Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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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(c) All Rights Released.
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"
...but I'm afraid they'd sue me.
Got Warez?
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.
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NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.