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AOL Sues Porn Spammers
MasterOfDisaster writes "c|net reports "that in a crackdown on spam, America Online is suing a company that owns and operates pornographic Web sites, accusing it of sending junk e-mail to AOL members." My favorite part is the comment from the accused, "We do not knowingly profit from unsolicited e-mail." Ah, blessed ignorance.
Cussing's bad, Mm'kay. You shouldn't cuss, cause if you cuss- you're bad, Mm'kay.
-p4
(c) All Rights Released.
Ummm...do you think that USPO mail doesn't cost the taxpayer anything?
Oops. I see your point. Sorry 'bout that. I was still kind of out of it when I read your post (too much surfing, way too little sleep), so I was just focusing on the part about using the RBL, DUL, and ORBS. And I agree with you. Hell, if someone didn't want to run Linux, they could use something like Mercury Mail, which is free and runs on Windows. My personal pet peeve are the old Silicon Graphics machines with the broken Sendmail--the one that is not only open but also doesn't record the connecting IP in the headers. Most of these machines must have found their way to places like China and Korea, as that seems to be where they're getting abused, and good luck getting anyone there to fix them or even to respond to your relay report. My only consolation is that the machine will eventually end up on enough blacklists that one big spam run will cause it to choke to death on undeliverable mail. Then the administrator is forced to deal with it.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
It is disturbing to me that AOl picked out "Porn Spammers" to sue. Do I get Porn Spam. Sure. Do I get MLM spam? Yes. Do I get semi-illegal decoder baox Spam? Fairly regularly.
Singling out Porn smacks of the deep thread of puritanism that still runs through America and gives me a 1st Ammendment chill.
I'm sorry, but i don't feel like leading legal mumbo-jumbo... :)
What you're saying though, can't be true IMO, because why would Fedex offer 2 or 3 day delivery, and UPS offer 5 or 7 day ground delivery? That'd be breaking the law according to the rules you laid out.
Spamming is done by spammers. Not spaming by Spamers.
Hint1: 127.0.0.1 is IP for "this host which I'm currently (ab)using."
Hint2: abuse is (nearly) a required email address on any mail server.
Now picture in your mind a mail server that doubles as a webbrowser server. True, a very bad idea in the first place, but what is management for if not for the bad ideas?
Stefan.
It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
Real simple answer to this one. My firends and I all sit in N/A mode. I think I've gotten two or three spam messages in several years. We can still send each other messages, but no spam - ah its wonderful :)
It's very simple. The purpose of trademark law is to allow a way for a company, such as AOL, Red Hat, SuSE, IBM or whatever, to protect their name by preventing the name from being used in a way that would cause 'confusion' (that's a term of art in TM law) in the minds of consumers.
... , but that's the legal reasoning, and in a lawsuit, that's ALL that counts).
Where a spammer runs afoul of trademark law in forging an e-mail header is this: by making it appear that an e-mail originated from an AOL server, the message allegedly meets the requirements of AOL's AUP and ToS, and is therefore, "approved" by AOL. (I know, I know
As in ANY IP lawsuit, the infringer is liable for treble damages PLUS attorney's fees. I saw, in another thread, that AOL's spam volume could be as high as 30% of total mail handled. Given the cost of handling that mail, the damages for handling 550'd mail from people who have the capability to bounce mail coupled with the cost of handling the complaints to abuse@aol.com and postmaster@aol.com add up to a substantial amount of money.
I hope AOL succeeds in this lawsuit and that they continue in this vein. The trademark infringement issue is a lay-down winner. I'd like to see hotmail (another prime victim of header forgery) adopt this tactic also.
Spammers have been using "throw-down" ISP accounts for access and header spoofing for years. They don't care if they lose their account because they can always open another. Making it cost them money to forge headers and pass off the cost of 550's to someone else just might bring the practice to an end.
Spamming exists because it allows the advertiser to transfer the cost of his advertising to the recipient. This is an evil practice. Battling spammers is something that is not for the faint of heart. One spam-fighter of whom I am aware has received death threats because of his activities. For all it's faults, AOL should be supported for it's apparently novel tactic.
Regards,
ninewands
utter rubbish
>> reap the benefits of spam
Benefits?
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Also, one thing to keep in mind is that if you are on AOL, and you get e-mail from blah@aol.com (unless it's from a mailing list or something) then the address is most likely forged.
To clarify: not all spam you get from AOL-based email addresses actually comes from AOL members. They're often forged. I have seen AOL in action, as it were, and since AOL-based email addresses are shown to AOL members without the domain, the presence of the domain in the source address proves more or less conclusively that spammers often forge their headers to fake an AOL source.
You might think that spammers would realize they shouldn't spam AOL members with obviously faked AOL source addresses, but apparently they're not a bright lot.
inigima
I love receiving AOL CDs because I know the money they wasted could have been used for more TV ads which I find more annoying...
Because, Santa, receiving AOL CDs doesn't cost you a penny, whereas receiving spam EMail does cost you.
"But I've never had to pay for it!" you cry.
Actually, you do. The Euro recipients know this right up front, because they get cold-cocked with per-second telephone access charges.
Americans *should* know it, if they'd only just think for a moment. They get higher ISP charges and/or go over their transfer limits because of the spam email.
Yes, yes. You only pay $35/month for your whizbang ADSL connection. But that $35/month *includes* the cost of spam. Your ISP is paying for the transfer, storage and processing of that spam EMail -- and you *know* that the costs are passed on to the consumer, with a few percent tacked on for good luck.
You pay for the spam, sure as god/dog made little green apples.
Ergo, no double standard.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
OTOH, as said earlier, there is somewhat of a hypocracy in their user agreement...
CAP THAT KARMA!
Moderators: -1, nested, oldest first!
SIG: HUP
The UUNET spammers collective is still being allowed to operate -- one of them tried a stealth port25 probe today but hit our firewall:
00:22:03 (EST) 04 January 2001: Port 25/smtp ACK/no_SYN connection DENIED from: 1Cust180.tnt38.det3.da.uu.net (63.44.201.180)
Coincidentally no doubt, this was quickly followed by the Harvard dialup scanners collective checking our netbios availability:
23:28:10 (EST) 04 January 2001: Port 137/netbios SYN connection DENIED from: sfp220-198.harvard.edu (128.103.220.198)
Someone please tell me UUNET and Harvard are doing something to stop these guys.
Scroogle
Stop using FUD.
*plonk*
Stefan.
It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
Stefan.
It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
If anyone installed AOL on my computer I'd be forced to kill them...
That may be true for some real-world businesses who are taking their first dip on the web, but it's clearly not true in this case. All of the big players in online porn are fucking brilliantly net-savvy. They keep up with the bleeding edge of technology, and they know exactly what they're doing.
If you read between the lines you'll see that Cyber Entertainment set up the anti-spam policy as a weasel dodge. As long as they don't do the actual spamming, and "don't ask don't tell" about spam sent by their licensees, the devilish contract stays intact. AOL is working hard to prove that even without direct orders to spam, their "wink wink nudge nudge" is bad enough.
Personally, I'd love to see eBay shot down for the same exact thing. eBay knows damn well that their auctioneers spam the hell out of off-topic Usenet groups. Unfortunately, Usenet doesn't keep a pack of rabid lawyers on retainer...
I wasn't really going for funny as much as I was going for clever.
-p4
(c) All Rights Released.
Isn't the junk mail (including AOL CDs) that comes to my real life mailbox just as annoying and using more resources than Spam? Why the double standard? Where is the clamor for ridding ourselves of *all* junk mail?
Dancin Santa
I was in Wal-Mart (large variety chain for the non US'ers) last night, and what did i see just inside the entrance? A display with a sign that said "Get 750 free hours" and under it was a container full of about a thousand AOL gold cd's. Needless to say, it was creepy.
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
If these spammers go out of business, will I still be allowed to opt-in to their helpful pr0n newsletters?
Dancin Santa
Set it so that it doesn't accept messages from users not on your contact list. Works for me.
In the UK you can opt out of paper junk mail by registering your name and address with the Mailing Preference Service. After I registered I got no more paper junk mail addressed to me. Occasionally I get junk mail sent to my address which have no name on them.
Freepost 22
London
W1E 7EZ
I was wondering whether there is a similar service in other countries?
Scroogle
My friend has an aol account. I used it the other day and boy, spam doesn't get any worse than aol's own!
Upon logging in, there were a total of 4 popup windows! Yes 4! The first one, you had to cancel before you were even let in to aol. If you didn't acknowledge it you'd be prevented from logging in.
Then there's another one, the "welcome" screen, that you can't close. All you can do is minimize it.
But of course, Aol doesn't tell you you can disable 3 out of 4 of these annoying popup windows. To get to it you have to dig real deep into aol's "personal preferences".
Screw aol. They're the biggest hypocrites if I've ever seen one.
-p4
(c) All Rights Released.
They try to, at least from my experiences. I've gotten dozens of screen names, if not the entire account canceled, but I honestly have no idea if that will do anything. Does AOL block addresses? In other words, if Joe Spammer at 1313 Jerk St., East Armpit, SC is a spammer who loses his AOL account, is anyone from that address banned, or can Joe just continue to buy new accounts?
Also, one thing to keep in mind is that if you are on AOL, and you get e-mail from blah@aol.com (unless it's from a mailing list or something) then the address is most likely forged.
Kierthos
(Yeah, I use AOL... at least it's not MSN)
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Are you suggesting that we create a violent new super-race of attack-nutria to sic on spammers? I'd go along with it, but as folks in Looserana have found, there's no market for nutria pelt. Surely spammer pelt is equally worthless.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Oh, I dunno... email? I'm reasonably certain that correcting timezones is off-topic to this conversation. As is this topic.
- Remove the spam for email.
That is what your beef is about? What the hell is a "webbrowser server" anyway?
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Imagine those spammers running with Boba Fett on their ass!
Woo hoo!
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NO TOUCH MONKEY!
The server from which the users start their webbrowser.
Stefan.
It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
Since AOL is suing spammers, we should then sue AOL because the users are much more affected than the ISP. Sure they suck down more bandwidth at the source, but it's the users' rights that are being violated and their time greatly wasted as well. If AOL scores a buck from spammers, then I want my share of that buck for being one of the end victims.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
14 billion more to go...
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Ok listen here, this is AMERICA. When we start to persecute those who like a little spam in their porn, who's next? The very framers of our hallowed constitution so many years ago?
If we start with the little people, the men and women of otherwise fine moral upstanding nature who just happen to enjoy copulation with meat products in all its varied depravity, then who among us can truly claim to be an AMERICAN?
Come on people, this is what
I think it was Mark Twain that said "When you lose the freedom of expression, then you're just fucked." Weighty words indeed.
They had a horrible time getting rid of it, and were losing the battle, until they came up with a unique solution.
Someone did some research, and figured out how to cook it, and promote it as a delicacy. The result was that suddenly you had a whole bunch of people hunting down the critter so they could cook it themselves, or sell it to a restaurant, or whatever.
The population is now very nicely under control, and is no longer an ecological threat.
So what has this got to do with spam?
It is my contention that spam will continue to exist as a problem until we make it profitable to go after folks who are spammers. Then it becomes a business.
that is why I have advocated a spam licensing program in the past, so that it would become legal for everyone to bill the spammers for traffic, etc. and business would pop up whose sole purpose in life would be to hunt spammers. The spam hunters would get a piece of the action, and send you a check.
It has to become advantageous for someone to have a business billing spammers on a general basis. Everyone hates bill collectors. We could turn them on the spammers.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
> What is it with Red Hat (l)users anyway?
Don't you know?
Installing Linux turned them into a 1337 455 h4x0r d00d.
*sigh*
-=-
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
That was a wonderful, nearly-incoherent post. I think I've got the gist of what you're saying, though, and I regret to inform you that you're wrong.
It isn't "really" another form of a company attempting to get your attention.
It *really* is a way for a company to force you to subsidize their marketing costs, whether you purchase the product or not.
In all other cases of advertising, you implicitly choose to suppose the costs of advertising when you choose to purchase the product.
About fifteen years ago, an exactly analogous situation existed: spam fax. In those days, faxes were thermafax: they used special paper that was bloody expensive.
Spam marketers had no problem using war-dialers to spread their marketing information to every fax machine they could. The costs to businesses were obvious, as their thermafax paper was rapidly consumed.
Unsolicited faxes were made illegal. It was decided that no business should be able to force others to pay for its advertising costs.
It's only because EMail costs are hidden, mainly unaccounted for and are new-tech, that the governments haven't stepped in to ban EMail spam.
The legal and moral issues have already been determined, by the previous spam-fax ban.
Your points re: porn advertising, AOL et al are irrelevent.
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A lot of people seem to be under the impression that since their own personal download time for spam messages is next to nothing in comparison to regular browsing traffic, it can't be costing them much. As a sysadmin for an ISP, I'd have to disagree. Spam in general raises operating costs quite a bit, ad that's what a customer's bill pays for. What users aren't thinking about is that it isn't just a few users that get spammed. Let's say a mid-sized ISP, with maybe 40,000 customers, suffers a spam attack in which 50% of their customers receive a 5k e-mail. You're looking at almost 100 MB of traffic generated by just one spammer in a short period of time.
What does it matter how many users you have? The useful traffic/spam ratio is still the same.
Actually it is quite common for domains to forward mail addressed to any part of the domain to the mail server, i.e. if I send mail to jupiter.math.uiuc.edu (one of the computers in the lab) it gets sent to math.uiuc.edu (the main mail server). Therefore if I go to the computer lab in the math building and send an email using Netscape to abuse@127.0.0.1, it will get read by sysadmin. Stefan is right.
Possible, but you loose the functionality too... You're better off not allowing multi-recipient messages, that way you get much less spam, the spammers can't use the mirabilis/aol servers to amplify their traffic, and you always get their ip...
>I don't *like* spam, and I don't think I should be *sent* spam, but the "time to download" argument doesn't hold water.
Kinda...
I'm affrade the "Americans pay for it too" argument isn't reasonable..
UK has this small problem of a phone monopoly who is also an ISP and wanabe Internet monopoly.. (Not yet but not for lack of trying)
But some Americans DO pay for time on-line or bandwith... charges for calling an ISP long distence mean spam costs money..
Also we don't allways pay directly.. We all pay for spam in the form of disk space... Your ISP pays for disk space on the bulkload so the added spam dosn't need to be added in..
Same for desktop users.. larg hard disk is used for e-mail, data files, porn, etc.. You really don't notice becouse the spam is really less noticable than the disk space used by your web browser cache. But when using a PCS or a Palm pilot your storage is considerably smaller. Spam could mean buying a unit with more memory or buying an upgrade to what you have.
Also some of us use free services... my free e-mail accounts grant me 10 megs to 30 megs of disk space to store e-mail.
Also spammers may seem rude but at least they try to matain a one time contact rule. Some spammers won't do that. The worst spam I got came from CyberPromo itself.. once every 30 min.. every day.. around the clock... That nonsence adds up..
While thats not happening anymore... Spam means BBS sysops can't afford a Usenet feed (and most ISPs won't provide same)... the FidoNet gateway is (basicly) shut down... etc... We may not be paying in dollers but we most certenly pay in lossed connectivity.. lost time.. and lost posabilitys...
I don't actually exist.
Well, you can't sue them because it didn't cost you anything. However, I don't mind getting AOL CD's anymore, they come in the DVD style cases now. Free CD cases for Charlie's CD-Rs!
No, you're thinking of a bill that was introduced into Congress in 1998 by Sen. Frank Murkowski. It passed the Senate as a rider to S. 1618 but died in the House after organizations such as CAUCE and FREE mounted a huge phone-in campaign. They were against the bill because it was seen as pro-spam because it implied that spamming was fine as long as the spammer provided a way to get removed from his list. Aside from the obvious problems with an opt-out system, there were major loopholes. For example, there wasn't much to prevent a spammer from removing you from one list, then adding you to others later, since you'd have to somehow figure out that the same person had spammed you twice. There was also nothing to prevent your address to be sold or given to another spammer. So, Party A could spam you, get your remove request, remove you, then give your address to Party B, who is spamming on Party A's behalf, to spam you again. (There was no penalty for the person _sponsoring_ the spam, only for the one actively sending it at that moment, so each and every spammer could spam you until you asked for removal.) Finally, neither you nor your ISP could sue for damages if a spammer didn't remove you. All you could do was report the spammer to the Federal Trade Commission, who had sole authority to levy penalties. Aside from these issues, ISPs were afraid that the bill implied a right for their customers to spam if they followed certain guidelines, and the ISPs feared that they would lose the ability to enforce their AUPs. For example, what if a spammer obtained a Hotmail address to receive remove requests, and Hotmail closed the account. Could the spammer argue in court that Hotmail had no right to do this, since the spammer was using the account to perform a legally-required function, namely, to receive and honor remove requests, as required by law? Luckily, this monstrosity died before it became law.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
"We aren't knowingly making money off of spam"
This dosn't mean "We are making money from spam we just fain ignorence" but "We never bothered to learn what spam is"
Thats the problem with a lot of busnesses. Our luck that spam simply dosn't occure to most people when they first start doing busness on the net. When they try to addapt the old postal junk mail anolog they print up post cards and mail them out. I rember when TI did this.. The first postal junk mail I ever got reguarding the Internet,... I was kinda supprised... But it wasn't the last junk mail.
Still when someone new to the Internet dose his homework often Spam supplyers strike.. They latch on and teach the ways of spam... "Ohh ignore those techno dweeb hippys... they aren't up with the cutting edge..." or some such nonsence... By the time they run accrost matereal against spam they think it's all nonsence and BS.
Then they spam.. lost all credability.. lose money.. and drop off the face of the net never to return again...
Then there is the other side of this...
"Ignorence is bliss" the reply to the comment..
We've come to expect Spammers to lie.. but for many spam hunters this has lead to a gult before innocents addatude..
Just becouse a person says "We aren't knowingly proffiting from spam" dosn't mean "We fain ignorence and spam anyway" they could simply be saying "Look we aren't sending spam.. someone COULD be spamming in our name.. but it's not us" For someone new to spam it seems a reasonable assumption... "Fans" do all kinds of nutty things to premote someone they like.
(Linux advocates are a good example.. some are really painfully annoying...)
At times it's a matter of chilling out...
For a while it was a spammers tactic to clame support (in some way) from a larger company. AoL and Microsoft got hit with this and for a long time (Becouse AoL and Microsoft are "Bad guys" in other areas) people belived it..
But realisticly AoL and Microsoft have allways been against spam... AoL sued CyberPromo on occasion and was sued by CyberPromo... Bill Gates wrote an artical trashing spam as a total waist of time.
So basicly when dealling with a potental spammer two rules apply.. Spammers lie convencingly and innocent victoms tell the truth unconvencingly...
Some times it takes work to find the guilty party.. some times it just takes work confermming the person you have in your claws really is as gulty as you think he is...
You can't use simple rules to base your judgment.. Spammers will just use this against you... They love it when you come down on an innocent victom... "See.. they just resisting change..." and they also love it when you pass over an gulty party.. "Encorcement..."
In the end I don't believe in letting them go easy I also don't believe in being trigger happy...
I don't actually exist.
If one is too many, why did it take 250k complaints before AOheLl cracked down!? They've really got their fingers on the pulse.
"Time to Download" does perfectly hold water.
If I browse with images enabled, I *choose* to. If I were paying exorbitant per-second connection charges -- and I was, back in the early 90's, using a slow modem and long-distance dial-in -- I would choose to browse with graphics disabled.
I'm not offered that choice with EMail. I have no simple method for blocking spam at the server. I must, at the least, download the headers.
Further, you're only considering the costs as an individual.
There are ISPs with *millions* of users. So multiply your figures appropriately: it works out to gigabytes of information. It's a huge waste of resources, including "time to download."
Get out of the "how does this impact me as an individual" box. The EMail servers must spend some amount of time to download the spam. It is significant.
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I would like to thank the asshole that modded me down and caused me to lose karma. Pointing out that an important message had been missed by the moderators isn't exactly off-topic. By moderating down people who are posting as non-anonymous you are promoting the type of anonymous-user bullshit that plagues slashdot.
$35/mo ISP cost, 3Gb xfer limit, ISP expects an average 20% use of xfer limit.
Effectively, $35/60Mb xfer per month.
Assume net profit of 10%. Actual cost of providing service, then, = $31.50. (Net profit includes *all* expenses of providing service, and is typically well below 15%, and usually gets down to less than 5%. I'm being very generous.)
Cost of providing service = $31.50/60Mb = 0.05 cents per kilobyte.
Average spam = 1k (HTML format these days, y'know). Average 20 spam received per day.
Average 60s time spent dealing with spam per day. Average wage $10/hr. Population = 330 million for North America. Average 30% population uses EMail daily.
Equals nearly 2 billion spams per day.
Equals nearly 2 gigabytes of spam xferred per day.
Equals $16.5 million dollars *per day* in wasted time.
Equals nearly $1 million dollars *per day* in wasted ISP resources.
Equals $64 **out of your pocket** every year, because those costs are ultimately paid for by you, the consumer of EMail services.
And that's an optimistic figure.
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Have you even read my post? You certainly have not understood it! If you had it would be clear why I use the email address I do.
I use abuse@127.0.0.1 for the very good reason that Junk emailers and mail-bombers, etc end up report themselves to their own Sysop.
If you can suggest a more elegant solution, I'll be happy to consider it.
Could this link reveal the real reason for your opposition to junk email traps. www.xs4all.nl appear to offer a bulk emailer service. http://www.xs4all.nl/helpdesk/algemeen/faq/bsmtp_f aq.html
The real pests on AOL run automatic Instant Messaging spambots. If you go into a chat room, your AOL Id is then visible, even to those outside the room, and their bots then IM you with their crap. They use the chatroom approach rather than just looking through the AOL directory to see who's on because the name of the chatroom lets them target their stuff more precisely. It's infuriating to have to turn off IMing just to chat in peace, and interferes with IMing those you're chatting with. I don't want these jackals sued, I want them imprisoned and tortured.
'My favorite part is the comment from the accused "We do not knowingly profit from unsolicited emai". Ah blessed ignorance'
The legal term for this kind of ignorance is called "plausible deniability." It is a clever way to escape guilt by claiming ignorance and surprisingly has worked for many people and companies.
I know this goes into another touchy subject but...why not charge spammers to email? Make the people that send out large quantities of unsollicited email pay postage. This would generate some lost revenue for the Postal System and it would make some companies think twice before clicking on "spam" err i mean send.
[ ]
The road to nowhere leads to me-Ozzy Osbourne
Storage and mail server meltdown may be issues, but the time spent downloading spam isn't. The banner ad at the top of the screen here was 10k. That's the equivalent of five moderately lengthy spam emails. A typical web mage has many images (adverts and non-adverts), and Joe User will surf through many pages in a day. Someone who never touches a web browser might see their charges rise due to spam, but anyone who browses even a little bit has a much, much bigger drain on their phone bill than spam would ever produce.
The ISP, too, is processing image and other binary data as the bulk of its traffic. Spam does load down the mail server quite a bit, but not the pipe.
I don't *like* spam, and I don't think I should be *sent* spam, but the "time to download" argument doesn't hold water.
Guys,
We should call this stuff what it IS. This is Unsolicited commercial email / junk email it is not Spam or done by Spamer's.
Spamer is my family surname (Try searching Google, you'll find hundred of us), and you can appreciate the unrestricted use of the expression Spamer, Spam, Spaming causes me (and my Brother who both work in IT/Internet industry) considerable problems. I've been flamed, mail bombed, had my machines attacked, this has become seriously unfunny!
This is plea that everybody be responsible, use and encourage others to use, the most accurate term Unsolicited commercial email / junk email.
Lately, I've been getting spammed from "sexyfun.net". Every time it comes from a different site with a STUPID ASSED sysadmin with his wide open for relaying mail server he probably never bothered to actually configure after initial installation.[*]
If this is the case then IMHO the vendor/supplier is at fault. There is no good reason to supply an MTA configured to relay at all. i.e. the sysadmin should have to explicitally configure it to relay. (Especially since the primary reason for needing third party relays at all is to handle crippled software which won't work without one.)
[*] Most of these sites are is asia, or some schmucks cablemodem/DSL conencted Red Hat box. What is it with Red Hat (l)users anyway?
It's Red Hat who are at fault here. They put together a system with inappropriate defaults. If they were doing this 15 years ago they might have some excuse, but there has been no legitimate reason for supplying an MTA which is an open relay in its "out of the box" configuration for well over a decade, assuming there ever was a good reason in the first place. Since RFC821 allows for relaying to be refused with a 551 return code.
I wish ICQ would do the same thing, I usually just leave it running, and about every 15-30 minutes you get a message asking you to llok at someones PornPics, I hate it.
maybe AOL suing will scare off the ICQ people.
I get tons of porn spam from AOL accounts. Shouldn't they make sure their own house is in order?
...but I'm afraid they'd sue me.
Got Warez?
If not (and I doubt it), of what law has Cyber Entertainment run afoul? The C|Net article only mentioned (as far as I bothered to read) that Cyber Entertainment violated its own anti-spam policy.
and i do not knowingly benifit from viewing such unsolicited e-mail... my brain isn't getting enough blood for it to register.
http://kered.org
LOL, I think the PorN people have too much PoRn and therefore able to make such comment.
Here's a great rainy day project that I've used a few times to keep the kids entertained, as well as to get rid of some of those pesky aol cd's: melt them all down into a disco ball! It's fun, it's functional, and best of all, you're recycling what's otherwise a collossal waste!
Please, it's spammers. The spell checker would be an invaluable addition to the Slashdot arsenal of text manipulation tools.
AOL is just jealous that they don't do adult entertainment, pushing their own so-called morality of an internet experience. Money has no morality. AOL is selling a 'family' aka clean-cut internet experience, but does allow their own news access to thousands of alt newsgroups, many containing adult binaries. They also seem to have no problem with the MLM spammers and other financial-freedom scammers that flood email inboxes. Considering the size of AOL, at what 97 BILLION USD market cap, they have the financial power to push an apparent "anti-spam" campaign that allows them to go after business models that compete with their own spam/marketing. By appearing morally 'right' within the box of their marketing campaign, they appear right vs their target appearing somehow "wrong". AOL is the pot calling the kettle black. It's all marketing. AOL is marketing anti-spam as a product, and simply being the big bully. If they were so solid with their argument then why are there so many people on AOL who spend so much time with adult entertainment and participate in responding to the so-called spam? Every been to an AOL chat room? As to the comment that CEN may profit from spammers, doesn't AOL profit as well? -pm
Check out their creepy orange teeth.
Cooking nutria.
Ha! I kill me!
Short of blocking all binaries, limiting crossposting and honouring cancels (and hoping they arrive in a timely fashion), there's not much else a server can do.
Why is it that whenever I send -anyone- on AOL mail, I start getting spam for a few days after?
I've long wondered whether AOL might be selling lists of external e-mail accounts to spammers.
Hi all,
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that since their own personal download time for spam messages is next to nothing in comparison to regular browsing traffic, it can't be costing them much.
As a sysadmin for an ISP, I'd have to disagree. Spam in general raises operating costs quite a bit, ad that's what a customer's bill pays for. What users aren't thinking about is that it isn't just a few users that get spammed. Let's say a mid-sized ISP, with maybe 40,000 customers, suffers a spam attack in which 50% of their customers receive a 5k e-mail. You're looking at almost 100 MB of traffic generated by just one spammer in a short period of time.
This isn't the worst of it, though. It used to be that spammers used lists of valid e-mail addresses to send their spam from... Now, going by what I've seen lately on our mail servers, spammers have taken up what I've coined as "shotgun spamming." They fire off e-mails alphabetically, from multiple sources simultaneously, choosing common last names and pairing them up with first initials, first names with last initials, etc, knowing full well that the bulk of their mail won't get anywhere, but be bounced back. During such an attack it is not uncommon for a server to get hammered with several thousand messages a minute assuming the hardware can handle it without deferring connections. By the time the attack is over, a server will have received somewhere along the lines of 100,000 to 200,000 messages.
The problem that makes this sort of spamming worse: MTAs will attempt to send a bounce message back to the sender if an address doesn't exist on a given server. The spammers know this, and don't want to catch all that traffic themselves, so guess what? They use an address that doesn't exist as well, causing the attacking server to bounce the bounce message our victim server sends right back again. This is known as a double bounce, and once it occurs, the message does finally die... But let's look at what damage has been done:
Using the hypothetical ISP outlined above, let's assume a fairly small attack of 100,000 5 kilobyte messages, of which 50% of the 40,000 customers end up receiving a mail... This results in the aforementioned 100 MB of traffic, and leaves us with 80,000 bounce messages to send. These bounces generally include the contents of the original message plus some additonal text describing the problem, so they'll be a little larger than 5k, but we'll ignore that.
Now, we've got another 400MB of traffic in bounce messages to send, to which we'll get another 400MB of double-bounces in reply. This results in 900MB (that's bytes, not bits, for hose of you counting at home) of total traffic from one such salvo of spam, not counting the endless amount of resends on each side since both servers will likely be deferring acceptance of messages by about halfway through, causing a buildup in each server queue and wasting HD space to boot. This is a fairly tame example.
I personally spent an entire week recently monitoring the mail queue of a mail server being shotgun spammed ("TURNKEY E-COMMERCE SOLUTIONS"), and shutting down acceptance of messages from their sources -- It was disgusting to see the Net's lowest life form next to child pornographers (spammers) sink to a new low in their tactics. Automated spam-blocking tools can't fully alleviate this problem, no matter how well designed. Heck, even non-automated attempts can't. As I was shutting down acceptance from one relaying machine, another would pop up and start spamming, taking the place of the one just blocked... It was like trying to fight a DDoS being done through SMTP!
Anyway -- in short, spam will cost you, not matter who you are. I'd recommend http://www.cauce.org for more information on this issue.
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
They had a little turf battle back in 1997 where bulk-mailer threatened to release five million AOL email addresses. It was all over the news at the time, because AOL was the big enemy on the horizon and it was fun to see them blackmailed. Now that I think of it, it still is. It takes something as evil as AOL to make spammers look nice by comparison.
Remember back in 1995(?) or so when AOL changed its terms of service to allow AOL to profit from charging businesses for access to AOL's mailing lists? The hypocrisy is revolting.
Read the rest of this comment...
Besides, all AOLers have to do is activate their quality "Spam Blocking Feature." Pfftttt.
And lastly, I'm suing AOL for the UNSOLICITED pop-up ads that they spring on me when I go to lau- ehh log into their site.
-p4
(c) All Rights Released.
didn't the telecommunicatios act of 1996(?) make it illegal to send someone unsolicited email without a way to be removed from a mailing list? or something like that?
i could live a little longer in this prison
I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me. Support free ASCII art!!! Yo! Dot matrix will never die!!!
And there isn't a massive amount the spammers can do about it. I don't see a lot of spam these days, the occasional one gets through though.
/dev/null anything which is addressed to the spamtrap account.
Basically, every time someone spams you, they give you information about themselves. You can use this information against the spammers.
Give the spammers a bunch of nice juicy spam trap aliases to fill their mailing lists then just
It's documented here:
http://www.yelm.freeserve.co.uk/spamido/
Excuse the spelling.
Deleted
So you mean all those girls don't really want to "hang out" with me? (...rejection embarassment setting in...) Here I thought I was just a |D|||V||D!!!
A point I found interesting was that AOL sued for header forgery, according to c|net
I'm not completely sure that this will stand up, nor that it should. Typing aol.com is, after all, necessary to send email. OTOH, intent does matter in trademark suits, so maybe this will be a useful tool.
Henry Troup, hwt@igs.net
One time I set up a blank AOL account and told no-one the address.. The result? When I had returned, my box was filled with spam mail. I have no idea how it got there, since my email is supposed to be secret, but I think the quality of the provider has something to do with it. Blocking certain domain names, and erroneous combinations (and/or putting the blocked mail in a seperate folder for later checking) are good ways to prevent Spam, but it seems these guys will stop at nothing. AOL says they have an Anti-Spam program, but it doesn't seem to be doing much good when I forward MY messages -- I don't even get an autoreply. Much less a personalized message at the end.
Seeka
Yesterday spammer Bill Graham somehow thought I was interested in spamming people to promote my site and phoned me up trying to sell his spam service. I told him I wasn't interested, so then he started asking me for referrals.
He started giving me his sales pitch about how they have servers in countries all around the world with providers who they have deals with so they can send bulk email. And their service never goes down because if one server is cut off then the others take over. He went on about how they have a deal with some foreign government who doesn't mind bulk email and this government has "technology" to prevent anyone from tracing the source. He also said that they have links at the bottom of each email to unsubscribe, however if the user clicks on it then it pops up a window, and if the user tries to close it, then more windows pop up.
I really couldn't believe what I was hearing. This guy was talking about it as though it was a legitimate business or something. Like running a bussiness where you have to hide and give people a hard time is on the level. Do these guys really believe that what they're doing is appreciated? I told him I wasn't interested. So then he started asking me if I was interested in website hosting for adult sites or knew anyone who was. Sheesh!
There are loads of uses for them. Coffee mug coasters is number 1 and I've tiled my cubicle with them but I have a pal with a sideline in cheap wallclocks. I don't know where he'd be without a steady supply of CDs from AOL.
Others think so too:
http://www.wanderlist.com/aolsux
http://www.networkboy.com/humor/aolcd.htm
http://www.aolwatch.org/disks.htm
Deleted
My company does business with Cyber Entertainment.
Specifically, we provide them with a fair number of email boxes.
While I certainly cannot attest for their practices with regard to AOL, I have noticed that they appear to follow their AUP closely; at least when it comes to us.
In every instance where a large number of complaints have come our way (generally because someone found one of the email boxes, discovered who the ISP was, and started hammering our abuse department), Cyber Entertainment has handled the issue quickly and professionaly, instantly terminating (or at least we never heard another word about it) their relationship with the offending spammer. In fact, we've seen numerous misplaced emails from former "webmaster affiliates" who are VERY upset that CE refuses to do further business from them.
Logically, I think CE views the whole thing (until now) as quite a scam.
Think about it: They get to have other individuals/companies spam for them, but once the spam is reported, CE can sever the relationship, not have to pay the spammer a dime, yet still reap the benefits of spam.
I'm sorry, but i don't feel like leading legal mumbo-jumbo... :)
Alas, that such mumbo-jumbo is what makes up the laws we live by (pardon my assumption that you're living in the U.S.
Here's the pertinant part:
Although the Postal Service, with exceptions, generally possesses a legal monopoly over the commercial carriage of ordinary "letters," see 18 U.S.C. 1693-99, 39 U.S.C. 601-06, 39 C.F.R. 310.2, a postal regulation authorized by 39 U.S.C. 601(b) has, since 1979, permitted private couriers such as FedEx,(1) subject to specified conditions, to carry "extremely urgent letters" for hire. 39 C.F.R. 320.6.
What you're saying though, can't be true IMO, because why would Fedex offer 2 or 3 day delivery, and UPS offer 5 or 7 day ground delivery? That'd be breaking the law according to the rules you laid out.
I think the key here is the word "guarantee" - FedEx et al guarantee delivery within the specified timeframe or your money back. The USPS cannot and will not make such a guarantee. Therefore they allow other carriers to compete, to some degree. This is, however, just my theory.
User logging on... 300 baud... 300 BAUD?!? (Click!) NO CARRIER
Sorry, third post regarding this issue already but I just can't help it. AOL, porn, and spam all in one subject line! Thank god this story had no ties to Napster or I might have had an annuerism.
-p4
(c) All Rights Released.