When Spammers Try To Sue You

An Anonymous Coward writes: "I was looking for information about what recourse there is against spammers when I came across this site. It appears that Bernard Shifman sent email to several people trying to solcit employment via spam, and when they replied to him, asking him to stop, and reporting the spam to his ISP he threatend them with a lawsuit. It's a very entertaining read."

Comments

Hmm

[tyrani]

I hate spammers as much as the next person, but I've also sent my resume out using a nifty little script I bru'd up to a hundred or so companies.

Re:Hmm

[SirGeek]

I hate spammers as much as the next person, but I've also sent my resume out using a nifty little script I bru'd up to a hundred or so companies.

Was it in regards to actual employment postings or were you just on a fishing expedition ?

Unsolicited email is unsolicted. And depending on how many addresses he sent the resume to it may be justifyiably SPAM.

Re:Hmm

[AndyChrist]

And who at the companies were you sending these to? I should think HR departments should expect it. Others might not be so tolerant.

Re:Hmm

[Tsar]

I hate spammers as much as the next person, but I've also sent my resume out using a nifty little script I bru'd up to a hundred or so companies.

Really? Try these versions out:

• "I hate crackers as much as the next person, but I've also sent my DDoS client out using a nifty little script I bru'd up to a hundred or so companies."
• "I hate RIAA lawyers as much as the next person, but I've also sent my subpoenas out using a nifty little script I bru'd up to a hundred or so companies."

Remember, if you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the SPAM.

Re:Hmm

[yatest5]

Remember, if you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the SPAM.

Er, SPAM is unsolicited email. If the companies this guy sent his CV out to advertise that they want CV's sent to them, it ain't SPAM, whetehr it's an automated script or not!

Re:Hmm

[tyrani]

I should have been more specific in what my script does:

1. I enter in the e-mail address of a HR department or specific person.

2. A cover letter is generated (for the type of job), with the person's name and e-mail address in the header.

3. The cover letter is sent, along with my resume attached to it.

4. My resume has a small vbScript in it that communicates with my server telling me that it was viwed and by who.

So for simply entering in a persons name and e-mail address, I have a somewhat customized resume sent directly to them.

Although just used for fishing (as one person pointed out), it has been very effective, although considered a form of spam by this /.

Re:Hmm

[posmon]

My resume has a small vbScript in it that communicates with my server

Oh, sorry. It's not spam, it's a fucking TROJAN HORSE.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 funny +1 insightful

Re:Hmm

[Chris Burke]

Dude. 1-3 are cool, and not spam as long as you are generating these addresses manually, knowing they are HR department emails who are willing to accept resumes, which I'll assume is the case... except that...

4 is fucking lame. Delivery confirmation is an existant feature of email, which notifies the recipient of the request for confirmation. You vbscript is no better than any other spyware.
And such lameness makes me doubt that my assumption of non-lameness regarding 1-3 is correct. Lamer.

Re:Hmm

[tyrani]

Here are my reasons for the vbScript:

I want to know if MY resume was read by the person I sent it too, and if they shared it with anyone. It's MY resume and I want to know if it's being used. No different than the data Netscape or IE transmit each time I visit a website "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98), 192.168.1.2". My log looks almost identical to this.

This is far from lame, or spyware. Read reciepts couldn't be phrazed into a logfile like I have.

Re:Hmm

[tyrani]

It's not all that bad.

It looks just like a cover letter and a resume that I am sending to you.

I've had more success seding it to individuals inside of a company (ie: the department manager in charge of what I am qualified for), rather then the HR department.

Re:Hmm

[tyrani]

I'd have to agree with the moderator who overated this comment.

Although not a bad point, those are totally different situations. Of course I think that DDoS attacks are wrong, and you can't subpoena someone via e-mail (yet I hope).

My point is, that there is nothing wrong with sending a couple of hundred e-mail cover letters and resumes out to people who I think might be looking for someone with my qualifications.

Re:Hmm

[Chris Burke]

I want to know if MY resume was read by the person I sent it too, and if they shared it with anyone. It's MY resume and I want to know if it's being used.

Oh, well, as long as it's YOUR resume and not someone else's...

Sorry, no dice. Especially now that you've revealed that the vbscript follows the resume around, reporting on what is done with it without alerting those who are viewing it. That is exactly what spyware is. Having a personal interest in the data being spied is no excuse at all.

No different than the data Netscape or IE transmit each time I visit a website "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98), 192.168.1.2".

Except that once you have the html file on your HD, the file doesn't go sending more data back to the web server whenever you copy it or open it again. Unless, of course, it contains a spyware vbscript.
This is far from lame, or spyware. Read reciepts couldn't be phrazed into a logfile like I have.

I agree it's not lame. It's fucking lame. You might not think so, because if you did you wouldn't be doing it. But it sure as hell is spyware, and I can't imagine how you justify to yourself that it isn't. But your justification that read receipts can't be put in logfiles is 1) wrong, as Mozilla is open source so the answer is "Yes the can" and 2) the lamest excuse for infecting other people's machines with spyware I've ever heard. Not being able to get the data you want isn't a justification for the way you're getting it.
Go ahead. Go email all the people your script has identified as reading your email and tell them that the resume they had a hidden vbscript in it. I'd be willing to bet that most of them would agree with -me- that this was double plus uncool. Though I don't suggest you take that bet, since you'd be betting your employability. Or more, if they take your script to be the equivalent of computer intrusion.

Re:Hmm

[smallblackdog]

Webmaster? If Shiffman has anything to do with wouldn't it be 'Assmaster'?

Re:Hmm

[tyrani]

Thank you for your posts to my comment. I appreciate your point of view.

I think that our differing oppinions lie in what we define spyware as.

I see your point of view. Creating a script that sends data without the users knowledge is spyware, and the script that I've created does this. So your right.

My point of view says that my script logs useage, just like many software packages do. We don't give netscape, or apache hell for creating detailed (user traceable) logs and cookies. So I'm right.

So you've made me realize that there is another way to look at my methods. However, they are justified and I'm not doing anything wrong. If you can't see that, then you're as lame as my fucking script. There, that comment should make us both happy!

Re:Hmm

[aenea]

However, they are justified and I'm not doing anything wrong.

If you don't think you're doing anything wrong, then there shouldn't be an issue disclosing what's being done to the person reading the document, right?

Give it a shot, let them know that you're tracking who's reading your resume. I think you'll find the most common reaction will be a quick deletion and a blackhole for your email address. If you're doing something in secret that people wouldn't want you to do if they knew, it's probably wrong. And unethical. And a good reason to get fired if your new employer ever figures it out.

Re:Hmm

[Chris Burke]

I think I've already demonstrated how your script differs from web browser identification. Cookies that track your behavior, ala doublclick, are rather unpopular and thus not a good thing to compare yourself to. If what you wanted was only what netscape and apache do, then you'd be using the normal email receipt notification means, and then, yes, you'd be right. But you have only shown that you are more like Doubleclick, a company that, yes, we do give hell. So no, you are not right.

The only thing I see is that you have justified your methods in your own mind, and don't believe you are doing anything wrong. Which is fine, though not uncommon among people doing things wrong. But in your own effort to show me how I am as lame as your fucking lame script, please take me up on my bet and tell everyone whose behavior you tracked that you have done so, as I suggested before. I know you won't, because despite our difference of opinion we are both intelligent enough to realize that this would not be in your best interest. And thus I smugly rest my case.

Re:Hmm

[THX1138]

So why did the braindead, pustulant, odious, flatulent sack of excreta from a herd of syphilitic, diarrhetic elephants send a resume (apparently containing typographical errors) to someone who had nothing to do with HR for his "company" and then, once given a good spanking for his stupidity, then go and send exactly the same spam to the same person.

The little puddle of urine from a dehydrated ruminant then decided to send another spam to another company then had the unmitigated gall to say that he wasn't interested in working for the company.

If he is such a hot computer consultant, why is the only "page" on his web shite an "Under Construction" page.

The fact that he feels the need to throw lawsuit threats around like he used to do with his half-chewed turd when he was the intellectual equivalent of a desicated fly speck (as opposed to the huge strides he has made to be now intellectually equal with an amoeba) shows that he clearly was bullied (and, from what I have seen of his flatulent flayling around like a guppy in a stgnant pool, deservedly so) and so feels the need to lash out in the futile hope of disguising the fact he is bawling like he did after his mummy wouldn't suckle him anymore because he had to attend the graduation of his fellow kindergarten students (he wasn't greaduation, just watching for the 15th time). As for his propensity for expletives when shown that he has stepped outside the bounds of netiquette, this clearly indicates that his vocabulary is as extensive as his intellect.

He is the perfect example of why a person should not be allowed to breed with his sister/cousin/mother.

Re:Hmm

[cybermint]

It's just a fucking e-mail. You bitches need to quit your whining. Learn how to operate a mail filter for god sakes.

Re:Hmm

[tyrani]

I'm not doing anything in "secret"

Now, I'm not putting up a warning saying "beware I know that you are now reading my resume" or anything, but I'm certainly not keeping it a secret either.

I think that this is a feature of my resume rather then a hinderence. I put more effort into the application process if I know that my resume has been read.

Re:Hmm

[tyrani]

So you mean that you don't see my point at all?

I might be less intelligent then you give me credit for, but tell me how creating a log file of people who view my resume is any different then people who visit slashdot.

Re:Hmm

[toneathome]

I might be less intelligent then you give me credit for Any idea how much less............

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been randomly calling SlashBots 'Jew' recently, but I didn't think that last one was warranted.

Re:Hmm

[Chris Burke]

Visiting /. is a transaction, and everyone already knows and expects transactions to be logged. The visitor is knowingly visiting /., requesting a page from the /. server, and even if not technically aware they would not be shocked to learn that the page has been sent would be logged by the server.

Someone reading your resume would not expect that it would be making contact with your server, or that the act of reading somehow is a loggable transaction. They may expect that -receiving- the email may generate such contact (via a read receipt) but not that copies of that email would also do this.

It's the difference between buying a book at a store and the store keeping a copy of the receipt, and the book having a transmitter in the book that tells the store whenever you open the book without you knowing it is there.

It's the difference between recording a transaction that both parties are aware of, and spying on people.

But you know what? I think you already know this. It's significant in its omission that you don't contest my claim that telling the people you are spying on that you have done so would be a very stupid idea. I think you won't contest that, because you know that there is a difference between /. server logs and your spyware, and that those people would see that difference as clearly as I (and I think you) do. But you pretend there is no difference, because if there was, since you are not a bad person, you'd feel morally obligated to stop. And then you'd lose the ability to gather the data you want.

Re:Hmm

[Chris Burke]

I'm not doing anything in "secret"

Bull, and you know it.

No one would expect a resume to be reporting to the creator that it has been read. No one would expect it to have an embedded vbscript. Yes, if they somehow noticed the strange connection to your server and looked for the script, it's there, but to say that makes it not in secret is pure semantic manipulation just to make yourself sound like you're not doing anything wrong.
I think that this is a feature of my resume rather then a hinderence.

Of course it's a feature to you. You're getting useful information. The people who want to spy on us always think it's useful, and maybe even think it is useful to those spied on. That doesn't make spying okay.

Not that I want to get into practical issues, because your script is lame for moral reasons... But do you realize that by putting more effort into applications that you have logged as being read, you're discriminating against companies that are smart enough to disable the automatic running of scripts?

Re:Hmm

[db_two]

My definition of SPAM is unsolicitied mail coming to me without my express authorization.....

I got the following Email the other day.... Now I get plenty of JUNK, and while I dislike it I just delete it if I have no interest. The key to this one though pissed me off. I have never solicted to get any email from these people.... so by that meaning any email from them is unsolicited or "SPAM". Any they have the Gall to start and end their email stating this in not SPAM.

What do you guys think?

--- Email Message ---

From: "ecommerce@macena.com"
Subject: Never Again Will You Be Overcharged

Computer Notebook Specials... Save $100 to $700

This is not a SPAM or junk email. This message has been brought to you by Macena Systems, a leading computer wholesaler working for your benifit and your advantage. If you do not wish to receive this information in the future, please reply and write REMOVE in the subject line. We sincerely apologize for the possible inconvenience. This message is sent in compliance of the new e-mail bill: SECTION 301. Per Section 301, Paragraph (a)(2)(C) of S. 1618.

For further information go to www.macena.com to place your online order or call sales at 1-866-4-MACENA.

---- Sales INFO ----

This is not a SPAM or junk email. This message has been brought to you by a leading computer wholesaler working for your benifit and for your advantage. If you do not wish to receive this information in the future, please reply and write REMOVE in the subject line. We sincerely apologize for the possible inconvenience. This message is sent in compliance of the new e-mail bill: SECTION 301. Per Section 301, Paragraph (a)(2)(C) of S. 1618


So does this mean via this new BILL mentioned that you can SPAM as long as you state that you are not. Confused???

Re:Hmm

[SirFozzie]

This "new Bill" was defeated two years ago in Congress.. If I remember correctly, it didn't en make the Congress floor. Kinda tells you something when they use a Bill that didn't pass two years ago to try to bullshit their way into keeping you from complaining about spammers.

Just remember the rules when dealing with Spammers, like Bernie.

1. Spammers Lie
2. If the Spammer seems to be telling the truth, see rule 1.
3. Yes, they are actually THAT stupid!

David

Re:Hmm

[tyrani]

Did you have a point in there somewhere, or are you just proving your idiocity?

C&C Warning for this kook of a spammer

[strredwolf]

He's been discussed to death for his escapades -- and all of 'em have "Coffee & Cat" warnings. It's laughable at best -- and lawsuits aren't valid until you get that supena in the snail mail.

Re:C&C Warning for this kook of a spammer

[onepoint]

well I thought the discourse with Mrs. Atkins was even funnier, she's about the later part of december e-mails and her reply on january is classic.

BUt the best one was that legal guy at the end. 2 pages worth.

Onepoint

Re:C&C Warning for this kook of a spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

in your previous message, what you said is mean and cruel. stop now or i will sue you. (breaks up in laughter. LOL. LOLOLOLOL.)

Re:C&C Warning for this kook of a spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

what if... you had a beowulf of this class of e-mail flame SPAM!!! hahahhaa.

Re:C&C Warning for this kook of a spammer

[Pig Hogger]

lawsuits aren't valid until you get that supena in the snail mail.

Make that in person, hand-delivered by a court officer .

Re:C&C Warning for this kook of a spammer

[syn3rg]

Wow, can you imagine a Beowulf Clu.. naaa, can't do it.

Re:C&C Warning for this kook of a spammer

[jerrund]

Actually, a lawsuit is "valid" (whatever that means) when it is filed with the court. The next thing that happens is that notice that the lawsuit has been filed and a copy of the suit are served on the defendants. This can happen many different ways and varies depending on what jurisdiction you are in. In Ohio, for example, Certified U.S. Mail is the preferred means of service of summons, with other means (such as personal service and service by publication) available if Certified Mail fails. Service of summons is not a subpoena. (A subpoena is an instrument that compells the receiver to appear in court at a specified date and time - service of summons does not do that directly).

Re:C&C Warning for this kook of a spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I'm really behind on a project right now, but happened upon this tidbit this morning, and I have to say, it was completely worth making this project even later. Absolutely top-notch. Thanks /. for providing some much-needed humor in the middle of the production cycle from hell. I feel so refreshed, it's like I just woke up from 12 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Re:C&C Warning for this kook of a spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

"Coffee & Cat"? Haven't seen this before. Does it imply laughing so hard you spill your coffee on the cat?

Re:C&C Warning for this kook of a spammer

[Dimensio]

"Coffee & Cat"? Haven't seen this before. Does it imply laughing so hard you spill your coffee on the cat?

Yep, that's exactly what it refers to. I've gotten a few kooky lawsuite threats too...

Actually, what's odd about the loser in question is that he spelled "lawsuit" correctly. Usually they do spell it "lawsuite".

Re:C&C Warning for this kook of a spammer

[THX1138]

The concept behind the C&C warning is as follows:

If you have any fluid (cola/caffeine) you are warned to swallow before reading so that you do not spray said fluid all over your monitor/keyboard and if there are any cats (or other nervous lifeforms) warning not to laugh so loudly that you then have to detach said cat from the ceiling tiles where it has imbeddede its' claws in shock.

And having been a longterm kookologist on Usenet, I rate this around the middle of the C&C scale.

Re:C&C Warning for this kook of a spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that but I just noticed a new link on the bottom of Neil's page. Its Bernie's Downtime Passion. Apparently he's not only a spammer and an idiot but he's a god damned druggie basehead!

Don't waste your time.

[Kris_J]

Even I've received spam from this dimwit, and I'm looking for a job in the same industry. If you wouldn't waste time reading the spam, don't waste time visiting the link.

Re:Don't waste your time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding? I dunno if you're astroturfing or what, but that page is hilarious! That's probably the only article on Slashdot that I've read beginning to end in years, great great stuff.

Re:Don't waste your time.

[mpe]

Are you kidding? I dunno if you're astroturfing or what, but that page is hilarious! That's probably the only article on Slashdot that I've read beginning to end in years, great great stuff.

The funniest bit is where the spammers asks for the address and telephone number to sue. No doubt if that was followed through they'd end up trying to sue a telephone kiosk :)

Re:Don't waste your time.

[The_THOMAS]

You're whacked! It's HI-Larious!!

Could have avoided this waste of time..

[soundsop]

When Neil Schwartzman, the person who received the spam, forwarded it to the appropriate places why did he include the spammer on the email?

I hate spammers as much as the next guy. I report them (without copying them on the email) and move on. Although the spam receiver is, of course, blamess in this, I think he could have avoided this whole silly mess.

Re:Could have avoided this waste of time..

[Woefdram]

I think he could have avoided this whole silly mess.

He probably could, but why should he? Spammers are annoying, but this is comedy. I love it. And maybe it's too late for Bernie to learn from this, surely some spammers-to-be can take this as a hint about how spam is seen on the Net. If you fail to be a good example, you can still be a horrible warning.

Honestly, I couldn't suppress a broad grin when I read this site. How more Slashdot-like can a post be? It's funny and related to the Internet. Admit, it can hardly be called informative :)

Re:Could have avoided this waste of time..

[Cato the Elder]

I think in this case it would have been a gross discourtesy not to have CC'd the sender. The sender didn't have to respond with a profanity laced email and then threats of lawsuits. He could have responded, and CC'd his ISP

I'm sorry, my email reached you in error. I was under the impression that this address was one used by Concordia University to accept resumes.

And _then_ this whole mess could have been avoided by both sides. (err, actually, probably not, the spammer seems pretty persistently dumb).

Re:Could have avoided this waste of time..

[showboat]

Well, Bernard, there are little things called "laws" in THIS country, and every now and then one pops up that's intended to protect the citizens' privacy and rights. Those regarding unsolicited (and the following barratous and obnoxious) email fall under that description.

Re:Could have avoided this waste of time..

[gorbachev]

1. to piss off the spammer by letting him know who exactly it was that caused him to lose his website. This is very satisfying for an anti-spammer.

2. For entertainment value. Spammers very typically react exactly like this moron. It's just that Bernie appears to have taken it much further than your average kook. This is funny stuff.

Re:Could have avoided this waste of time..

[Dimensio]

And _then_ this whole mess could have been avoided by both sides. (err, actually, probably not, the spammer seems pretty persistently dumb).

Calling a spammer "dumb" is redundant.

Re:Could have avoided this waste of time..

[eap]

Calling a spammer "dumb" is redundant.

Saying that calling a spammer dumb is redundant is redundant.

Re:Could have avoided this waste of time..

[Anonymous Coward]

ok, no more redundancy here... this will go on indefinately... (hopefully that wasn't redundand)

Re:Could have avoided this waste of time..

[The_THOMAS]

You include the spammer to let them know this is unacceptable and they will have to move on to the next ISP. Eventually the ISPs will add them to their bad guy list.

Tough luck...

[Joakim A]

Wonder what his reacaction to being appreciated by the /. community is?

/J

Re:Tough luck...

[Anonymous Coward]

I SUE YOU! I sue you all! I sue the Internet, you bastards!

Bernard Shifman

P.S. (I sue your little dog too. Please tell me what his name is so I can write it on the papers.)

Re:Tough luck...

[DEBEDb]

I SUE YOU! I sue you all!

Why sue? Not be angry. Kiss!

I kiss you! I kiss you all! And I kiss
your little dog.

- Mahir

Re:Tough luck...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I SUE YOU!"
Aah... screw you...

Re:Tough luck...

[zbuffered]

It's now just after 5am, Chicago time. Is anyone else fighting the urge to dial *67,773-391-0595 'till someone picks up, act drunk, and try to order a pizza?

Re:Tough luck...

[saridder]

Everyone has e-mailed hime by now, right? I haven't read the end of the page yet, so I hope his account isn't shut off yet, but this is hilarious.

Re:Tough luck...

[Digital11]

HAHAHHA... I just called him to see what the answering machine would say... The dude actually answered!!! Call it!

Re:Tough luck...

[sharkey]

Dial "0" to call collect. DON'T save him a buck or two.

Re:Tough luck...

[cHiphead]

mod this on up up up

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

"Listen you stupid bitch."

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this was on topic. Mods are supposed to read the articles, too.

spammers are a pest

[rbreve]

but why they still spam...does it really work to
spam?

Re:spammers are a pest

[Anonymous Coward]

does it really work to spam?

Consider that there are 30,000,000 AOL users and that AOL users are, on average, of sub-average intelligence.

If you succeed in spamming all of them and only one hundredth of one percent (0.001) of them respond - that's 30,000 customers.

So, does it work? What do you think? Why else would they still be at it?

Re:spammers are a pest

[ErikTheRed]

Unfortunately, many, many people buy things because of spam. It's actually one of the more effective ways to mass-market all kinds of crap. As long as there's good money in it, we'll have to deal with spam, regardless of what laws are passed (think offshore servers, etc.).

Re:spammers are a pest

[RC514]

You must be one of them. Not only is "one hundreth of one percent" just a wild guess, it is also not 0.001 but 0.0001. The real reason spammers are still spamming is that they *think* it works because people like you are telling them it works. Why would anyone trick someone into believing that spam works? Easy, to sell the tools and the lists. The only spam which works (as in earns-you-money) is the "Buy millions of verified email addresses" spam.

Re:spammers are a pest

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually.. one hundredth of a percent is .01,

what is .01 99 times, ? easy its .99, now add a hundredth, 1.00.

Re:spammers are a pest

[Cygnusx12]

Horsehockey! They do not!

Direct Marketing to people based on their intrests is far more economical than mass emailing... Most people take no intrest in junk email that they receive.

If it was nearly as effective as you say it is, then there wouldn't be laws, nor people up in arms about it.

Keep in mind, there is a difference between direct marketing and spamming. I, personally, have no problems getting the continuous specials from SouthWest, or the weekly hardware sales pitch from Sears.

Where on earth do you get the concept that it's mass emailing is an effective way to market a product? Do you have any numbers to back this up?

I wouldn't be surprised if half of them aern't selling anything at all, but trying to harvest emails from unsuspecting users trying to "remove" themselves from a list.

Re:spammers are a pest

[Anonymous Coward]

One hundreth of a percent is .01% which equals .0001

Re:spammers are a pest

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's not

one hundredth of a percent is 0.0001 or 0.01%. If you don't have the % label, divide by 100

Re:spammers are a pest

[Xesdeeni]

Forget the law, I think we can eliminate most SPAM very simply with as small change to current technology I've outlined before:

"I can't figure out who to open a discussion with about this, but I have this simple idea that should at least eliminate the anonymous/spoofed spam, which is all I get.

You simply modify the mail servers to query the sending server whether a received mail actually came from that server. The query is a key based on the contents of the message and a key included with the message, which is itself based on the same contents and a private key of the sending server. If the sending server has been upgraded with this feature, it can validate, or not, the message. If it's not validated, the message is bounced. For backwards compatibility, if the sending server hasn't been upgraded, the message always goes through. [Here's the beauty of the idea:] But as more servers are upgraded, fewer and fewer servers will be able to be used as scapegoats for spoofed spam, and pressure will mount to upgrade these servers as well.

Eventually, the only spam you will get will be from a valid return address, which can be handled more effectively in more conventional ways. In fact, adding manual bouncing at this stage might be helpful as well, since now it really will bounce back to the sender.

I realize I've glossed over some details here, and someone much more experienced in mail servers will have to massage this approach to make it practical, but I think the germ of a very simple but effective idea is here."

Xesdeeni

Re:spammers are a pest

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I used AOL for years because they were the best available in a small town. Anything else was $10 an hour, long distance on top of ISP service. I switched to cable service the second it was available. DSL won't work in my area; phone lines are too poor. Not all of us live in the big city. I've been embedded programming since 1972.

Re:spammers are a pest

[Kierthos]

And many more people just get annoyed by it. I mean, a little less then two months into my most recent job, I started getting "toner supplies" spam. Apparently, even though I was the most recent hire, was not directly responsible for purchasing any sort of supplies, and wasn't in anything that could be remotely construed as a management position, I somehow am considered a viable target for spam that wants me to switch suppliers for printing supplies. And it wasn't random.... I didn't get a single one until after I started the job. (Oddly enough, that was about the time I joined the now seemingly defunct info-gne mailing list. I suspect another possible pattern...)

Kierthos

Re:spammers are a pest

[orionpi]

Does all@aol.com still work? I remeber someone asking why they got email when it was to "all".

Re:spammers are a pest

[ScuzzMonkey]

There are a lot of hard-core anti-spammers who would include direct marketing in their definition of 'spam'. So, if you think that can be effective, than in some people's books that would mean that spam can be effective; I would have to agree with that.

One of the problems, though, is definitions. I would say that what I consider to be 'spam' is not very effective (in part, probably just because I consider it in those terms--I don't even see most of it as it goes straight into the trash, so how effective can it be?); but what I think of as spam is primarily the poorly written, obviously mass mailed, dubiously legal adverts for pr0n, Viagra, and shady business deals. There are a lot of people, though, who apparently consider mailing a few resumes out at the same time as spam (although, having read the site, I have to agree that is exactly what this twerp was up to), which I would not--I've done it myself (although I have to say that I do manage to get the correct HR address ahead of time) and consider it no different from mailing out hardcopy resumes to companies I'm interested in working for.

Anyway; the point is, which side you stand on of the debate over whether or not spam is effective as a marketing tool depends very much on what you define as spam. I don't think the communal definition is nearly as solid as some people seem to.

Re:spammers are a pest

[realdpk]

Spam doesn't necessarily work in that consumers buy products from spammers. The main spam product is the spam itself. There are many companies that spam on other's behalf. They're pretty much the only ones making money off this stuff. (Well, the spam-friendly ISPs (sprintlink, I'm talkin about you) are, too.)

Re:spammers are a pest

[gmack]

Hate to say it but it semi works..

Your odds are much better if you spam AOL. at my last job I even got complaints form AOL users when I took down a spammer's website.

Yea the percentage of respondents is low for the rest of the net but if your a total obnoxious bastard you can make good money that way.
That is of course if you don't mind having to have an unlisted number _with_ call privacy.

Re:spammers are a pest

[b1t r0t]

[Here's the beauty of the idea:] But as more servers are upgraded, fewer and fewer servers will be able to be used as scapegoats for spoofed spam, and pressure will mount to upgrade these servers as well.

Considering how many spams are sent through open relays, which are usually caused by someone (often in east Asia) doing a default install which includes a five-year-old version of Sendmail, or using some broken utility to generate their sendmail.cf file (which can also result in an open relay, since that stuff gets upgraded along with Sendmail), and of which the person running the computer may not even know is running (thanks to the glory days of RedHat turning every inet daemon on by default), the number of broken servers will probably increase at a much higher rate than the servers that get upgraded.

Every time I go to a used book store, or a thrift store, and see years-old distros of Linux on the shelf, I shudder at the thought of how much 'sploitable stuff is permanently etched into those old CD-ROMs.

Re:spammers are a pest

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider that there are 30,000,000 AOL users and that AOL users are, on average, of sub-average intelligence.

If you succeed in spamming all of them and only one hundredth of one percent (0.001) of them respond - that's 30,000 customers.

one hundredth of one percent is 0.01% or 300 customers

Re:spammers are a pest

[markmoss]

I think the point is to (1) have a way by which servers can be set to recognize & reject bogus return addresses, and (2) get enough servers running this way so that the ones that don't download the patches can be blocked without major disruptions. Spam aside, if we keep giving equal rights on the net to insecure boxes and outdated server programs, eventually any 10 year old with a DDOS script is going to be able to recruit enough zombies to bring the net down world-wide. So at some point we've got to black-hole those that aren't even making an effort...

OTOH, I really don't want to rule out anonymous mail entirely. Let's make an exception: false-names get black-holed, but return address = "anonymous.coward" (say) gets passed through the backbone. Individual users can choose whether or not to bounce anonymous mail, and if a server is getting overloaded those may go first.

The other issue is that there are some legitimate reasons for wanting responses to come back to a different IP address than the sender. So it should be possible for you to convince the server that you do own an alternate return address, and have it accept that as legitimate, or even do the address change for you. But I'm not sure the extra code complexity would be acceptable in all server installations...

Re:spammers are a pest

[unDees]

I've done it myself... and consider it no different from mailing out hardcopy resumes to companies I'm interested in working for.

There's nothing wrong with e-mailing a resume to a few HR departments if the addresses came from a "Send resumes here" link. But wouldn't be even more effective to send an individually tailored cover letter and resume to each company, rather than CC'ing an identical letter/resume to all of them?

Might've even spared Bernie the "broadcast" part of the spam definition....

Re:spammers are a pest

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they could pass a law and make sending e-mails from country to country to be concidered international trade (of come sort), and then pass a law forbidding the spamming of... international trade. After that, if they go against the international treaty, you can declair war on them! bomb the computers to the ground!

Re:spammers are a pest

[ScuzzMonkey]

FWIW, I do tailor my cover letters, but not my resumes.

But the point is that by some people's definition (including some legal ones--see the page referenced above for an example from, I believe, Illinois) it's still spam. It wasn't solicited, I have no prior relationship with them, and the bulk of the content delivered was identical to what was delivered to someone else.

Interesting side topic, though--if Bernie had used a script of some sort (not that it sounds like he would be capable of authoring such a thing) to individually tailor his e-mails, would it then not be spam?

Re:spammers are a pest

[DavidTC]

Now, that's just silly. Sending something to an address that is clearly designated to receive that thing is never spam. If an address has 'send resumes here' and you send a resumes to a bunch of those addresses, it's not spam, period.

It's the same with real opt-in lists. I'm on a few lists that send commercial content out, and I don't consider them spam anymore then I consider apache-announce spam, because I a) signed up for them, and b) can get off them.

People who say spam is any bulk email are simpletons. Spam is unsolicted email, period. If you ask for it, it by defination is not spam, regardless of how many other people asked for the exact same thing and got it at the sametime.

Note 'ask for it' isn't literally 'send X type messages to my address'. If you post in on usenet about alt.car.fords (pretending that exists), using your email address, and don't have any qualifications for email in .sig, it's presumably okay to email you about things you said, like you would on the newgroup, but just privately. Presumably, people you knew at some time in RL have the okay to email you and say hi, also, if they happen to run across your name too. As do people who have a comment on your web page, etc.

So, there are 'implied consent' things, where if you happen to run across someone's email address in a certain context, it's okay to email them about something. Even if the HR email address didn't have 'send resumes' here, if they had a position open that required one, it's a safe assumption you should send them an resume there, etc.

The rules aren't hard and fast. But this idiot was just emailing harvested addresses. I can't think of a single time harvested addresses are a legit thing to email. Maybe if whirlpool has a recall and they harvest alt.dishwasher.whirlpool or http://www.whirlpoolfan.com/messages or something like that. But that's a fairly wacky example,it's much more logical to simple post the recall there.

Re:spammers are a pest

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're gonna bitch, do your math first. 0.01% of 30,000,000 is 3,000. No more, no less.

Re:spammers are a pest

[Anonymous Coward]

interesting,

I have, in the past, recieved such mail to a les used account. The subject line was "Hello [insert username here]" (with my username) and the spam mail (an unsolicited bulk mail regarding dept relief) used this as my first name a good number of times. If my username had infact been my first name (in thi case it wasn't). Would this be spam? Ofcourse. The definitions are kind of fuzzy by nature aren't they?

Further, if an old friend (a contact really) sends out masses of unsolicited links and mails to a group of thirty/forty people, is THAT spam? I know him, but does that make it OK? Once again, definitions waver.

/nils

Re:spammers are a pest

[ScuzzMonkey]

Well, I couldn't agree with you more. I guess that the scary thing that I am getting at is that some of those "simpletons" submit things to MAPS and other blacklists, or write complaints to ISPs, or otherwise do all the things that you and I might agree to be appropriate for use against 'real' spammers. It's not just silly--it's problematic.

My problem with spam

[Burgundy Advocate]

Or, more pointedly -- with the lengths that people go through to try and stop the spammers.

The Constitution is a wonderful thing, and I'm sure that all of us are happy that we have it to protect our rights. Free speech is one right that I'm sure we all cherish... imagine what it must be like to live in a country where you can't speak out, like China, the former USSR, France, or Iraq!

So, it bothers me when people go through such tremendous lengths to silence spammers. Granted, they're annoying. Granted, they're one step lower than a leech. There's honestly not much to like about them.

But by silencing them, we will only be hastening our countries decline into a totalitarian state.

Is software the only thing online that should be free as in speech? Why not spam?

Re:My problem with spam

[OmegaDan]

Your a troll but not a good one :)

The problem isn't of course any individual spammer but the problem as a whole ... I think in any given day I recieve between 15 and 25 spams either via email or messenger, this is between quite a few accounts (10 email accounts, maybe 6 messenger accounts). Where do my rights not to be bothered with this bullshit start, and "free speech" begin ... Im sure I spend (just) 5 mins a day deleting spams or closing AOL/ICQ spam windows ... Thats 12 seconds per spam if I recieve 25 a day. Do the math, thats 30 *hours* a year dealing with spam.

Im sure you'll have lots of trollish responses, but one had best not be "then don't use email."

Re:My problem with spam

[Datafage]

The thing is, this guy didn't JUST spam, he threatened Neil with a lawsuit for the basic act of reporting the spamming. THAT is flatout illegal, as it should be.

Re:My problem with spam

[colinscott]

Spam is not really an issue of free speech. It's a matter of freedom to listen. When a spammer sends me email, then it costs my ISP (and hence me) money. If the net were truely a free resource then we still have issue that spam wastes my time. Not being immortal, I only have a limited amount of time available, and I don't want to use it reading spam.

Hence the point: Although I strongly believe in freedom of speech, I believe more strongly in the right to control what I listen to. I have no right to force people listen to what I have to say, and I expect the same in return.

Re:My problem with spam

[notsoanonymouscoward]

Oh do shut up would you? By silencing them we reduce the number of people (angry and annoyed people) who get spam in this world... thus making it a much happier place for us all. Freedom of speech was not intended to let those f00kers call me once a week (or more) at dinner time to sell me crap I'd never want to buy, nor to fill up my mailboxes with junk. Freedom of speech was mainly created to protect the airing of grievances against the powers that be, not so someone can turn a buck. Shame on you for supporting such an attitude

Re:My problem with spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do my rights not to be bothered with this bullshit start

What right to not be bothered? I don't seem to remember that one.

-Tim

Re:My problem with spam

[Anonymous Coward]

MyRealBox is pretty good about stopping spam. I used to have a Hotmail account and I got more than a few pieces of spam a day. Switched to MyRealBox probably more than a year ago, and Ive only got maybe 3 or 4 pieces of spam since. Also they say they have stopped 1,303,931 pieces of spam :)

Re:My problem with spam

[darketernal]

So, it bothers me when people go through such tremendous lengths to silence spammers. Granted, they're annoying. Granted, they're one step lower than a leech. There's honestly not much to like about them.

Just like junk mail that you find crammed into your mail box, or the calls that you get from people offering you free issues of some crap magazine. But generally, spam wastes more time. You can just chuck anything that looks flashy/seedy in the trash, and hang up on telemarketers. Here in Hong Kong you get a few calls a week from telemarketers. Once I hear the tell-tale, recording-like stream of Cantonese that doesn't let you get a word in edgewise, I hang up. They call back, I recognize the voice, I hang up. It's pretty fun doing that actually. :p

Thats 12 seconds per spam if I recieve 25 a day. Do the math, thats 30 *hours* a year dealing with spam.

30 hours that could be well spent playing a good oldskool RPG :P

I'm surprised that people in the US get so much spam...the most I got in one day was four. And that's with no hokey hotmail junk mail filter. (I use it now, but it doesn't really seem to help at all now that spammers are getting hold of lists of email addresses.)

On an unrelated note, I wonder why Bernie boy makes such a fuss out of people reporting his endless stream of crap. Is it the challenge, whether he can convince anyone that he can sue with his army of imaginary lawyers? Ah well maybe we'll never know...

Re:My problem with spam

[Queer Boy]

But by silencing them, we will only be hastening our countries decline into a totalitarian state.

Is software the only thing online that should be free as in speech? Why not spam?

Problem with your "free speech" and spam metaphor is that it does not cost me anything to hear someone.

Spam is push, not pull like software. It clogs bandwidth, which I pay for, it clogs hard drive space on my mail server, and it also is one of the biggest reasons why e-mail viruses are even still around.

Hows aboot where spam must have a "text/spam" mime type (or something), and I get to choose whether or not I download spam?

The best part about free speech is that I have the freedom to also not listen. But with spam I am forced to have to at the very least read the subject to decipher whether it is a real message.

Spam filters can filter out messages from companies that I have given my e-mail for product updates or announcements.

Re:My problem with spam

[LeftOfCentre]

Also, downloading spam means my modem will stay connected for a longer period of time while my money ticks away.

Re:My problem with spam

[AnotherBlackHat]

I guess it's feeding time.

I think the appropriate sound byte is, "your right to swing your fist stops where my nose begins." Spam causes harm to the person who receives it. Granted, it's a tiny amount of harm for a particular individual, but the total harm is actually significant. Absent some redeeming social importance, spam is time wasting garbage.

Although I believe you can't defend spam as free speach, that doesn't mean laws against spam are OK. Any law must cause less damage to free speach than the harm caused by the spam it's stopping for me to support it. Every law I've seen so far fails in both categories: they prevent a lot of free speach, and don't stop a lot of spam. The RBL, ORBS, and SPEWS though better, are still questionable IMO. They are more effective at stopping spam, but cause considerably more damage than they stop.

Re:My problem with spam

[blonde rser]

All rights a government doles costs somebody (and sometimes everybody something.) If they didn't cost somebody something (remember cost includes possible gains in game theory) then there would be no need to create the right. I don't have to listen to some party's propaganda but I do have to deal with the propaganda's effect on society.

But email isn't solely an act of speach; in the case of spam it is also an act of assault forcing a physical responce. It's a fuzzy area but free speech is involved.

Re:My problem with spam

[Sobrique]

My problem with spam is simpler.
When some monkey sends me a comparatively big html-ised email with graphics and even (once shudder) some flash, it's _me_ paying for the bandwidth.
OK, if you're on cable or DSL the b/w is flat rate, but even so, if you consider that it's otherwise wasting a resource for which you've paid, then spam costs you money.
Getting junk through a letter box, you can just ignore, and it cost _them_ to send it. Ditto faxes. Spam doesn't.

Re:My problem with spam

[sakusha]

There's an old legal maxim, "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."

Re:My problem with spam

[ameoba]

The problem with the MIME type solution is that, by the time you get to filter it out, your ISP, and all the unfortunate ones in between, have already been taxed by the load of 100s (or thousands) of identical messages.

Actually... I think spammers are getting dumber. Twice in the last month, I've recieved 50+ identical emails from the same person at the same time.

Re:My problem with spam

[ymgve]

"Spam is push, not pull like software. It clogs bandwidth, which I pay for, it clogs hard drive space on my mail server, and it also is one of the biggest reasons why e-mail viruses are even still around."

Just how does spam contribute to the spreading of viruses? So far I've never received a virus-infected spam mail...

Re:My problem with spam

[Maddog Batty]

I'm surprised that people in the US get so much spam...the most I got in one day was four.

Consider yourself very lucky. I must delete 30 to 50 spams a day (and I'm from the UK). The main problem is that I have to have a valid email address on my companies website and that has meant the auto collection bots have grabbed it. Its easy to spot some of the emails as the bot made a mistake in getting the email address and corrupted it. Unfortunately, this only accounts for about 20%.

I don't personally go after spammers though I wish I had the time and very much thank those that do.

Re:My problem with spam

[cgenman]

"Hmm. It looks like a beautiful morning. I'd like to share it. Let's just walk to my friend's house and and..."

"BEAUTIFUL WOMEN WANT TO MEET YOU!!!"
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp"ARE YOU POOR, BROKE, DEEPLY IN DEBT!?!"
&nbsp"INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES AWAIT YOU!"

"...or maybe I'll just stay inside again today, so that I can listen to some Garcia and call them instead..."

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp"WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN A PREVIEW OF OUR LONG-DISTANCE SERVICES?!"
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp"PLEASE DON'T HANG UP, THIS IS NOT A TELEMARKETING MESSAGE!!"
&nbsp&nbsp"HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THE COST OF HEALTH CARE FOR THE UNINSURED?!"

"...or not. And I think my member is a perfectly adequate size, thank you very much. Oh well, at least I can just IM them."

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp"DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR IT INFRASTRUCTURE IS!?!"
"I BECAME A MILLIONAIRE AND SO CAN YOU!"
&nbsp"YOU CAN BE PART OF THE ACTION AND WIN AT LORDOFTHERINGS.COM TODAY!!"
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp"I SEND YOU THIS IM IN ORDER TO HAVE YOUR ADVICE."
"ARE YOU HAPPY WITH YOUR RELATIONSHIP?!"
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp"SPEND EVERY YEAR IN THE BAHAMAS WITH THIS AMAZING NEW PROGRAM!"
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp"HOT YOUNG TEENS WANT TO BE FRIENDS WITH YOU!"
"HERE IS THE INFORMATION YOU REQUESTED!!"

&nbsp

"...maybe I'll just..."

&nbsp&nbsp"rssn wmn hre cll nw"

"damn, forgot to turn off sms. Maybe I'll just complain on slashdot."

&nbsp"YOU HAVE JUST 2 MORE CHANCES TO WIN $10,000 BY MODERATING THIS COMMENT UP TO 5 - INSIGHTFUL."

&nbsp

*whimper*

&nbsp

Re:My problem with spam

[Wild Wizard]

ok chew on this

Here in Austrlia we ALL pay per MB for ALL data we receive.

Do I want spam NO BLOODY WAY!

Re:My problem with spam

[sqlrob]

I've gotten a good five or six.

Spammers tend to get infected with SirCam.

Re:My problem with spam

[plague3106]

Try reading Locke or Keyes. You basically have the right to do what you wish, so long as it does not interefer with others.

Re:My problem with spam

[d-e-w]

The problem isn't of course any individual spammer but the problem as a whole ... I think in any given day I recieve between 15 and 25 spams either via email or messenger, this is between quite a few accounts (10 email accounts, maybe 6 messenger accounts). Where do my rights not to be bothered with this bullshit start, and "free speech" begin ... Im sure I spend (just) 5
mins a day deleting spams or closing AOL/ICQ spam windows ... Thats 12 seconds per spam if I recieve 25 a day. Do the math, thats 30 *hours* a year dealing with spam.

I work with a volunteer-based website that has specific e-mails (which I filter into specific folders) for different types of complaints and requests. These addresses have been on the web since 1997.

We run our own mail server. We use ALL the anti-spam services we can track down (MAPS RBL, ORBS when it was alive, all its successors now, etc.) We block IPs for open relays and spam servers that aren't in these services at the firewall (basically, IPs for any piece of spam that gets through the above.) We still receive--at most of these addresses--5-10 pieces of SPAM for each legitimate piece of mail. And we receive quite a bit of legitimate mail.

The problem arises in attempting to find the legitimate mail amongst all the SPAM. If I am off-line and not dealing with my e-mail for 2-3 days, I can come back to 50+ e-mails in each of those folders. Probably 5-7 are users, the rest are spammers. I have to find the users from amongst the spammers. And since the users that tend to contact us are not always among the smartest of users, their e-mails can accidently *look* like spam from just the index view. (No subject line, subject line with just Re:, nonsensical/unrelated subject line.) This is very frustrating. This can result in poor user service. When the noise-to-signal ratio becomes high ... it becomes harder and harder to separate.

It is bad enough that we've switched some addresses (as an experiment) to a whitelist system on top of all the blacklist systems we participate in. (If the e-mail address isn't on the approved list, the sender gets an e-mail back saying that they must validate their address--by clicking on a link--in order for their message to be processed. The address is then added to the whitelist.) We're testing the intelligence levels of our users. If the majority of them can figure out how to click on the link and thus approve their message, it's a possibility for an additional level of filtering. It protects against the forged bulk SPAM, at least.

What depresses me is that such a restrictive system is necessary to provide users with the service we wish to provide them. It seems counter-intuitive; but my mail folders after my Xmas holidays have proven to me that *something* needs to be done. I just have to hope that it's not the future of the Internet itself.

Re:My problem with spam

[Progoth]

I've gotten a good five or six.

Spammers tend to get infected with SirCam.

I might be wrong, but I thought SirCam looked through IE's cache for addresses. I heard that, and it makes sense, because when sircam struck I was getting tons of emails to the only address on my website, which I didn't use anywhere else (at a time that my website was getting tons of hits because of somebody I hosted).

Re:My problem with spam

[sqlrob]

I believe it was SirCam. Doesn't that also go through the OE/O address book?

Re:My problem with spam

[Queer Boy]

Just how does spam contribute to the spreading of viruses? So far I've never received a virus-infected spam mail...

You mean to tell me that all of the recent e-mail viruses and worms people were opening and propagating lately have looked like something other than spam?

The point I was illustrating with regards to viruses and worms is that all of the white noise from spam creates a great screen to throw in a harmful e-mail.

Re:My problem with spam

[jedidiah]

The degree to which some amateur spammer "interferes" with others is quite disputable. It is certainly quite disputable in this case.

No real "tort" was perpetrated by the "spammer" against the person that went out of his way to seek revenge.

One should not need to worry about being imprisoned for merely raising their voice in public. (or it's logical equivalent)

Re:My problem with spam

[jedidiah]

Bullocks. The "forced physical response" is meagre to trivial.

One wonders if any of you pansies have ever had to deal with serious REAL threats to your liberty or personal safety. When complaining about the likes of this guy, you all come off like a bunch of spoiled, pampered, sheltered whiners.

Re:My problem with spam

[Anonymous Coward]

"Calling spam 'free speech' is like calling rape 'unsolicited love'." -- Ron Schwarz

Re:My problem with spam

[Anonymous Coward]

How about 'trespass against chattel' for using resources not his?

Last I checked, trespass was illegal.

Re:My problem with spam

[jedidiah]

Actually, the degree of harm is VERY significant if you intend to go about carelessly supressing the liberties of others. NO ONE's liberties should be suppressed without quite compelling reason. Otherwise you make it far to easy for states and governments everywhere to suppress civil liberties at will and effectively NULLIFY them.

A minor inconvenience is far from compelling.

Re:My problem with spam

[tijsvd]

I believe more strongly in the right to control what I listen to

I don't care. I've got headphones.

Re:My problem with spam

[archmedes5]

Thats nothing, at one point I received 500+ spam emails from the same person in the span of an hour. Needless to say, I was *pissed*.

Re:My problem with spam

[Jhon]

What right to not be bothered? I don't seem to remember that one.

Amendment 10:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Many people miss that one and it's a darn shame.

- Jhon

Re:My problem with spam

[iamplasma]

What the hell are you talking about? I'm an Australian, and there are plenty of unlimited plans (my cable included). In fact, virtually nobody pays by MB. Or are you just spelling "Austria" very poorly?

Re:My problem with spam

[Progoth]

Yeah I think so. My point was that I got a ton of sircams from total strangers which at first I thought was spammers, but then my conjecture after reading their personal documents (hehe) and even talking to a couple was that sircam got my address through IE.

Re:My problem with spam

[AnotherBlackHat]

Actually, the degree of harm is VERY significant if you intend to go about carelessly supressing the liberties of others. Otherwise you make it far to easy for states and governments everywhere to suppress civil liberties at will and effectively NULLIFY them.

I assume you're talking about the harm of supressing speach when you say the harm is very significant.
Free speach doesn't mean the right to scream the constitution into someones ear.
Suppessing that aspect of speach and only that aspect would be of far greater benfit than harm. But laws requiring that all people speak in a soft voice do a lot more, they would stop people from yelling when there's a real need, such as a fire in a crowded theater. Likewise laws which prevented spam and only prevented spam would be good. The fact that every law to date would do almost nothing to stop spam, but would do far too much supression of other speach, doesn't change the goodness of the concept.

Re:My problem with spam

[Wild Wizard]

What you have an UNLIMITED internet account really are you sure have you read the terms and conditions and the acceptable user policy.
The only unlimited accounts in
Austalia cost around $799 dollars a month for a 256/64 adsl link (metro only) jumps up to $999 in regional areas which I am in.
http://www.tpg.com.au/products_services/adsl.htm l
Go on Use your link as an umlimited link and I bet you wont have 1 next month you TROLL

Hmm

[Iamthefallen]

Free tip for Mr.Shiffman, I hear TimeCanada are looking for a new webmaster.

And, I feel that my sig has never been quite so appropriate.

SPAM in reverse

[sonicstorm]

Haha, this is hilarious. Every slashdotter that reads this should send our old pal Bernard a nice e-mail. See how he likes SPAM when he's on the recieving end.

Re:SPAM in reverse

[Iamthefallen]

At least someone should tell him he's being featured on slashdot and will be known to and remembered by a fair amount of people in the IT biz. I really really wanna see the reply to that :)

Re:SPAM in reverse

[qubezz]

Or better, call Friday 'sue Bernard Shiffman day'. How many courts can he appear in at once?

Re:SPAM in reverse

[panZ]

I already did this before I started reading comments but his @home address is already down. Try his consulting address instead:
bernard@shifmanconsulting.com
I thanked him for his entertaining read and suggested a more objective course of action... e.g. hide out in the hole you dug your career in to for a while.

Re:SPAM in reverse

[Anonymous._.Coward]

If we all send Bernie emails addressed only to Bernie then it is not spam. To be spam emails must be both bulk and unsolicited.

Re:SPAM in reverse

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks I just did! I hope you don't mind that I used your email address!

Re:SPAM in reverse

[Anonymous Coward]

Well do what I do, create a yahoo account and send the e-mail back to the spammer.

Just a thought but does shifmanisamoron@yahoo.com sound like a good e-mail address to use from now on?

Re:SPAM in reverse

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's not spam, it's a DOS attack.

Re:SPAM in reverse

[Anonymous Coward]

save me from the command prompt, argh

His Excuse...

[tunah]

No, really I was just replying to someone elses spam, but i guess the reply address was the mailing list. Copy of message follows:

===
Date: 2 Jan 03:34:45 GMT
Subject: Re: Make millions at home!

Why yes, yes I *would* like to MAKE MONEY FAST!

Bernard Shit^Hfman.

haha

[austad]

That's one of the funniest things I've ever read. I know lots of people in IT in chicago, I'll make sure to send them the link. Poor Bernie's going to have to change his name to ever get an IT job again.

Re:haha

[jcr]

Poor Bernie's going to have to change his name to ever get an IT job again.

I doubt that a name change will suffice. The dot-com boom is over, and these days IT employees have to be competent to get the job.

-jcr

Re:haha

[spinningdc]

Changing his name probably won't be enough. Now that everyone has his resume, they can just filter for NetBEUI spelled wrong and they won't even get it. Dufus.

It is funny!

[www.sorehands.com]

At the bottom of Bernie's website, the people publishing it said:

nor can the publishers guarantee
the work of any of the professionals listed here.

But, the title is misleading, it would seem as though he did not try to file suit, but just threatened. From what I can read, if an attorney did file the attorney would be personally sanctioned under FRCP 11 making a friviolous filing where it could not pass the giggle test.

Re:It is funny!

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if he filed in federal court, and I doubt he has the wherewithal to afford an attorney admitted to practice before the 7th circuit. I don't practice in IL, but I'm sure they have an analogous rule to FRCP 11 there.

The part that kills me (but I'm weird) is that any attorney representing one of the "Shifman Suees" (that is to say, us) would also be in violation of the RPC were they to contact Shifman directly (ex parte). If Shifman were actually represented by an attorney (assumption: the attorney is not related to Shifman, and thus capable of parsing sentences and tying his own shoelaces), Shifman would certainly be aware of this and would stop requesting to have y'alls attorney contact him.

Who knows, maybe he'll choke on his own spittle during an apoplectic fit of rage, and Shifman can complete the bifecta of /. and Darwin awards in the same year.

Hmm

[bonch]

Wish *I* had a posse to bitchslap evil spammers into oblivion like that.

gasp, ahahaha!

[loraksus]

Damn that's funny.
Anyone remember the usenet flame wars of the early 90's (really depended on which group you were in)? Those were the days eh? I like how the asshole first writes "Fuck you bitch" emails and then follows them by slightly witty "please send me your addess so I can sue you" emails.

n00b. . .

I was bored so I sent him a link to the page (yeah, yeah, I'm an asshole :)

(Grammar nazi is gonna love all the spelling / grammar corrections)

Re:gasp, ahahaha!

[Anonymous Coward]

get a real keyboard layout
1'2,3.4p5y6f7g8c9r0l'a,o.epuyiydfhgtcnrsl-a;oqej uk ixdbhmtwnvsz

Replying to spammers is fun

[Whelkman]

Once in a while, I'll reply to the solicitors. Of course nine times out of ten it's a bogus email address, but once in a while it actually goes through.

I got that Nigerian money laundering email twice a day for a week from the same guy before I cut him an email threatening to take a squad of tanks to his contry and turn it into rubble. To my amazement, he actually replied! He (sarcastically, obviously) invited me to attempt to destroy his country.

I was expecting a DoS flood of Nigerian solicitations (which caused me to learn how to use procmail really fast), but, again, to my amazement, the spams stopped.

The moral: never underestimate the threat of tanks.

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[searleb]

I got that Nigerian money laundering email twice a day for a week from the same guy before I cut him an email threatening to take a squad of tanks to his contry and turn it into rubble. To my amazement, he actually replied!

Last year at the end of semester my roommate was kicking around my office reading e-mail. He recieved the Nigerian money laundering e-mail and, since he was trying to kill time, he looked up the FBI hotline number and phoned in a report of suspicious foreign money launderers. The Feds asked him for his phone number and address, and said that they would investigate it further. We were expecting the FBI to drop by the house to see some of the evidence, but they never did...

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Oooh. I had a client once who took the Nigerian fee scam seriously. As in HE NEARLY FELL FOR IT.

The "business relationship" was several emails along when...some of the email involved uh...made its way to the sysadmin.

So, what to do? Warn the client? Let the client be taken in? Post a description of what *really* happens in the Nigerian Fee scam on the company bulletin board, anonymously? NB: did the latter.

agreed. 50% of peole *are* dumber than average. 68% of people are right around average. Half the remainder are *way* dumber than average.

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[DrSpin]

Next time, you might suggest that he watched "419 Squadron" - Nigerian Statute 419 prohibits fraud based scams. All Nigerians know that.

You might suggest that one of your in-laws is now head of 419 sqadron, and they have a few B52s spare after Afganistan! Either he pays you $6,000,000, AND stops spamming, or the sqadron pays a visit.

Pity it wont work on US lawyers.

Half of my spam is from US lawyers, and since I don't live in the US, its even less relevant than Nigerian fraud.

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[mpe]

I got that Nigerian money laundering email twice a day for a week from the same guy before I cut him an email threatening to take a squad of tanks to his contry and turn it into rubble. To my amazement, he actually replied! He (sarcastically, obviously) invited me to attempt to destroy his country.

What gave it away was your saying "tanks". Had you said "bombers" they might have thought you were serious...

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[Edward Teach]

LOL, I sent the Nigerian Money Laundering spam to the U.S. Customs Service. They replied that they sent it to their fraud division. Haven't heard anything back on it though.

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[Col. Klink (retired)]

This is the reply I last received from enforcement@sec.gov:

Dear Investor:

Thank you for taking the time to forward to us another instance of advance
fee frauds. I have fwded. it in turn to the Secret Service at:
419.fcd@usss.treas.gov.

Our only request would be that you be kind enough to forward any additional
iterations of and/or variations on the Nigerian advance fee fraud spam you
receive directly to the Secret Service. That Federal agency is handling
this matter, and it would be a great help for you to send them to the Secret
Service instead of the SEC: 419.fcd@usss.treas.gov.

Again, thanks for your e-mail.

Sincerely,

Jim Daly
U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission
Office of Investor Education and Assistance
(202) 942-7173, (202) 942-9634 (fax)
oiea@sec.gov

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone paying me $6,000,000 can spam me however much they feel like!

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[Erik Fish]

My favorite reply to the 419 scam (found in the spamcop.geeks group on the spamcop.net news server):

Subject: Re: Nigerian Scam ressurected
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2001 09:21:03 -0500
From: "ISSA GIDADA" <IssaGidada@yahoo.com>

Dear DR.ONORIODE BOBOLO,

It is so good to hear from a fellow-countryman, having been raised and lived for many years in our most beautiful homeland, Nigeria. I want to send you my sincere thanks and gratitude for your kind offer of USD$25,000.000.00 (TWENTY FIVE MILLION UNITED STATE DOLLARS) for taking part in this funds transfer transaction.

However, I am a businessman too, and I make my living transferring large sums of money from and to my friends, relatives, and business associates in Nigeria. Therefore, I know that you would agree, that in order to participate in this wonderful opportunity, I must have an advance monetary commitment from you -- a good faith gesture on your part -- in order to proceed.

Therefore, I ask that you deposit just 10% ($2,500,000) of the $25M into my PayPal account as an indication that you truly possess the funds and are actually authorized to release them. Using the online PayPal service is a very convenient and secure way to transfer funds. All you need do is access the PayPal web site -- http://www.paypal.com -- open a PayPal account, deposit the funds into your new account, and then transfer the money into my existing account, which has already been set up to receive the $25M.

You only need my email address, which you already have, to transfer the funds into my account. Therefore, the complete safety of your account, as well as mine, is guaranteed and insured unconditionally. You have asked that this matter be handled with the strictest confidentiality, and I will agree to that condition, provided that the transfer takes place in a reasonable period of time, say by Friday, 5 October.

If the money has not been received by that time, I must assume that you are not making a legitimate offer, and that you might be someone other than who you say you are -- although I can tell by the exceptional language of your email, that is probably not the case. However, if that is the case, then I will be forced to embark upon a most unpleasant course of action that I would prefer not to undertake.

Because I have so many loyal friends in the Government of Nigeria and the Military, and many close ties within the Security Service where you work, it would be quite easy to locate your office and your home, as well as learn the identities of your friends and relatives.

I truly don't believe that you would want to jeopardize their health and well-being, and your own future. I will access my PayPal account on next Saturday to verify that your good-faith payment has been made. Once that takes place, we can move forward with the final transfer.

I trust that you will not disappoint me in this matter, since the consequences for non-compliance could be quite severe. I look forward with great anticipation to working with you.

Yours faithfully,


Issa Gidada, JD, MMB,
President & CEO
U.S./Nigeria Funds Transfer Organization
Beverly Hills, CA

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Had you said "Tom Cruise Missile", you would have been sued by the C.o' $cientology

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it would be quicker to kill the spammers too!

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[Syberghost]

For lengthy and no-longer-applicable configuration reasons, I used to receive a ton of misdirected email intended for staff at The Economist magazine's "Economist Intelligence Unit", including all their writers.

Whenever I discovered a new one, I'd write a procmail rule bouncing their mail to them, and telling the sender to update his address book.

The primary discovery tool I had for finding the names I needed to bounce was people sending the Nigerian scam spam to them; I think every writer on their masthead got at least one of these. I don't know for sure how many they each got after I created the procmail rule, of course, since I was deliberately not tracking such things.

I sort of miss those days; I used to get dozens of Rush Limbaugh's misdirected emails every day, too. Many of them virus-infected.

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... I replied to this "Nigerian money"-thingie once like this:

Dear Sir,
I thank you very much for your mail. I didn't know what I did wrong that I didn't receive this spam till today. I thought but I would never get it, because this particular spam is so old that I thought it had already died out. But now I know the world won't stop turning and everything is right. At last even I got this wonderful piece of spam. You see, you've made me very happy. But now you can stop sending such things to me, because nearly every other spam is already in my archive.

And I even got a reply!

Dear friend,
In all my quest in life I never thought I'll come across one like you.
May the Lord continue to keep you.
And may same be for your family.
Send me your comments soon
Edward.

Re:Replying to spammers is fun

[lewp]

I don't know, spam is pretty annoying.

Honestly, is this really that uncommon?

[ebbomega]

I'm still waiting for a subpoena from back in December 99 from some guy threatening to sue some people on alt.cult-movies.rocky-horror for "slander" (guy claimed to be a software patent lawyer and didn't even know the difference between "slander" and "libel"... it was classic) because we made him lose money on e-bay, as we pointed out that his so called "Super Rare" (which, since then, has become blaspheme on the Rocky Horror newsgroup... but mostly because me and a Frank-N-Furter from Vegas spammed the board one night with a plethora of jokes about "Suck my super-rare schlong" and the like...) Rocky Horror Dolls he was selling on e-bay for $80 were available at your local Spencer's gifts for about $16....

This is just another case of someone threatening with lawsuits when they're really just full of chicken$#!+. Come on. Who here hasn't been threatened with legal action by some moron online?

I still say the coolest part of that whole flame war (which, btw, lasted a good month) was that he kept giving us phone numbers for the Pittsburg department of investigations (being that I'm Canadian, it would've been quite impressive that someone whose jurisdiction I'm not even in the same country as would be investigating me) saying that it was his proof that he was going to see us in court. And then he called us evil viscious [sic] morons.

"Come to think of it, there already are a million monkeys at a million typewriters, and usenet is _NOTHING_ like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton.

Re:Honestly, is this really that uncommon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who here hasn't been threatened with legal action by some moron online?

I have, as well as some friends, by a well known net.kook and maroon. Alas, in this case, the lawsuit was filed and rec.gambling.blackjack.moderated was shut down by the moderators due to the possible legal bills. Check the last message in the newsgroup in the Deja/Google archives.

Re:Honestly, is this really that uncommon?

[ParisTG]

Come on. Who here hasn't been threatened with legal action by some moron online?

I've been threatened with legal action by the MPAA for hosting a copy of DeCSS. Does that count?

ROFL

[I_redwolf]

This has to be one of the nets few great soap operas. BERNARD DUDE!! KEEP IT UP!! You'll be the first person in history to be blacklisted from the internet all together!!!

Re:ROFL

[Phork]

actually, he wouldn't be. at one point in the early 80s(or was it late 70s?) the moderator of rec.funny.humor was banned from the net.

Re:ROFL

[qubezz]

You'll be the first person in history to be blacklisted from the internet all together!!!
After Kevin Mitnick?

Re:ROFL

[phil reed]

He'd have to wait in line behind Bob Allisat.

Re:ROFL

[Anonymous._.Coward]

You'll be the first person in history to be blacklisted from the internet all together!!!

Nah, you could never ban him. Bernard knows what he's doing. He'll just upload an internet to his mouse mat and store it on a CD RAM for later use.

poor bernie

[Samari711]

better watch out, he could threaten /. with a lawsuit next :) hey has anyone even checked out the credentials of the law firm he said he was using?

Re:poor bernie

[olivechicago]

Knowing him... he prolly will. He came after me for simply commenting on the mail in passing convesation. This dude is so full of it! Seeing as it made it on slashdot... among other sites will surely piss him off even more.

Re:poor bernie

[Cutriss]

A quick Google turned up a single solitary link that happened to have those three names in it, but it was just a list of names on some Russian site.

I have a hard time believing that such a high-falutin computer consultant would use lawyers that don't even have an Internet presence. Then again, it's also highly likely that the retard just mispelled their names.

My mom lives outside Chicago. I think next time I go visit her I'll have to pay a visit to his office just so I can tell him that he's a moron.

Re:poor bernie

[GigsVT]

Also the fact that he is unemployed and looking for work is probably a big tip off that he has no lawyers.

Re:poor bernie

[Progoth]

Also the fact that he is unemployed and looking for work is probably a big tip off that he has no lawyers.

or the fact that his "baby girl has to go without some clothes she wants"

Re:poor bernie

[chotasahib]

You won't find this firm, I think. Tupoy = obtuse, dull Durak = fool Bolvan = blockhead It would be more appropriate for this guy to retain a firm called "Mudak, Opesdol and Razebui."

Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[Tsar]

I'd have thought that someone would have brought up SpamCop by now. Is there a better service that I don't know about?

Anytime I get a spam, I hit the link that I received when I registered with SpamCop, and paste the email (complete with header) into the provided textbox. SpamCop processes the email, compiles a report of the offending spam, computes the appropriate reporting addresses, and delivers a copy to each one.

It even allows you to add text to the beginning of the report. I always add this:

The electronic mail message referenced in this report was transmitted to a user or users of an electronic mail service based in the state of Tennessee, USA, in direct violation of Tennessee Code Title 47, Chapter 18, Part 25: "Unsolicited Advertising by Electronic Means." See http://www.spamlaws.com/state/tn.html for the complete text of this law.

Does that make me a bad person?

--
Tsar's Hypothesis: As the population of the Earth increases, the sum of human intelligence remains constant.

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[vandan]

Yes SpamCop is good.
I can testify that they actually do make a difference because I was threatened with legal action myself after reporting a local (Australian) marketing company to spamcop. Apparently they lost their account with their ISP.
I got a phonecall from an idiot who started threatening me with a lawsuit to recover 'great financial hardship' or some crap. It was a very abusive conversation. So then I rang the Australian Direct Marketing Association and told a girl there my story, put together a formal complaint. I haven't heard anything since (this was probably 3-5 months ago now).
So anyway the point is that SpamCop works & work GOOD!

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[RFC959]

Now the dissenting point of view: I've been on the other side of SpamCop too many times, because there are too many people out there with an overdeveloped sense of anti-spam righteousness and an underdeveloped sense of clue. I worked for a company that maintained a number of mailing lists - which I know were strictly opt-in - and every time we sent out a mailing, we'd get back at least one incoherent "STOP SMPAMMING ME YUO BATARDS I WILL SUE YOUR FOR ONE MILLION DOLARS" and a bunch of SpamCop reports. So we ended up with a SpamCop report as long as your arm, through no fault of our own. (We even got in a bit of trouble with Jon Orwant and O'Reilly one time! That was more a case of the interaction of a couple different things having an unexpected result than the typical spam-like mail, though, and Orwant and the O'Reilly guys were pretty cool about it once they realized we were actual human beings trying to DTRT. OK, gratuitous name-dropping over.)

I have to admit that we didn't make things all that easy for the subscribers - we only sent out mailings every few months, so it was easy for people to forget they'd subscribed, and the business people were always changing the names of the lists, and merging the lists, and splitting the lists, so it was easy for people to get confused about what exactly they were receiving. Still, it was an eye-opener to be on the other side of the fence.

SpamCop isn't the problem itself - the idea is good - but let's face it: Internet users are largely the same users who call their monitor the computer and their computer the hard drive, or think you can get the Internet on CDROM, or click on any attachment they get. Do you really think they're going to be capable of using a tool like SpamCop properly?

So, a couple tips (which I wish I could send to the Internet population as a whole, since the /. types need it less than others):
-Read the whole message. If you don't recognize it, make sure it didn't just change its name or merge with another list or something.
-Check to see if it has unsubscribe instructions. Yes, I know, every spam these days says "mail jessica12345@hotmail.com to unsubscribe!", but if you get a message from "newsletter@example.com" that says "You are receiving this message because you subscribed to the Foo Newsletter at http://www.example.com/subscribe; to unsubscribe, simply forward this message to unsubscribe@example.com; if you have a question or a problem, please contact us at newsletter@example.com" - then it's probably real and MAYBE YOU SHOULD TRY ACTUALLY FOLLOWING THE INSTRUCTIONS. (Instead of just picking an email address at random from the mailing and demanding to be unsubscribed!)
-Don't start swearing at people and making threats right off the bat. If the sender is legit, there will be a real human reading your mail, and pissing him off is probably not a good way to get stuff done. If you've already tried to unsubscribe and it hasn't worked, consider the possibility that there was a technical glitch, and maybe the sender isn't just trying to piss you off. (I was amused to notice a certain correlation between the number of swear words the angry recipient used and his (claimed) rank in his organization. If the email began "Fuck you, you cocksucking spammers...", it was a pretty good bet it would end "...Joe Johnson, CEO, MegaSite.Com")

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[CaptainSuperBoy]

You could always reply to the spamcop report and show the recipient the e-mail they sent when they went through your confirmed opt-in procedure. Unfortunately many marketers don't use confirmed opt-in, which opens you and your customers to a lot of misunderstanding. If you can prove to someone (complainant, or your ISP) when they subscribed to your newsletter you'll save yourself some grief.

Changing the names of newsletters / businesses will also get you complaints. Say your company made widgets, and I as a consumer of widgets subscribed to your "Widget news and deals" newsletter. The widget biz turns sour and you get eaten up by a sprocket company. Now I receive "Sprocket Center" every day and I'm left wondering when I subscribed to it.

Last, the vast majority of "corporate / mainsleaze" spam I get is just that, spam. Let's say I signed up for some service that was giving out free money back in the .com hey days.. I specifically told them I didn't want any e-mail. The company goes bust, my e-mail address gets bought and sold a few times, and someone's database conversion 'forgets' that I unchecked the 'spam me' box. It happens. If your company bought "opt-in" e-mail addresses to put on your list, it's likely your list is dirty.

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[Anonymous Coward]

SpamCop is bad, at least for innocent ISPs (like us! :-)

A spammer used @.com as their From:-address, and besides flooding our mailservers with bounced messages and "FUCK YOU SPAMMER!"-mail, they also got spamcop to send a dusin or so complaints to postmaster@, even if we had nothing at all to do with the spam.

*sigh*

The problem with spam is this: there are millions and millions of idiots out there that will believe in what someone tells them. (ie "amazing discoveries" or just about any daytime tv-shopping channel/programs).

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[RC514]

The right thing to do is double-opt-in. I've received a good share of spam mails claiming that I've at one time subscribed to a service or a list. This is almost always complete bullshit. I am tracking subscriptions and the address on which these mails appear hasn't been used to subscribe to anything for years. Also, don't join, split or rename lists without notifying all recipients of the change and don't blame it on "business people" if you don't keep the recipients up-to-date about their subscription status. You probably didn't do this, but just in case: Don't sell lists to other entities at all. Such a move should always require the users to resubscribe.

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[ktakki]

I got a phonecall from an idiot who started threatening me with a lawsuit to recover 'great financial hardship' or some crap.

How did the spammer get your phone number?

k.

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that make me a bad person?

Well, you ARE relying on Tennessee law, which is not typically much respected in forums such as /.

You're not a postmaster down there in Tennessee, are you?

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[TimboJones]

Possibly similar to the way I just got yours:

• First, I clicked the link in your slashdot profile: http://www.xensei.com/users/ktakki/vcr.html
• That page wasn't useful for my purpose (by the way, the blink tag is deprecated and nonfunctional on most newer browsers), so I backtracked up the directory tree until I found a useful page http://www.xensei.com/user/ktakki
• Looking up xensei.com itself wasn't likely to work, since yours is a user page at a web hosting provider. If other avenues failed, I would have tried it as a semi-last resort.
• From your user page's copyright notification, I knew your name, which corresponded to your slashdot uid, so I knew it was a pretty good lead. I also explored your site a little more and noted your email address(es) on K. Takki Media Services and your personal home page.
• Armed with this information, I headed over to http://www.netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois to see what I could find. A search on your name revealed you as the Administrative and Billing Contact for artcrime.com, also the domain of your email address.
• Voila! I have your phone number.
• Now, the parent post is a little harder since he doesn't list a website or email address in his slashdot account. 'Vandan' is apparently a common Indian nickname, so searching on that didn't turn up anything either. However, the spammer had access to his email address, which would make things much easier.

A couple other points:

• Reputable professionals often have their email program configured with their full name.
• There is a semi-strong correlation between people likely to report spam and people that administer domains.

These two things make it likely that you'll be able to pull a phone number from whois. If you can't, I'm sure there are other means (that require more work.)

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[StenD]

I worked for a company that maintained a number of mailing lists - which I know were strictly opt-in

...

the business people were always changing the names of the lists, and merging the lists, and splitting the lists,

I might agree that the lists were strictly opt-in if lists were split (since the subscribers opted in for all of the content which is now on multiple lists), but if I can't call it opt-in if lists were merged (since people who were not on all of the lists did not opt in to material from them).

-Check to see if it has unsubscribe instructions. Yes, I know, every spam these days says "mail jessica12345@hotmail.com to unsubscribe!", but if you get a message from "newsletter@example.com" that says "You are receiving this message because you subscribed to the Foo Newsletter at http://www.example.com/subscribe; to unsubscribe, simply forward this message to unsubscribe@example.com; if you have a question or a problem, please contact us at newsletter@example.com" - then it's probably real and MAYBE YOU SHOULD TRY ACTUALLY FOLLOWING THE INSTRUCTIONS.

Been there, done that, seen how often it works. In fact, I see the "because you subscribed" notices more often in emails sent to an email address I never use (my account at the ISP that hosts my domains), than in email sent to addresses which are actually subscribed to mailing lists.

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[Dimensio]

I get a lot of e-mails that assure me that they are only being sent because I "opted-in" to a mailing list...

...except that I never sign up for mailing lists, and I never recognize the names of the companies that send me such junk.

In some cases the e-mails are addressed to "darkstar@iglou.iglou.com" or "darkstar@iglou1.iglou.com" or some other variant of my e-mail address that only appears when I make USENET postings; the only way to have those addresses on a list is to harvest addresses from USENET. This of course means that any "opt-in" claims are bullshit.

Other times I actually see my real name on the e-mails. This means that some company had my information, including my name and e-mail address, and sold it as part of a mailing list. I have never granted permission to sell my e-mail address to marketers when signing up for anything, and as such I treat e-mails as any other spam and I make an effort to have the sender's account nuked. Unfortunately I can only "nuke" them inasmuch as getting them kicked from their ISP. In an ideal world all spammers would be rounded up, placed on an island and then vapourized in the blast of an thermonuclear detonation.

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[kanne]

Okay, slightly off topic, but my boyfriend has a pretty good method of ferreting out who gives his contact information away - and this is a guy who religiously replies "NO" to the do you want to receive info/updates/ads, etc. questions.

He has his own domain name, so whenever he is asked on a site to give his email address, he gives the sitename@hisdomainname.com. Like, nytimes@hisdomainname.com or hotjobs@hisdomainname.com or whatever. It doesn't stop him from getting the spam, but at least he knows which companies sell his email address and to whom.

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[ktakki]

I didn't ask how you could get my phone number. I asked how the spammer got his phone number. Let's backtrack a bit...

However, the spammer had access to his email address, which would make things much easier.

How did the spammer get his e-mail address? Did he actually CC: the spammer in the complaint he sent to the spammer's ISP? Did the spammer's ISP forward the complaint to the spammer with his address intact? In my opinion, the former would be stupid (like walking around with a "KICK ME" sign, or in this case, "MAILBOMB ME"), the latter irresponsible. Aren't TOS/AUP complaints confidential?

That's what I wanted to know.

Besides, you could have saved four or five steps by typing "ktakki" into Google, the Stalker's Best Friend.

k.

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[TimboJones]

Besides, you could have saved four or five steps...

I could have, and to a certain extent, I did save some of those steps. I didn't actually go through all the work I described; mostly I was covering bases in my little guide for inexperienced internet stalkers. Note that I meant it for the inexperienced -- thinking about it now I realize that most people here likely know how to use whois. Early morning caused me to forget my audience.

How did the spammer get his e-mail address?

At first I thought, "What a silly question. The spammer clearly sent him mail in the first place, how would they not have his address?" But then I realized that they shouldn't have any way to realize who had reported them, and they therefore wouldn't know which of their spammees was responsible. Is good point.

Number 1, the issue of notifying the party you report is up in the air. If it's a genuine spammer, you have the risk that you've just provided a confirmed, premium address. But if it was an honest mistake, it seems to me that the party deserves the courtesy of knowing you didn't like it. Then again, honest mistake cases would be isolated incidents, and the ISP wouldn't take any action. But note that Neil CCed to Bernie, and he is theoretically a well-known anti-spam figure.

Number 2, perhaps the marketing company in question had control of the abuse@ address for their domain, and the spamcop report was sent to that address as well as the abuse address of the ISP. e.g. if www.ozspamco.com mapped to www.aussiehost.net/~ozspamco, spamcop or vandan may have sent the notification to both abuse@ozspamco.com and abuse@aussiehost.net. I believe that admins have the ability to get more information from the reporter when they receive a spamcop report, unless the headers have been munged.

Number 3, I will now admit that I don't know enough about the situation to defend it. Therefore, I should stop doing so.

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[Saffamer]

Spam Motel is nice too. Everytime I need to use my email address, I go to spammotel, create a new address with some description of who I'm giving information too. When I get spam, I can see who sold my email address then go back into spammotel and delete that address.

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[RFC959]

(Following unsubscribe instructions)

Been there, done that, seen how often it works. In fact, I see the "because you subscribed" notices more often in emails sent to an email address I never use...

*sigh* Yeah, I know, but spammers lie. This is one of the great sad truths of life. I'm not saying that "because you subscribed" is a magic phrase that automatically means you should consider it legit, but if the envelope sender matches the addresses in the body of the mail, which are consistent with each other, and in turn are consistent with any URLs mentioned...it's more likely. I get a lot of the "because you subscribed" mail too (thank Crom for procmail!) but the great majority of them are mailed from one domain, include a URL in another domain, and an "unsubscribe" address in a third, which smells really fishy.

Re:Why hasn't SpamCop been mentioned?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think my favoriate SpamCop abuse was a complaint against my system for sending him spam from MAILER-DAEMON. The message was, incidentally, a bounce message (of spam). Fool also sent his own threat. The received headers on the original spam just happened to match the received headers on his message.

ISTR someone else closed the issue, due to something coming up about then that "only [the anonymous coward] could handle".

Oh My God

[Rinikusu]

Jesus Christ. I just wasted 30 minutes of my life reading through that whole mess. I want those 30 minutes back!

Do I have such a miserable life that I'm willing to spend that much time on something that affects me in no way whatsoever AND the few minutes it takes to post about it on /.????

Man. I need to get back to work.

Re:Oh My God

[Harvey]

> Jesus Christ. I just wasted 30 minutes of my life reading through that whole mess. I want those 30 minutes back!

Sounds like it's lawsuit time to me...

Re:Oh My God

[chad_r]

you're complaining about this on Slashdot?!

Re:Oh My God

[jpostel]

ROFL!! I have not laughed this hard in a while. I have been reading that website and the comments for the last 45 minutes. I can't get any more work done today. I can't stop laughing.

Re:Oh My God

[geekoid]

you read it!
you can't un-read it!

Re:Oh My God

[hardburn]

Jesus Christ. I just wasted 30 minutes of my life reading through that whole mess. I want those 30 minutes back!

Welcome to Slashdot!

If you're really bored..

[loraksus]

Give Bernard a call ;)
(773) 391-0595
What a fuckin' moron. Tho methinks he just disconnected his phone from the wall. I sure as hell hope he isnt expecting any calls . . .

(poor bastard)
Hey, this is turning into kinda a fc thread.. woot!

Re:If you're really bored..

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm, off to the pay phone on the corner. Chicago is Central time right?

HAhahaha

Re:If you're really bored..

[omega9]

Don't forget your Red Box! Be a shame to pay for that call.

My god. Think of it. If only a handfull of /. readers dusted off their red boxes and gave this guy a ring.

Re:If you're really bored..

[metallidrone]

Or you could send him a post-card.

http://samspade.org/t/whois?a=shifmanconsulting. co m&server=magic

(not linked to conceal link's origin :)

Got to love Whois.

Re:If you're really bored..

[Anonymous Coward]

pager bomb him.

Re:If you're really bored..

[Anonymous Coward]

eek! it worked, I called the spam guy from 8000 miles away! An answering machine picked up the phone...

Oh, and that voice...

Now I have to sue you for my phone bill :-)

Re:If you're really bored..

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless I'm mistaken, Red Boxes haven't worked on payphones in years. Wouldn't do much good to break 'em out, unless of course you live in Podunk where the phone equipment hasn't been updated in the last 15-20 years.

Re:If you're really bored..

[Anonymous Coward]

Equipment has been in large part updated, yes, but there are still plenty of places ye ol trusty red box will still work. My "red box" is actually an analog tape with the tone representing a quarter drop repeated over and over on both sides. It's paced at 4 tones/sec on a 60 minute tape. Do the math and that comes to ~$3,600. I use a broken pair of headphones to play it into the phone.

A short, half-block walk from my appartment takes me to a 7-11 with four "working" payphones. I have been using these same payphones for about eight years now.

Walk up to any payphone, pick up the receiver and blow in the mic. If you can hear yourself in the speaker the red box will work. New phones solve the red box problem by not turning on the mic untill the call is connected.

Slashdot THIS link and cost spammers $$$

[vandan]

Click here and then each link on the page and the advertisers gets charged the amount shown in small print. But for a permanent solution: I want to charge people who send me email. I would obviously pay back all those people who send stuff I wanted to see, and not pay back those who pissed me off. What's the chance of this happening? It would be good.

Re:Slashdot THIS link and cost spammers $$$

[AnotherBlackHat]

... I want to charge people who send me email. I would obviously pay back all those people who send stuff I wanted to see, and not pay back those who pissed me off. What's the chance of this happening? It would be good.

Well, it's possible to refuse email that doesn't have a special (usable only once) password, and charge for the passwords. This is something you could (theoretically) set up right now using paypal, procmail, and a custom web site. Since it's possible, and it's been posted to slashdot, I'd guess the odds at about even money.

Re:Slashdot THIS link and cost spammers $$$

[storem]

In the end, and what was expected since several years, is that most of us will -by default- deny all mail messages arriving in our INBOX. Maybe a system such as ICQ, requesting authorization, might be put in place. I saw a friend using Hotmail, and I believe there is already a feature to only allow people in you addressbook to send you e-mail (except MS).

Re:Slashdot THIS link and cost spammers $$$

[dreamfactory]

Talking about icq, On my icq UIN I have my email UINNUMBER@mydomain.com, and lo and behold I recieve spam email on my email with that UIN number in front!!

Wonder how they got the lists of email??

Re:Slashdot THIS link and cost spammers $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

For a scheme to charge spammers (in resources, if not in money), check a recent link from sweetcode. Probably 2nd or 3rd down.

Re:Slashdot THIS link and cost spammers $$$

[ag3n7]

Or you use SpamGourmet and set up your website to randomly generate the first field so that if a spambot spiders your address, the email is only valid for x number of times.

Re:Slashdot THIS link and cost spammers $$$

[BACbKA]

Non-genuine ICQ clients bypass the authentication, at least for watching whether you're online. micq is one of such clients. That's an ICQ protocol deficiency, which I guess they live with so not to piss off the older own clients' installed base (maybe if the share of micq-like clients goes high, they'll reconsider...)

Re:Slashdot THIS link and cost spammers $$$

[Maserati]

When I signed up for ICQ I got a porn spam message less than a minute after I signed on for the first time.

Re:Slashdot THIS link and cost spammers $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Hash cash! (not a drug reference)

http://www.cypherspace.org/hashcash/

Spammer tries to sue...

[Datafage]

Man bites dog...

Sounds about as ridiculous. I especially love the guy's total and complete lack of grammatic ability.

Re:Spammer tries to sue...

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself...

Re:Spammer tries to sue...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I especially love the guy's total and complete lack of grammatic ability".

...talk about the pot calling the kettle black...

This is funny stuff!

[Bombcar]

We should perhaps look more into spammer-baiting! Anyone in Chicago able to get a personal interview with Bernie?

Now he's Slashdot Famous! He'll probably advertise that he's a Slashdot Expert!

Spam Saga: Attack of the Moron

[Brit Aviator]

That was a highly entertaining read. The stupendous irony of opening oneself up to civil liability though the improper threat of holding someone *else* liable is worth the price of admission alone. Bravo!

Aha!

[Compact Dick]

I can't wait for the 'ENLARGE YOUR PENIS BY FIVE INCHES' thugs to get down on me.

Re:Aha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that in length or girth, and could you send my boyfriend the spammer's email address, for, uh, research purposes, yes, that will do nicely.

Re:Aha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or else, "Tiffany" or "Tanya" or "Jasmine" will hunt you down and either suffocate you between her legs or drown you in her dripping womanhood (and then we'll get spam offering to let us see the live feed of the whole event...)
Speaking of which, has anyone been following that guy who was going to cut off his own feet to "make a point"?

Trying to stop a sex news "newsletter"

[angkor]

There's nothing more astonishing and frustrating than when spammers try to attack back. I've been trying to stop some kind of "sex news" newsletter that's followed me from email to email address for the last three years (I suspect they are just spamming Thai-based email in general).

I get angry responses from them each time I report them for spamming. They say that I am engaged in "extortion" against them (?) and complain to my ISP and SpamCop. Nothing's ever come of it, but every 3 or 4 months I can count on a fresh newsletter and another round of invective.

Re:Trying to stop a sex news "newsletter"

[bero-rh]

The best way to stop them is to find a minor who received their spam - sending XXX material to kids is a criminal offense in almost all countries, and spam always reaches kids...

Re:Trying to stop a sex news "newsletter"

[The Pi-Guy]

!!! As you can see from an earlier post, I am a minor (12 yrs. old) - Anyone wanna take up a suit for me vs. EmailBucks?

--pi
"Who else but a kid has the time to memorize 32 digits?!"

Re:Trying to stop a sex news "newsletter"

[hearingaid]

If you're 12 years old and receiving explicit emails, you don't need to file suit. Contact your local police. Complain about the nasty email you've been getting.

They'll bust the spammers. In this case, criminal is better than civil, I think.

Funniest quote ever

[tunah]

How much more helpful could I be than to provide you with the appropriate e-mail address? I could engrave it on a clue-by-four and deliver it to you in Chicago, I suppose.

Funniest thing i've read in a long time. Like my new sig?

Re:Funniest quote ever

[vladkrupin]

No, that's not that funny. The real kicker is the attorney representing Bernie Shifman (quoted from spambag.net):

Bernie Shifman left another voice mail message for me today (this time entirely in English) informing me that he's taking me court, represented by the law firm of "Tupoy, Durak, and Bolvan", Attorneys At Law.

For those poor non-Russian speakers... 'Tupoy', 'Durak', and 'Bolvan' are the three synonyms translated into English as 'idiot'! I bet the guy owns that law firm too!

Yes, I am hoping for an extra karma point for 'Funny' or maybe even 'Informative'. Karma is good. But even without it it's nice to share the fun with the 99% poor /.'ers souls who are illiterate in Russian.

Re:Funniest quote ever

[SirFlakey]

Hahaha that is hillarious - thank you =). But it probably highlights the potential for a hoax =) .. Still it's made my evening =)

Re:Funniest quote ever

[Technician]

Just to confirm the obvious, I checked the online phone book. The result is here.

http://www.qwestdex.com/cgi/search.fcg?resultform= basic&inreg_flag=N&dir=91600&metro=1&heading_id=22 2&heading=Attorneys&state=IL&city=CHICAGO&alpha=Ts &alphaend=Tz

It's amazing how non-internet guru's can use the net to spot a hoax. If he names attorneys, he should use real ones. Maybe he didn't use real attorneys because he might get sued by them for mis-representation.

Re:Funniest quote ever

[Ronin Developer]

"Tupoy, Durak, and Bolvan", Attorneys At Law.

I thought you were going to say "Moe, Larry, and Curly", Attorneys At Law.

Enjoyed your post.

RD

Re:Funniest quote ever

[Chainsaw76]

So, i'ts the russian equivilant of Dewy, Cheatum, and Howe.

-J

Re:Funniest quote ever

[PhipleTroenix]

What I really liked was that in the middle of the harshest invective I've ever read was:


You have no rhythm.

Re:Funniest quote ever

[Syberghost]

I was counting on "Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe".

Hey, Taco; this is my third attempt at sending this. The goddamn lameness filter is really pissing me off, and I still don't see any signs of it preventing actual lameness; just preventing one-line comebacks and inconveniencing fast typists.

Re:Funniest quote ever

[jpostel]

I just told this to some Russian co-workers. They thought it was hilarious.

Re:Funniest quote ever

[Fishstick]

That whole "open letter to spammers" was hilarious. I cut n pasted that to save for later.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

Re:Funniest quote ever

[wiredog]

Dewey, Cheatam, and Howe.

Re:Funniest quote ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Running

Topoy
Durak
Bolvan

Through the Babelfish I get:

Tupoy Fool Is Blockhead

Re:Funniest quote ever

[Rupert]

Soo, Grabbit & Runne

Re:Funniest quote ever

[studerby]

Findum, Fleesum, Skinnum & Skip

My open letter...

[doorbot.com]

Congratulations, you're front page news!

(On Slashdot.org, though)

The voice mails are GREAT!

[TheViffer]

omfg .. sounds like a 17 year old, zit faced high school drop out who weighs 122 pounds, cant get a date, and drive a rusted out 1986 Honda Civic and is mad at the world!

Voice Mail #6 is GREAT!!!!

Re:The voice mails are GREAT!

[alt.sex.fetish.jesus]

Yeah, the mp3's are hilarious. I couldn't make out a few sentences in bernie.mp3. Was that French or something??

Re:The voice mails are GREAT!

[icedivr]

Well, if you click on the link entitled "Bernie's Musical Taste," the posting it pulls up shows him having a USRobotics email addy. At a minimum, we know he's been employable for a few years now.

Re:The voice mails are GREAT!

[abdulla]

apparently he also has a daughter he can't afford to clothe, somethings are just askew

Bernie should apply for work with...

[Anonymous Coward]

NPO Technologies.

Mirror for when it get /.

[rf0]

Most of the HTML:
http://www.rusnet.info/mirror/ShifmanIsAMoronSpamm er.html

send him some

[Sean5033]

Reading something like that just makes me want to send some unsolicited email his way.

Spam is getting worse than ever...

[storem]

I'm active on the Internet since 1995. Never have I received this many SPAM as now. During the last couple of months both my personal and corporate e-mail addresses (my corporate e-mail address even more than the others) are no longer usable anymore without the traditional morning cleaning. I expect to received each night over 20 SPAM messages. This amount doubles during the day.

When some unfortunate unemployed guy would send me an non-personal e-mail requesting a job I would probably return him te same answer. People have to know that they will never be hired by sending such a standard letter to companies. You have to be unique and stand out of the crowd to be noticed. sending the message over and over again doesn't help you in searching a new position.

But it's maybe not the best thing for this company to send out angry mails everytime they receive SPAM.
Two reason:
1) If it's a spammer, they now know that you are a live person, not a bogus address.
2) You can hurt people by accusing them of being a spammer. The case above proves this.

Conclusion:
1) Write very case specific letters to request employment.
2) Do not accuse people of spamming before you knwo what you are actually doing.

Re:Spam is getting worse than ever...

[eclectro]

Yeah, it's getting really bad. Too bad congress is so ineffective against special interests, we'll never see any help from them. Something needs to be done though.

Slashdot to be sued for sure

[ssheth]

I am sure CmdrTaco is going to start getting threating emails from Shifman tomorrow claiming he is going to sue Slashdot for linking to the petemoss webpage. And soon, all who post in this thread will get a email too... (Do you think he can decipher those tough email scrambling schemes /. uses ... better alert my lawyers to be ready :-)

This whole thing just makes me sad that I am from same town as Shifman. And what kind of dumb "computer consultant" can't even use whois info to track down someone's address? It took me a whole 3 minutes to track down Neil Schwartzman's address.

Re:Slashdot to be sued for sure

[Malduin]

Oh! Oh! If he's going to threaten all of the people who respond to this post, I wanna get in on it! Having recently lost my job due to the closure of st3.com, I have nothing better to do!

Re:Slashdot to be sued for sure

[Anonymous Coward]

decrypting slashdot e-mail masking methods is against DMCA! DMCA DMCA! hahahaha.

Re:Slashdot to be sued for sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Let him have fun trying to figure out how to sue all the AC's. For once not setting up a /. account may be a blessing ;)

Oh .. and this is flamebait I know ..

[TheViffer]

but I guess the poster was to scared of Bernard thinking he/she was going to get sued and posted it anonymously :-)

What? Someone had to say it :-)

Shifman spam and sue services

[arvindn]

Hi. I'm Bernard Shit^Hfman, and I do computer consultancy services. I'm looking for contract work. I specialize in spam and sue services: I offer advice on how to spam, and then sue for damages. So any time you want to make some money, you can use my phone number as a starting point.
P.S If you don't get back to me within a month, you'll be liable for damages resulting from my going out of work. My lawyers will be getting in touch with you and you could be facing upto $1500 a day
P.P.S wanna fuck me?

Re:Shifman spam and sue services

[jsse]

P.P.S wanna fuck me?

Shouldn't it be 'P.S.S.' instead? Just asking.

Re:Shifman spam and sue services

[baglunch]

Shouldn't it be 'P.S.S.' instead? Just asking.

No, p.s. stands for "post script", so p.p.s. would be "post post script" or the script following the post script, where p.s.s. would be "post script script" which would be an autosig generator.

Re:Shifman spam and sue services

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe P(ost) P(ost) S(cript) makes more sense then PSS.

Re:Shifman spam and sue services

[BACbKA]

Did you mean "Post Spam & Sue"?
Then it could have been P.S.S. :-))

The open letter to spammers

[Chris Tucker]

Oh, my! What a perfect piece of work that was.

Regarding Mr. Shifman, Marx (Groucho) has a quote for every occasion.

"There's my argument, restrict immigration!"

Whoops! Looks like I'm gonna get sued, now. The firm I keep on retainer, Mako, Basking & White, will handle my defense.

I wonder...

[Night0wl]

What the odds are of this resulting in a suicide...

If he does take this too seriously, as it seems he does. The odds of him getting employed with-out redicule in any tech savvy computer industry are greatly reduced.

All it will take is one slashdot reader/appropriate internet surfer with a decent memory to recall his name and make mention of it.

We've effectively killed his internet persona.
Name change maybe? heh.

Re:I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

ISP Bill: $40/month

Flame war of E-Mails: $0

6 pack of lawyers: $210/hour

Being banned from the internet and commiting suicide: Priceless

For all your needs, use Vista Card, the number one in joke related humor.

Rash Movements Hurt You, not me...

[DaftShadow]

What exactly would be the use of sending e-mail to a spammer? It's not like he's going to read it, he'll just toss it out like the rest of us...

But first, he'll do this: The fellow will take your insulting e-mail, find the little address you have attached, and plop it onto as many spam lists as he can find. So, he wakes up in the morning with one insulting letter and the good man gives you 100 messages a day about Free Horny Teens.

After you, sir...

- DaftShadow

Re:Rash Movements Hurt You, not me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Send it anonymously and set the subject as re: resume or something of the sort.

Re:Rash Movements Hurt You, not me...

[BlackEmperor]

doh! like you would use a valid email address, that would be smart. it only takes a few minutes to create a hotmail address.

Re:Rash Movements Hurt You, not me...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, dont abuse him, offer him what he wants - get him to mail `you` stuff or phone `you` or whatever...

Re:Rash Movements Hurt You, not me...

[issachar]

sure he will. but how many people read slashdot? How many unique e-mail addresses is that? The best part is that it's not even spam. It's just a lot of unique e-mails coming in that you don't want to get. (and don't use your real address obviously)...

Re:Rash Movements Hurt You, not me...

[icedivr]

I think ol' Bernie has proven that he does not simply toss out messages he wasn't expecting. Maybe he *ought* to but that's a different story.

Re:Rash Movements Hurt You, not me...

[Anonymous Coward]

I already created the hotmail account for this. Go send him something...
username: shitmanconsulting
passwd: spamsucks

Re:Rash Movements Hurt You, not me...

[brrd]

Bernie seems to be answering all his email, one by one, by one, by one...

From : "Bernard Shifman"
To : "'bernard shitman'"
Subject : RE: Consulting firm
Date : Wed, 9 Jan 2002 13:53:01 -0600

please don't ever send me e-mail again

-----Original Message-----
From: bernard shitman [mailto:shitmanconsulting@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2002 1:49 PM
To: bernard@shifmanconsulting.com
Subject: Consulting firm

Sheesh can't wait to see how this all ends! This is even better than temptation island! :)

Re:Rash Movements Hurt You, not me...

[Anonymous Coward]

I took the opportunity to use the above and send him the following missive:

To: bernard@shifmanconsulting.com
Subject: Defending Your Reputation

Based on your performance thus far, some of the folks you spammed have suggested you as a prime candidate for the Darwin awards. While you might be initially excited at the possibility of receiving such prestigous recognition, I must regretfully inform you that you are not eligible. To be eligible for the Darwin, the nominee must be dead as a result of his own stupidity. Merely being brain-dead, no matter how demonstrable, does not suffice.

Better luck with your next stunt!

Since this was sent from the hotmail account so thoughtfully created by my brother anonymous coward, any responses from Shifman to Shitman should be available for all to view using that login and password.

I can hardly wait to see what he does next.

Is this related to the previous article?

[gewalker]

Previous story was on the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence then we get the article on Bernie the spamming moron. These articles must be related.

You just can't make up stories like this -- you have to be a bonified idiot to come up with this stuff.

Does anybody have a truly good idiot stories site? One site that I've liked is here but I hope there is a really good one somewhere that needs to be slashdotted.

Re:Is this related to the previous article?

[Anonymous Coward]

bonified

That's bona fide, Pooky.

Re:Is this related to the previous article?

[gewalker]

Geez, I knew that. Probably shouldn't post at 3:30 in the AM

Not sure why I qualify as Pooky, but the correction is noted.

Re:Is this related to the previous article?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.morons.org/

I sense a familial resemblance

[acb]

Do you suppose that Bernard Shifman is related to John "Doctor of Law" Grubor?

Forward spam to their whois admin contact

[migstradamus]

When particularly motivated, usually when the 'remove' address proves bogus, I'll go to their site and whois the URL. Then I'll forward the spam, often two or three per day, to the contact e-mail addresses found there with a brief explanation. Sometimes I even sign them up for p0rn newsletters, not that I would know where to find those.

The typical e-mortgage spams lead to an URL registered to a casino company. They'll probably enjoy the newsletters.

Mig

Almost as funny as....

[Atrax]

... being threatened with a lawsuit for telling someone to RTFM in a programming group. I must be up to about my tenth one of those by now...

Re:Almost as funny as....

[SirFlakey]

Hmm I won't bother to post this on core =) hehe it is mightily funny though ..

Your email adress

[Per Abrahamsen]

Your troll would be so much more convincing if you didn't hide your email adress.

Think: In which world is speach most free:

1) A world where you can send single personal messages to anyone, but can't send multiple copies of the same message to people who haven't authorized you spending their ressources that way.

2) A world where you only can send messages to people who have explicitly authorized you to do so.

If we win the fight against spammers, we get world 1. If we lose, we get world 2.

Some people believe free speach, and thus world 1, is worth fighting for. Some feel the battle is already lost. Personally, my email filtering is now based on a whitelist, i.e. I have already joined world 2. Just like you have, by hiding your email adress.

Re:Your email adress

[zbuffered]

It's not black and white like this. Effective spam laws could be devised that would prevent people we don't want mailing us from doing so. Enforcement might be a problem, but it would be a huge step in the right direction.
Let me repeat: effective spam laws are not an oxymoron. We can make it work. We just have to try, and try again.
Don't you think that if a law were passed that made illegal forms of e-mail we needed, there wouldn't be public outcry enough to modify that law? The first step is a big one, but if they can ban drugs, they can ban spam.
One more thing, don't you think the guy that spearheads this into law will get some serious kudos for it? I mean, take Mr. Tax-and-spend, the guy whose entire reason for being in politics is to subsidize big business with tax money. He's coming up for election, needs to win a few votes, so he helps push through some imaginary legislation that makes a 50% dent in spam. Would you not be more likely to kiss his ass come election time? I know I would.

Re:Your email adress

[Anonymous Coward]

If we make spam illegal, then the terrorists have won. God Bless America!

Re:Your email adress

[limekiller4]

Spam is sending broadcast advertisements. That's the first place your analogy breaks down. Second, you have the right to speak, you do not have the right to be heard. Sending email requires that I bother with the email.

If you want to speak, put up a website.

Reminds me of a hoax

[mirko]

French Slashdotters may have heard about David Hirschmann. In short (if you don't like Fish) David Hirschmann was supposed to have some misconception of the corporate world which he shared with one of his female co-workers an inapropriate way. She then would have forwarded it around the Internet and at the end DH may have comitted suicide.
This got covered quite a lot by the French Press but finally appeared to be a hoax as no one of these protagonists actualy existed.
Now in this case I'd also tend to think that it may not be real...
I don't know people as stupid as this b.shifman that would have an internet connection.
There's something extreme here. it smells like comedy...

Re:Reminds me of a hoax

[Secret Coward]

While reading through the story, I started thinking, "No one could possibly be this dumb. Someone must have broken into his computer and is playing a practicle joke." Then he went off and started making phone calls from his house. What an idiot!

Re:Reminds me of a hoax

[Spilver]

There's definitely something sick with this guy, if he really does exist. Reading the page was funny at first, but his persistence suggests to me that he really needs a psychiatrist rather than a laywer. In the end, I kind of feel sorry for him. Still, I would love to read his resume...

Re:Reminds me of a hoax

[CatherineCornelius]

I don't know people as stupid as this b.shifman that would have an internet connection.

There's something extreme here. it smells like comedy..

At the risk of raising an almighty fuss, I suggest you haven't heard of Edmond Wollmann and his gaggle of kookchasers...

Re:Reminds me of a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no my dear friend, I'm afraid there ARE people out there this stupid. In some comical exchanges on a public mailing list for shopping cart software (the Miva Merchant Users list) a certain Michael Walker has managed to prove himself to be just as idiotic, litigious, and deluded about reality and his position on this planet. He's been banned a few times, always manages to pop back up and start more trouble. It provides a nice break in the day when we can all sit back and laugh at him. Evidently his past business partners have had to deal with his tirades and tantrums as well - vdo-specialties.cc is a nice satire site, whereas vdo-specialties.com is evidently his real site/business. He has illegally impersonated a lawyer, made all sorts of wild (and false/idiotic) claims, and generally proven himself to be an ass. Anyway, these kooks out there do exist .. and if you're bored then take a look at the satire site and for heaven's sake, search the archives of that mailing list for "Michael Walker" and just see what might pop up! After observing Mr. Walker from the sidelines on that mailing list, I have NO doubts in my mind that our B. Shiffman could be a real live (possibly mentally unstable) person.

Hope this doesn't get modded down too far for being posted as AC -- I think those entertained by B. Shiffman could get a kick out of this as well. But I am indeed an Anonymous Coward -- don't need any lawsuit threats! *grin*

Re:Reminds me of a hoax

[fredrik70]

same here, don't think it's a hoax. More some lonely poor soul who is desperatly trying to get some credibility and resorts to childish lawsuit threats and name calling ('your company will be out of business in 3 years time,' etc, etc).
Bit sad actually....

Re:Reminds me of a hoax

[tskirvin]

I suggest you haven't heard of Edmond Wollman and his gaggle of kookchasers...

I wish nobody else had, either. Gods, leave him alone, people!
Oh: the Dungeon seems appropriate right now.
- Tim Skirvin (tskirvin@killfile.org)

Re:Reminds me of a hoax

[d-e-w]

But alt.usenet.kooks is good for a laugh when you're having a really bad day. ;)

If you've got to deal with idiots in RL, it's a good place to come to the realization you could be dealing with someone even more clueless. And a good place to remind yourself that your personal usenet kook isn't as kooky as he/she could be ...

Re:Reminds me of a hoax

[CatherineCornelius]

I wish nobody else had, either. Gods, leave him alone, people!

Yep, that kind of personality seems to bring out the worst in people, sooner or later.

However, my point is that the reported activities of this Shifman character, if he exists, appear to be well within the bell curve for internet stupidity. It doesn't look much like a hoax to me.

Re:Reminds me of a hoax

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually got one of B.S.'s spams. And my website clearly has nothing to do with anything remotely related to his work, so it is spam.

So anyway if this is a joke then either:

A) They riffed off of a real spammer
B) The jokers themselves are spammers

Re:Reminds me of a hoax

[tskirvin]

And a good place to remind yourself that your personal usenet kook isn't as kooky as he/she could be ...

Unless, of course, this isn't true:

John Grubor

ThomasW540

Michael Falkner

Terri DiDisto

Brandy Alexandre - Tim Skirvin (tskirvin@killfile.org)

I am not Canadian

[analemma]

Tired of Spam?

Try PocoMail.

This is so funny.

[Bender Unit 22]

I can recommend that everyone read the entire page.
This guy just doesn't know when to quit. A good thing he got the "fame" of a slashdotting. heeh.

US Mailing Address

[0xA]

There are serveral references on the site about Bernie trying to get a U.S. Mail address from Schwatrzman. I assume he would like to send him a registered letter via the US Postal Service.

Too bad Neil didn't give it to him. The email Bernie sent was to an alcor.concordia.ca address.

Concordia is a University.... in Montreal....

Re:US Mailing Address

[MaxPower582]

Bernie probably thought the ".ca" was California. His actions show he is a genius!!

Re:US Mailing Address

[cuberat]

Concordia is also a college...in Moorhead, Minnesota. Not that Neil is there, either, but for the sake of completeness... ;)

The guy is clueless...

[Adrian Voinea]

This is one of the funniest parts from the webpage...

AH! SOMEONE TOLD HIM ...
From: Bernard Shifman
[mailto:bshifman@cometlink.com]
Sent: Monday, December 31, 2001 2:37 PM
To: 'abuse@google.com'
Cc: 'forumadmin@geminione.com'
Subject: FW: Article regarding Bernard Shifman


ABUSE@GOOGLE. = This person is using your search
engine to host a link. please read entire e-mail
below to understand how this berson is abusing
your service. It is your job to put a stop to this.

[I am "using their search engine to host a link"? Oh geez. Talk about clueless]


This guy is beyond clueless! How can he claim he's a computer consultant? What would he do if someone really hired him?

Re:The guy is clueless...

[Adrian Voinea]

This is the guy's last e-mail. The horror!

From: "Bernard Shifman" To: "'Jeff Cooper'"
Jeff,
I will always be a very big part of the I.T.
industry in Chicago. There will never be anything you can do to change that. You're a
nobody in this town. Bill and Joe are just little
turds in this world. I will always work in I.T.
all over the globe, DON'T YOU EVER FORGET IT
PEON. I have over 40+ businesses as my clients.
To be honest, I got two new clients this week
from sending out my e-mail to companies. My
reputation is solid gold because of the level of
service I provide. Do not reply to this e-mail.
Bernard

Re:The guy is clueless...

[Anonymous Coward]

Never trust a person who uses the term 'To be honest'. Clearly all previous things may, by inference, have been dishonest.

Re:The guy is clueless...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeff Cooper @ Direct.CA is a mailbomber (search for Jeff Cooper & Mailbomb). Again, anything that's not by someone who was actually spammed by this person is just one big AOLesque Mee Too.

Property

[Per Abrahamsen]

> What right to not be bothered? I don't seem to remember that one.

I don't know about the US, but in Denmark property is a right (even if not an absolute one). By spamming _my_ email lists, they make people unsubscribe and/or forcing me to close it, both of which make it less worth.

Yes, just got myself a new email adr. for webforms

[Bender Unit 22]

Yes, Just got myself a new email adr. for using in webforms. and that email is bshifman@cometlink.com (where they require that you input something but you don't need to see the result).

anyone surfes on warez sites? I am sure there's a lot of porn ads. where you can type in a email adr. for free pron ;-)

but your sig isn't necessarily accurate

[blonde rser]

without added context average usually means mean. One can know that 50% will be below the mode but it is possible that the average (mean) and the mode are not equal... of course it is also possible that they are equal. I don't think a normal distribution is to be assumed here.

Re:but your sig isn't necessarily accurate

[e.a.kendrick]

I've got some moderator points, but I couldn't find a category of "Anally retentive". So I'm safe to say that it is Shipman who is in Chicago, the guy he's trying to sue is in Canada.

It's interesting to note that Shipman claims he comes from a *family* of lawyers. In other words he gets his legal advice across the dinner table at home at daddy's. Of course, if they sue on his behalf he has the opportunity to ruin his family as well as himself.

Did anyone read the resume the kid was sending out with the spam (it's on the web page)? Shipman was an "I.T Director" for a "consulting division" of a small firm - though experience in that job appeared to involve a lot of laying cables and "finding and removing viruses" (gotta love it). He had such a cushy time of it, when he left (pushed?) he decided to start his own consultancy - though by the resume he hasn't had any clients worth referencing since the turn of the millenium. The resume as it stands is difficult to wade through and omits most of the important information (like qualifications of any sort - did he even graduate from college? Daddy must be most disappointed in him). Shame, looks like he may have done some worthwhile work - some potential there (in admin and technical support). Such a shame, his career had everything to live for, to die so young - oh the humanity! heh heh heh

He's gone totally mad! And I'm reaping all the benefits - The Wedding Singer

Re:but your sig isn't necessarily accurate

[Ewan]

Surely the mode is the most common result?

e.g "1 2 2 2 3 4 5 6", the modal value would be 2?

The mean is the sum of the values divided by the number of values?

e.g "1 2 2 2 3 4 5 6", the mean would be 25/8=3.125

Do you not want the median, which is the value halfway along the values?

e.g "1 2 2 2 3 4 5 6", 2.5?

I could be wrong, been a while since I bothered to do anything like this :)

Re:but your sig isn't necessarily accurate

[iamplasma]

No, you're completely right. The nitpicker has been nitpicked. Mode is the most common element in the set. Median is the one which 50% are above and below.

Re:but your sig isn't necessarily accurate

[Mr. Slippery]

One can know that 50% will be below the mode...

I think you mean "median".

I don't think a normal distribution is to be assumed here.

I believe intelligence (or at leat IQ) is fit pretty well by a normal "bell curve" distribution. (Actually IIRC there are slightly more people at the high end than a Gaussian model would predict.)

Re:but your sig isn't necessarily accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Bernie. I wanted to let you know that this is the last straw. This post and all the others like it are slander and I'm suing you, slashdot and all of its ussers who read it for making a major big mistake with me.

Attention everyone: you must send the name of your attorney to me by 5 PM today or I will sue you for not letting me sue you and will have a major big law suit on your ass. If you really piss me off I will sue the entire country of Canada which deserves it anyways because it is not as smart as an expert IT guru from Chicago like me.

This post cost me $2 million to write so I'm suing slashdot for my costs.

BERNIE

Re:but your sig isn't necessarily accurate

[jpostel]

I wish I had some Mod points because THAT was funny!!!

Re:but your sig isn't necessarily accurate

[kanne]

AND he lists every salary he's ever been paid, which is nuts, particularly since he wasn't making much money. And he's supposedly sending this around to get consulting gigs!

Re:but your sig isn't necessarily accurate

[Lars T.]

IQ isn't perfectly normal because there is a lower limit at 0, but no upper limit. But those aren't even one-in-a-million cases.

Re:but your sig isn't necessarily accurate

[Anonymous Colin]

Lars said:
>> IQ isn't perfectly normal because there is a lower limit at 0, but no upper limit. But those aren't even one-in-a-million cases.

More to the point, accident, environment and disesase can all decrease IQ, but rarely if ever enhance it (OK, syphillis will enhance IQ, but only temporarily :-). This cause a far larger skew to the low end than the excess spread to the high end.

Can't Sleep...

[Anonymous Coward]

Spammers will sue me....

Blocking Spam

[sirsnork]

Personally I run my own mail server and whenever I get spam I go though the logs, find the IP of the server it came from. The block it at the firewall. Takes a bit more time but it VERY effective!

Re:Blocking Spam

[13013dobbs]

Other have already found those IPs for you: http://www.declude.com/JunkMail/Support/ip4r.htm.

Re:Blocking Spam

[Darth RadaR]

Yeah, but a lot of spammers will use free yahoo and hotmail accounts. Those are the ones that are hard to filtre out.

Re:Blocking Spam

[theSprocket]

We do the same thing, now that we nolonger get any email from yahoo.com, hotmal.com, and msn.com domains our inboxes have really cleared up.

Bernard Shiffman is something else...

[voronoi]

After reading the article I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Consider his career in IT /.ed!

Re:Bernard Shiffman is something else...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha ha! Yes, that good ol'e /. joke
never wears out! ROFLTLMDFOSDOJTJEM1337AO

Bah, the world is filled with unrepentant spammers

[zcat_NZ]

Julian Angelo also springs to mind.. I don't know if he's still actively spamming, but he's tried several times to have NZNOG archives purged of his name. The large number of references to him in the NZNOG mailing list somewhat ironically results in google ranking it even higher!

retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, that spammer has some serious mental
problems, that much is clear.

But what does it say about someone like Schwartzman who would waste so much of his time
and carry on this charade with an unstable man?

zeke

I get these all the time

[bildstorm]

It's really funny to get these e-mails. They happy most when I'm looking for work, which is exactly the time when I will not be hiring another developer.

The fun part about spam is that spammers don't pay any attention to country domains, or even to check where an address is registered. For example, my address is registered in Finland, and so free cell phones from the US are useless.

Honestly speaking, I don't mind the occasional well-targeted mailing. Once upon a time I use to receive those through the mail. You know, when it's clear that I'm really, REALLY interested in something, and it's something I can buy and use? Then I don't mind.

But please tell me when as a U.S. Citizen living in Finland working as an Information Architect for a mobile services company I'm going to need free U.S. cell phones, a quick route to get a green card, or another intern from some thirld world nation studying at a U.S. university.

*ROFLMAO*

[ausBollix]

Well . . . . *wipes corners of eyes* - out of sheer morbid curiosity I visited the Shitman(*oops*) link. I can honestly say from down here (in Australia) I've never read such a load of half-assed, kindergarten-grade as what I did from this person. BTW - if business is booming to such an extent that he's going to charge megabucks to other people for infringing on his time, why doesn't he go and get his own web address instead of using a virtual "hole" to host his (*gasp shock horror*) amazingly talented web site??

Re:*ROFLMAO*

[olivechicago]

my thoughts exactly. and why a cell phone as your main buisness number? I have the feeling that his "SUITE" is a small little mailbox rented to collect postal mail.

Re:*ROFLMAO*

[phil reed]

For the record, his web site is hosted by some company in Clearwater, Florida.

Re:*ROFLMAO*

[bing]

Nah...it's a crappy little walk-up fourth-floor apartment in the Lakeview neighborhood where the residents claim to live in Lincoln Park.

If memory serves me correcly (I have lived in both Lakeview and Lincoln Park at various times), 2828 Burling is a crappy little apartment fairly close to a fire station whose residents love nothing better than to fly along Diversy (his cross-street) with lights and sirens and horn, especially in the middle of the night when there's no one on the roads.

cheers,
bing

Re:*ROFLMAO*

[rabidMacBigot()]

eek, now we have a Sci*ntology connection with spammers. Chilling!

Re:*ROFLMAO*

[RC514]

No need to rely on wetware memory:

http://rubloff.com/building/lvbuild/2828bur.htm
http://www.bestagents.net/sweethome/listings4.htm

You can move in on the same floor as Bernie(#402)! #420 is available...

Re:*ROFLMAO*

[ausBollix]

Yup - down here we'd say his best friends were a dark room and an industrial-sized jar of Vaseline . . .

Re:page lengthening post!

[doozy]

I miss you on slashdot silly boi.

Spam & Free Speach

[DrSpin]

Spam is effectively a DOS to Free speach.

You are free to say what you like on your web site. You are not free to send me spam telling me about it.

You are not free to prevent me from listening to my stereo by playing yours so loud, I can't hear my own.

Dave Rhodes, and Bernie Schifman..

[jcr]

I, too wish him the best in his new career as a Bovine Foodstuffs Periodic Inversion Technician.

-jcr

The lawyer

[3.14lgrim]

Funny that his lawyer finelaw@cometlink.com is using the same ISP as he is; bshifman@cometlink.com. Maybe they are related.... ;-)

Maybe it wasn't spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

Assume for the moment the guy isn't a total moron (a stretch).

Now lets imagine he does spam but not his CV/resume. He has all those addresses and he has one email with his resume.

Now he catches a virus which then spams everyone?

Could happen?

Naaa.

5-step program to get Mr Shifman a job again

[Dynamoo]

My five suggestions..

1. A name change. How about Bernard Ctrl-Alt-Delman?

2. Move out of Chicago. Better still move out of Illinois. Even better, move out of the industrialised world altogther. I understand that they're looking for IT consultants in Kandahar. Your Russian may come in useful.

3. Apologise. Make humor of it. Show some hubris. Everyone makes mistakes. My biggest involved rat poison and some hamsters.

4. Find a new career where no-one has access to a web browser. Maybe a prison warder in the state penitentiary?

5. Invent an UNDO button for real life. Get Mr Shifman to press it about a zillion times and let him start over.

Any more ideas? :)

Re:5-step program to get Mr Shifman a job again

[Anonymous Coward]

Show some hubris

hubris is "overweening pride" which is what he is showing. I think you meant "humility".

Web-enabled cellular access

[hyrdra]

The problem with SPAM I see is that when I check e-mail on my phone, it costs me money to delete and wade through all those messages.

so is it bad to send Bernard e-mail?

[Anonymous Coward]

If his e-mail is still active, it must be saturated by now, but I sent him a nice handcrafted note. Man that guy is funny...

Uh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, this is so petty I think I will stop visiting slashdot. For at least a month. A week. Well until I wake up again.

The guy can be as clueless as he wants, but why continue to encourage him? So you gather all his corresponence on the subject and everyone else and make it public. Then to pour salt into the wound, you submit the link the slashdot.

Spam sucks. You have a delete key, mail filters, procmail, and other tools at your disposal. Ruining someone's reputation over sillyness sucks. I don't have a key on my keyboard to fix that, nor have I found any neat *nix tools to do it either.

Moral of the story: Some people are born with a clue. Some people are born without pity.

((hooray for [x] Post Anon!))

This is funny, I got his resume also.

[rawg]

I have his resume in my mail archives also.

From bshifman@ameritech.net Tue Dec 18 05:47:40 2001

Its to a personal email address that I never use at all for the past few years.

Re:This is funny, I got his resume also.

[jpostel]

I swear I got it on one of the email addresses that I use for registering domain names. I have to check when I get home.

Re:This is funny, I got his resume also.

[TACD]

Do you think you could see your way clear to emailing me a copy? I would love to peruse it, but sadly I don't think he will reply to the (Hotmail) email I sent him requesting it... Email link

Seize the day?

[RovingSlug]

Have you ever heard the expression? Something like

This minute, this hour, this day... is your life.

Do you really want to fill your life with sophomoric debates with a "spammer"?

Forget about his spam. Forget about him. Do something more rewarding with your time.

Re:Seize the day?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your feeble attempts to direct attention away from yourself will not work, Mr. Shifman.

The correct link is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here

Hrmm notice his website.

[mallie_mcg]

A pity about the lack of information on his website.
I really really wanted to email this guy and thank him for being such a plonker and giving me something to show people what not to do.

I admit the main reason I wanted to visit his web site was so that i could send him an email and not have him say that it was unsolicited, bugeer.

I hope that this toss bag is unable to find a service provider in the near future.

Uh I hate to say this...

[jgerman]

...but that's not Spam. The difinition on that site is entirely too loose. The mail including the headers was valid, and Niel decides after recieving one unsolicited message that it's spam. Bullshit, if I send this guy an email by mistake am I spamming him? What if I send him an email and he just isn't interested, is it spam? Just sending large numbers of the same email out IS NOT spam. Note the definition listed does not even have any criteria based on whether or not the mail was solicited so even list hosts that you subscribe to qualify.

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[Hanno]

...but that's not Spam

Of course it is.

It was unsolicited, it was bulk, it was email. UBE. Spam.

The mail including the headers was valid

Spam isn't about invalid headers. It's about unsolicited bulk email. UBE. Spam.

and Niel decides after recieving one unsolicited message that it's spam.

Yes. Because it was unsolicited, bulk and email. UBE. Spam.

Bullshit, if I send this guy an email by mistake am I spamming him?

If your message is easily identified as being a bulk message, thus being an unsolicited bulk email or UBE or spam: Yes. If it wasn't bulk, it wasn't spam and you'd be entirely safe.

Just sending large numbers of the same email out IS NOT spam.

Yes, bulk mail to people who solicited it is ok.

But sending out the same large numbers of the same email to people who haven't asked for it makes it unsolicited bulk email = UBE = Spam.

Do you get the point now?

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[KjetilK]

Yes it is spam (BTW, moderators, don't mod the parent as Troll, please, it is an issue that needs adressing). Everyone has to exercise some caution in who they send e-mail to or else e-mail will be completely useless for everyone.

I have lots of different interests. I have a life. Really, even if it doesn't feel that way now and then. ;-)

There are hundreds of organizations and corporations that I have some interest in, that I may buy products from, and who may entitled to assume if they are not doing further checks, that I'll be interested in hearing from.

If only those who have something I might be interested in e-mailed me a couple of times a year, there would be thousands of messages a year. There would be tens of messages every day, that would demand my attention.

Most of the time, I'm not interested, and my attention is the most precious thing I have. They can't just come in here and take it. If I would have to devote attention to tens of messages from companies that I might have an interest in a day, I would stop using e-mail (nowadays, well, I get tens of spams every day, but they are deleted without giving them much attention. I deeply despise spammers nevertheless for the resources they steal). That's why the only way is opt-in. If I am interested, I can go and search for the information. I'm pretty good at that.

This spammer obviously did no research at all when he spammed people. If he even looked at Steve's website, I think he would go away.

Instead of spamming lots of people, those who are interested in giving someone employment would search a database of resumes. It's much more effective for everyone.

It was definitly spamming that was going on.

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[Darren Winsper]

He sent the same e-mail 3 times, to the same address he has been sending lawsuit threats to.

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[jgerman]

I agree that it was stupid, and that it becomes spam the second time he sent it out. But the spam guns were brought out WAY too early in this case. I have the right to send anyone I want mail, to attempt to contact them at least once, within reason, obviously if I'm sending you death threats it's another story, without being accused of spamming whether it's effective or not. Just like I can initiate a phone call or snail mail. It's when I repeatedly attempt to contact you after you've asked me to stop that it becomes wrong.

Not that I don't see your point, but my definition of the word spam is much more strict than yours apparently.

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[jgerman]

My definition of the word is more specific than yours for the very reason that people are quick to define any mail that they aren't interested in as spam. When you have a publically accessible medium of communication you are implicitly agreeing that anyone may attempt to contact you at least once. That's just the way it is. Assuming that the headers are correct and there is a way to let the sending party know that you don't want this mail anymore AND they stop sending it, it is not spam. When there is no way to unsubscribe, or no way to contact because of forged headers then it becomes spam. It doesn't matter that it's bulk or not, that's just an attribute usually found with spam. Let me ask you this, if I repeatedly send you a mail trying to sell you something, and I've forged the headers so that you cannot contact me, and my unsubscribe link does not work, am I spamming you? What if I'm only sending to you? It's not bulk and by your definition not spam.

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[Hanno]

Your definition is less specific than mine and explicitely allows email abuse to continue. Just consider Multi Level Marketing / Pyramid schemes ("make money fast"), where everyone does this "once" only, for an example where your definition doesn't help at all.

It's not wether I am interested or might be interested. It's wether it's unsolicited, bulk and email. UBE. Spam. It's just as simple as that.

Think about it.

Let me ask you this, if I repeatedly send you a mail trying to sell you something, and I've forged the headers so that you cannot contact me, and my unsubscribe link does not work, am I spamming you? What if I'm only sending to you? It's not bulk and by your definition not spam.

Then you'd be harassing me, which is also abuse of email and a violation of the AUP at practically every provider on the planet.

Well then, good luck with your view on spam. Just don't try to use it as an excuse once you send your first spam, since no provider will agree with you.

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[jgerman]

Plenty of providers will agree with me. In a legal sense, the definition will have to be much more specific and allow for that first attempt at contact before any law will be passed. If I send out one email my provider will not drop me, because you would have no case and they want my monthly payment. I'm not saying that I like the fact that I get constant emails that I'm not interested in I don't like it either, but I'm not going to play the spam card until I can't unsubscribe.

Personally I feel that all bulk email should be opt in. I'd even tolerate unsolicited first attempts assuming that it requires me to respond positively that I want more mail from the sender, not that I need to go through steps to get myself unsubscribed.

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[jgerman]

One more note, your definition is less specific than mine which allows more emails to fall into this category. I think the word you're looking for is strict, since it cracks down on a wider range of instances.

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[Jay L]

In a legal sense, the definition will have to be much more specific and allow for that first attempt at contact before any law will be passed.

Think about it - "one bite at the apple" doesn't work. There are over 22 million small businesses in the US alone. If only 1% of them each tried to e-mail you only once over a one-year period, you'd get 600 messages a day.

You're wrong that most providers disagree with the "spam=UBE" definition; in fact, most Acceptable Use Policies do prohibit UBE. Trust us. We've been through this before. In 11 years at AOL I was on the winning end of quite a few anti-spam lawsuits in federal court. And there are several other Slashdotters here with even better credentials.

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[tommck]

When there is no way to unsubscribe, or no way to contact because of forged headers then it becomes spam

Well, many spammers use the "click here to unsubscribe" link to verify that the email address is an active one (and thus be able to charge more to resell it in a SPAM list). I NEVER unsubscribe, because it just means more SPAM.

T

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[Jay L]

I have the right to send anyone I want mail, to attempt to contact them at least once

No, actually you don't, at least not in bulk. Compuserve and AOL both settled that issue in the mid-90s in federal court - mail servers are property, and the property owner has the right to decide who may enter. If you enter without authority, you are trespassing. If they post a "sign" saying "no unsolicited bulk e-mail", and you violate it, you are trespassing.

I was involved in the first AOL spam lawsuits. Believe me.

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[Syberghost]

When you have a publically accessible medium of communication you are implicitly agreeing that anyone may attempt to contact you at least once.

An email saying "I'm looking for work. May I send you a resume?" is an attempt to contact you.

A huge Word attachment sent to names you harvested from contact lists on web pages is theft of service.

If you sent me a snail-mail unsolicited with your resume, addressed directly to me instead of to our Human Resources department, and I didn't know you, I'd probably throw it in the trash. I wouldn't complain about it, though, because it cost you money to send it, and didn't cost me anything but a small amount of time to receive it. My time is worth money, but not so much that a few seconds of it bothers me.

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[dclydew]

> Plenty of providers will agree with me.

Not really. Your defination is rather unique, I believe. Most, if not all providers I've worked with define Spam as UBE.... The name Spam came from the famous Python sketch where the Vikings keep singing "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam". The similarity is that it was Bulk and unsolicited. They were not forging the headers of anything.

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! I like your definition of spam!
I'll go tell all my 10,000 friends to e-mail
you once...

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[Sir Tristam]

When you have a publically accessible medium of communication you are implicitly agreeing that anyone may attempt to contact you at least once.

No, I'm not making that implicit agreement. You might be assuming that, but I'm not implying that. Unless I explicitly ask for e-mail to be sent to an address, it is unsolicited.

Let's look at it this way. There's a street that runs right next to your house, and so standing on that street with a bull-horn is a "publically accessible medium of communication". By having that street next to your house, are you claiming that you are agreeing that anybody can stand on that street and send you a message through a bull-horn at least once?

if I repeatedly send you a mail trying to sell you something, and I've forged the headers so that you cannot contact me, and my unsubscribe link does not work, am I spamming you?

Yes, as spam falls into two categories: UBE (Unsolicited Bulk Email) and UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email). Most spam seems to hit both but your example only hits UCE, and would even if you didn't forge any headers and the links all worked. The key in common with both is unsolicited. From dictionary.com: unsolicited: Not looked for or requested; unsought: an unsolicited manuscript; unsolicited opinions.

Chris Beckenbach

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[ilsa]

Of course *if* we are to take this at face value: 1) Guy gets list of email addresses. 2) Guy mails everybody on list of email addresses asking if recipient wants his services. This is definition spam. 3) Recipient reports as spam. 4) Sender immediately gets snippy and obscene. 5) Much comedy ensues.

Much aggravation and bandwidth could have been saved by using a little kindness. Example: "Dear Sir, I am terribly sorry to find that you are not in fact the human resources contact for your company. I honestly only intended to contact them, and deeply regret any inconvenience I may have inadvertently caused you. I certainly will endevour not to make such a mistake again. This being the case, would you please let my ISP know that this has all been a misunderstanding? They are threatening to close my account, which needless to say would be a great inconvenience. Thank you so much for your time."

Re:Uh I hate to say this...

[witwerg]

Most problem spammers are the ones abusing the system to begin with. For example using other people's resources they have no right to. Even though sending UCE without a real email address, may or maynot be against ISP policy, over using their equipment for sending UCE probally is. Additionally, many ISPs do have a policy against large mass mailings. The Terms of Service will be written in a way such that the burden of proof rests solely on the ISP's judgment. My personal feeling toward such abusers even if it is first attempts are much less kind than a bussiness person that provides instruction for removal, a valid address, and has a rep for acting on removal requests.

The ISP may or maynot do anything additionally.

For a residental account, you bet the ISP will say something because you then aren't paying commerical prices for "commerical" activity
(I hate "commerical" for this because I have a commerical account only to get the the bandwidth I want.) Depending on the commerical account, for one complaint maybe the ISP will not do anything, but if several people complain, they see that you are using their server too much, or you are taking up a bunch of bandwidth then they'll change their tune. For a first incident, maybe they would do a temporary supension until they have contact the person directly. The Terms of Service with often even let the ISP drop a a TOS violator very easily with little more than prorated refunds(if any at all) and a breif explanation.

Now if the user is paying for the additional bandwidth and equipment, the ISP has charged him appropiatly, and the ISP knows the commerical email may be sent; then there may be more leeway, and the first attempt would more likely apply more consistantly for known legit bussinesses
and organizations. Still if the number of complaints (even if they are complaints about first contact attempts) remains high, action might be taken.

The exception _might_ be not so much typical ISP's, but "ISP's" that just provide backbones to people that actually have their own networks. In which case they act more like a teleco, as long as you are paying for bandwidth and aren't doing anything that could put them on legally shaky ground, they wouldn't care.

Just be happy....

[Anonymous Coward]

Just be happy he doesn't have nudes of you, on his website!

Ebay

[Beowulf_Boy]

I've had the same thing happen on ebay before.
I found some guy trying to sell a CD with a bunch of GPL'd programs. Clearly visible in the screenshots where The Gimp, Staroffice, and Abiword. He claimed his company, something like
Blah industries, created the programs themselves.
I wrote him an email and let him know that if he didn't change the ad, he would be in violation of the GPL.
HE THREATENED TO SUE ME FOR HARRASMENT!!
He actually had his lawyer email me (yes, it was his lawyer, the email address was from a business and I went to the website and looked).
I wrote the lawyer back, told him what the man was doing, and never got a reply back.
I really wish I would have saved those emails, but I have switched services and computers since.

Damn it all!

[Anonymous Coward]

The dot-com boom is over, and these days IT employees have to be competent to get the job. That's why I'm not able to find any work.

Re:Damn it all!

[Anonymous._.Coward]

That's why I'm not able to find any work.

Bernie, stop posting here! There are enough ignorants on /. without you too. And BTW the dot-gone has nothing to do with your lack of employment.

I had a problem like this once..

[sakusha]

I had a cyberstalker who harassed me mercilessly on usenet. Finally, a private detective came forward after seeing this bozo go after me, and offered to take him down for me, and he wouldn't even charge me for it. Aside from helping me sucessfully prosecute a criminal complaint, the guy made it pretty clear that he also provided services that I would be better off not knowing anything about. I got the distinct impression that he sent one of his P.I. buddies to go beat the shit out of the idiot perp. But what I don't know won't hurt me. And the cyberstalker was silenced forever. If he harasses me again, he'll get deported, and no doubt with an extra beating thrown in for good measure.

Careful now

[Rogerborg]

Editors and posters, please take care: we're talking about Bernard Shifman (single 'f'), not any of the Bernard Shiffman's (double 'ff') out there.

As Mr Shifman seems to be highly irrascible, it's probably as well to at least get his name correct.

Re:Careful now

[AnalogBoy]

Score (-5, Anti-Slashdotian)

You're requring slashdot users & editors NOT to jump to conclusions, NOT to have kneejerk reactions..

What are you thinking?

Please please please correct his name....

[BenBenBen]

It appears that Bernard Shiffman sent email to several people trying to solcit employment via spam, and when they replied to him, asking him to stop, and reporting the spam to his ISP he threatend them with a lawsuit.

Bernard Shifman... One f.. I (and I'm sure everyone who read that page) wants this story to appear on Bernie's egosurfing searches for many years to come...

I can't believe people like this exist.. I used to work in HR, and "spec" resumes went in a big pile to be looked at if we could be bothered, but I'd never consider sending a de-personalised email to a *list* of addresses... And if that list includes a non-HR address at a university hundreds of miles away, and he has as little nous as he demonstrated in those emails, I sincerely hope he never gets offered employment over anyone else ever. Jeez, it's enough to make baby Jesus cry

Ben^3 Why couldn't I have signed up after 31 more people?

Re:Please please please correct his name....

[Maserati]

It could be worse, at my last job we had to quarantine HR's computers because of the massive quantity of virus-infected Word-format resumes they received. At another, we had a candidate for IT Director send a virus in his/her resume. I cleaned HR's computer and advised her that this candidate was blatantly unqualified for any IT position.

DOH!

[Minupla]

You know you're having a bad day when the site trying to lambaste you gets listed on /.

You know you're having a worse day when the site refuses to crash under the /. effect!

Re:DOH!

[Fishstick]

You know, I wondered what the fallout from this would be. I'm assuming that Mr. Schifman is going to get a whole lot more email today, wonder if he's going to start threatening slashdot with his vaporous lawsuits as well?

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

Re:DOH!

[bark76]

You know you're having a bad day when the site trying to lambaste you gets listed on /.

You know you're having a worse day when the site refuses to crash under the /. effect!

But does this mean Slashdot will be named in the lawsuit too?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Schwartzman's page not indexed by search engines

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder why - has BS actually succeeded in making Google & Co not index the page? It should be indexed: The page uses <META name="robots" content="all"> and the robots.txt doesn't blacklist the page, either...

What's his point?

[zbuffered]

I read more or less the whole thing, but I'm unclear on what this guy's major objection is. He send unsolicited e-mail, in bulk. They called him on it. He's talking about slander or something, making obviously empty threats, but I don't follow what grounds he claims to be able to sue on. Just vague threats of lawsuits, lots of pretend lawyers, and vulgarity. Now, he e-mailed his resume to this guy, which means that it's basically public domain, right? This is the only thing I'm not 100% certain is groundless. And there's certainly no law against linking to a page, even if some person may not want you to. I know about the 2600 case, but my point is, until spammer wins suit against spamee or some sort of preliminary injunction or whatever, linking the page is completely harmless. So if his request to the bulletin board to remove the links were BS, that pretty much removes all credibility. Not that he had any, after the fact that the entire episode came out of HIS UCE. Listening to those voicemail messages, you'd think this guy had a combination of some serious social defects, and a superiority complex. I hate those people. They're wrong all the time, but they get bitchy when you call them on it.

PS: IANAL, although I have watched My Cousin Vinny at least twice.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I read half of that page and...

[Anonymous Coward]

had to give it up (!)

I came to the conclusion that idiots should not have access to either computers or lawyers. Why isn't there an "minimum IQ required" regulation on computers?

I've always wondered

[Lozzer]

What Signal 11 did when he wasn't on /.

The wonders of usenet/mr. spammers personal life

[Bender Unit 22]

Sometimes people forget that all they write in newsgroups can be viewed by everyone. If is fun when collegues or friends do this. It is interesting when enemies or the biz you are competing agains does it. Take a look and you will be surprised. In the case of our spammer here, We can learn about his private life that he is interested in Geckos and that he has a "African Fire Skink". Read all about it.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

it must be going really bad with the economy

[jas79]

resumes aren't spam!!
threating a resume like spam is just really dumb.
the way bernard reacted was even dumber. I doubt that a ISP would disconnect someone for sending a resume, but they do for sending flames.

Most companies are happy with a resume even in the current market.

companies want resumes. we want laws against spam. we don't get those laws when they include resumes.

Re:it must be going really bad with the economy

[schon]

resumes aren't spam!!

And paper isn't junk mail.

According to your logic, I can just attach a resume (not even mine) to a "MAKE $$$ FAST!!!" email, and it's no longer spam, right?

Most people describe spam as Unsolicited Bulk Email.

Hmm, he emailed it, so there's one.

It was unsolicited - in that he not only sent it to people who did not ask for it, but he sent it to PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS. That's two.

It's bulk (he sent it to more than one person). That's three.

Therefore, it IS spam.

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it entertaining reading deranged folks' email drama as much as the next person, but I've seen it all before on Usenet over the years.

I can't help feeling sorry for that deranged guy, and more so, thinking that all the *real* arsehold spammers are being ignored. They're the real bad guys, this is just noise.

Excellent Troll!

[netsharc]

Hahaha, what an excellent troll. This guy should start posting in Slashdot. Well I bet he will too, once he found out he made front page "news" here. And he'll probably try to sue Slashdot and everyone who commented here, too.

They picked on this guy...

[bjtuna]

I can feel the mod-downs coming, but I feel this has to be said. I think these anti-spam zealots teamed up on this poor spammer, and the only reason it went as far as it did (and as hilariously as it did) was because Shifman has a large amount of juvenile pride.

First off, it should be noted that almost all the players in this little cast (except for Shifman) are members of anti-spam Usenet groups. Do a Google Groups search for "Joe Greco", who claimed to receive one of Bernard's emails, and you'll get some not-so-nice reports of Joe's behavior:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=joe+greco&meta=. Laura Atkins, who claimed her company received a spam from Bernard, also weighed in on the whole thing. Laura's company, Blighty.com is a privacy consulting firm: people hire her to find out who spammers are. Laura's name shows up in various anti-spam newsgroups also, including the one that Joe Greco & Bill Carton post in. In this thread, you can see this for yourself.
In fact, it appears that Joe, Bill, Neil, Laura, and her husband Steve are all active posters on news.admin.net-abuse.email

I believe everyone needs a hobby, and these anti-spam people are no exception. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but I think these people see themselves as anti-spam vigilantes. Most of the time, it's okay because they're doing some good (since spam DOES suck). In this case, it appears that while Bernard's emails were sent in bulk, they were not sent to random emails. He seemed to have made an honest attempt to ensure that only HR Departments receieved his mail. In some cases, he messed up and targeted the wrong people. Since he's trying to find jobs with computer companies, it's not uncommon to send HR requests to a non-HR department; after all, many small computer companies don't HAVE an HR department, but just an admin running the whole show.

I receive a lot of spam, but most of it is for breast-enlargement pills or Make-Money-Fast schemes. If I got an email like Bernard's, I would assume:
1) he probably sent this to companys other than mine
2) he probably found my company on the web, by hand, which is why he knew we were a computer company. If we sold sofas, I wouldn't have gotten the mail.

Thus, the emails were bulk and they were unsolicited, but they were sent to addresses posted on the websites of the target companies STRICTLY for the purpose of receiving job requests and resumes.

I think Neil overreacted, and his anti-spam bully friends took over. These guys cover for each other, and pick on the alleged spammers as a team.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

I kind of agree with you. They did go a little overboard on him.

Even considering Bernie's overreaction to the first abuse reporting, I think that he didn't really deserve what he got here.

Maybe he's just a guy looking for work in hard times.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, but don't we have to set an example for the other would-be spammers out there? If some don't get hit really hard here and there in the public eye, spammers will think that they can just keep out flooding the Internet with their useless crap. Yes, it was probably a bit cruel...but I'm glad they made an example out of him. And a quite funny one too. :)

Re:They picked on this guy...

[RC514]

The mails were not sent to addresses posted on the websites of target COMPANIES in at least one case. They were also not directed at companies Shifman wanted to work for. That is obvious from some of the replies to his solicitations. Companies in the IT business are also much more likely to act against spam because they do recognize what it is and what problems it causes. Thus you shouldn't assume that Shifman's mails were targeted at all, just because you don't see counteractions by non-IT businesses. And after all, he sent the same spam to Neil after being told it wasn't welcome at all the first time. If that is not spam, what is?

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, I see no reason to go to these lengths. If I see someone who I think is parked the wrong way on the street, is it my right to try to destroy his future? What this reflects are lack of empathy on the side of the spam fighters and the excitement over finding a "real" person that they can fight instead of just transients. (If my spelling sucks its because its from Sweden).

Re:They picked on this guy...

[bjtuna]

And after all, he sent the same spam to Neil after being told it wasn't welcome at all the first time. If that is not spam, what is?

It makes Bernard defiant, pigheaded, and stupid for not removing Neil's email from his list. It may have even been intentional, to piss Neil off. But sending it twice doesn't have any impact on our debate over whether the addresses were targeted or random. Bulk? Yes. Unsolicited? Yes. Untargeted? Probably not.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[RC514]

So "targeted" doesn't imply that you are trying to aim your mails at a reasonable target? Shifman claims to be computer literate. If that is not complete bullshit, he should be able to at least sort out addresses who earned him complaints to his provider. Besides, if an email is unsolicited and sent to many recipients, it fits the term UBE. The U is "unsolicited", not "untargeted".
There are enough indications that shifman did not carefully select the recipients of his resume. That would have involved checking wether the recipients are likely to be interested in receiving his mail, making it "solicited". The most obvious indication is that he sent his mail to Neil after being told not to.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Carlos Laviola]

You forgot that Neal has nothing to do with the staff of the University, and could never hire him if he wanted. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that Mr. Shifman has harvested e-mails with an automated tool, which fortunately gave him a spam-fighter's address and ruined his career for good.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you report that guy and he threatens to destroy your future for that (he threatened to sue and put others out of business), it is your right and in your best interest to defend yourself. That may involve letting others know what they can expect from him.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[CaptainSuperBoy]

I believe everyone needs a hobby, and these anti-spam people are no exception

For many it's no hobby. Some are sysadmins, network admins, abuse staff. This is their job, and their systems are being abused by thieves. By organizing against spammers they are doing a service to the entire Internet community and they should be commended, not called 'vigilantes.'

When you describe any group (anti-spam, linux users, bow hunters) as 'these people' it tends to set them off too.

He seemed to have made an honest attempt to ensure that only HR Departments receieved his mail.

Still spam. After he made his 'honest' attempt to target his spam, he made another 'honest' attempt to harass people who reported him to his ISP. What are you saying they did wrong? Should they have not reported him?

Hey, at least you didn't say "just hit delete" anywhere in your post..

Re:They picked on this guy...

[olivechicago]

Buzzzz.....

I am not affiliated with the anti-spam community! Just a bass player in a band who got his resume and chuckled about it to what used to be 20 some odd people who knew my site existed. Google grabbed it... and the rest is history. Where did he get my address from? I am surely not a company!

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Rogerborg]

• the emails were bulk and they were unsolicited, but they were sent to addresses posted on the websites of the target companies STRICTLY for the purpose of receiving job requests and resumes

Which is where your apology (in the sense of explanation) falls apart. The original email was not sent to a posted address of a target company, it was a badly targetted unsolicited commercial communication.

From the recipient's point of view, badly targetted and untargetted look exactly the same. Without further communication, there's no way to tell, and further communication these days generally means you disclosing that your address is active, which just solitics more spam. Also, most spammers these days slather their dross in laughable disclaimers like "This is not unsolicited email" or faux-intimate personalisation, and there's nothing in Shifman's original solicitation (sent from an @home address rather than his own domain) to mark it as being badly targetted through ignorance rather than untargetted through malice.

Sad to say, there's now only one sensible response to receiving any piece of UCE, from any sender. Refer it to the sender's upstream provider, and let them deal with it. If the sender has made one - or a couple - of innocent mistakes, they should have no problem convincing their provider of that, right?

What's most telling is Shifman's response to the initial and impersonal complaint. He took it as a personal and malicious attack, which indicates either that he doesn't understand why Bill interpreted his email as untargetted (rather than badly targetted), or that he simply thinks that there's nothing inherently wrong with untargetted UCE. A simple, "Sorry, my bad, targetting error" would have sorted the whole thing out.

Note that by the time Bill's chums leapt it to join the Shifman taunting, he had already dug his own grave with his ignorance and belligerency. Cruel as it is, it is undeniably funny to read his frenzied frothings.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Remus Shepherd]

First off, it should be noted that almost all the players in this little cast (except for Shifman) are members of anti-spam Usenet groups.

Yep. And in my book, that makes them heroes. What's the problem?

Re:They picked on this guy...

[dazed-n-confused]

I think Neil overreacted, and his anti-spam bully friends took over. These guys cover for each other, and pick on the alleged spammers as a team.

If that's so*, then they must have also used their evil anti-spammer mind-control rays to make Bernard Shifman look like a drivelling cretin. He should sue!

* (leaving aside paranoid theories such as "it's all a hoax," or "they doctored his emails")

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Sodium Attack]

I can feel the mod-downs coming, but I feel this has to be said.

If I bothered modding anymore, I'd mod you down myself. Still, I must commend your nice use of the "Say 'I know this'll get modded down, but...' to avoid being modded down" tactic.

In fact, it appears that Joe, Bill, Neil, Laura, and her husband Steve are all active posters on news.admin.net-abuse.email

Ooooh, there's the smoking gun right there! They post to nanae! What despicable people they must be!

I hate spam as much as the next guy, but I think these people see themselves as anti-spam vigilantes.

I wasn't aware that asking ISPs to actually enforce their posted AUPs now constitutes vigilantism. By that standard, I guess I'm an "anti-spam vigilante" too.

Since he's trying to find jobs with computer companies, it's not uncommon to send HR requests to a non-HR department; after all, many small computer companies don't HAVE an HR department, but just an admin running the whole show.

concordia.ca is neither small nor a computer company. Just how many concordia.ca addresses did he send his resume to? (Hundreds, I'm guessing.) If only one, what conceivable reason would he have for picking Neil's?

Re:They picked on this guy...

[hawk]

>First off, it should be noted that almost all the
>players in this little cast (except for Shifman)
>are members of anti-spam Usenet groups.

that was rather hard to miss from the page,yes.

>In this case, it appears that while Bernard's
>emails were sent in bulk, they were not sent to
>random emails. He seemed to have made an honest
>attempt to ensure that only HR Departments
>receieved his mail.

That hardly seems to be the case at all. It appears that he hoped some would be forwarded to HR departments. I receive these, and there's no reason any half-way intelligent person could have assumed my address to be appropriate.

I once accompanied my complaint to abuse@ with a comment about the clear lack of skills of someone who would spam for this type of employement. I cc'd the spammer, and got quite a similar response. I have no idea if it was this person or not.

>Thus, the emails were bulk and they were
>unsolicited, but they were sent to addresses
>posted on the websites of the target companies
>STRICTLY for the purpose of receivin job requests
>and resumes.

yes, he claims this. From this and otther addresses he spammed, it doesn't appear to be even close to the truth.

Yes,they had fun with him. And he *was* entertaining. After the initial complaint, they did nothing but respond to his antics.

hawk, who dealtwith his shareof kooks while practicing law.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[SpacePunk]

The whole thing proves a point that I keep trying to make, but nobody listens is that there is a core of anti-spammers that are just as bad as the worst of the spammers and pro-spammers. Instead of just reporting the guy to his ISP they must also tell the guy he's being reported. Then they feel they must respond to his response instead of just ignoring it like civilzed people. It all comes down to a matter of the lack of two things on the parts of rabid pro-spammers and rabid anti-spammers, and those two thing are 'class' and 'style'.

It's as assinine as in IRC when someone tells someone else that they are putting them on ignore. If someone has class and style they would JUST DO IT, and dispense with all the stupid threats. It's largely cartoony from both sides.

The spammer on the other hand should have applied class and style and ignored them. The whole thing is nothing more than a juvenile shouting match where the forum is the internet instead of the school playground.

It all can be summarized this way...

'fuck you, I'm telling your mom!'
'no, fuck you fucker, my dad will kick your fucking ass'
'fuck you you fucking fucker'

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Thus, the emails were bulk and they were unsolicited, but they were sent to addresses posted on the websites of the target companies STRICTLY for the purpose of receiving job requests and resumes.

Not entirely true, the address we received Bernie's resume at can only be found by reading through to the bottom of . This is the site we run as a public service and is separate from our business activities on blighty.com.

Laura Atkins
laura@blighty.com

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that they really told his mom but his dad didn't kick anybody's ass.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[WNight]

Not quite... If I was being reported to my ISP for some suspected violation, I'd like to know.

Let's say I piss off a few people each year and they decide that a flame is "abusive email" and send it to my ISP who, for sake of argument, has a three-strikes policy.

If I know about the report I can follow it up, or if I know I've been reported a few times and really was guilty, then I'll know to cool it before the plug is pulled.

Had BS (how aptly named) just accepted the complaint and stopped doing his bulk email, he'd have been fine. He was the one who decided to start the harassing behaviour, the phone calls, etc.

If there are consqeuences (that matter) to your actions against me, I'd like to know.

The only tackiness in annoucing /ignore is that people tend to do that after trying to get in the last word. "You're a poopy head! BTW, I just /ignore'd you. haha" People also usually find it necessary to broadcast this to the channel instead of using a private message.

I think the big problem with this situation is the idea that people can be so damaged from receiving a spiteful email that they should be able to sue. Well, that and the idea that they should be able to sue someone for a truthful representation of their actions. (The log of BS's emails to them.)

Re:They picked on this guy...

[TimboJones]

Let's have a rundown of the 'zealots' that received this email, since as of yet I've seen no one comprehensively cover the list. Then I call for a recount on your decision whether Shifman's mail was spam or targetted.

1. Neil Schwartzman @alcor.concordia.ca
   From a search on google, this email address is used exclusively in Neil's capacity as a employee of the IITS department at Concordia University (Montreal). As has been said, there is no indication anywhere that he has anything to do with human resources or the hiring process. The only contact person listed for Concordia's HR is a Sylvie Dubuc. Neil is not even listed as a member of the staff (leading me to believe he's doing contract work).
   
2. A second copy to Neil Schwartzman, a month and a half after the lawsuit threats. I grant that Schwartzman never told Shifman to stop sending emails, but (just personally) if I had threatened someone with a lawsuit, I wouldn't send them my resume a month later.
   
3. I don't believe that Joe Greco or Bill Carton received copies of Shifman's resume. So their participation in the matter could be genuinely considered suspect.
   
4. Laura Atkins c/o steve@blighty.com. This address is available as a security/abuse contact for samspade.org and blighty.com, but only on the samspade.org contact information. There is no indication that this address is a good lead for hiring, especially since laura's address is listed as a hiring contact on blighty.com. This would be forgivable since there is no hr information on samspade, but Stilfman replies to Laura as if he had never sent a resume to anyone. This would lead me to believe that his resume is being sent to anti-spammers without his knowledge, but this is inconsistent with the rest of his messages.
   "I never asked to work for your company." (Except for when he did)
   
5. Mr Man, the bass player for The Culprits in Chicago. Now Mr Man is indeed a player in the corporate game, so perhaps there is some connection that Shifman found back in October. But Shifman threatens a slander suit for Mr Man's audacity at posting 'learn to spell Cisco right' on a small band's weblog. (Seriously, that is as slanderous as Mr Man got)
   
   So here's Shifman's MO:
   Send resume to some off the wall address
   Get response: 'Don't send me unsolicited resumes'
   Respond: "Fuck you! I'll sue."

Re:They picked on this guy...

[kindbud]

For many it's no hobby. Some are sysadmins, network admins, abuse staff. This is their job, and their systems are being abused by thieves. By organizing against spammers they are doing a service to the entire Internet community and they should be commended, not called 'vigilantes.'

For many it's no hobby. Some are lyricists, composers, studio staff. This is their job, and their works are being abused by thieves. By organizing against pirates they are doing a service to the entire Music community and they should be commended, not called 'vigilantes.'

Re:They picked on this guy...

[eg]

Ditto.
But what Shifman's musical taste has to do
with anything?
I find this kind of viciousness disturbing and
unethical.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[CaptainSuperBoy]

Oh come on.

What the hell are you? Do you actually work for the content industry?

You're really, REALLY stretching it with that analogy. Let's see:

A sysadmin's job is to keep systems up, running, and available. Spam can flood e-mail systems enough to make them completely unavailable to legitimate users. Spam costs companies billions of dollars in lost productivity, system downtime, abuse staff, and bandwidth. Pretty much everyone is against spam, except a handful of people (called spammers).

A composer's job is to write music. The composer will receive a small royalty each time an album is sold with their song on it, each time the song gets radio airplay, etc. The artist will get a larger, but still small chunk. The recording company will get most of the money.

The amount lost due to unauthorized copying (and I strongly object to the use of the word 'piracy') is negligible. CD sales went up during the year Napster became popular.

It seems like you forgot that many, many artists and composers completely support file sharing. The only people who object, the true 'pirates' who want to destroy your fair use rights, stifle creativity, and cram a steady flow of corporate BULLSHIT music down your ears, are the RECORD COMPANIES.

Don't believe me? The record companies only want you to be able to use APPROVED hardware and software (search for SSSCA), which would prevent unauthorized copying. It would also destroy the computer industry as we know it, but they're not concerned about that. The record companies pushed for legislation that would allow them to HACK into your computer in order to delete your MP3's. Now tell me. Are these really the good guys?

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

This was never a question of "defending". They were purposly leading this guy on. This is just a group of people trying to earn respect by gangin up on someone outside of the group. They are frantic cause they have found a "real" person that they can beat on! I think that if BS _was_ a spammer he would sue there butts, and would win! but he is not, and therefor does not have the money for it. Sad really.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[kindbud]

I think you need to look at your irony detector, it may be malfunctioning.

The amount lost due to unauthorized copying (and I strongly object to the use of the word 'piracy') is negligible. CD sales went up during the year Napster became popular.

The amount lost due to unsolicited emailing (and I strongly object to the use of the word 'spamming') is negligible. Spamming has increased in past years because email is more and more popular.

Don't believe me? The record companies only want you to be able to use APPROVED hardware and software (search for SSSCA), which would prevent unauthorized copying.

Don't believe me? The anti-spammers only want you to be able to use APPROVED hardware and software (search for CanyonCreek), which would prevent unsolicited bulk emailing.

Do the ends really justify the means?

Re:They picked on this guy...

[CaptainSuperBoy]

Wow.. I guess anyone can stretch ANY point to fit ANY conclusion, if you ask the audience to disregard the gaping holes in your argument. I can't believe I'm having an argument with someone who thinks there's no difference between spam and P2P.

The amount lost due to unsolicited emailing (and I strongly object to the use of the word 'spamming') is negligible.

Didn't I just explain how this isn't true? Lost productivity, abuse desks, bandwidth.. these are real costs! P2P costs bandwidth too, but users agree to the cost of an ISP before they sign up! You are NEVER agreeing to receive spam, just by signing up for an ISP.

The anti-spammers only want you to be able to use APPROVED hardware and software (search for CanyonCreek), which would prevent unsolicited bulk emailing.

I think it's safe to say you're a spam-friendly twit.. first of all you got the name wrong - it's CYBERCREEK. I can see you're very familiar with all the aspects of the case. Mr. Chickenboner (Andy Brunner) sold spamware, software with NO REDEEMING value. I fully support his right to sell his spamware however - it's his 1st amendment right. I am strongly against any law banning spamware. HOWEVER - I strongly support blackholing the fucker from the Internet and getting his accounts killed. MOST ISPs prohibit spam support in their AUP. There is nothing wrong with blackholing him either - it is completely your ISPs choice whether to allow you to get to his site, and it is his ISP's choice whether or not to drop him.

Also, I have yet to hear of someone trying to ban "spam hardware". Try again.

If you'd like to make a blackhole list, and try to block users/ISPs who use P2P, feel free. Of course you won't get a single ISP to subscribe to your list. I'm sure the record companies would be happy to support your efforts, though.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[kindbud]

Didn't I just explain how this isn't true? Lost productivity, abuse desks, bandwidth.. these are real costs!

BSA dues, RIAA dues, legal fees, campaign contributions, hiring large surly men to participate in raids - these are just some of the real costs of piracy!!

If the RIAA can buzz off (and yes, they can), then so can the anti-spam zealots. Both are trying to control behavior they have no business trying to control.

The most cost-effective way to control spam is liberal use of the delete key (or its automated proxy, the mail filter). No help desk, abuse desk, DNS blacklist, Spamcop, or any such thing is required to use it. If people stopped complaining about spam to their ISP - or the spammer's ISP - the ISPs would not incur increased support costs due to spam. I guarantee you that bandwidth and storage costs are a pittance compared to staffing a help desk.

So the "real costs" of spam are largely incurred voluntarily by those who decry its costs the loudest.

That is the irony. You want to have all these abuse and help desk people to complain to, which increases the fees I pay for my ISP, even though I am happy with the delete-key solution.

Now whose little crusade is costing whom?

...it's CYBERCREEK.

Whatever. I am no anti-spam zealot so I didn't recall the name correctly when I tried to think of one off the top of my head. So sue me. But that doesn't detract from my point, which you entirely missed.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[CaptainSuperBoy]

A million dipshits like you have suggested 'just hit delete,' and a million patient anti-spammers have explained why this is the dumbest solution known to man. I don't have that patience for you any more.

http://www.cauce.org/about/nonsolutions.shtml

Spam is harassment and theft of service, plain and simple. It is not the same as P2P and you are a moron if you think they are remotely similar.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[kindbud]

A million people think that Miss Cleo knows something they don't (actually, she does, but I digress). Just because everyone is on the bandwagon doesn't mean the driver knows where he is going.

And I hate it when zealots quote scripture at me. You are trying to prove that god exists using the bible. Just as I do with bible-quoting zealots, I will address the CAUCE scripture's flawed arguments one-by-one.

• There's Too Much. The amount of spam is growing day by day, with no signs of an abatement in volume.
  

  This proves only that all anti-spam measures have been largely ineffective, including the ones you advocate. That is exactly what I have been saying all along. This proves my point, not yours. Spam volume is growing because there are more email senders, more messages and more recipients overall. How dumb do you have to be not to see this? (don't bother answering, that was a rhetorical question)

• You Still Get Spam. In order for this to work, you have to receive the spam in the first place. Your time, money and energy, not to mention huge amounts of bandwidth...

  Prove it. There is no evidence that spam is more a bandwidth hog than other email, Usenet, P2P, HTTP, and so on. If we implore them to discriminate against this traffic, they will feel free to discriminate against other traffic. It's already happening. Ask anyone who has tried to send or receive (non-spam) email through AOL, only to have it mysteriously disappear for no apparent reason, with no way to determine what happened. This cure is worse than the disease, especially when the disease is as easily avoided as brushing away a fly.

• It Doesn't Work. Period. Most spam is forged in some fashion, making it impossible to determine the origin.

  Then why does Spamcop exist to assist with reporting the spam to the originating ISP? How can DNS blacklists do what they claim, if it is impossible to determine the origin of the spam?

  No matter what filtering mechanism is built, spammers will find a way around it.

  Again, this only proves my point. The existing mail system is too friendly to spammers. That is a problem that can be addressed with technology. But no one wants to do that. You'd much rather go around making laws telling everyone who may speak to whom, or enacting some vigilante ideal of who may talk to whom. Enough already!

• How Much is Too Much? What does it take before your email inbox is useless to you? 5 spams a day? 50? How about 500? If spam manages to become legitimized, then 500 messages a day will be small potatoes. Spam is amazingly cheap to send, and spammers will take advantage of this to turn your email box into a billboard for their advertisements, making it totally useless for regular (wanted) email.

  Again, CAUCE supports my position. Spam exists because the SMTP protocol makes it possible to get away with it. We need a new mail system, not new laws. Blacklists, filters, LARTs, these things are useful only in the short term, as CAUCE rightly points out. The SMTP and POP mail system places a large part of the burden of receiving mail on the recipient, by design. A new mail system that reverses the order of things will stop almost all spam, at least from the small-potatoes schmuck. It addresses exactly the problem spam-complainers object to most, that spam costs them money. It will not, however, stop mass-marketers who can afford paper spam in addition to electronic spam.

This is a solveable problem, only we're all too collectively lazy to implement a working solution. We'd much rather go around making laws to punish people's behavior rather than having to re-invent the system to make the undesireable behavior unappealing or unrewarding so as to make it not worth the bother. That sounds an awful lot like your friends over at the RIAA and MPAA. One day, maybe both of you will get a clue.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear god.

You've never had to maintain an email system in your life, nor understand the constraints of maintaining an email system. Do you realize what Microsoft-based mail systems actually DO when you hit that delete key? THEY PLACE THE EMAIL INTO A DELETED ITEMS FOLDER BUT (by default) DOES NOT EMPTY THE FOLDER - EVER. Mail system databases are not boundless entities either, the typical corporate mail system can only contain 16 GIGABYTES of email - period. When you're putting a couple hundred people onto a mail system, that breaks down to less than 80MB of email per user.

MOST of those users, and I know this is a major breach of understanding (since, by your logic trail, you've shown yourself to be a clueless highschool/college student or a fine upstanding member of a collegiate marketing program), actually have WORK related emails they need to keep around and reference, not to mention new correspondence with coworkers and colleagues. Cram all that mail alongside the several megabytes of spam the average worker receives every month, and you've got a very bad situation.

Unless, of course, you honestly, actually, seriously think that having all the CEOs email go away when the database overflows and crashes is a tenable situation. Really? Do you?

Gosh, Mr. Spam King, you certainly have ALL the damn answers, answer this: Which is more important (as in, will profit the company - not to mention society as a whole) for an employee to read and deal with on an ongoing basis - email that pertains to individuals getting work done, or "advertising" about the latest group of XXX sites and get-rich-quick pyramid schemes?

Grow up, get a life, and better yourself. Stop being a detriment to the human race and for once, in your pathetic little life, think about someone besides yourself.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, it's amazing to me that the ones who run around calling everyone else lazy miraculously are the same ones who are doing exactly SQUAT about the problem.

You have a computer. You have a TCP/IP stack. Put up or shut up - design a better system. DO IT.

Wait, let me guess - YOU HAVE THINGS TO DO. Gosh, just like 99% of the human race.

Re:They picked on this guy...

[kindbud]

Oh dear god.

Kindbud will do, thanks.

You've never had to maintain an email system in your life, nor understand the constraints of maintaining an email system.

Sez who? That is one of my primary job duties. Another one is answering mail sent to abuse@ and postmaster@. Yet another one is implementing spam control measures. I am intimately familiar with the ins and outs of this issue. It is my job and I have been doing it for the past decade. I was using Internet email before there was any spam, when UUCP was still widely used. All I lack is a pot-belly and greying beard, and I am the stereotypical Unix guru they keep in the back room and don't let customers talk to.

But I don't share your opinion about what to do, what will work, and what won't, when it comes to spam.

Do you realize what Microsoft-based mail systems actually DO when you hit that delete key? THEY PLACE THE EMAIL INTO A DELETED ITEMS FOLDER BUT (by default) DOES NOT EMPTY THE FOLDER - EVER.

And whose fault is this? That Microsoft's software exacerbates the spam problem is an argument against using Microsoft software, not an argument in favor of vigilantism or tossing "suspect" messages without notice to anyone.

When you're putting a couple hundred people onto a mail system, that breaks down to less than 80MB of email per user.

Couple hundred? My company has close to 5000 employees, contractors and partners on our mail system.

Cram all that mail alongside the several megabytes of spam the average worker receives every month, and you've got a very bad situation.

Hasn't been much of a problem for us, but we have competent NT admins and help desk people who know how to keep the Exchange side of the mail system working smoothly, and users' desktops configured properly to not keep stuff in the Trashbin forever. Of course, it was a struggle to get to this point, since Exchange isn't exactly the easiest piece of software to deal with. Myself, I never let my email touch the Microsoft side of things. I intercept it and deliver it to the IMAP/POP server where the Unixheads and other clueful souls have their mail delivered.

...the typical corporate mail system can only contain 16 GIGABYTES of email - period.

Huh? Ours is at 3 or 4 hundred gigabytes. The Netapp filer on which the Exchange mailstore is kept can be expanded to 2Tb eventually. I guess your budget is a bit smaller than ours. Or you didn't buy the BigMailStore License, or whatever.

Cram all that mail alongside the several megabytes of spam the average worker receives every month, and you've got a very bad situation.

Your numbers are so tiny, it's laughable that you're having problems already. I shouldn't laugh though, you probably can't help it.

Unless, of course, you honestly, actually, seriously think that having all the CEOs email go away when the database overflows and crashes is a tenable situation. Really? Do you?

No, that's why I argued against Exchange, but they really wanted the shared calendar and stuff, and at the time, I couldn't provide an open source alternative. In any event, they worked out the kinks and got it all working, with more than 16Gb capacity, over a CIFS share from a Netapp filer. The CEO has not lost any mail.

Gosh, Mr. Spam King,...

Snicker. That's pretty funny.

... you certainly have ALL the damn answers...

I never said that. I expressed my opinion, and attempted to engage in a discussion, but all you zealots only want to shout me down because I am not spouting the party line.

Stop being a detriment to the human race ...

Oooo, you gonna compare me to OBL now? Please?

Heh heh

[Anonymous Coward]

bshifman@cometlink.com has been succesfully added to the Gay Porn mailing list.

:).

How NOT to get a job

[markmoss]

1) Send an unsolicited resume _everywhere_, not just to places you have researched and have some reason to think you might have a chance at...
2) When they ask you to stop sending resumes, respond with foul language and threats of lawsuit.

And this idiot did it repeatedly!

Really, even McDonald's won't hire you if they are aware of a history like that.

Re:How NOT to get a job

[Will_TA]

Indeed. The other thing you never ever do is then threaten that company with legal action - and act like a w*****. It just gets you blacklisted. If you run a google search on the bloke in question's name, the site dissing him appears on link #8, I believe. That will ruin him.

Re:How NOT to get a job

[pi_rules]

1) Send an unsolicited resume _everywhere_, not just to places you have researched and have some reason to think you might have a chance at...

<gulp>

killall spam_monster_dot_com.pl

He's here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks Bernard.

"I've forgotten how good my memory is." - Can't remember

Re:He's here!

[jas79]

no , I am just one of those mililion other people who sent e-mails with resumes. It actually works better than the old fasion snailmail.
I have to admit that I actual send them to the hr department and not some random adress.

Tricky word

[Anonymous Coward]

Subpoena is one of those words that does not spell like it sounds. When confronted with these, I often deliberately mispronounce the word in order to remember its spelling.

Subpoena = sub po EE nah

Since I learned that trick I found my spelling has greatly improved.

Re:Tricky word

[Anonymous Coward]

Subpoena is one of those words that does not spell like it sounds. When confronted with these, I often deliberately mispronounce the word in order to remember its spelling.
Subpoena = sub po EE nah

But that's how it is pronounced!

Current ecomony = too much time

[Bakajin]

All of these people have too much time on their hands.

Luckily, or unluckily I only have time to post frivilous postings to slashdot.

We need anti-spam measures NOW!

[Mustang Matt]

I know there are a lot of you that think spam is no big deal, but for those of us that are dealing with a lot of domains and a lot of email addresses, it is getting unbearable. Yes, I can filter 99% of it, but geez, it is REALLY becoming a waste of my bandwidth even if I throw out my time wasted. Bandwidth = Money.

Missouri's new anti-spam legislation should go into effect with the next couple of weeks but it's not going to be effective without more states getting involved.

For those of you that care, write or email your local representatives and ask what anti-spam measures are in place and what can be done to get more if yours aren't effective. Tell them about the Washington law and it's effectiveness.

At a bare minimum, another thing I would like to see is a federal law that allowed every domain to have some email address (maybe postmaster) that it would be illegal to send spam to. This address would be strictly used for individuals needing to contact the administrator of a machine or domain. Imagine that...

Do any of you know how to trace down these 800 number companies that are sending spam off servers from overseas? Server admin's overseas either can't read my english requests or don't give a crap about spam coming from their servers. I've actually started calling the 800 numbers leaving valid contact information in hopes that they'll call me and I can rip someone's head off for two seconds. Amazingly enough, I haven't even gotten any responses!!!

I think I even got a fraudulent spam the other day. This "company" was claiming to be a non-profit child abuse organization. I'm almost sure they weren't and they were simply suckering money out of people. I tried to report it to both the real company and the FCC but I don't know if I got to the right people or not.

Are there any groups that are actively standing out against spam and lobbying the politicians? If so, I'm ready to join, if not, I need to start one.

Re:We need anti-spam measures NOW!

[SLot]

Are there any groups that are actively standing out against spam and lobbying the politicians? If so, I'm ready to join, if not, I need to start one.

http://www.cauce.org/

"CAUCE began as a discussion group called SPAM-LAW, which was an outgrowth of another list called SPAM-L, the Spam Prevention and Discussion List. A number of people who participated in SPAM-L felt that legislation was necessary to stop spam from choking the life out of the Internet. To keep the list topic focused, it was decided to create a separate list, the SPAM-LAW list, to discuss options on how to further legislation to prevent spam."

HTH. :)

Re:We need anti-spam measures NOW!

[dazed-n-confused]

Are there any groups that are actively standing out against spam and lobbying the politicians? If so, I'm ready to join, if not, I need to start one.

CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email)

They have links from their home page to related regional organisations, including EuroCAUCE (European branch)

Re:We need anti-spam measures NOW!

[bleeeeck]

I'm from MO and didn't know this law covered email as well as telemarketers. Cool! Here's a copy of Missouri's anti-spam law: http://www.spamlaws.com/state/mo.html

Re:We need anti-spam measures NOW!

[Maserati]

uce@ftc.gov

they're particularly interested in fraud, pyramid schemes and the like.

See their press release.

Re:We need anti-spam measures NOW!

[knobboy]

Missouri's new anti-spam legislation should go into effect with the next couple of weeks but it's not going to be effective without more states getting involved.

Can you point me somewhere with more information on this? I wasn't aware an anti-spam law had been passed in Missouri.

Re:We need anti-spam measures NOW!

[fred3666]

One ex-client of mine (now-bankrupt) had a four character plus .com domain and they got ridiculous amounts of spam. We needed to upgrade their internet bandwidth because of the problem and that ended up doubling their monthly access costs. Their 256k SDSL connection should have been good enough for their staff of 30 but they ended up moving to ADSL 2.5/768. That's paying over US$100/month extra just for the privelidge of receiving SPAM. We had SPAM filters in place to "protect" the users but we still needed to download the messages before our mail server and anti-spam tool got their wack at it. And heaven forbid we have access problems. 600 messages would pile up in a couple of hours. It was down for about a day and a half and their were 3700 messages. 99% SPAM. The poor mail server spent over a hour just trying to catch up. A who says that SPAM doesn't cost anything to anybody.

Re:We need anti-spam measures NOW!

[Mustang Matt]

http://www.spamlaws.com/state/mo.html

I'm also working with State Rep. Carl Bearden to get our laws up to par with Washington State's laws.

http://www.house.state.mo.us/bills02/bills02/HB1 04 2.HTM

It will add the following to our existing laws:
SECOND REGULAR SESSION

HOUSE BILL NO. 1042

91ST GENERAL ASSEMBLY

INTRODUCED BY REPRESENTATIVES BEARDEN (Sponsor), KING, LEVIN, WILSON (42), DOLAN,

HUNTER, CRAWFORD, REINHART, MOORE, OSTMANN, HEGEMAN, MYERS AND CUNNINGHAM.

Pre-filed December 3, 2001, and 1000 copies ordered printed.

TED WEDEL, Chief Clerk

2584L.01I

AN ACT

To amend chapter 407, RSMo, by adding thereto one new section relating to unsolicited electronic messages.

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the state of Missouri, as follows:

Section A. Chapter 407, RSMo, is amended by adding thereto one new section, to be known as section 407.1125, to read as follows:

407.1125. 1. No person may initiate the transmission, conspire with another to initiate the transmission, or assist the transmission of a commercial electronic mail message from a computer located in Missouri or to an electronic mail address that the sender knows, or has reason to know, is held by a Missouri resident that:

(1) Uses a third-party's Internet domain name without permission of the third party, or otherwise misrepresents or obscures any information in identifying the point of origin or the transmission path of a commercial electronic mail message; or

(2) Contains false or misleading information in the subject line.

2. For purposes of this section, a person knows that the intended recipient of a commercial electronic mail message is a Missouri resident if that information is available, upon request, from the registrant of the Internet domain name contained in the recipient's electronic mail address.

Re:They picked on this guy... not

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of all the people you mentioned, Joe Greco is the only one I personally know. Reading archived posts only tells one side of the story. Sure, Joe may fly off the handle at times, but he's been in the field for so damn long it would make your head spin.

Barraty?

[fhknack]

I'd never heard of the crime(?) "barraty" before--threatening to sue in order to get a reaction, then not following through. Wouldn't something like this be applicable to the Felton case?

Re:Barraty?

[homebru]

I'd never heard of the crime(?) "barraty" before

That's because it is spelled barratry. And, interestingly, the layman's dictionary def is "instigating lawsuits", not "threating to instigate lawsuits". Dunno if there is a legal distinction, since (all together now, children) IANAL.

Over in what represents itself as a legal dictionary, law.com mentions barratry as a form of shady/illegal business practice by lawyers. Goodness, surely not lawyers.

Why Shifman got nailed.

[mrsam]

I think these anti-spam zealots teamed up on this poor spammer, and the only reason it went as far as it did (and as hilariously as it did) was because Shifman has a large amount of juvenile pride.

A couple of things:

1. I am the spambag.net guy.

2. In my experience, people who use the term 'anti-spam zealots' are either spambags themselves, of members of the mainsleaze spam lobby, (i.e. Ken Magill of the Direct Marketing Associations, or various random clueless marketdroids who occasionally write for mainstream rags).

3. The reason Shifman was piled on was because he deserved it. Nobody cared about him much until he began calling people up on the phone, yelling at them, or leaving crank messages on the answering machine. The initial version of spambag.net was only a few short paragraphs. Then Shifman began calling my voice mail and screaming into my answering machine.

Here's a free clue to wanna-be grubors and speedbumps. Be very careful before you decide to waive your dick around. Someone might just have a bigger one themselves.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[bjtuna]

2. In my experience, people who use the term 'anti-spam zealots' are either spambags themselves, of members of the
mainsleaze spam lobby, (i.e. Ken Magill of the Direct Marketing Associations, or various random clueless marketdroids who
occasionally write for mainstream rags).

I don't think I deserved that.
[Insert the whole "i'm not a spammer or anything else you just called me" rant here].

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Semyon Varshavchik, can you explain again why alt.net is equivalent to satan?

Why do we have to listen to imported zelots when we have our own here? Go back to usenet.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[corbettw]

Hmm, completely insulting to someone who makes innocent comments, results to vulgarity to get his point across, admits to asshole tactics because "he deserved it". Wow, you sound just like Shifman! It really makes me wonder that the whole thing wasn't made up afterall.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[vjzuylen]

In my experience, people who use the term 'anti-spam zealots' are either spambags themselves, of members of the mainsleaze spam lobby, (i.e. Ken Magill of the Direct Marketing Associations, or various random clueless marketdroids who occasionally write for mainstream rags).

That's harsh, man. The guy just presented an alternative viewpoint to this whole case - one which he obviously researched and which tells a story many people reading about the Shifman case probably don't know about - and you call him spambag, sleaze, or clueless. And then you wonder why he uses a term like 'anti-spam zealot'... Sheesh. Look, I hate spam as much as the next guy, and Shifman obviously is at fault here, but-- dammit, did it really take four of you to poke through the bars of this rabid dog's cage? I think that question is actually quite legitimate.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[RC514]

Spammers are sending their junk to a large number of recipients to increase the number of positive replies. The downside of this approach is that they are also pissing a lot of people off. Now only four of those pissed off people teamed up on a decidedly uncooperative and aggressive spammer. What makes you think the spammer should be defended against such an "onslaught"?

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[Erasmus Darwin]

"The guy just presented an alternative viewpoint to this whole case - one which he obviously researched"

One which he didn't research very well. His points about the various anti-spam people all knowing each other are legitimate. However, that potential conflict of interest is explicitly stated in one of Laura Atkins's emails in the exchange -- Shifman points out that the site she referenced wasn't on the search engines, and she mentions the common Usenet group.

He also defends Shifman's targeted spamming of HR departments. However, when presented with evidence refuting the targeted nature of the spam job, Shifman simply ignores it. Further evidence against the spam job being targeted was provided in other comments in Slashdot.

All-in-all, while the original poster did raise an interesting point or two, his position is poorly thought out (at best) or clever trolling (at worst).

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[vjzuylen]

Because even rapists and murderers have rights?

I don't know for certain. It's just that Shifman strikes me as someone who doesn't know how to face his mistakes, or deal with his anger. As he becomes angrier, he resorts to worse forms of harassment - which amuses the anti-spam activists greatly - which in turn makes him angrier. At what point exactly do you say "enough's enough"? When he becomes so blinded with anger that he physically hurts someone? Or himself?

Do you want this man to be pointed out the error of his ways, or ridiculed into oblivion? And if he stubbornly refuses to accept his errors, does that excuse you to continue pressing his buttons until his fits of anger no longer amuse you?

Imagine a police officer giving a Tourette's Syndrome patient a ticket for speeding - the Tourette's patient becomes agitated, loses himself in a stream of cursewords, and all of a sudden his fine is doubled for insulting an officer of the law. Will he A) sheepishly accept the ticket and go about his business or B) become more agitated and therefore more prone to shouting obscenities?

Okay, the parallel's a bit off and I admit that I don't know much about Tourette's syndrome at all, but I think you catch my drift. If I get spammed on any account other than Hotmail, I will usually try and send a notice to the spammer and his ISP. Anything he sends after that, I just have to delete. I mean, if he doesn't get it by then, he probably never will - and his ISP obviously doesn't care.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[hawk]

>Shifman points out that the site she referenced
>wasn't on the search engines,

He doesn't point this out; he claims this. It seems highly unlikely given the rest of the background that google never found a link to this site. My immediate reaction was that it was far more likely that he couldn't handle a search engine, either.

hawk

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[RC514]

This is leading to "he killed while he was drunk, so he can't be held responsible for his actions". While that is a consideration, others still need to be protected from such an incident being repeated.

Spammers deliberately hide behind the fact that most spam recipients have no way of knowing for sure how many other victims there are and who they are. That makes the ever-so-annoying "Oops, sorry, made a mistake" a viable excuse. Every once in a while, when a truly obnoxious spammer hits the wrong people, an example like this reminds people that you can't walk around ignoring all the rules and expect to be treated politely.

I seriously doubt that Shifman can't control himself in the sense that he needs psychological help. He's just trying to avoid the consequences of his spamming and because he has no legal leg to stand on he resorts to empty threats. He's just not used to dealing with professional anti-spam people, which makes him look stupid in this comedy. I suspect his tactics work just fine when used against less experienced people.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[vjzuylen]

Perhaps you're right. I hope you are, because the hole Shifman is digging for himself is becoming awfully deep. I don't think he really needs to be protected from the anti-spam activists who are obviously smarter than him. I do, however, get the impression that he could use a little protection from himself every now and then.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[macdaddy]

Sure you did. Both his and my experience tag you as either what he wrote or like a handful of my users that think that me as an ISP filtering their mail is wrong and demand to receive all the spam. I think it's totally justified.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[for(;;);]

> In my experience, people who use the term 'anti-spam zealots' are
> either spambags themselves, of members of the mainsleaze spam lobby,
> (i.e. Ken Magill of the Direct Marketing Associations, or various
> random clueless marketdroids who occasionally write for mainstream
> rags).

Bah. By this logic, anyone advocating due process for suspicious immigrants is a terrorist, and the HUAC's victims must really have been Stalin's spies after all. Sounds like zealotry to me.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[vjzuylen]

Really? I didn't think his post was all that inflammatory. I thought he was merely trying to illustrate the other side of the story, the one that didn't become completely obvious to me from reading the web page. Yet, for whatever reason, people are furious, calling him a troll or worse. He has a different viewpoint -- he must be one of them! Pinko! Commie!

Well, I happen to think he raised a few good points in his post. Perhaps he's wrong; fine, we can discuss this here, and point out the weaknesses in his arguments. But merely calling him names, pegging him with the spammers and saying he deserves that is... well, it's not even zealotry, it's McCarthyism.

I defended some of his arguments. Does that make me a spambag? Am I now officially part of the mainsleaze spam lobby? Do I deserve to written off as a clueless marketdroid, too? Are you prepared to level that accusation at me, in all honesty?

Must be easy living in your world.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[Happy go Lucky]

2. In my experience, people who use the term 'anti-spam zealots' are either spambags themselves, of members of the mainsleaze spam lobby, (i.e. Ken Magill of the Direct Marketing Associations, or various random clueless marketdroids who occasionally write for mainstream rags).

I don't think I deserved that.
[Insert the whole "i'm not a spammer or anything else you just called me" rant here].

Not speaking for Mr. Sam, but it's not a question of "deserved." It's a question of the fact that it's extremely rare for someone to use the term "anti-spam zealot" without being a spam apologist. It's sufficiently rare that in eight years online I've never seen it. If you're really using the term without being a spam apologist, you're literally the first that I've seen.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[Ionized]

In my experience, people who use the term 'anti-spam zealots' are either spambags themselves, of members of the mainsleaze spam lobby, (i.e. Ken Magill of the Direct Marketing Associations, or various random clueless marketdroids who occasionally write for mainstream rags).

hmm.. that doesnt look like a directed attack to me. perhaps you misread the original post.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[Anonymous Coward]

> In my experience, people who use the term 'anti-spam zealots' are
> either spambags themselves, of members of the mainsleaze spam lobby,
> (i.e. Ken Magill of the Direct Marketing Associations, or various
> random clueless marketdroids who occasionally write for mainstream
> rags).

Bah. By this logic, anyone advocating due process for suspicious immigrants is a terrorist, and the HUAC's victims must really have been Stalin's spies after all. Sounds like zealotry to me.

• It wasn't a statement based on logic, it was based on personal experience of the poster (and his judgment of other people). This tells us something about the poster's experience and judgment.
• You're the one making assumptions about how the original poster would judge people in other domains and implying that his judgment is at fault, which tells us something about you.
• The legal/governmental apparatus make judgments differently than individuals do - it's called "due process". No one has the fucking time to apply "due process" to day-to-day personal judgments.

Personally, I've also found that the most common/vocal "pro-SPAM" people are, as the original poster indicated, someone with a vested interest in spam or a shill. However, I've also run into a few clueless souls who just don't understand the scale of the spam problem.

Re:Why Shifman got nailed.

[macdaddy]

I defended some of his arguments. Does that make me a spambag?

No but that does make you appear to be someone that picks a fight just to pick a fight.

Oh, come on!

[Otto]

From the read it seems readily appearant that their only "provocative" actions were to forward a complaint to the postmaster addresses of whatever ISP Bernie was using at the time. From there this little shithead goes ballistic, threatens legal action, calls people names and generally harasses them. The guy is a moron and deserves every bit of it. Okay, so they don't let up when it becomes obvious that Bernie's full of shit, but big deal..

I personally think the only appropriate response left is just to have him whacked and be done with it (hey, I know some people in Chicago, you know?)... ;-)

IT Directors

[madeye]

If Bernie is not careful he'll give all us "IT Directors" a bad name

What about spontaneous job applications ?

[clarkie.mg]

Instead of spamming lots of people, those who are interested in giving someone employment would search a database of resumes. It's much more effective for everyone.

Do you know that spontaneous job applications are common practice ? They are appreciated by many companies and human resources managers who read them and put them in a database even if the company has no job available at the time of reading. Later, if a position needs someone, they usually look first in this database before posting ads or other means of asking for candidates.

I read somewhere that spontaneous job applications account for 50 percent of some hiring.

Of course, the person looking for a job should research the company he is sollicitating and customizing any email he sends. But opt-in only for job sollicitations is not appropriate and even human resources managers would not like it.

Re:What about spontaneous job applications ?

[Jay L]

If a company posts their HR department's e-mail address on the web site, then obviously they ARE soliciting resumes. That wouldn't be UBE.

OT: Parent Redundant. Re:Excellent Troll!

[netsharc]

Hmm, re-reading the comments made me realize the comment I wrote (parent post) is now redundant. Please don't hurt me, moderators. :)

Contact him?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has any of these people actually tried to contact him for work? He's putting his phone number everywhere, with no request for it to be taken off. Does it even work? I'm sure he's dieing for a job, spamming this many people. Maybe call collect and ask for his credentials?...

No, anyone cannot send you an email.

[clarkie.mg]

When you have a publically accessible medium of communication you are implicitly agreeing that anyone may attempt to contact you at least once.

I disagree. How many business companies are there in the world ? If all of them send you an email for advertising, will you take the time to unsuscribe a few million times ? And if they are really nasty, they can even make the unsubscribe process a bit complicated or long.

So the basic question to ask is not who can send you an email but how did they get your email ?. It's a matter of privacy. If you give your email to one company, they should be prevented by law to give or sell your private records except if you authorize it.

Furthermore, you should have the right to see and edit your records for any company that have anything about you. I don't know for the US but, in Belgium, that's the way it works and I am happy with it.

Re:No, anyone cannot send you an email.

[jgerman]

To tell you the truth I don't know if that's the case or not, it should be. But if a company sells your name to another company for the purposes of email that's a privacy issue with the original company, not the company that attempted to contact you. Like I said before, it should all be opt in, with an implicit opt out rather than explicit.

My question is...

[Guppy06]

Has anybody gone through his resume and attempted to contact his (supposed) former employers to hear what they have to say about him, if anything? Did he really work for who he said he did? Is he committing fraud?

Re:My question is...

[jsse]

I notice:

1) His last company looks like a law firm

2) He said he's from a legal family(I guess he meant his family is stuffed with lawyers - mighty awkward at family gathering *argh*)

So....he works for his family before seeking a real job. "Oh he's a good boy at family...I mean company" :)

Re:My question is...

[nic_strong]

2) He said he's from a legal family(I guess he meant his family is stuffed with lawyers - mighty awkward at family gathering *argh*)

Judging by his character more like his family is use to dealing with lawyers!

Re:My question is...

[Gambit253]

Last time I checked it was customary to have actual contact information for your references. A phone number at the least, a physical address at the company if you can get one. He just provides name and position. If I was trying to hire somebody, I wouldn't want to go through the effort of trying to get in contact with references without any information besides name, title and company.

Re:My question is...

[hubie]

Are you suggesting that he wouldn't be able to get a coaching job at Notre Dame?

Spam wastes my valuable time.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate spam because it wastes my valuable time. So when I get some, instead of taking the 3 picoseconds it would take to simply delete it and get on with my life, I begin an all-out assault against the perpetrator. If the spam has particularly wasted some valuable seconds of mine, I'll code up a web page and register a domain name to complain about it. Because it wastes my time. My valuable time.

Similarly, telemarketers also interrupt what I'm doing and waste my time, so when they call, instead of simply saying, "I'm not interested" and hanging up and returning to what I was doing, I'll go on for several minutes berating them, asking to speak to their supervisor, or engaging in any number of 'hilarious' schemes, some of which take ten minutes before the final comdeic act. They certainly know better than to waste my time after that!

Re:Spam wastes my valuable time.

[hkmwbz]

One piece of spam a day takes not effort to delete at all. A hundred takes considerable time to delete.

If only spam didn't take time to deal with... As it is now, it is important that someone can actually be bothered to fight back, in the hope that spam will at some point be a thing of the past. I am grateful towards those who take up the fight, and I try to do it myself when I feel like it.

(Sorry for replying to this obvious troll...)

Re:Spam wastes my valuable time.

[Anonymous Coward]

I manage a corporate e-mail account that gets about 70 spam messages per day. It has won several Florida vacations, has a small penis, wants to see hot hot teens, needs to make money fast, and is helping Nigeria through some financial difficulties. It takes about two minutes a day tops to delete it all. I can't imagine wasting the time it would take to track down each of them and complain about it.

I don't like spam but it's not the end of the frickin world. Delete it and move on with your life. Do you write letters to every company that sends you unsolicited ads in your snail mailbox? Of course not.

Out of all the things to get bent out of shape about, getting unwanted email is so petty it's ridiculous. The only reason so many people are so easily whipped into a frenzy about it is because it's so easy to frenzy about. With the touch of a button you can deftly zip off a nastygram to the vile individual who had the audacity to send you something you didn't want. And with a little more effort you can set up a whole web site about this terrible violation of your time and space.

Get a grip.

Re:Spam wastes my valuable time.

[Cestus]

It's a waste of time and energy to 'fight' spammers. This isn't a holy crusade. No one is going to give you /. brownie points for being enraged of the great spam injustice.

Delete the spam and move on. Of all the things that waste time in my life, spam isn't really high on the list. Where is all the rage against traffic jams? Or slow tellers? Or Chris Carter for subjecting us to the last several seasons of the XFiles?

Re:Spam wastes my valuable time.

[hkmwbz]

If you had read my previous message, you would have seen that I do not spend a lot of time fighting spam. I do, however, support those who do. It is a worthwile cause, because spam is a major problem.

Re:Spam wastes my valuable time.

[Cestus]

If you consider spam to be a 'major' problem, then you have it pretty easy.

Re:Spam wastes my valuable time.

[hkmwbz]

"It takes about two minutes a day tops to delete it all."

Those two minutes are a waste of time. Why should I have to spend several minutes every day to delete mails I don't even want in the first place? It doesn't make sense. And since I am often connected with a dialup and since we actually have to pay per minute where I live, spam also costs me money. I have to download it! And have you any idea how large some of these spammers manage to make their mails? HTML mail doesn't exactly make them smaller either.

"I don't like spam but it's not the end of the frickin world. Delete it and move on with your life."

It isn't that simple. Spam costs me time and money, and is useless.

"Do you write letters to every company that sends you unsolicited ads in your snail mailbox? Of course not."

No, but I can easily stop people putting ads in my mailbox by adding my address to a list. If anyone sends me ads after this, I can have them sued for breaking the law.

(And as I wrote in my previous reply to you (I assume it was you), I don't spend a lot of time fighting spam. I try to filter as much as possible, and I generally ignore it and move on. I do appreciate that someone takes the time to fight spam, though.)

Not only that, e-mail spammers abuse other people's systems and make others pay to receive the spam. Yes, you are actually paying to receive those spam mails every day, as it takes up your disk space and your bandwidth.

"Out of all the things to get bent out of shape about, getting unwanted email is so petty it's ridiculous."

Not if you have better things to do, and not when:

1. Spammers abuse other people's resources
2. I have to pay for spam when I am connected via dialup

Now, to answer your main point, which is that you are wondering why people spend their time yelling about spam and trying to fight it. Having to deal with spam is boring and pointless. Fighting spam, however, is contributing something to the Internet community as a whole. You are doing something valuable with your time.

If someone feels that fighting for what they think is a good cause is worthwhile, why spend your time complaining about them? Because that's what you are doing. Follow your own advice.

Why should spam fighters stop fighting? Because they'll never achieve their goals? How would you know? What if everyone had your attitude and stopped fighting for good causes just because it looks hopeless?

"Get a grip."

Why? I have the right to spend my spare time on Slashdot, discussing spam. I think spam is a major problem, and hope that those who actively fight it will eventually prevail.

Please, don't try to push your attitude on others. Without people who actually cared for something, we would be getting nowhere. I'm glad someone can find a worthwile cause to fight for.

Re:Spam wastes my valuable time.

[hkmwbz]

It is a major problem, because the amount of spam going over the Internet costs money - and the spammers abuse other people's resources.

Do you think disk space and bandwidth is free?

Re:Spam wastes my valuable time.

[Cestus]

"I'm glad someone can find a worthwile cause to fight for."

Of all the worthwhile causes out there to fight for: Human rights, whaling, the rainforest etc...

Some might say you are being tremendously shallow to say that this is a worthwhile endevour. Some might. Me included.

Re:Spam wastes my valuable time.

[hkmwbz]

"Of all the worthwhile causes out there to fight for: Human rights, whaling, the rainforest etc..."

Are you saying that just because there are other worthwile causes, one should ignore the ones you personally don't see a point in following up on? If we spent less money cleaning up the mess spammers are making, we could perhaps spend more money on issues like human rights, the rainforest and poverty.

(By the way, is whaling even an issue these days? The minke whale is far from threatened by extincion, and it's the one certain countries hunt.)

Re:Spam wastes my valuable time.

[Cestus]

False dichotomy.

Just because I don't think it's a major problem does not mean I think that dasd and bandwidth are free.

Spammers have to pay for dasd and bandwidth. They are connected to the net just like you and I are. Is it a 'waste' of bandwidth for me to run nmap on remote servers to test them? What about the kid down the street running quake. Is he costing me money becaue he's eating my bandwitch on my cablemodem?

Re:Spam wastes my valuable time.

[hkmwbz]

"Is it a 'waste' of bandwidth for me to run nmap on remote servers to test them?"

No, but you won't get your free e-mail service flooded with angry responses because of it, like some e-mail providers have even seen their systems grind to a halt because of massive spammer attacks.

"What about the kid down the street running quake. Is he costing me money becaue he's eating my bandwitch on my cablemodem?"

Are you forced to watch the game?

The point is that spammers abuse other people's systems and force others to receive mail, while making money from it themselves.

Re:Spam wastes my valuable time.

[Anonymous Coward]

I fight for whaling everyday. I still have time for filing spam complaints and eating blubber.

In a perfect world...

[Guppy06]

ISPs would be held accountable for the damages caused by not enforcing their AUPs.

What about spontaneous job applications ? (II)

[clarkie.mg]

But sending out the same large numbers of the same email to people who haven't asked for it makes it unsolicited bulk email = UBE = Spam.

And what if I send my resume to companies asking for work ? As I said in a previous post, spontaneous job applications are common practice, appreciated by many human resources managers and should not be prevented.

Obviously, it should not be bulk as you'd better customize your applications but dumb people should also be allowed to search for a job.

Re:What about spontaneous job applications ? (II)

[Hanno]

And what if I send my resume to companies asking for work ?

You answered your own question. They solicit resumes, fine.

Re:What about spontaneous job applications ? (II)

[sqlrob]

If the company has a blurb on their web page "Send resumes to...", it's not unsolicited now, is it?

Re:What about spontaneous job applications ? (II)

[clarkie.mg]

Well my english is probably not accurate enough. You should have read :

And what if I send my resume to companies
,
asking for work ? (Myself asking for work)

Re:What about spontaneous job applications ? (II)

[danielrose]

If they solicit these types of mailings, for example they have a page stating email hr@whoever.com with your resume or similar type deal, it is ok.

Directly mailing joebloggswhoyoufoundsomeotherway@whoever.com with your resume is not.

Re:What about spontaneous job applications ? (II)

[Maserati]

It is if you don't use the "Send resumes to..." address. It is if you have NO IDEA if the person you mailed has anything at all to do with hiring contract techs.

Re:What about spontaneous job applications ? (II)

[sqlrob]

I'm not arguing that point.

I'm saying that shotgunning companies with resumes would not necessarily count as spam. If you have a crappy list of addresses and hit people unassociated hiring, yes, it is spam. If you have a list that is only HR, no, I wouldn't consider it spam. I don't consider it smart either, but it's not spam.

Re:What about spontaneous job applications ? (II)

[TimboJones]

No, it's not spam if your list is all HR contacts.

But it's clear that Shifman's list was not only HR.

Re:What about spontaneous job applications ? (II)

[SSpade]

In fact, one of them was to an email address that either

1. Bernie harvested from usenet
2. Bernie harvested from whois records
3. Bernie harvested from the SamSpade.org FAQ
4. Bernie bought a list from someone else who harvested it
5. Bernie read the SamSpade.org FAQ and decided that SamSpade.org, an anti-spam site, would want to received spammed resumes.

Even Bernie isn't stupid enough to do number 5, is he? Silly question, I guess.

There is a good lesson here

[finkployd]

Whether the first email was technically spam or not is not really relevant (and doesn't provide the humor). The interesting thing here is how our new spam mascot bernie reacted. Always remember kids, what you say in email can easily be posted, despite those silly little "this message is intended only for the recipient" disclaimers.

Finkployd

Same Guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick Google showed this:

http://www.usiia.org/members/founders.html

His CV shows US Robotics as a previous employer (94' to 96' - same period).

If it is him, then the usiia privacy policy becomes quite entertaining,


http://www.usiia.org/legis/privacy.html

Of course it may not be the same person - apologies if I am mistaken.

Too late to be efective

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit, story is just late! Christams has passed

This story could be the nicest present some people got.

P>S> Bernie is applying for a job, and he wouldn't work for anyone???
P>P>S> I also suggest that everyone that is submiting false email in some register to submit bshiftman@cometlink.com and clicks all "Yes i want to receive..."

I wish this POS would spam me

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish oh Bernie would spam me. If I replied and he called me a bitch and threatened to sue, I'd have my real life lawyer who I still have on retainer send him a nice letter. Fun stuff.

Re:I wish this POS would spam me

[BACbKA]

Now that you've just expressed your wish, can he spam you? You have just actually solicited a bulk mailing from him :-)

Correction:Too late to be efective

[Anonymous Coward]

Not Christams, XMASS

But in Bernies language knowledge...

Got to learn how to type

Humor at the Expense of the Mentally Ill

[ROBOKATZ]

I don't think this is at all funny. Clearly this guy has some serious psychiatric problems and I'm sure this situation has just exacerbated his condition.

What if this guy were retarded? Would this still be a front page story? Would you all still be laughing at it, even though anyone could point out, "Look, guys, he's retarded, it's not like he knows what he's doing."

Depressing, but not because of Bernie

[shimmin]

What does it say about the IT industry when experienced managers and entrepreneurs take time out of their busy day to antagonize losers with "you'll never work in this business again" threats, particularly when it seemes likely the loser in question never worked in the business in the first place?

I can see no reason for anyone to even reply to any of Bernie's blatherings, unless it be out for some sort of entertainment value. And if this is entertainment... The whole page recalls the adage about those arguing with fools running the risk of observers being unable to distinguish the participants.

Math rules...

[Glove d'OJ]

Actually, with increasing sample sizes, the mean and median tend to converge. This holds for most standard distributions including normal.

Given that the original SIG reads "Remember that 50% of people are even dumber than the average," given that "intelligence" is approximately normally distributed, and if we assume that "people" refers to people in general, the two can be considered identical.

lim x-> inf [mean] = ~median

With sufficiently large datasets, you can do most anything. (snicker)

Re:Math rules...

[Anonymous Colin]

Glove d'OJ said:
>>Actually, with increasing sample sizes, the mean and median tend to converge. This holds for most standard distributions including normal.

Bluntly, no. This is true for symmetrical distributions. There are plenty of standard distributions which are asymmetric (Poisson - sp? - can be and log normal always is, e.g.), and it is rarely true for an asymmetric distribution.

email postage?

[peter303]

If the governement taxed email, say a penny a piece, legitimate users would harly notice, but spammers would be tanked.

Re:email postage?

[pi_rules]

If the governement taxed email, say a penny a piece, legitimate users would harly notice, but spammers would be tanked.

Better yet, if they charged 34 cents per spam -nobody- would -ever- send out unsolicited messages to people in mass quantities. <roll eyes>

Aside from that the government has no business taxing what goes over a privately owned network. If high speed bandwidth came along with being a tax paying citizen of the US I could see email as being taxable -- but there's no way something like that can, should, or would go through.

If it does next I'll expect a tax on swearing to keep me from doing that too.

Re:email postage?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the goverment taxed air, say a penny a breath, rich people would hardly notice, but poor people would be tanked.

Re:email postage?

[Tyrant Chang]

Great for companies too? How about internal email? Do you want to tax those?

How about email to listserves? Listserves generate lots of email everyday - they will be taxed to death as it gets popular. There are many other scenarios where legitimate users will notice.

Badly thought out idea IMO.

Re:email postage?

[Anonymous Coward]

If government taxed masturbaring your debt would make the national debt look like the cots of a super value meal at McDonald's.

Why do stupid people always go to the extremes with arguments like this? Do you honestly think it would be even remotely possible to tax air? Why must you raise the spectre of big brother in situations like this?

Re:email postage?

[frantzdb]

And which government should do the taxing?

--Ben

Re:email postage?

[balthan]

Yeah, it's not like any companies would pay postage to send out junk mail.

Re:email postage?

[smyle]

Methinks you've posted this to the wrong forum. This is Slashdot, where practicality is valued and there reside many VERY SMART folk (along with a good many more sheep, but I digress). This is not a legislators forum.

Such a law (even assuming it is only a US, or even a single state's law) is completely unenforceable.

• When I send an e-mail to my cow-orker down the hall, the mail never leaves our server. Am I then required to have some sort of governmental spy-ware on my server to report this?
• As someone else mentioned - what about a listserv? Do I get taxed on the (1) message I send out or on the x thousand that get received. Taxing on just the one would do no good against spammers, as they could easily setup a listserv to do the same thing. Taxing on thousands could get very expensive for "legitimate users".
• What constitutes e-mail? Any connection to a port 25? What if I open a single connection to aol.com and send a million messages over that connection? How could you how many messages that is? What if I configure sendmail to listen on a different port?

Hmmm... The more I respond, the more I think I've found a troll.

Re:email postage?

[ScoLgo]

>If the governement taxed email,
> say a penny a piece,
> legitimate users would harly notice,
> but spammers would be tanked...

A penny today... $0.34 tomorrow... wait a sec - make that $0.37!. Once it starts, where does it stop? Are you, perchance, an IRS troll trying to drum up yet another source of revenue for the gov'mint?

Also, aren't you being a bit 'US-centric' here?

Sheesh -- talk about needing a 'clue-by-four'!!

/ENDRANT

Ok - at the risk of going off-topic, let's explore a tangent to this comment....

Since we've taken a turn onto the slippery slope of taxation, can anyone explain to me why the following would not work?:

1. Repeal Federal Income Tax.
2. Institute Federal Sales Tax (say.. 10% - or pick a 'better' number if you like).
3. State sales taxes and income taxes stay in place.
4. No tax on necessities (e.g., food).
5. No tax on goods for resale (currently true).

Benefits:

1. I keep the money I make until I decide to spend it on something. Whether I'm an individual, an organization, a corporation, etc. has no bearing. If I spend, I pay tax - period.

2. All this purchasing across state lines to avoid taxes becomes moot. Believe me when I tell you that I do it as much as possible. If I buy a book, a DVD player, a CD, a computer system, whatever, I try to buy out of state to avoid the tax, (ok, I do batch-buy smaller items like books and CD's to cut the freight costs :).

3. The government collects all those dollars that they are whining about missing out on because of internet sales.

4. The IRS can be re-structured to become a collector of sales tax for the fed. No more need for complicated, convoluted tax forms.

Drawbacks:

1. Puts a bunch of accountants, tax lawyers, etc. out of business. (Or at least makes them re-structure their businesses.)

2. ???

Any comments on this from the /. faithful?

Cheers!

Re:email postage?

[Manuka]

Nah, keep the IRS out of it, and leave it to the USPS - drum up a source of revenue for *them*, as they don't benefit from government funds.

Re:email postage?

[ScoLgo]

Internal Revenue Service.
US Postal Service.

I guess I don't get your point - why would you want the postal service collecting taxes? Like you say, they don't get revenue from taxes now - why let them start? I like the idea that if I want to snail-mail something, I buy a stamp for $0.37 and send it. If I don't send, guess what? I don't pay. Which is my point when it comes to income taxes; I like the idea of not paying taxes until I decide to. Why go the other direction and make the USPS dependent on collected taxes?

Please clarify if I'm missing something here.

Re:email postage?

[Roadmaster]

i send an avg of 50 email messages daily. Not spam, they're strictly personal or business related and only in reply to mail I get. So are you saying I'd have to pay 10 bucks a month (assuming 20 workdays per month and no mail on weekends), ON TOP of what I already pay for internet connectivity, as a measure to stop people engaging in an illegal activity and highly likely to find yet another means of passing the cost on to somebody else?

No way.

keep in mind that at least one of the servers involved in the transaction belongs to me. Should I, then, collect fees from people who send mail destined for my server?

No way.

I dont think it's a good idea.

Re:email postage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the spammers, with their great regard for existing anti-spam laws and outstanding moral character would actually pay this tax.

Such a law would certainly suffer from the "if you outlawed only criminals would " phenomena.

Re:email postage?

[TheShadow]

No no no... all states (except Delaware) already collect sales tax... have the states collect the tax on behalf of the federal government and give them a piece of what they collect (to cover costs, etc). Then get rid of the IRS all together. Why not leverage systems already in place?

Re:email postage?

[ScoLgo]

And Oregon, that I know of. They have state income tax instead of sales tax.

I don't disagree with you. I just think that there's not a snowball's chance of abolishing the IRS. There might be a chance of modifying it's function if enough people got on board with the idea of repealing income tax and replacing it with a reasonable sales tax tho'. Probably the same chance I have of waking up as a congressional representative tomorrow (heh!)

I also don't think you'll be able to get all 50 states to agree to drop their local fiscal jurisdictions to hand control over to the feds. That's just not the way government works (how's that for an oxymoron? :)

I dunno, I think the best chance of anything like this succeeding is to leverage the system that is already in place - the IRS.

OT: No ./ Effect

[_Neurotic]

Kudos to those involved for hosting a site that can stand up to an all out ./ so well...

Regards,
Justin McMichael

Re:OT: No ./ Effect

[Forkenhoppen]

Nah, like usual, people just haven't been clicking on the link. Remember, just because someone posts on a Slashdot article doesn't mean they read what it's about. Common fallacy, that. ; )

Seriously, though, the fellow in question never tried to sue; he threatened to sue. There's a bit of a difference.

Hate to piss on you parade...

[beaubell]

...represented by the law firm of "Tupoy, Durak, and Bolvan"...

I'm pretty sure that was ment as an insult to Bernard by the authur of spambag.net. They both speak russian and it would make no sence for Bernard to make up an obviously false law firm.

Also... Nowhere in voice mail is there mention of a law firm anyway.

funny

[phyberop]

this was a great read for a dull morning. While reading it, something to the tune of Eminem's Stan, popped into my head, like
My mailbox's full I'm wondering why.... Im getting all this spam
maybe someone could remix the whole song and dedicate it to Bernard. I'm sure he'd love that.
Careful not to get a lawsuit filed against you tho... ;)

Re:funny

[connorbd]

Mailbox full I wonder why
I'm getting all this spam
It fills up my mailer window
With teen sluts and Sircam
And even if I delete it'll all be back
Hit my head against a wall
And it reminds me
That my life is not so bad, not so bad at all

/Brian

Far Enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly this episode resulted from a stressed out, depressed and probably financially struggling guy, snapping when it got too much.

Sure, he should have dropped it, but there is a certain feeling of intentional perpetuation to this whole thing.

It was entertaining, but now its time to put on our grown up shoes (even if he didn't) and give him a break.

Save your ammo for the porn mailers and scammers we all know and love.

what a waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

my sole response to spammers and morons: nothing. Once you send a reply it will go on and on, wasting hours and hours of your short life. It costs me not even a second to delete a spam or moron's email and thats the maximum time I will invest.

Re:page lengthening post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget to add me [slashdot.org] to your foes list! Fags!

count on it crapflooder

Bernie a pothead?

[EllisDees]

Check this link out. Not that I have any sort of problem with stoners, but maybe the guy has just been high this whole time?

Re:Bernie a pothead?

[ShortSpecialBus]

Actually, he was telling the dude to not try to buy pot on that newsgroup, so I dunno exactly what your point is.

What does Bill have to prove?

[Rogerborg]

I recall an online altercation that I had a few years back. A post appeared in one of the UK ISP groups advertising a "too good to be true" service. This was at the time when narrowband access was going nuts in the UK, with companies taking a year's money off of people, then going bust the next day.

As a warning to the terminally gullible, I posted the whois info for the domain, and noted that it didn't match the trading address on the website.

A few hours later I received a vicious email from the poster threatening legal action because I had posted his home address on the group, when he was only the admin for the site, and threatening to post my home details all over the place.

Well, fuck me sideways, I thought, and let loose with a tirade about how anyone could possibly call themselves an admin when they didn't even understand that whois records are public - which mine were, and so I couldn't give a damn about what he did with them.

Two minutes after I sent it, I thought... wait a minute. There's a real human being receiving this.

And so I hammered out an apology, a genuine and heartfelt and sincere apology. Oh, I didn't mean a word of it, of course. The guy had screwed up, and was too stubborn to admit it. But I screw up every day, and don't like having it pointed out, and it was simply cruel to heap any further misery on this poster.

So I apologised for posting his address, and he replied in a calmer manner, and we had a chat, and he turned out to be a decent (if slightly clueless) bloke. He declined my offer to post a public apology on the group. I would have had no qualms about doing so, because knowing that I was absolutely in the right meant that I really didn't have anything to prove, and that my priority was to reduce the amount of human suffering in the world (in a small way, but every little helps, right?).

It's a shame that Bill didn't take the opportunity to defuse this situation. It's so obvious that Shifman is in the wrong that it really doesn't need to be laboured. He's clearly not very bright, and so it's rather cruel (funny, yes, but cruel) to taunt him so. I'm sure that Bill could just send a without-prejudice apology and walk away from this, and we'd understand that he's doing it from kindness and generosity, to dig Shifman out of the hole that he's dug for himself.

The fact that Bill doesn't do this, and that he's taking care to avoid actionable statements even though he claims that Shifman has no case rather implies that Bill isn't entirely confident that he's in the right here. And that's a shame, because he could end this with one brave and courteous gesture, for pity's sake, and out of strength, not weakness.

Re:What does Bill have to prove?

[Rogerborg]

Er, of course, that would be Neil and not Bill. That's real karmic payback for my complaint that the editor has spelled Shifman's name wrong. ;-)

Re:What does Bill have to prove?

[Belgarath52]

This is a really good point, one that as far as I can tell nobody else has made. I've met my share of clueless people, and they often get confrontational if you push them around. I can imagine that if people gave me a lot of crap, even if they knew that it was for a good reason, I'd probably respond quite vocally.

The thing is, is that there's really no point to all of this. As soon as it became clear that Shifman wasn't actually going to sue, they should have either defused the situation as you recommended (if he was still willing to accept that), or simply killfiled him. It's fun to watch, but there's really no intellectual challange to outsmarting a person who's so clearly ignorant.

Re:What does Bill have to prove?

[Bill The Roadie]

Well....Bernie was one dumb dude to SPAM Neil again in December after having been reported in November. Even if Neil had de-escalated in November, Bernie was still using the same technique, and was too stupid to scrub Neil's address off the spam list.

Bernie was the one to escalate the issue. To give in to spammers is to allow them to own your in-box. We don't play 'dat game no more, homey.

Bill, the Roadie (yes, that Bill)

Re:What does Bill have to prove?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you did was WRONG.

ZERO tolerance to spam. And NO MERCY whatsoever to spammers. Put them to the wall I say and fire freely.

What to do with your SPAM.

[mencik]

I like to save the SPAM that I get from the people that want to tell me how to make millions, and then forward it to the SPAMmers that are supposedly representing charities and are asking for money. I figure I should cut out the middle-man and just let these "charities" make the millions for themselves!

Wait a moment!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that the whole goal?

Could this whole thing be a hoax?

[variable26]

Does anyone else think this thing could have been a well orchestrated hoax to scare off the spammers that to waste so much of our time?

Shifman Consulting

[Anonymous Coward]

A little search on the address the spammer uses for his consulting reveals that it's a condo. I'm surprised. I expected a mailbox place.

Re:Shifman Consulting

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is just hilarious how Bernie keeps seeking this guys snail mail address. First two secs on any number of phone lookups out there and bam there's Neil Schwartzman in Montreal.

Neil Schwartzman
5732 Av Somerled
Montreal, QC H3X 1Z8

It lives!

[Anonymous Coward]

as of 10:30 eastern, it still lives without slowdown :-)

The obvious comment:

[olympus_coder]

What a moron...

Md and Va UCITA tactic

[st0rmshad0w]

I'm frankly curious to see how this might play out and IANAL but, that said, what if MD or VA residents were to comment to this "gentleman", perhaps bring his recent notariety to his attention and suggest he apologize post haste. However all mail sent from VA and MD should contain a quick little blurb, at the bottom, something along the lines of: "With reply to this email, [rude spamming moron] and [his company] agree to payment of US $1000 to [sender] per [MD/VA] UCITA."

Any laywer folk out there think this may hold water in a legal arena against spam folk?

dibby dobber

[abdulla]

i'm telling mommy on you
i'm telling teachers on you
i'm telling lawyers on you

There IS a lesson to be learned here....

[CSG_SurferDude]

There is a lesson to be learned here...

Play nice, the world is now a very small sandbox.

The corollary here is:

Anytime you are about to interview somebody for a job, do a google search on them first.

Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, is this Shifman fellow a real person? The reason I am asking is because I didn't think anybody could be such a complete asshole.

I had qualms about giving this story to slashdot

[User18706]

Because someone is a moron, is it worth giving the person all the grief of having everyone who reads slashdot his name? From my point of view, it makes me more valuable at what I do, because of morons like him. It may be frustrating, when/if he is my boss, but really, turning all us geeks loose on him? 002-01-09 03:02:26 Is it ethical to give out a spammer's name? (askslashdot,spam) (rejected)

No Shifman Consulting in the Chicago Phone Book

[DanielRavenNest]

That's one calibration of his 'business status'

Can anyone in the physical neighborhood of this address:

Bernard Shifman
Shifman Consulting
2828 N. Burling St. Ste. 402
Chicago, IL 61108

tell us if that is a residential neighborhood
and therefore whether 'Suite 402' is really
an apartment, or if it is a maildrop address?

That would give us another calibration.

Daniel

Re:No Shifman Consulting in the Chicago Phone Book

[sqlrob]

See this comment. According to that, it's residential, a condo. Pictures in the link

Re:No Shifman Consulting in the Chicago Phone Book

[Darth RadaR]

Yeah, but what I want to see are some pictures after it's been egged by some militant Chicago anti-spammers. :)

Re:No Shifman Consulting in the Chicago Phone Book

[wemic]

I live about half about half a block away from this jerkoff and can confirm that it's a large condominium complex (maybe 20 units) in a fairly nice neighborhood.

My roommate and I have discussed stopping by for a chat, but wonder if it might be too creepy.

Re:No Shifman Consulting in the Chicago Phone Book

[olivechicago]

and thanks to research... Shifman Consultiing is not a registered business name in Cook County (where his "work" address is) or Illinois. Draw your own conclusion! I was thinking about recuiting people from chicago to actually form a mob. You know.. like the kind in the old black and white monster movies. We can get people with pitchforks, and torches.. angry wives with rotten heads of lettuce to throw. We can get the local kids to show up with slingshots. -- and we thought the "real world" kids when in chicago had an effect on chicagos pop-culture media. What do you think a real mob will do? We do have right to gather...

Re:No Shifman Consulting in the Chicago Phone Book

[wemic]

My roommate and I actually checked out the entry way to the building this morning on our way to work. His name isn't listed on the directory, and there is no unit number that matches his supposed address.

So I'm not saying something's fishy here, but yeah - something's fishy here.

Shifman is, in my opinion, a net-kook...

[KC7GR]

There's already been a thread about him on the Usenet group news.admin.net-abuse.email. He has no legal leg to stand on because, contrary to popular belief, the huge cluster of servers, routers, and other network goodies that make up the 'net are privately owned, not public property. Said owners have absolute authority to accept or reject whatever traffic they want on their respective networks and equipment.

In short: If they want to tell Bernie to bug off, and report his missives as spam (which they most certainly are if the recipients were not explicitly soliciting resumes for open positions, or if he did not call the recipient first to see if it was OK to send said resume), that's their option.

I hereby nominate Bernie for Kook-of-the-Month. Any seconds?

Mail Benard Worry Free (read below)

[Anonymous Coward]

username: shitmanconsulting@hotmail.com
passwd: spamsucks

Re:Mail Benard Worry Free (read below)

[Guru2Newbie]

I think the password got munged. It asked me 3 times, so I bailed.

Bernard = master troll?

[mpweasel]

Has anybody thought that maybe he's not really a moron?
Maybe he's a comic genius under the guise of a master troll? Martini

To be fair to Mr. Bernard Shifman

[JWhitlock]

I was reading over the page (Shifman is a Moron Spammer), and got to the point where other folks were getting the email, and emailing back the link, saying "I found this link, sorry, I'd never hire a spammer." So, I tried to do a google search for "Bernard Shifman".

I found the inevitable geneology links, a link to his actual web page (check the phone number), and an old link to a web page that has since removed the email.

If I received the spam, and were just the right level of cluelessness (clueless enough to consider hiring a spammer, clueful enough to do a web search on his name), then I may not find a web page claiming him as a spammer. Either Google has removed some content, or it was never indexed. There's no //petemoss.com/robot.txt, so I have to assume the former.

This may mean the folks that sent him back the link heard about it through the anti-spam newsgroups, or some other channel. That's a little different than doing a web search. I can imagine HR folks doing a web search, but maybe not a usenet search. Of course, if you do do the google usenet search, you find a number of links.

While I'm being fair, I did do a few ARIN whois searches. For those out of the know (I was one of them this time last year), the whois database gives information about the entity that registered a particular domain.

Searching for petemoss.com (Neil Schwartzman's prefered domain and the host of the website) gave nothing. I then pinged petemoss.com, got an IP address (206.117.161.122). The query returns the netblock's identity, as well as an administrator name, email, and (important to Shifman) phone and fax.

It seems a little more damning that Mr. Shifman doesn't know about these tools of the trade for tracking down people on the net. Of course, since I'm being fair, it wasn't until I started setting up my own home network and had to decipher firewall logs that I learned about whois...

Re:To be fair to Mr. Bernard Shifman

[Robotech_Master]

Don't forget that if you have a URL, you can do a back-content search at the Wayback Machine. I don't have time to see if Bernie's website ever had any content on it, though--got to get to work. So I'll leave that joy to someone else.

Re:To be fair to Mr. Bernard Shifman

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no content for Bernie. But the url creation date is only Nov 14, 2002 so what do you expect. By the way the way back machine works, it is scary to see how crappy my pages were in 1995.

Re:To be fair to Mr. Bernard Shifman

[Bill The Roadie]

Usenet searches are very up-to-date. groups.google.com

Lotsa hits.

Bill the Roadie (yes, that Bill)

I'd like to make him a job offer.

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy would be tremendous fun to interview, I think.

Wrong Idea!

[iplayfast]

When Governments start to tax, they don't stop. You say ligitimate users would hardly notice at a penny a piece, but there is no guarentee that the government would keep it at a penny. Better to pay end users to receive email. Better yet, make spam illigal and keep email free. I'd rather spend my time deleting a few unwanted emails then pay out my hard earned money!

SPAM is good, live with it

[Anonymous Coward]

Most personal deparments, if there company has a website, have a little notice somewhere in the HR section that says, essentially, "Send us your resume via e-mail."

By posting jobs online, its a constructive request for e-mail.

Maybe Bernie made a genuine mistake by sending you the e-mail.

What is certain is that if the fellow does not have a job, you should have compassion on him, not make his life miserable.

If you can't be compassionate towards people in tough spots, I wish you would kill yourself and make the world a better place.

That goes with most of the other hyper-critical bastards on /. too.

Re:SPAM is good, live with it

[mbstone]

Sending out resumes to lots of email addresses listed in the want ads isn't spam, but it will piss off some ISPs unless and until you explain things to them. This is not the problem it used to be, since the number of IT want ads is asymptotically approaching zero and has been ever since GWB was anointed President. Returning autoresponder mail that claims the co. will keep my resume on file, now THAT's spam.

How many messages did Mr. Shifman send?

[Some Dumbass...]

The thing that bothers me about this is that I don't see anyone saying how many e-mails Mr. Shifman sent out. The original message posted on this site has one name in the "To:" line, and no mention of a "CC:" line. That suggests that it was sent to exactly one person. My question is, did Mr. Schwartzman know that Mr Shifman was sending out multiple e-mails when he made his complaint to Mr. Shifman's ISP. If so, how did he know? (I know that he found out later on when other people got involved, but at the time that he registered his complaint, how did he know?) From the page itself, it looks like Mr. Schwartzman got a single email (one sent to an inappropriate address, true) and got the sender's e-mail account cancelled. Is there more to the story? Because if not, it sounds like Mr. Schwartzman was in the wrong. Sending out one e-mail to the wrong person is annoying, but it's not spam.

Re:How many messages did Mr. Shifman send?

[nigelc]

Well, it looks as though Neil got an unsolicted email message, which he then reported as "spam" to the originating ISP.

Was it spam? Personally, I think that Neil suffered from premature ejaculation on this one, but he didn't do anything too bad. I think that the ISP has the role of determining whether this complaint was justified and of then doing nothing or taking some action.

Presumably, if Neil's had been the only complaint, nothing would have happened.

Re:How many messages did Mr. Shifman send?

[Erasmus Darwin]

"My question is, did Mr. Schwartzman know that Mr Shifman was sending out multiple e-mails when he made his complaint to Mr. Shifman's ISP."

Other than guesses based on the impersonal content of the email and the recipient address not being associated with a typical resume-receiving operation, I don't think he could've known for sure. Similarly, it's theoretically possible, for example, for someone like me to take a copy of Make Money Fast and send it to CmdrTaco.

However, Mr. Schwartzman didn't close down Mr. Shifman's ISP account. If it was closed, it was closed by the abuse desk at Mr. Shifman's ISP. They should've been able to determine whether or not Mr. Shifman was sending out bulk email. It takes 30 seconds to do an fgrep on the mail logs for mail sent from Mr. Shifman's account. If they see tens of thousands of hits, they know something's not quite kosher.

Re:How many messages did Mr. Shifman send?

[Some Dumbass...]

Other than guesses based on the impersonal content of the email and the recipient address not being associated with a typical resume-receiving operation, I don't think he could've known for sure.

Exactly. If Mr. Schwartzman had any other evidence, he would have mentioned it in the complaint to Mr. Shifman's ISP. Even then, how often are resumes sent in "personal" letters? They're supposed to be presented in a businesslike manner.

However, Mr. Schwartzman didn't close down Mr. Shifman's ISP account. If it was closed, it was closed by the abuse desk at Mr. Shifman's ISP. They should've been able to determine whether or not Mr. Shifman was sending out bulk email. It takes 30 seconds to do an fgrep on the mail logs for mail sent from Mr. Shifman's account. If they see tens of thousands of hits, they know something's not quite kosher.

True. I shouldn't have implied that Mr. Schwartzman himself "got Mr. Shifman's account closed".

Then again, I wonder if Mr. Shifman's ISP actually takes the time to look at their logs. My concern is that it's too easy to have a "knee-jerk" reaction on things like spam, even for the ISP. So the ISP loses one user. Who cares? Especially if it's a user who has been generating complaints, legitimate or not...

Besides, imagine this scenario: Mr. Shifman sends out many copies of his resume all at once. All but one of them go to people who really are soliciting resumes, and one goes to the wrong person. In the ISP's logs, this may look like spam. Sending 10,000 copies of a resume is certainly spam (and enough to clog the mail server if they all have Word Documents attached!), but how about 10? How about 100? (And again, remember that resume mailings don't particularly need to be "personal".)

Re:How many messages did Mr. Shifman send?

[Anonymous Freak]

Yes, the usual defenition of 'spam' is when it is sent to multiple people. However, the legal defenition of 'UCE' or Unsolicited Commercial Email (as defined by the state of Washington, possibly others) is that the recipient did not ask for it (as Neil didn't), that it is commercial in nature (soliciting business is definitely commercial), and, of course, that it be email. It doesn't have to be bulk.

As for the spam I recieve? 90% of it lists either only me in the To line, or no To line at all. So I have no way of knowing how many people it was sent to. My most recent was an ad by some random reseller for Dish Network. The 'To' line lists only my email address. And it claims to have been an opt-in email. I recieved it on my hotmail address (which I have NEVER given out to ANYONE, I only use it to see how much spam I can collect.) and my Yahoo address, and my AT&T Broadband address. Very thorough spamming, I must say. (Heck, I got it twice on the AT&T account.)

Oh yeah, the Hotmail account gets about 5 pieces of spam a day. *WITH* it set to the most restrictive spam filtering, on auto-delete.

Re:How many messages did Mr. Shifman send?

[BamaSlam]

Actually, from the looks of things, his email never made it thru his provider's email servers. All the spam seems to have been relayed elsewhere.

Re:How many messages did Mr. Shifman send?

[Some Dumbass...]

Yes, the usual defenition of 'spam' is when it is sent to multiple people. However, the legal defenition of 'UCE' or Unsolicited Commercial Email (as defined by the state of Washington, possibly others) is that the recipient did not ask for it (as Neil didn't), that it is commercial in nature (soliciting business is definitely commercial), and, of course, that it be email. It doesn't have to be bulk.

Also, are you sure that UCEs are illegal? Looking at Washington's anti-spam law here, it looks like UCEs are not illegal. Only misleading commercial e-mails (with forged headers, etc.) are illegal. Perhaps there are other anti-spam laws in Washington that I don't know about.

Re:How many messages did Mr. Shifman send?

[sheetsda]

The original message posted on this site has one name in the "To:" line, and no mention of a "CC:" line

If I remember my SMTP correctly, what the "To:" line says (if it even exists) can be entirely different from who the message is actually delivered to. The "To:" is considered part of the data of the message and is specified separately from the actual recipients. Hence how BCC works. Of course it'd look pretty odd if someone received this message who wasn't in the "To:" line so I'm guessing he just used some sort of spambot to generate individual "To:" lines on a ton of messages (or SMTP may facilitate this, I can't remember).

Re:How many messages did Mr. Shifman send?

[Some Dumbass...]

Of course it'd look pretty odd if someone received this message who wasn't in the "To:" line so I'm guessing he just used some sort of spambot to generate individual "To:" lines on a ton of messages (or SMTP may facilitate this, I can't remember).

Sure, a spambot could collect a bunch of addresses and send out a bunch of individual-looking e-mails (thus leading back to the original question, how many e-mails did Mr. Shifman send?) But if there's a different "To:" line on each message, and each message is actually going to the one person who is named in the "To:" line, then that's exactly the same as the usual use of the "To:" line, isn't it?

Re:How many messages did Mr. Shifman send?

[sheetsda]

But if there's a different "To:" line on each message, and each message is actually going to the one person who is named in the "To:" line, then that's exactly the same as the usual use of the "To:" line, isn't it?

Yes, but thats not my point. The poster mentioned the fact that there was only one person in the "To:" line and no "CC:" line and concluded that the message was only sent to one person, which is incorrect.

Re:How many messages did Mr. Shifman send?

[Some Dumbass...]

Yes, but thats not my point. The poster mentioned the fact that there was only one person in the "To:" line and no "CC:" line and concluded that the message was only sent to one person, which is incorrect.

Nope. In both posts, my concern was that there wasn't enough evidence in the e-mail itself to show that it was sent to more than one person. I never concluded that only one was sent. I even said in my last post that "Sure, a spambot could collect a bunch of address and send out a bunch of individual-looking e-mails..." My point is that the recipient of one of these e-mails does not have enough evidence to prove that it was spam. In fact, such an e-mail would look exactly like any regular 'ol e-mail. So why did the e-mail prompt a reaction appropriate for a spam e-mail when it was not clear that the e-mail was spam (rather than a single unsolicited request)?

out of job

[Anonymous Coward]

this guy is out of job, leave him...
Also, i don't feel, it is a good behaviour
to publish his name on slashdot.. :(

Bernie joins the ranks of Karl and Gary

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps Bernie's a wanna-be, but I'd say he's definitely coming up the ranks to join Karl Denninger and Gary Burnore, as part of the all-time internet losers club

Hmmm - I can't quite think of the proper award to give them, but a baseball bat does come to mind.

is sending out resumes spam?

[rjnagle]

While the rhetoric of the emails is outrageous, the point raised here is very interesting.

A person seems to have looked for email addresses of computer companies in order to send solicitations to do work. The recipient of one such solicitation didn't like it and called it spam. His reasoning went like this: because we have an HR department, therefore any job solicitation sent to any other email is spam.

That is curious reasoning. Many online applications simply dump online resume submissions into a database where they are never read. The job seeker is encouraged to contact a real person, not an online tool, and Mr. Shifman seems to have adopted that strategy.

I think this exchange reflects badly not only for Mr. Shifman, but Mr. Schwartzman, who seems to take umbrage at a simple, direct resume submission. Shifman's anger aside, it seems that it would be a great injustice for an ISP to treat Mr. Shifman as a spammeister.

I frequently sent out things to acquaintances and friends (url's, essays, and yes, even jokes once in a while), and it would be frightening if one of my acquaintances treated it like spam!

The best thing about the whole episode is that I learned what the word "barratry" means.

Re:is sending out resumes spam?

[BlacKat]

The difference being you are sending it to an accquantance or a friend. Not some unknown person.

Plus he claimed he thought he was sending his resume to a person who owned a buisness... at a email address for a school in Montreal, Canada. Not exactly the brightest defense.

Re:is sending out resumes spam?

[demon]

Except that it's an obvious form letter/mass-mailing message (no names or personalization) - plus it's to someone he doesn't even know. Also, the message to a guy at Concordia U - I mean, come on, they're not an IT company, and according to the people at Concordia whose messages appeared, they don't even have anything about HR on their pages.

However, in later messages he says how (I'm paraphrasing) "I didn't want to work for your stupid company anyway, I was trying to get clients for my business". Seems like a funny way to go about it to me. But what do I know anyway?

but if intelligence has a few factors

[hawk]

then what we call intelligence will be some type of weighted mean, and some version or another of the central limit theorem will apply, and we get a normal distribution.

Most of you, however, will runn in horror,screaming, at the proofs of this :)

hawk

Send him ecards...

[wowbagger]

Go to all of those "Click here to send somebody you love a card" sites (which are nothing but address harvesters for spam.) Put his email in.

Every time you get a spam, reply to the "Remove" address with his e-mail address.

Give him a taste of his own medicine.

Oh, and Bernie, if you are reading this - you are hearby advised not to email me (even if you are bright enough to figure out how.) If you wish to serve me papers, you may ask for my lawyer's snail mail address.

i was thinking more along the lines of...

[Anonymous Coward]

video taping his beating to warn other spammers NOT to spam me. i feel the rage of most would be satisfied knowing that he lives at:

Bernard Shifman
773-391-0595
2828 N. Burling St.
Ste. 402
Chicago, IL 60657

i've never been to the windy city (conditions were always a bit too windy for me), but i could happily make an exception. imagion downloading some funny clips from morpheous/p2p servers, only to find this guy beaten on video tape and recorded onto the internet.

(one can dream can't they? :D)

Insult as an art form...

[Da VinMan]

I am humbled by the mastery demonstrated here. ;+)

And I quote:

YEAH, BUT HOW DO YOU REALLY FEEL?

Matt from The Culprits' Open Letter to Spammers

From: "Matt Hiltner"
To: "'Neil Schwartzman'"
Subject: Open letter to spammers
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 00:57:00 -0600

Mr. Spammer, you swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As they say in Texas. I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.

You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you my not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.

The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known, that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.

P.S.

You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, byzantine,conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good.

In other words, go away.

Re:Insult as an art form...

[paitre]

As beautiful an insult as this is, it's -NOT- an original work. I, unfortunately, can't quote the source, but ISTR that it was originally posted in a response to an idiot's post on USENET.
I know for a fact that I read it a couple years ago when a coworker showed it to me.
SOrry to burst people's bubbles....

Oh, and it is -DEFINATELY- appropriate to the situation :)

Re:Insult as an art form...

[alexburke]

That was actually going quite well, until

You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill.

Shame we couldn't keep the whole thing in English...

Re:Insult as an art form...

[JWhitlock]

Not an original, but mutated a bit over the years. Here's a proto-version (text-only or in context), from the google archives (uk.singles, April 1996). The interesting thing is that he apologizes "to those who already have this archived" - I wonder where?. The poster goes by the name Nick Sellors, nicks@wipak.demon.co.uk.

Gotta love those Google archives. Here's the main part, if the google link is too slow...

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. What is that tripe you call your opinions? What is that scrofulous little tumor you call a brain? Don't you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth, you wad of pus. You're a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a goat then be seen with you.

You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention, you smell?

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You're grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. I have excreted better things than you. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you.

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. I would rather bathe with Hitler than speak to you. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends to character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

You are a fiend and a coward and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away.

There, I feel better now.

Re:Insult as an art form...

[Anonymous Coward]

fascistic, racist, sexist,

Why this flattery in the middle of all the insults?

Re:Insult as an art form...

[SlackBastard.net]

It's English.

It's just not American.

Credentials

[Anonymous Coward]

check out: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25893&cid=2808 471

A spoonful of research...

[CyberLife]

I took the liberty to do a little bit of research on good 'ol Bernie. Here's what I found:

• The address listed on his domain registration is over four miles from city hall (source: MapQuest.com). Granted I know nothing about Chicago's layout, but I would assume this is not in the high-rise district.
  
  
• There are no less than nine schools and nine supermarkets within the immediate vicinity of his location (source: MapQuest.com).
  
  
• In his block alone there are 164 housing units of which nearly 50% are single occupant dwellings. In addition, nearly half of the housing in that same block are rentals. (source for both: US Census for 2000)
  
  
• Again, his block alone is only about 1/4 of a mile long (source: US Census for 2000).

Now, the "suite" number listed on his domain registration is in the 400's, implying it's on the fourth floor. The fact that there even exists a unit number in the address proves it's a multi-occupant building. Taking into consideration all of the above information along with the type of work he claims to do, it's my opinion (possibly incorrect) the address listed in his domain records is most likely a single-family apartment.

I seriously doubt his claims of the greatness of his career. He's probably just some wannabe compulsive liar who screwed up and refuses to bow out gracefully.

BTW, I'm not infallible (wait a minute, yes I am) so I would appreciate others checking my figures. :)

Re:A spoonful of research...

[RC514]

Have a look:

http://rubloff.com/building/lvbuild/2828bur.htm
http://www.bestagents.net/sweethome/listings4.htm

You are right: #402 is on the 4th floor. #420 is available:
2828 N. BURLING #420 1 Bedroom / 1 Bath $189,000 Assessment: $142 / Taxes: $2,181

Re:A spoonful of research...

[CyberLife]

So it's not only an apartment but a crappy one at that. :)

+1 Insightful on the MQR standard

[MarkusQ]

Uh I hate to say this... (Score:1)
by jgerman on 3:32 09 January 2002 (#2808571)
(User #106518 Info)

...but that's not Spam. The difinition on that site is entirely too loose. The mail including the headers was valid, and Niel decides after recieving one unsolicited message that it's spam. Bullshit, if I send this guy an email by mistake am I spamming him? What if I send him an email and he just isn't interested, is it spam? Just sending large numbers of the same email out IS NOT spam. Note the definition listed does not even have any criteria based on whether or not the mail was solicited so even list hosts that you subscribe to qualify.

Quite true. I'd mod you up but I have no mod points save the ones I make up.

--MarkusQ

All your lawsuits are belong to us

[Belly of the Beast]

We (myself included) need spell checkers & grammer checkers built into our browsers to go over what we post.

This is a worse problem than some people realize.

[chefmonkey]

I need to back this up. While many people may see a managable "trickle" of two or three e-mail messages a day, I get on the order of 100 to 200, split fairly evenly between work and home. Much of what I do involves working with groups benfiting newsgroups or the underlying internet protocols -- so, that's how my e-mail address gets out.

Here's a sampling of what I've received at my work address over the course of the past 24 hours; I will have about as much waiting for me when I get home:

[1]
From: Ancestry.com@opt22.edirectnetwork.net
Subj: Trace your family tree FREE at Ancestry.com
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 9:28 AM

[2]
From: WinterGamesInfo@opt16.edirectnetwork.net
Subj: Get ready! You're going to the 2002 Winter Games on us!
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 7:56 AM

[3]
From: Savings_From@opt07.edirectnetwork.net
Subj: Save $500* on Cabinet Refacing from Sears!
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 7:52 AM

[4]
From: Jose Bautista
Subj: EARN $2 - $8 PER CLICK FREE!!!!
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 7:50 AM

[5]
From: sales@cmbcomponents.com
Subj: HOT PARTS IN STOCK
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 7:37 AM

[6]
From: maletta665661@ahff.se
Subj: 15 days to 1,000 Dollars in Your Pocket.
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 7:37 AM

[7]
From: Make Money
Subj: Who Wants To Be a Millionaire??
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 7:35 AM

[8]
From: ipopatmis@yahoo.com
Subj: Home Loan Center... Save Money! FE
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 7:12 AM

[9]
From: gift@opt05.edirectnetwork.net
Subj: You've been selected to receive FREE Software from Sega, IBM, Disney and many others...
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 6:54 AM

[10]
From: wesson
Subj: Increase Your Size And Performance NOW 32363
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 6:07 AM

[11]
From: Just For You
Subj: Earn your degree online - FAST!
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 6:07 AM

[12]
From: Nicole Jameson
Subj: Re: Business Opportunity 23328
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 5:26 AM

[13]
From: RallyRacer.com@opt03.edirectnetwork.net
Subj: Casting Call for Reality TV's Fastest New Show!
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 5:26 AM

[14]
From: Sarah Kingdon
Subj: Re: Business Opportunity 12887
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 5:23 AM

[15]
From: number0845@login.yahoo.akadns.net
Subj:
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 5:09 AM

[16]
From: number0845@login.yahoo.akadns.net
Subj:
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 5:07 AM

[17]
From: dj1y1s@msn.com
Subj: Don't suffer in debt any more, info inside. [skjg4]
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 4:34 AM

[18]
From: dj1y1s@msn.com
Subj: Don't suffer in debt any more, info inside. [skjg4]
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 4:32 AM

[19]
From: ReferralWare@opt03.edirectnetwork.net
Subj: Be VERY careful with this...
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 4:08 AM

[20]
From: Credit Relief!
Subj: BAD CREDIT? Consolidate BILLS! PAY OFF Credit Cards!
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 3:06 AM

[21]
From: photography.com@opt25.edirectnetwork.net
Subj: Win $10,000! Free Photography Contest- Enter Now!
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 2:56 AM

[22]
From: marketinfo2002771230@yahoo.com
Subj: TRADING ALERT (6163EwQi9-20@11)
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 2:42 AM

[23]
From: Here it is -
Subj: FREE Home Security System from ADT!
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 2:42 AM

[24]
From: ipopatmis@yahoo.com
Subj: Home Loan Center... Save Money! FE
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 2:35 AM

[25]
From: Congratulations!
Subj: We're ready to send your FREE* GIFT
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 2:20 AM

[26]
From: uklkritgfuhjyntjk@msn.com
Subj: Historic Highs are ahead
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 2:20 AM

[27]
From: tuesdaymano2@yahoo.ca
Subj: GET MORE EXPOSURE ON THE NET W/MASS E-MAIL-------GET 1 FREE MILLION -09-0-0-
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 1:40 AM

[28]
From: astroleads@china.com
Subj: global exposure - we do the work
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 12:57 AM

[29]
From: Trudelle
Subj: Got Resolutions?20910
Date: Wed 2002-01-09 12:44 AM

[30]
From: Your_Smart_eStore@opt34.edirectnetwork.net
Subj: FREE!* Kids Software - Phonics, Reader Rabbit, Leap Ahead! and more...
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 10:59 PM

[31]
From: wefjr@usa.net
Subj: Smiles worth a thousand words
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 10:56 PM

[32]
From: GleInt25@yahoo.com
Subj: No Boss! No Suit! No Commute! Time:10:14:10 PM
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 9:49 PM

[33]
From: Your Opportunity . . .
Subj: Why pay more for Domain Names?
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 9:46 PM

[34]
From: Kelly_Peterson@mantramail.com
Subj: You Can Copy Any DVD
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 9:42 PM

[35]
From: Ryan Feldman
Subj: Closer to the half century mark?
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 9:37 PM

[36]
From: Referralware
Subj: Be VERY careful with this...
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 8:12 PM

[37]
From: John Murdok
Subj: Hey!!
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 7:11 PM

[38]
From: gman3067r65@yahoo.com
Subj: Cell phone owner
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 7:10 PM

[39]
From: Broderbund
Subj: Discover the FUN way to get organized in 2002!
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 7:00 PM

[40]
From: Coupons! Coupons!
Subj: Post-Holiday Clearance Deals! + Plus Year Rounds Savings!
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 6:59 PM

[41]
From: CopyANyDVD817338@mail.ru
Subj: Dvd Movie to CDROM!!
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 6:40 PM

[42]
From: don_smarty@yahoo.com
Subj: As Seen On TV
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 5:46 PM

[43]
From: eDirectNetwork
Subj: Get your favorite CD's FREE (details inside)
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 5:24 PM

[44]
From: don_smarty@yahoo.com
Subj: $$$$CASH USING YOUR P. C.$$$$$$
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 5:16 PM

[45]
From: Blair
Subj: Shop & Save with Free Shipping at Blair.com!
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 5:11 PM

[46]
From: news@bluecom.com
Subj: Stock clearance
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 5:02 PM

[47]
From: CopyANyDVD028440@mail.ru
Subj: Dvd Movie to CDROM!!
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 4:49 PM

[48]
From: Kyung
Subj: 70% Saving on Insurance HU
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 3:59 PM

[49]
From: fine_cigars0109@writeme.com
Subj: for all the Cigar Aficionados in the world
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 3:20 PM

[50]
From: Quit 4 Good
Subj: Be Free
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 2:56 PM

[51]
From: teamst78@excite.com
Subj: Trial Offer - Alternative to Viagra..... Time:2:19:34 PM
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 1:42 PM

[52]
From: 20merchantacc@msn.com
Subj: ACCEPT CREDIT CARDS & TRIPLE YOUR SALES 23699
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 1:23 PM

[53]
From: bushy_george9977@altavista.com
Subj: Enhance your Sexual Experience Naturally
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 1:13 PM

[54]
From: umbrella34@hotmail.com
Subj: FREE Embroidered Patriotic Checkbook Cover
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 12:33 PM

[55]
From: holloweed09@hkem.com
Subj: CAN MASS E-MAILING WORK 4 YOU? GET 1 FREE MILLION =--0====-
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 11:15 AM

[56]
From: jerry1965@yahoo.com
Subj: GET THE BEST NET EXPOSURE W/MASS E-MAIL--GET 1 FREE MILLION L;;
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 11:14 AM

[57]
From: eDirectNetwork
Subj: Tell me something.... for the chance to win an X-box!
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 11:13 AM

[58]
From: 4828515travelincentives2002@aol.com
Subj: 4120 Would you like to lose weight while you sleep? 2851548
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 11:06 AM

[59]
From: Save BIG on Insurance!
Subj: No Obligation! Life, Health, Home, Vehicle, Business!
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 10:57 AM

[60]
From: Anna
Subj: Please call me back... It's Important! H
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 10:49 AM

[61]
From: sales@cmbcomponents.com
Subj: TXC03452C10GA FOR SALE *
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 10:43 AM

[62]
From: Bill Formacker
Subj: RE: 10948
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 10:31 AM

[Note: there were about six additional spams in east-asian character sets that the lameness filter forced me to remove]

This is a farce!

[variable26]

Whois Results for shifmanconsulting.com
The Data in Network Solutions' WHOIS database is provided by Network
Solutions for information purposes, and to assist persons in obtaining
information about or related to a domain name registration record.
Network Solutions does not guarantee its accuracy. By submitting a
WHOIS query, you agree that you will use this Data only for lawful
purposes and that, under no circumstances will you use this Data to:
(1) allow, enable, or otherwise support the transmission of mass
unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations via e-mail
(spam); or (2) enable high volume, automated, electronic processes
that apply to Network Solutions (or its systems). Network Solutions
reserves the right to modify these terms at any time. By submitting
this query, you agree to abide by this policy.

Registrant:
Shifman Consulting (SHIFMANCONSULTING-DOM)
2828 N. Burling St. / Ste. 402
Chicago, IL 60657
US

Domain Name: shifmanconsulting.com Enter amount (min $200.00)

Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
Shifman Consulting (BANRKNYHSO) boba130@home.com
Shifman Consulting
2828 N. Burling St. / Ste. 402
Chicago, IL 60657
US
773-391-0595 fax: 773-935-7498
Technical Contact:
WorldNIC Name Host (HOST-ORG) namehost@WORLDNIC.NET
VeriSign, Inc.
21355 Ridgetop Circle
Dulles, VA 20166
US
1-888-642-9675

Record last updated on 04-Dec-2001.
Record expires on 14-Dec-2001.
Record created on 14-Nov-2001.
Database last updated on 9-Jan-2002 01:12:00 EST.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS91.WORLDNIC.COM 216.168.225.231
NS92.WORLDNIC.COM 216.168.225.232

The phone number

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone tried calling it? Or at least letting their modem ring it and hang up after one ring? Repeatedly?

On this site: 773.391.0595

Shifman's not suing anyone

[tgeller]

Folks, take a look at this. Mr. Shifman hasn't sued anyone for responding to his spam, and I'll wager he never will. He's made baseless threats, referring to non-existent lawyers. That's common among people who feel backed into a corner and don't understand law.

The site is mirrorred on spamflames.com. As the domain reseller for that domain, I also received a legal threat from Mr. Shifman. I have no intention of responding, and don't feel even slightly threatened by it. When I get court papers, I'll take it seriously.

My letter to bernard...

[vandelais]

To:
Subject: Dude, you are famous.
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 10:53:21 -0600

Your voicemails rule!
Are you hiring?
Where can I submit my resume?

I am 3733t network admin, believe me.

One possible SPAM solution.

[rworne]

I was kicking this idea around while logging into my Hotmail "dropbox" (used for things like required e-mails for web site access, web e-tailers, etc.)

This mailbox is now getting 30+ spams a day, the majority from other Hotmail/AOL/Yahoo/MSN users.

Quite a few of these users are creating obviously fake user names such as a sring of 3-4 characters and some integer value. Would it be possible to punish some of these free e-mail services by writing a bot that creates hundreds or thousands of spambait mailboxes on these services? Examples would be aaaab, aaaac, aaaad, etc. Get several thousand (or tens of thousands) of people to participate and it would easily clutter up the servers, directories, etc. -- AND it would be ready-found fodder for brute-force spambots that troll these free e-mail services. As an added bonus the user can run another script to log in once every two to three weeks to keep the created accounts active.

Just a thought... thinking ain't illegal yet, isn't it?

ObDisclaimer: No scripts have been written, none intended to be written, nothing past the "what if..." wondering stage. So keep the lawyers leashed.

Good consultant

[ehiris]

The guy got more publicity now then he imagined.

I'll hire him to fight with my girlfriend.

Just tell us where Shifman is hiding...

[cecil36]

...and fuhgedaboudit!

Hmmm

[Linux_ho]

[linuxho@faramir linuxho] $ telnet mail.relay.com 25
Trying 63.192.100.60...
Connected to mail.relay.com (63.192.100.60).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 CheckPoint FireWall-1 secure SMTP server
HELO mail.microsoft.com
250 Hello mail.microsoft.com, pleased to meet you
MAIL FROM: bill.gates@microsoft.com
250 2.1.0 bill.gates@microsoft.com... Sender OK
RCPT TO: bernard@shifmanconsulting.com
250 2.1.5 bernard@shifmanconsulting.com... Recipient OK
DATA
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself

Hi Bernard,
I suppose having your name posted on Slashdot and having practically everyone in the IT industry know your name must be pretty humiliating given the context it was published in.

I'm sure you've learned a lesson about when it is a good idea to back off and apologize, even when you feel you are in the right. This is probably the most expensive way I have ever seen anyone learn that lesson.

I am offering you a job at Microsoft, mostly out of pity. Please send your resume to HR@microsoft.com with a cover letter indicating your areas of expertise, and attach a copy of this e-mail to it.

Bill Gates
Chief Visionary
Microsoft Corp.
^D

Nope, p.p.s.

[hawk]

post script (after the writing)
post post script (after after the writing)

hawk

Re:Nope, p.p.s.

[Anonymous Coward]

P.S. = post scriptum, written afterwards

We need a Slashdot Q&A with Bernie!

[rarose]

(that ought to spin him up another couple hundred RPM!)

Shame on slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Shame on whoever thought this qualified as a 'story'. It's Trash.

We owe Bernie more than this!

[scoove]

Bernie has done all of us slashdotters a great benefit by helping instill a meme that simplifies our lives. Just think of the ways we can save time now by immortalizing his name when we refer to disease of high-esteem, nonexistent competency fools that bark empty threats every time their useless lives are recognized for what they are.

For example, someone sent you a totally bogus loser resume?

"Oh geez, get rid of that resume. It's a Bernie Shifman."

Spending the weekend cleaning up a totally fscked up wiring or server job? "Yea, I'm working late on a Bernie Shifman job."

Bernie deserves to be imortalized as the /. poster boy for arrogant incompetence.

*scoove*

p.s. Anyone hear if Bernie's learned of his /. fame? Hey Bernie, your fifteen minutes are ticking!

Re:We owe Bernie more than this!

[esper]

"Oh geez, get rid of that resume. It's a Bernie Shifman."

Or, if you're feeling lazy, just use his initials:

"Oh geez, get rid of that resume. It's B.S."

Re:We owe Bernie more than this!

[theSprocket]

I'm with you brother... "Oh damn, i just stepped in some Shifman".

Pissing in Bernie's Grave

[FFFish]

His web sites, here and especially here have images that are surely copyrighted.

I wonder if the copyright owner would be interested in a lawsuit?

hey, didn't there

[hawk]

used to be an option on wget to get it to ignore robots.txt? . . .[*evil grin*] or, how about the next great outlook virus. Before spreading, it hits every link on that page :)

hawk

Re:hey, didn't there

[damiam]

You don't need to ignore robots.txt - it just works...

wget http://www3.overture.com/lamenessfilereatsurl/
--18:02:11-- http://stupid.lameness.filter/
=> `goddamnlamenessfilterwontletmepostrealoutput'
Connecting to www3.overture.com:80... connected!
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Moved Temporarily
Location: http://www.marketing-2000.net/ [following]
--18:02:12-- http://www.marketing-2000.net/
=> `index.html.8' Connecting to www.marketing-2000.net:80... connected!
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 31,924 [text/html]

0K ..stupidlamenessfilter... 100% @ 63.49 KB/s

18:02:12 (63.49 KB/s) - `index.html.8' saved [31924/31924]

Re:hey, didn't there

[jpiterak]

You could try w3mir

Tho I never told ya...

Re:hey, didn't there

[DavidTC]

wget only checks robots.txt for recursive mode. Checking for robots.txt before getting a single page would be pointless and a waste of bandwidth.

The Law in Illinois

[Anonymous Coward]

Harassing phone calls are still recorded at the phone company even if you "disable" caller ID with *67

Two harassing phone calls from the same phone number constitutes telephone harassment.

Moral. Use a pay phone. Use several of them.

Slightly confusing

[SpacePunk]

After reading the whole thing I wonder who the bigger dumbass(es) are/is. Shifman for being he dumbass who sent the spam, or the others for taunting the village idiot.

Submit the URL to search engines

[gessel]

The guy is obviously not a prime candidate for employment. Apparently his spelling would rule him out for most potential employers, but some might rely on doing a web search. The page doesn't show up in most search engines. I've submitted it as I think it's important that such information be available to potential employers. Others might consider doing the same.

http://petemoss.com/spamflames/index.html

Who said it to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

You said "surely". Why?

Anti-SPAM measures.....

[mgandhi2]

We should coin a new term to describe a spammer morons.... "Shifman."

Re:Anti-SPAM measures.....

[mgandhi2]

sorry. not "morons." "moron." and really, i swear, i'm not.

Bernie's Perk

[minou]

Ironically, I bet thousands of people have visited his little website as a result of this fiasco.
Too bad he didn't have a guestbook. *evil grin*

i'll get something done

[Anonymous Coward]

how's about an angrey mob beats him? why won't anyone listen, it's simple

step one, get a bat, step two drive to chicago (even canadians can help, i will. :)
step 3 get the video camera on him
step 4, let the magic flow through you (and into him)

this is easy stuff. :)
i sure would spam if MY life was in danger by being caught at it. take control of your lives. don't rely on a govt that won't help you.

Caught in the crossfire

[/ASCII]

Looking at this page it looks like in 1994 a Bernard Shifman was employed by US Robotics and one of the founding members of the US Internet Industry Association.

I'm guessing this is not the same person that is making a total idiot out of himself eight years later. Shifman SR might take a beting or two down the road just for having that name.

Re:Caught in the crossfire

[Anonymous Coward]

Bernie's resume indicates that he was employed by U.S. Robotics at that time. I would guess that he is the person referred to on the USIIA site.

Good Morning!

[BB1]

This is Bernard! Here is the story For the record I'm not a spammer. I was sending my resume to several companies in the last few months. During my search for businesses I accidently added Neil to my list. It was my mistake. I'm sorry. My cable / dsl / t1 accounts are all still active despite Neil telling people I was removed from my cable service for spamming. I can respect what the ANTI-SPAMMNIG community is doing with their efforts, but they have the wrong guy this time. I'm just like all of you trying to add some contracts to my business. I'm surprised at all of the death threats(2 of them this morning since being posted on SLASHDOT.ORG)-->(laf)...that are coming to my 773.391.0595 number. Since being listed on SLASHDOT.ORG, I have received over 400 phone calls. Since being in contact with NEIL Schwartzman I have recieved over 500 pieces of SPAM e-mail. He is registering me to porno subscriptions and you can just use your imagination. So who is really abusing the e-mail systems and wasting resources of the internet? Please stop the phone calls, death threats, porno subscriptions, spam mail, mailing list subscriptions, and all the rest of the pranks. Why do you want slashdot to have this kind of rep? Most of the information that I've read on this thread and others.. is incorrect and misleading. Please use your brain and commen sense when reading these posts. All of this publicity!!! One of your users hired us for a consulting contract which we will be taking on next month. He asked to remain anonymous and I repsect his wishes. Thanks for the new client guys. Please have some integrity before you decide to "act" on someone elses incorrect statements.

Re:Good Morning!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bernard:

PLZ DONT SUE /. K??? WE LUB j0000000

I WI11 HIR3 Y0U 53ND Y0UR R35UM3 70

FUCKY0U5P4MM3R@B3RN4RDI5H4Y.C0m

KTHXBYE

Re:Good Morning!

[TheShadow]

wow... excellent use of hacker speak.

Re:Good Morning!

[Anonymous Coward]

cable / dsl / t1 accounts? new client? lawyers? He has a small apartment is a low-rent area of Chicago with an @Home connection. I'm sure he can eek out a living through a small number of boneheaded clients. The only legal background that he is from is one that has been in legal trouble. Careful, you're pants may be on fire.

Giggle test?

[Chris Burke]

Hmm... I'm not to familiar with the law surrounding frivolous lawsuits, but nevertheless I've not heard of the "giggle test". Granted, I can certainly see that being a good indication of frivolity ("You sent spam then tried to sue them for complaining about it? Tee hee hee! Well, I giggled. Case dismissed, plaintiff is fined $1000 for Incitation of Judicial Giggling."). But couldn't that be bad if, say, the plaintiff had a legitimate case that happened to be hilarious?

Good luck finding a job now BS

[Anonymous Coward]

see subject

me too.

[wiredog]

At least, I think so. I know that at about that time I got a resume, in doc format, from someone in Chicago. I sent him a "Dear Asshole" reply and added a Rule to kmail. Hmmm, wonder if I saved the resume?

Bernard's Comments

[BB1]

This is Bernard! Here is the story For the record I'm not a spammer. I was sending my resume to several companies in the last few months. During my search for businesses I accidently added Neil to my list. It was my mistake. I'm sorry. My cable / dsl / t1 accounts are all still active despite Neil telling people I was removed from my cable service for spamming. I can respect what the ANTI-SPAMMNIG community is doing with their efforts, but they have the wrong guy this time. I'm just like all of you trying to add some contracts to my business. I'm surprised at all of the death threats(2 of them this morning since being posted on SLASHDOT.ORG)-->(laf)...that are coming to my 773.391.0595 number. Since being listed on SLASHDOT.ORG, I have received over 400 phone calls. Since being in contact with NEIL Schwartzman I have recieved over 500 pieces of SPAM e-mail. He is registering me to porno subscriptions and you can just use your imagination. So who is really abusing the e-mail systems and wasting resources of the internet? Please stop the phone calls, death threats, porno subscriptions, spam mail, mailing list subscriptions, and all the rest of the pranks. Why do you want slashdot to have this kind of rep? Most of the information that I've read on this thread and others.. is incorrect and misleading. Please use your brain and commen sense when reading these posts. All of this publicity!!! One of your users hired us for a consulting contract which we will be taking on next month. He asked to remain anonymous and I repsect his wishes. Thanks for the new client guys. Please have some integrity before you decide to "act" on someone elses incorrect statements.

Re:Bernard's Comments

[DirkDaring]

You sir, are a moron.
Dirk

Re:Bernard's Comments

[Anonymous Coward]

One of your users hired us for a consulting contract which we will be taking on next month. He asked to remain anonymous and I repsect his wishes.

You really haven't cottoned on to the fact that everybody knows you are a pathological liar, have you? Nobody believes that you have lawyers working on your case. Based on the data as presented, if anyone has actually offered you a job, it will turn out to be a cruel hoax.

I have known pathological liars before. They exhibit all the same symptoms as you, including the insane ability to reject any form of criticism, no matter how minor or justified. I also know that there is a tiny little part of you deep inside that knows you are wrong, and it is crying and snivelling, wondering why the world is so mean and nobody will suck your dick. It's because you stalled at a mental age of three, and nobody likes you.

Sue a spammer in California

[Animats]

The lawyer who just won the "Ferguson vs. Friendfinder" spam case on appeal accepts spam cases in California. There aren't many lawyers who've handled spam cases yet, but they exist.

Not original.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's old, and nobody knows the original author.

scared

[Anonymous Coward]

How can one be sure this Shi*man is a real guy? What if he is an impostor?

The whole story points out one thing: it is VERY easy to destroy someone's reputation by doing some stupid things under his name. Google will have it all handy for HR of any company.

How could an industry pioneer fall so low?

[StenD]

Don't you know, Bernie was a founding member of the US Internet Industry Association. What's next, him holding a "WILL SPAM FOR FOOD" sign at Soldier Field?

dude

[Anonymous Coward]

his email address is billg@microsoft.com

Re:dude

[_ganja_]

"his email address is billg@microsoft.com"

Yeah, like shit^Hfman is going to realise.

Bernard Shiffman is a lousy consultant

[Anonymous Coward]

The Bernard Shiffman of Chicago? Oh my god...

Yeah, this guy went to a Chicago customers offices a year ago, to put a new hard drive in their NT box. We did the clean up ($$$$).

To make a long story short. He ended up deleting the mirrored drive set, lost all the data, and then tried to install Windows 98 on it. It had Microsoft SQL and was an NT.40 SP5 box with SCSI drives. BTW the SCSI drive he brought was a UW with a 50 pin adapter, and he had it set to ID 5 which was the same address of the DAT. What a riot.

This is the best part - he then told them that any loss of data was not any fault of his, it is their responsiblity to make a complete back up before calling a consultant. (Never mind that he also lost their applications having installed the entire setup as a windows 98 box.)

The punchline is he sent them a bill for over 2000.00 for this service, not including the drive.

Bernard Shiffman aka Bernie Shiffman self proclaimed Computer IT Consultant IS a dolt.

Do not, under any circumstances, give him access to any systems.

BEWARE.

Re:Bernard Shiffman is a lousy consultant

[BB1]

This is a lie. I don't who this person is or what he is talking about.

Next time, use spamhole.com...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only site worth using for e-tailers...

I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying this is an insult to all morons. Please try to be sensitive.

I know who he is...

[telstar]

Is this that kid from the Florida Cessna crash?

Embarrassing.

[mrtrumbe]

This whole situation is totally embarrassing. For Mr. Shifman. For Mr. Schwartzman. For slashdot...I even find myself embarrassed as an onlooker.

To Mr. Schwartzman, I would say that giving people the benifit of the doubt is in order sometimes. Asumming that every unsolicited e-mail received is spam is a little extreme. And by replying to further contacts, you only fan the flames. And posting Mr. Shifman's personal information is as irresponsible an action as any. Shameful.

Accept it or not, you instigated this terrible situation with your purist pusuit of a world without spam. I hate spam too. I do what I can to avoid it and to stop those who are sending it. But your solution will not end spam, and if your actions with Mr Shifman are indicative, you may only be making the problem worse.

To Mr. Shifman I would say that I have rarely seen a more childish and innapropriate response to a situation. By attempting to bully Mr. Schwartzman you caused a small miscommunication to blow up into a hugely damaging and embarrassing spectacle. One way or the other you were wrong. Even if you weren't spamming, you sent an unsolicited e-mail.

Next time swallow your pride--or at least respond in a more constructive and mature manner. Learn something from this and move on.

To slashdot, I would say that this should never have been an article. Such material doesn't belong anywhere in this world. Publishing it could only have lead to the insane threats and statements posted in the forums. People calling his home number, threatening him in the forums...all of that is despicable behavior. Those perpetrating these acts should be very ashamed.

This kind of mindless bulls#%@ really gets me angry. Stop the insanity!!

Spammers suing

[BillX]

The title was a little misleading. I was under the impression a spammer had actually filed suit against someone whose abuse@ letter got their service cancelled. Still I'm glad I read. I've had an AOL'er claiming to be an AOL Hometown admin send me an unsolicited legal threat spam, but I still think this Shi*man takes the cake.

I think "Bernie"...

[newbob]

is some 13 year old kid. No computer consultant would try to solicit work this way.

Still, he claims to make $1300/day. (His claim for lost wages for 1 day). I wonder if he reports this income to the IRS?

You should notify the IRS and say that, if Bernie isn't reporting at least $260,000/year (assuming he works 200 days), then he's hiding income. They have a handy form to report it, or a toll-free hotline .

Message from Bernard

[BB1]

This is Bernard! Here is the story For the record I'm not a spammer. I was sending my resume to several companies in the last few months. During my search for businesses I accidently added Neil to my list. It was my mistake. I'm sorry. My cable / dsl / t1 accounts are all still active despite Neil telling people I was removed from my cable service for spamming. I can respect what the ANTI-SPAMMNIG community is doing with their efforts, but they have the wrong guy this time. I'm just like all of you trying to add some contracts to my business. I'm surprised at all of the death threats(2 of them this morning since being posted on SLASHDOT.ORG)-->(laf)...that are coming to my 773.391.0595 number. Since being listed on SLASHDOT.ORG, I have received over 400 phone calls. Since being in contact with NEIL Schwartzman I have recieved over 500 pieces of SPAM e-mail. He is registering me to porno subscriptions and you can just use your imagination. So who is really abusing the e-mail systems and wasting resources of the internet? Please stop the phone calls, death threats, porno subscriptions, spam mail, mailing list subscriptions, and all the rest of the pranks. Why do you want slashdot to have this kind of rep? Most of the information that I've read on this thread and others.. is incorrect and misleading. Please use your brain and common sense when reading these posts. All of this publicity!!! One of your users hired us for a consulting contract which we will be taking on next month. He asked to remain anonymous and I repsect his wishes. Thanks for the new client guys. Please have some integrity before you decide to "act" on someone elses incorrect statements.

He asked for it...

[forrest2000]

Joe,

I didn't spam anyone. After reading your e-mail I would never work for you anyways. I sent Neil a resume because I was under the impression he owned a company and could use a contract consultant. It's not like I'm sending thousands of e-mails to random people.. I am always happy to get resumes via e-mail from strangers. It is o.k to send your resume to a company in hopes of getting contract work. This e-mail along with others is being forwarded to my lawyers and ISP for their review. If your doing this through a company.. on company time.. I hope you will be able to answer to your boss.

Thanks,

Bernard 773.391.0595

I guess that I'll have to send him a few...

Re:He asked for it...

[Anonymous Coward]

By a few ... you mean a few thousand, right? Might as well make him REALLY happy.

That's gonna hurt in the morning

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like someone posted his contact info over at f*ckedcompany.com, the meanest pack of spiteful, adolescent bastards since alt.tasteless. I'd say Bernie's in for a long day.

Shifman's not suing anyone, but he doesn't have to

[WillSeattle]

Folks, take a look at this. Mr. Shifman hasn't sued anyone for responding to his spam, and I'll wager he never will. He's made baseless threats, referring to non-existent lawyers. That's common among people who feel backed into a corner and don't understand law.

Actually, not only is that common among people without lawyers, it is a common practise amongst lawyers.

Few cases ever involve litigation, or even arbitration. Most of the time, a lawyer sends a threatening letter, stating his view of the legal matter, and scares off the other party.

Were one to go to trial, one would find most of the threatening lawyer letters one gets will result in the defendant winning.

This is also how Microsoft scares off the small companies. It's not that they broke the law - it's that they don't have either the resources in time and money to fight Microsoft, which will gladly use teams of lawyers to bully their way to what they want.

-

I did!

[wiredog]

From: "Bernard Shifman"

Definition of moron

[ahde]

I read this on the link page:

moron (môrn, mr-) http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=mor on
n.
1. A stupid person; a dolt.
2. Psychology. A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to 12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational employment. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive.

Mod the parent way down

[macdaddy]

Please mod the parent way down. Apparently this guy didn't fully read the story. It also sounds like he has a grudge against anti-spammers in general, probably against ISPs that filter email based on their efforts as well. He sounds eerily familiar, like one of my users that ranted and raved at me until I used Sendmail's SPAMFRIEND declaration to let mail destined to that user bypass all my spam checks. Of course he now gets around 200 pieces of spam per week but who's counting. If this guy would have read the story he would have noted that the original recipient wasn't listed on any website as an address posted for the purpose of receiving job requests and resumes. In fact the guy had nothing to do with the hiring of people at his place of work. BS also couldn't provide the URL at which he claimed to have found the address that solicited his resume. At one point he said he may have accidentally got his address from a spamming list. Whoops! The author also pointed out that the address was only used as a POP pickup and for spam LARTs. A "honest attempt to ensure that only HR Departments received his mail" my ass. Obviously this guy didn't read the story or he would have picked up on those minor pieces of fact.

I love it when ignorant people, such as the parent of this thread think, that anti-spammers tag team alleged spammers and get off on our actions. "oh baby, I got another potential spammer boot from the provider. Was it good for you?". Yeah, uh huh. Whatever. This guy does not deserve a 5.

Re:Mod the parent way down

[RC514]

Please note that there is no moderation option "wrong" or "didn't read the article". The moderators seem to have a hard time making their minds up about this comment. While it clearly contains hints that the author didn't read or completely understand the linked webpage, it also raises the question about anti-spammers becomming self-righteous and starting unnecessarily harsh games with clearly inferior spammers. I don't agree with that notion but it's an interesting addition to the discussion, even if only to make others point out what's wrong with that impression. I would rate this an "interesting troll", in other words +0. You however are calling him ignorant, which deserves -1, flaimbait.

Re:Mod the parent way down

[kindbud]

...one of my users that ranted and raved at me until I used Sendmail's SPAMFRIEND declaration to let mail destined to that user bypass all my spam checks. Of course he now gets around 200 pieces of spam per week but who's counting.

Your user was. He was counting all the mail he didn't receive. He was counting on his ISP not to intercept his mail. He was probably counting on his ISP to have a reaction other than incredulity at his request. Frankly, I'm incredulous that you made him "rant and rave" before you believed he was serious about not wanting you blocking his email anymore.

Spamfriend, by the way, is not part of sendmail. It is part of the anti-spam rulesets you're using.

Disagree

[Spinality]

You may not think it was appropriate to post it, but I find it one of the funniest threads ever to appear here. I enjoyed it immensely. I agree that anybody who gave him so-called death threat phone calls or otherwise responded inappropriately is an equal moron (or if not equal then at least an honorable-mention moron). But to say this doesn't belong on slashdot? No, I think is is exactly the kind of nerd-trailer-trash slugfest that slashdot participants relish.

What is Coffee & Cat?

[Cheshire Cat]

Here's your chance to earn a point or two of karam: What exactly are Coffee & Cat warnings?

Found the guys phone number

[1155]

The spammers number is 773.391.0595, if anyone would like to inform him of what has happened on slashdot.org, I would think it would be a hilarious sound recording.

Re:Found the guys phone number

[1155]

I actually did a search on google on got it.

The truth is in the numbers

[WillSeattle]

I personally have about 10 email addresses, so I get a lot of spam. In fact, one of the easiest ways to tell it is spam is that I get eight copies of it (two are private accounts).

Under my state (Washington) law, as upheld by the US Supreme Court, it's illegal to send me spam with forged headers and misleading subject lines.

In fact, I can charge the spammer money for it.

Usually, I just report it upstream. Sometimes I report it to the Washington State Attorney General, who's a really nice person with very pretty eyes (yes, she's married with teen kids, but just had to say that).

If one had the time, one could sue these people in small claims court.

My point in all this is that I DO get hundreds of spams a day, because my site pages have keywords that many of those pr0n people use - it's for a women's organization - and I suffer from the fact that each spamster thinks it's ok to send out one email. So I get hundreds a day.

When I go on vacation, I usually just nuke the bounced emails that my list filters redirected and start again, but it does take me a lot of time to deal with jerks who send me spam.

-

Re:The truth is in the numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Washington State Attorney General, who's a really nice person with very pretty eyes

Pics, pleas?

Re:Yikes - He's right. Whoops.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, oh you are right. Whoops.

I checked up on it the person was a Leonard Shiffman, Jr. Two FFs, first name Leonard. I guess I should have checked it with the customer before posting. I saw the name and went "Oh yeah, that guy..."

Oh well, I guess this is the sort of thing that happens when you get carried away with a story.

Although you can't say you didn't bring it on yourself Bernie!

I am sure your team of lawyers will straighten it out :-)

Bernie's genealogy

[variable26]

I guess if you want to know everything about Bernard.

He was one of the Founding Members of USIIA,

http://www.usiia.org/members/founders.html

Bernie's genealogy:

http://www.interlog.com/~perelgut/d0001/g0000151 .h tm#I287

Replying to Nigerian spammers with $

[WillSeattle]

I got that Nigerian money laundering email twice a day for a week from the same guy before I cut him an email threatening to take a squad of tanks to his contry and turn it into rubble. To my amazement, he actually replied! He (sarcastically, obviously) invited me to attempt to destroy his country.

Actually, you should report this to the Secret Service - they have a department that investigates international frauds like this. You can find them on the Treasury site for the US govt.

I say this because I used to report such spams to the SEC and they asked me to report them directly to the Secret Service.

-

Re:Mom found my porn stash!

[Anonymous Coward]

bastard tease!!

shifman's company info

[MathJMendl]

hey hey! take a gander at http://client.aavirtualoffice.com/LocalPartners/Pa rtnerDetail.asp?ID=8600&AccountID=9749 . it's a form at a website allowing you to email shifman...perhaps someone wants to set up a script to email him? or perhaps it should go straight to bernard@shifmanconsulting.com

Tricky Dick

[volpe]

Be very careful before you decide to waive your dick around


I'd think twice before I even *wave* my dick around. So you can be damn sure I'm gonna be very careful before I *waive* my dick.

watch for fakes

[BlueboyX]

Spammers nowdays use fake emails. They harvest a huge list of valid emails, right? Well, it seems that some of them use that list for some kind of email spoofing as well as for sending.For a while, I was getting bounced emails and replies saying to stop sending spam that I never sent. However, it only lasted about three days. My guess is they go through their email list rotating the fake sender email addresses to make it harder for them to get cought/filtered. Since my email starts with a 'b' I was relatively high on their alphabetical list, and thus apparently one of the first they did this to.

It sure was funny getting a reply email to something I never sent telling me that I was reported for spam, but also scarry in a way.

Re:watch for fakes

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't worry about it. Other than the occasional annoyance, the headers on the e-mail will clear your name without dispute.

wow, making fun of this guy is soo cool

[jopet]

its amazing how many people here join the crowd and obviously get a big boost in self-esteem making fun or even getting aggressive towards BS. This guy might be a moron or be mentally retarded. But honestly, the attitude of the people here kicking somebody already on the floor is worse ("oh yeah lets all send him mail bombs" -- jeez). Neil obviously has a lot of time to waste doing his statistics on his spam, sending endless emails and letting the world know of all that. I wish he had just pressed "delete" twice. There is nothing more moronic than wasting time with morons and complaining about it.

Re:wow, making fun of this guy is soo cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed... while exposing the man's stupidity is one thing, having all the extra material that seems to keep getting associated with it is another. The jokes, the poems, the MP3 songs... what's next? Bernard Shifman is a Moron Spammer: The Musical?

Bahahahaha!

[BoarderPhreak]

"...A representitive will get back to you."

This REALLY had me cracking up... You mean YOU, Bernie - an operation of ONE. LOL!

I can picture Popeye, just kind of puffing up his chest and flexing his muscles.

Re:This is a worse problem than some people realiz

[Anonymous Coward]

[49]
From: fine_cigars0109@writeme.com
Subj: for all the Cigar Aficionados in the world
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 3:20 PM

[50]
From: Quit 4 Good
Subj: Be Free
Date: Tue 2002-01-08 2:56 PM

</irony>

You wasted your mod points on what??!?

I LOVE YOU, BILL!

[Anonymous Coward]

(Just another nanae lurker).

We need NO MORE anti-spam LAWS

[kindbud]

What we really need is a new mail system that is inherently spam-unfriendly, where the sender bears the burden of storing the message until the recipient chooses to come pick it up. Dan Bernstein is working on such a system, which he calls Internet Mail 2000. Check it out.

Re:We need NO MORE anti-spam LAWS

[PurpleBob]

With a name like that, it's no wonder it's not getting accepted anywhere.

Re:We need NO MORE anti-spam LAWS

[kindbud]

DJB has many faults, but being a good marketer is not one of them.

Some one's a bit uptight methinks

[litewoheat]

I don't think the original e-mail, with the resume was SPAM. Niel Schwartzman seems to be a very uptight sort of person. E-mail programs do have a delete function. I don't understand the need to go crazy over every peice of e-mail one recieves that is unsolicited. I would totally uderstand if it was a LOOSE WEIGHT NOW AND ADD 3 INCHES TO YOUR PENIS ON A FREE CRUISE TO JAMACA WHILE CONSOLIDATING YOUR DEBT WITH A 3RD MORGAGE FROM MISS CLEO WHO WILL GIVE YOU HER 3 OTCBB STOCK PICKS kind of mail. Then sure, go after the bastard. But when someone sends you a resume?? Come On!.

Now what Bernard Shifman did after was totally moronic and I think he got what he deserved. But not all blame goes to him, just most of it.

Re:Some one's a bit uptight methinks

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree, BS maybe an idiot but Niel Schwartzman is a total asshole for framing one email with a resume as a spam attack. paranoia is a sickness u know!!

Who is this really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is this really? The Shifman resume mentions Microsoft. Is some Microsoft hater doing a practical joke?

My lawier

[FCAdcock]

JOHNNY CHOCHRAN

Re:My lawier

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not about race. When I see you, I don't see a white boy.

AH SEE A DAYM FOO'!

PERL SPAM

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wrote a perl script that spammed the shit out of his email.

Hahahaha

Dear Slashdot,

[Ethelred Unraed]

Dear Slashdot,

I am writing to ask you for your name and address, as I want to sue you. I am suing you for damages to my new 17" flatscreen monitor incurred by you providing a link to the webpage "Bernard Shifman Is A Moron Spammer", which I was compelled to click on, resulting in my aforementioned monitor being destroyed in a spray of Coca-Cola (which I was drinking calmly until being compelled to click on the link) issuing from my nostrils.

The Coca-Cola Company will also be a party to this suit, as the Coke that went through my nostrils has also caused serious damage to my sinuses. I am afraid a telephone discussion with you regarding the suit is therefore out of the question.

My legal team (me and my cat) agree that I have a watertight case.

Thank you.

Ethelred

P.S. First post!

Mad IT Skillz

[mother.zimage]

Anyone catch the mention of "WinZip" at the end of his long itemized list of software skills- in the same breath as "Network General Sniffer"? Obviously differentiating himself from other strong IT applicants. Crazy like a fox!

Just out joyriding?

[NineWives]

Umm, I might be missing something, but "Bernie" has all the signs of being a high-school kid trying to drum up some spare cash doing a little programming. I mean, a real adult wouldn't behave like this, would he/she?

Spammers

[Scoria]

220 Welcome ESMTP to carbon.initialized.org sendmail. If you spam us, you agree to allow us administrative access to all of your machines indefinitely; you also agree not to hold us liable for anything we do to the machines.

That is my sendmail MOTD. I enjoy replying to spammers and demanding their root password persuant to my "sendmail agreement." :)

waive or wave?

[Roadmaster]

there's a difference, and i sure as hell wouldn't want to waive my dick. heh.

Inappropriate Complaint?

[Anonymous Coward]

From a cursory review of the site, it only appears to be an unsolicited junkmail that was received, and not spam.

Note that I'm not saying that it wasn't spam, but that there wasn't any evidence that it was -- even the site quotes a definition that indicates that "spam" involves the same thing being sent to a large number of newsgroups or email accounts. And 1 is not "large".

So the initial complaint WAS bogus and inappropriate, even if it was in response to something obnoxious and annoying. SOME evidence that it had been sent to a large number of people should have been provided, or some weasel-words included (like, "The attached MAY be spam.."), or a less strident tone taken.

Re:Inappropriate Complaint?

[Autonin]

AC,

While may appear to be a point to point communication (from a 'cursory view') the impersonality (not specifying the recipient by any identifyable means) and the inappropriateness (sending an HR oriented letter to a random account) of the email decidedly tag this as SPAM.

The generally accepted point is, Bernie sent Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) to Neil. It was unsolicited; Neil didn't ask anyone for resumes of pompus laywer-wannabe IT consultants in the greater Chicago area, but Bernie sent it anyway. It was commerical; Bernie's asking for money for services. I hope you're not arguing it wasn't email.

The fact that others recieved exactly the same mail message confirms the 'group' requirement you're hung up on.

The complaint Neil used was fairly standard boilerplate for this sort of thing. I can't quite see how you'd consider it bogus or inappropriate. Neil definately put more effort into his email than Bernie did for his. Go figure.

An ISP won't generally kill access with a single spam complaint. It takes a number of complaints to get most admin's attention. This also solves your "but what if it was only sent to one person" blah blah.

I think Bernie's fsck'd, but he did it to himself. It's called self destruct!

Up to our necks in 'Bernie Shifman'

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly Bernard Shifman is not for real!

His initials say it all: B.S. (AKA bullshit)

This character has spun up so much flame on this he should have a fan club by the time it is done.

My guess is NO SUCH PERSON. In other words we are up to our necks in Bernie Shifman!

We've been duped again...

Re:Up to our necks in 'Bernie Shifman'

[Roughy]

Oh, he's very real. Years and years ago (around 10 or so) he was known as "PepsiMan" in the PC BBS Warez Scene. I even believe he was in -=iNC=- or whatever cool little thing the kids were doing. Same guy. Nothing's changed since then. Roughy Well, he's aged, just not matured or gained any wisdom, apparently.

You're wrong too

[volpe]

You can't know that 50% will be below the mode either. You're confusing "mode" with "median". The mode, in a list of values, is the value that appears most often.

Mod the parent up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.

One Lamer plays with another Lamer

[Jesus IS the Devil]

Everyone seems to be bagging on Bernard Shifman, but nobody seems to be considering the disruptive attitude of Niel Schwartzman. It's one single email mistakenly sent. To then send a complaint to his ISP and then reply back with personal insults is just damn lame. And THEN to post up a website too? Get a life Niel!!

you don't need to target when you can mail to ever

[autopr0n]

Junk snail mail makes money

Junk phonecalls make money

The thing is, it costs money to send snailmail and phonecalls. But spamming dosn't cost money. Suppose there are maybe 5,000 people in the world intrested in your product, and you email every single person in the world, you'll hit those 5,000 people. Much cheaper then finding out who those 5k people are really.

And spamming does make money. for every person who gets livid and tries to sue, you'll get a thousand who sigh and delete the message. And maybe one or two people who are actualy intrested.

Get a Condo at Bernies Building!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes wonderful homes are avaliable in Bernies neighborhood..

http://www.bestagents.net/sweethome/listings4.htm
You too can live in this spammers paradise!

This file is temporarily unavailable because of li

[Anonymous Coward]

This file is temporarily unavailable because of limited bandwidth,
try again in a few days.

:-(

OK : How bout this for ease of use

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us add a button to Kmail, Mozilla and other browsers that says SpamCom.....

User gets spam, user pushes button, more users push button spammer has bad day....

repeat until spammer no like spam no more...

Just my rant

Just Desserts

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great, now I don't have to make up a fake address when signing up for nytimes, etc.

boba130@home.com

Bernard Shifman
773-391-0595
2828 N. Burling St.
Ste. 402
Chicago, IL 60657

Think I'll go sign up for some more newsletters and junk mail.

Bernie Shiffman and Art Shwartz

[Jedi Binglebop]

Bernie and Art should be in movies!

{Opening Sequence:
The camera pans across a messy bedroom. A weedy looking teen male is lying in bed, bare backed, with the sheet tangled around his feet. His alarm goes off at 10:11, he sits up and slides to the end of his bed. He reaches out for something - his monitor switch. He turns it on, waits for it to warm up and then opens up his email client. They finish downloading and he reads the first one. Nothing spectacular, just a comment from one of his buddies. He opens up the next one and a bright flash emits from his monitor! The camera zooms in on the screen, and what can be seen is ghastly and horrendous in every regard! A picture of a can of spam!}

Geek - "Gaaah!" Shades eyes, and then holds his fingers in a "warding off evil" sign.

Geek - "SPAYM!"

{ The picture of spam dissapears, and the body of a spam email can be seen on screen. The geek whacks his delete key in disgust, and life returns to normal, for the moment! }

Like it? I've been planning it for over a year now, but that's all I have so far. Plus that and the fact that I don't have $5 million (although I'm told that a movie can be made on less than $500 thousand if the team is willing to wait for their pay).

-JB

DIE!

[autopr0n]

(not linked to conceal link's origin :)

Yes. Fantastic. Of course, in doing so you also broke the link in half. This is incredibly annoying to anyone who actualy wants to go to the link as not only do they need to cut and paste the URL in they need to edit it and remove the blank spaces. If you wanted to you could have done http://samspade.org/t/whois?a=shifmanconsulting.co m&server=magic in which case people could have either clicked or cut, pasted, and edited the url. BTW, slash now shows the domain name after the link if you actualy do link, so it's not all that bad.

In the future, please do not paste plain text links in slashdot.

Re:DIE!

[Stone Rhino]

or you could type it in plain text, and link the plain text, mmm?

Dear Slashdot Posters

[Transcendent]

Hello Slashdot Posters,

My name is Bernard Shitman and I'm a computer consultant. I'm interested in half-assed contract work. My resume is attached to this post in Microsoft Word and HTML format to help out all the IT people using the secure and safe Windows operating system on their servers. If you or any of your business associates are in need of a computer consultant suffering from mild retardation, please keep my number and resume as a possible starting point.

Thanks for your time.

Bernard Shitman
773-391-0595
2828 N. Burling St.
Ste. 402
Chicago, IL 60657

Re:Dear Slashdot Posters

[dacetone]

Actually, as proved by his headers enclosing his resume, he's a Mac user.

Attachment converted: Macintosh HD:bresume.doc (WDBN/MSWD) (000529BD)
Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
name="bresumehtml.htm"
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="bresumehtml.htm"

Yeah, I respond to flames. I also worship trolls.
Attachment converted: Macintosh HD:bresumehtml.htm (????/----) (000529BE)

'their' site?

[autopr0n]

You know that if the remove address dosn't work the email domain might just as well be forged. I mean, you do realize that there's a very good chance you're spaming totaly innocent people, right?

Re:'their' site?

[migstradamus]

Not the e-mail domain. (Yep, that admin at MSN is really going to pay!) They ain't spoofing their URL..

Spammer Grammar

[windside]

Wow.

The low quality of Bernard's grammar, given his threats of legal recourse, is mind boggling.

I myself have never filed a law suit, but I'm sure that if I did intend to, I would make that AT LEAST I had a thorough understanding of Fourth-Grade concepts such as proper apostrophe use.

Sheesh,
~windside~

Re: Spammer Grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

I find your comments on his grammar somewhat ironic.

Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine, a beowulf cluster of bernard shifman...

Bernie's Lawyers

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I don't speak Russian, the word "Durak" in Russian translates as "Idiot" (viewing the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie with John Belushi, if forget the name of it), will verify this.

Durak huh? Friends of yours I assume.

PLEASE DEAR GOD, CALL A TV STUDIO!

[Anonymous Coward]

SOMEONE IN CHICAGO, please contact a tv studio.

HAHAHAHAH I'd LOVE to see Bernie on the news!

sounds like...

[Anonymous Coward]

the bs guy and the guy who's replying to him are the same person. If not the same, they act the same.

If the one guy had just blocked bs's emails he wouldn't have to worry about any of it. Instead, he continually replies to the guy because of an apparent love of conflict.

It's something I've seen in a lot of people... many of which post on slashdot.

Did you notice he and his buddies immediately started ganging up on the other guy? Again, happens way too much.

Spam is bad. But not so bad as to ruin a persons life or reputation over. And being told to stop spamming isn't either. (one guy tells the other guy he's going to sue... the other starts reporting him to his isp trying to get him charged $150 per email)

If nobody else sees what's wrong with *BOTH* their attitudes, no wonder this world sucks so bad.

Sometimes I wonder...

[RnKTessai]

It's a shame that Mr. Shifman has become known on various message boards and news websites as a damn fool. How in the world does this guy get up in the morning knowing that with each email he worsens his public image. Did he think that he was clever enough to outsmart someone in an anti-spam group? I think this incident hits home for a lot of us /. folks (I've been a silent lurker, but I now wish to get into the mix), even with all of the email filters. Sometimes, random spammers manage to sneak through and wreak havoc on us. Even with all of the laws in place to prevent "SPAM," I still find myself adding 10-15 kill filters in Agent (yeah, I use a Doze box to check my email) a day. Hopefully Neil and others will start fighting back against this moron and teach him a lesson. Other than that, I must say that this whole thing is silly. Nonetheless, it has provided a lot of us with one hell of a laugh.

Ding dong ditch, anyone?

[crossseyed]

I've been lurking on Slashdot for a while now and this beauty of a story is the one that finally got me to comment :-)

Does anybody happen to live near this moron? Got an evil urge to buzz up to his apt. after a night at the bars in Wrigleyville?

How about a Bernie pub crawl?
Bar
Visit Bernie
Bar
Visit Bernie
repeat as desired until humor value disappears.

If I Were Bernie...

[FrankDrebin]

I'd be looking to inform on some Chicago mobsters. The Witness Protection Program is about the only way he'll ever recover from this...

it makes me sick

[jopet]

it makes me sick to read the attitude that many, if not a majority of posters here have towards this incident. i feel ashamed of how you people go on and on and come up with new ideas how to "punish" this man, just because Neil was arrogant enough to make a big fuss about it and bother the rest of the word, instead of silently deleting a piece of email. I feel ashamed of what character or lack of character a big number of people are showing here.

Re:it makes me sick

[Anonymous Coward]

Bernie is getting what he deserves. Since there is no way Neil's e-mail address would have been gotten as a point of contact to a HR department, it was unsolicited. It was a bulk e-mailing, so it was a spam. Neil was right to complain.

Bernie is getting piled on because of his "lawyer" tactics. Anytime someone does something wrong, and is called on the carpet for it, and then they threaten to get their lawyer deserve to be nailed big time.

To tell the truth, it's wankers like you that make me sick. "Just delete the e-mail" Why should I have to go to that effort? It's my fscking account, not some toilet to be used by spammers.
Why should I have to flush my toilet after you used it?

By the way, the amount of spam everyone gets is probably much less than what it would have been thanks to the efforts of the anti-spammers. So you are just a freeloader.

Re:it makes me sick

[Anonymous Coward]

my point was not whether his unsolicited email was spam or not and i fully agree that his lawyer threat was pathetic. but this is really harmless compared to the hystery and uproar this is causing here. people who obviously have nothing else to brighten their miserable lives than fantasizing about how to make Bernie"s life even more miserable. Oh Neal is right, yes. But his attitude of running around and shouting out how oh so right he is has something of a little child with mental problems. And what do all those slashdot posters do? they join this pathetic "yeah, we are right, lets kill that bastard" chorus. This reminds me of the mob in a roman apmhitheater shouting to have agladiator killed, not of educated people having a discussion about spam. Its the mercilessness, the hatred in all these postings that makes me sick. If little things like these causes such reactions, what will these people do if somebody makes a real error (maybe somebody of their own family)? Kill him and spit in his grave?

Re:it makes me sick

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd almost totally agree with your post, except your assertion that the email should just have been deleted.

I agree with the first step that Niel took, in reporting the spam. And after the abusive email, I think I might have been goded into replying.

After the repeated abusive emails and threats, all which could have been stopped by either party, I think I would have felt compelled to create a web site.

At some point in time, though, you have to realize that you have given this gentleman more time than he ever deserved.

No one wants to let a child insult them, and walk away. But there is a certain amount of embarassment that should follow when you realize you have been standing on the street corner trading barbs with the child for some time, with all passers-by looking at you both like insufferable children.

I think Niel should have taken his first course of action. When he recieved the abusive second mail, I think I would have deleted that one with a chuckle, however hard that would have been. Or maybe, if insulted enough, sued him for baritry. Without a threat mind you, just deliver the subpoena.

Punitive Damages!!

[orius_khan]

I'm gonna sue for punitive damages. Sue you, and the people you work with... I wanna sue you, and sue EVERYBODY! All these punitive damages I've had...

(awwww I don't see so good. I'll bring my shoes and my glasses so I have them...)

last thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Reaching this comment (which won't stay at the bottom for long) let's take something in account.

This slashdot news has been aimed, not at a company, or at market, but at a single person.

Howmuch negative slashdot attention can a single human mind witstand before it caves in on itself?

What? And miss out on this circus?

[Viceice]

Really, this seems to have the all appeal of a public execution. I think the only thing more entertaining then this is to watch Osama being tortured in the town center.
We sould do this to spammers more often

Re:page lengthening post!

[Anonymous Coward]

You fag!

Do you like my email?

[controlphreak]

Do you like my new email address?
bernard_shifman_is_a@moron.co.uk

(and yes... its real....)

Fight back against spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you been getting e-mails that you don't want? Got some extra time on your hands? Here is a way to fight spam. If the bozos that are spamming are stupid enough to list an 800#, then every time you call them it cost them money. Give them a call, and hang up, or give them a call and place an order and when it comes time to give them the credit card number say something like "Oh, gee - I just realized you guys are SPAMMING the internet! I don't order from spammers!"

SPAM #1

WE HAVE A SOLUTION TO EXPENSIVE INKJET CARTRIDGES

800-352-9481

SPAM #2

VORTEX SUPPLIES
YOUR LASER PRINTER TONER CARTRIDGE,
COPIER AND FAX CARTRIDGE CONNECTION

ORDER BY PHONE:1-888-288-9043
ORDER BY FAX: 1-888-977-1577
E-MAIL REMOVAL LINE: 1-888-248-4930

Give these ding dongs a call, fight spam & almost order now !

Shall we play a game?

[Autonin]

Ooohhh... Where the hell did I put my Wardialer...

You remember? In the Olde Dayes, with accustic couplers? War Games anyone? ;)

Isn't this an over reaction?

[micromuncher]

I mean, the guy is looking for work, does something stupid, and the result is another
guy over reacts, does something stupid, and
all these other stupid people jump on the bandwagon. If being stupid was a crime subject to the death penalty, then there wouldn't be a single person left on Earth, because everyone at some point in their lives does something stupid.
What should the reward be? Obviously Darwin's theories do not apply, as the less stupid survive
and procreate effectively.

I get over 80 spam messages day, from porn, to loose weight quick, and a lot in languages I have no idea what they are. I get spam on e-mail accounts I never used. I wrote my own SMTP relay to weed out the bulk of this spam, because sending mail to abuse NEVER works, and very few ISPs care. I stopped trying to get removed, because it just seems to let spammers know they
have a valid e-mail address. Sorry, "421 Are you talking to me? Are you talking talking to ME?"

Mm

Someone mod this parent up.

[Mustang Matt]

This is an interesting concept. It does seem kind of backwards but it just might work. I really don't see it getting accepted everywhere.

If this (or an equivalent) system could get implemented into some of the big mail servers (including MS Exchange) and a few of the big backbone providers actually implemented it, it might work, but I just don't see that happening.

Having laws against spam is not bad, they just need to be well thought out and implemented carefully. And they definately need clear and precise definitions.

OMFG, THIS IS HILARIOUS!

[Anonymous Coward]

The hotmail account appears to work. It currently has 11 messages in it, including one from Bernie himself.