamming is too easy - bulk snail-mail costs some serious $$$ to do, spam is free. 520 hours on AOL and some spam software for $50. The problem with spam is that if it's allowed to grow in use, it will inevitably grow to the point that any e-mail messages of use are drowned out by the noise. And what about occasional users? There are some people that only get 5 messages a week from friends! Can you imagine what a PAIN it would be to sort through 3500 messages just to find those 5 that you want to read? E-mail would be crippled by it, USENET already has been largely crippled by spam.
The S/N ratio of the net has been dropping steadily for a LONG time, it's doomed if people don't try to fight that trend.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
If more big networks get bogged with eeevil Spam, maybe they might rally together and stop it.
Sounds to hard to do. The UUnet story mentions all the hassles (weeks to stop Spammer's accounts).
Maybe they should learn to use SPAMCOP?
I can confirm that this is not true. I cannot relay through Verizon from my office, even though my headers all say Verizon.
What can we do to solve this problem once and for all?
What weaknesses are there in SMTP that, if fixed,
would improve the situation?
That isn't a very good analogy.
First you need to seperate people who make vulnerabilities public from those who actually use them. Those who use them need to be punished. Those who point them out (assuming proper notice/time was given to the vendor to fix it) should not be.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
When you think about these facts a little, you'll realize your plan doesn't make much sense.
These days, a lot of smart people put a lot of effort into nixing spam, and I still get 10-20 pieces a day. Why? Because it's so cheap! Even if 99.99% of people don't respond, that's still a hundred responses per million spams. A bulk mail campaign with a response rate like that would get the staff fired, but if you make a few bucks on each one, then that's enough to pay for the spam.
So since spam is orders of magnitude cheaper than paper mail, then making it legit will mean that you will get orders of magnitude more spam than you do paper junk mail. Everybody who now buys tiny ads in the backs of newspapers will realize that they get more for their money by sending our a million spams.
And since it's so cheap, they won't be careful where the send them, either. Will you still feel that spam is better when you're getting 100 a day? 200 a day? Your local newspaper has a lot more ads than that every day, and there are a lot of local newspapers in the world. I now regularly get spam for businesses on other continents, and the Internet has barely touched large parts of the world.
I agree with you that paper junk mail is annoying and a waste of good trees. But if you want to save trees, put a 100% tax on non-recycled paper and put the money into forest conservation. Don't ruin our in-boxes in hopes of making some Faustian pact with the marketing industry.
I have my own domain, and just use Verizon for connectivity. My domain _happens_ to live elsewhere, on its own box, but you can get your own domain for $20 + $10/month. It's great for bragging rights, running your own email accounts, and webhosters don't make as enticing targets for spammers. Also, that's what they DO, not some bandwagon that an old, crufty Telco decided to jump on. Check out He.Net for an example.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The punishment for spamming should be death by hanging.
Local ISP users get mail bounced because spam has put them over quota, UU net has to double capacity to keep up & Verizon can't deliver e-mail in a timely manner. Every one of these people has been denied service do to unsolicted commercial e-mail.
Everyone says "taking a spammer to court takes to much time", "not worth the effort", "To costly and to long", "you can't get blood from a stone", "It won't do any good". It seems to me that if you hurt spammers finacially, and hunt them down that eventually they start to go out of business. Make the risks TOO high for them, make the profits too low.
I know they can spam from bora bora (save those flames for somone else), but you I can put bora bora IP's in my router and be done with the whole mess. It makes it MUCH easier to force them into a corner, and then wall up that corner a la Count of Monte Crisco.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Every time some web site/software company makes me give them my email address, I enter "support@verizon.com" or "sales@verizon.com". I guess it has just added up so much that it brought their servers down.
Check your logs. Did you find lots of bad addresses? Basicly did you find that someone (on a fast link) would hit your mail server with about 30 addresses of guessed user ids, disconnect and try again with a different set? If so, let me know. If you have any govermental or infrastructure clients, I've got a phone number of who you need to contact.
Ermmmmm... that's all fine and dandy, but do you think that that's his real name? Do you think that all those pitchmen you see on late night informercials are actually legally named as who they appear as? So, in essense, if it makes you feel like you're doing something constructive, fine. But you're not making one iota of difference for your cause.
It is a privilige, one earned by being judicious. Choose your ISP carefully, have "spam magnet" accounts to give to websites, and use the common name mangling techniques. Remember, when you signed up with your ISP, you agreed to let them spam you, if you don't like it, find one that won't.
Ashes of Empires and bodies of kings,
The truth about Michael
Oh, piffle. Give e-mail spammers 5-20 of hard labor cleaning up landfills and planting new trees, and both problems are solved. :-)
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Okay, well that also makes kevin mitnick guilty, all "grey" and "black" hat hackers guilty (common /. causes). And hey, if you visit my website and i didn't explicity invite you, aren't you then breaking the law? And how would i invite you? I email you, because if you got angry you could say iw as unnecessarily using your hard drive space to store the invitation to...
Forget it.
If
I don't understand your spacing.
Now that a large company has been mesureably and obviously affected, I really hope they take legal action. I generally don't support legal action, but against spammers, well, there are exceptions... Same with DoS monkeys... erm, kiddies ;).
SSL Certificate
How come, according to slashdot, spammers are evil and need to be made an example of, yet website hackers, "security consultants" and the like actually deserve protect, under the guise that all they're doing is pointing out vulnerabilities and providing tools to expedite process of the vendor releasing a patch?
Feel sorry for everyone who won't be getting their mail though. Maybe this will change their policy on selling email lists.
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
I'd hope the next time that someone complains to Verizon about spam, Verison would do something about it.
Many ISPs, don't take it seriously. This might help.
Fight Spammers!
That got me to thinking. Back when I reviewed shareware for Windows Magazine, I came upon an interesting program whose only purpose was to make a HTML page with randomly generated false e-mail addresses.
;-) ) I'll leave that to someone else to figure out too. (Oh, and if you find this useful, just drop me a reply or an e-mail.) Windows users will need to have ActivePerl installed.
;-)
One way spammers compile their e-mail address lists is to troll Web pages and pick up as many e-mail addresses as they can. By making one of these "Spam Bait" pages, and linking to it from a main page, you'd poison the spammer's database with nonworking random e-mail addresses. Of course this was a Windows-only binary and the web page has, over the course of time, vanished. So I've recreated the functionality in a Perl Script.
Some notes before I give you the code: I made and tested this script on a Windows 2000 machine. Some tweaking will, no doubt, need to be done for this to run on Linux or other platforms. I'm sure there are plenty of people here who can do that. (Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Linux machine right now.) Also, it occurred to me that you could make this into a CGI Perl script that, on every load, would give a new set of random addresses. (So spammers might think they hit a treasure-trove of e-mails.
I was also going to just paste the code here, but Slashdot doesn't seem to let people post perl code. (I'm sure they have their reasons.) So I've upload it to my web site. Here's the link: http://www.urateit.com/jlevine/spam-baiter.zip
Hope you enjoy baiting the spammers.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
One would think that a company as large as Verizon would know enough to stop spam, like don't allow relaying or spam filters. I think the larger a company gets the dumber they become....
---- In a world without fences who needs gates.
I've had verizon DSL since february. It was down about 30% of the the time for 3 months. They blamed old wires! The truth is they didn't know what they were doing and their (NT?) servers were crashing all the time.
Their mail server has been playing up for weeks. sometimes it takes an hour to connect to the SMTP server. Now they are blaming spam, yeah sure.
So, I'm supposed to feel bad for Verizon? I get basketloads of spam either from them, or from mail systems hosted by them. The do nothing when you send in a complaint! Sorry, not this little black duck...
When I asked, they said there was a huge email backlog upstream from them, and that their own machines choked holding all the messages that they couldn't deliver.
The strange part is that after the problem was cleared, response time on their machines got way better. Not just better than it was on Friday; better than has has been for weeks.
If that's actually a question, then no a regulatory body would not be an attractive solution. What the heck would they do, put meters on everybody's mail client?
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This was sent to an address I have never used, the spammer they hired built it from a domain I owned and my first name. I'm sure this information was supplied to them by network solutions.
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
If you go to DSL Reports, you'll see that Verizon is one of the worst DSL ISPs out there (it's not THE worst just yet; PSN gets that honor since they're pulling the plug on their customers in January). Add to that Verizon's recent ad blitz (despite the pleas from the DSL department to stop), and you've got a notoriously bad company; sort of like Ultor in Red Faction.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Took a look at that page and it looks very bogus. It stinks of a spurned ex-lover who is jealously trying to ruin her life. The pathetic little hax3r intro followed by him immediately somehow getting a screenshot of her screen (without claiming that she was already infected by a trojan) just seems completely and utterly bogus.
Well, I don't live in a small town but my current residence receives an inordinate amout of junk mail. I happen to know the person who lived here before me and she admitted to buying clothing occasionally through a certain mail order catalogue.
Just last Friday I received 3 different catalogues and SEVEN miscellaneous envelopes telling me I'd already won billions.
These catalogues I receive are from very different companies - clothing mainly, but also woodworking, house/home/gardening stuff - you name it, I probably get it by post. Not only that, but I receive doubles of certain publications. This time of year (Xmas) I sometimes get three copies of Victoria Secret in one day....
...
...sorry, what was I complaining about?
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
This is a great example of how spam mail is a waste of resources the same way it is a waste of resources to use a fax machine to spam other fax machines. Of course its illegal to do that and we need the same legislation to do the same to spammers.
I'm just sitting around waiting for this to hit critical mass, when mostly every mailserver and mailbox is jammed packed with crap. Maybe we'll start seeing some attention hungry politicians on TV giving a speech on how "our information age wil come to a crash unless we pass this measure immediately."
they were "identitical")
What language is that in, Englilish?
Funny, many spammers say the exact same thing. And they'd never lie, would they?
-jon
I used to get a lot of spam. Interestingly, my Mindspring mailbox was really heavy on spam. Interesting, because I NEVER used that email address ,or gave it to anyone for anything, which means my (former) ISP sold it or gave it to spammers. This from the company that hyped their "spaminator" email filters. :)
On my other accounts, I started to get spam shortly after they were set up. For six months or so, I was religious about doing a full inspection of all spam -- headers, traces, whois, port scans, etc. I'd send a spam report to every ISP between me and the source, and sometimes to an attorney general somewhere. For intransigent cases, I'd mail-bomb them, sometimes attaching 100+ copies of the particular spam to the reply and sending it every @culprit.com address I knew.
Now, I must be on some special "don't ever spam this guy ever" list, because I just don't get spam anymore.
:)
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Did you even read the article? This more than proves what we've been saying all along - SPAM uses huge amounts of bandwidth. How can you even think that it only wastes a 'miniscule amount of bandwidth'?
Maybe the amount of SPAM you recieve is 'minuscule', but multiply that by the 200 million or so e-mail addresses (there are many more E-mail addresses than ISP customers) and you have a serious hog. Throw in the millions of failed SPAMs (many spammers use automatically generated 'guesses' at e-mail addresses, with a huge failure rate) that the servers still have to handle, and maybe you'll see the light...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Forget 'whois' lookups, spammers often set up domains which all list each other as DNS providers or contact addresses.
Do a traceroute to the spammer's site. Note the site (or two or three) at the end of the host list.
Now do the 'whois' lookup for those sites. If it's just an IP address use whois.arin.net to get the ISP.
Next, subscribe every admin, technical, zone, and billing contact, as well as postmaster@, root@, sales@, to other spammer's mailing lists. Post the adresses in USENET postings so harvesters will snag 'em.
Crues to the ISP hosting the spammer? Yep. That's the idea. Make it so no ISP will want the bother. Repeat for the next site or two up the chain. Any ISP providing to a smapper firendly ISP is just as evil as if they sent the spam themselves.
I'd be quite interested to know if anyone knows when Verizon thinks the problem/attack started. I'd also like to know if any other medium-to-largish ISPs had similar problems in the same time frame...
Also, if it was an attack, how was it launched? Anyone know? I can't see someone sending gigabytes of mail from their home dial-up connection, so I'm thinking zombies again...
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
6 test messages duplicate message = 4 times instant delivery = 0 delayed 1 hr = 4
I also just got 4 messages this morning that were 2 days old.
Having dealt with Verizon/BA about my DSL line that was up only 70% when I first got it, I got to know their tech support procedure pretty well. As far as I can tell, they do not inform their customers of an outage while it is happening. They usually wait until it has either hit the news or 200 people call to complain before they even acknowledge it. They will deal with it when they get the chance, but it also seems that their high level network and system people only work 9-5 five days a week.
I wish I could switch to another broadband company, but nothing else is available in my area.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
I think the body can anylise the situation and pass Laws or guidelines. Everybody has to obey the law - it's a simple and effective deterrant.
Also, a government body would be an excellent focal point of ideas and possible solutions. It would bring those who want to seek a solution together, and give them a voice and some muscle.
Just my opinion, anyway.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
I saw what you are talkin about but
I wasn't clear in my post
the acual spam recieves very little return
1,000,000 spams how many replies?
If you just called the 800 number
it would take a very small percentage of
antispammers clog thier phone system with
phone spam and every 800 number call cost them money
It's simple math
we could easily kill all spam with 800 numbers
yes thats only one type of spam but it
would be a pleasent victory
:)
http://Lenny.com