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Rep. Bill Jones Thinks Spam is "Innovative"
GMontag writes "Wired is running this story:Candidate: Spam in Every Pot about candidate-for-governor Bill Jones' spam campaigning. The most telling quote: "Jones spokesman Darrel Ng said the e-mail wasn't spam, commonly defined as unsolicited commercial e-mail. Ng instead classified Jones' non-commercial mass-mailing as an "innovative way to use the Internet.'" Another interesting item: "An examination of the e-mail sent out by the Jones campaign revealed forged headers. The e-mail, purportedly sent from an MSN.com address, was actually routed through the server of an elementary school in Chonnam, Korea.""
He should make his campaign slogan "a spam in every mailbox." That will get him elected.
I can't help but think "so what?". This seems to me to be very standard political spin. A politician uses spam to try to further his campaign, and then defends it as "innovative" just because email spam *is* new in the domains of campaigning. Obviously anybody with a brain can say "it's not innovative unless the concept is new, not the application". By his logic I could spam for saving purple elephants and be "innovative".
It's just playing with words and being a political spin doctor. I, for one, am only surprised that email spam has not been used for campaigning earlier.
But I'm not in california, I used the "never get this again" link after the first one, and subsequently got 3 more, and it was freaking html! Does California still have the death penalty??
Thinking about this further- does he think of mail fraud as an innovative use of the postal system? Many spam laws aren't against the spam themselves but are against falsifying header info.
I hate to say it, but I think we're going to see much more of this kind of mentality coming from our elected officials (and candidates). You have to realize they farm this sort of thing out, and to them it's all a broad spectrum of marketing/contact/fundraising/etc.
I doubt the candidate in mind was even aware of what was going on, but when confronted he responded as you would expect any politico to respond. doublespeak and warm fuzzies, with a handful of buzzwords.
Hopefully there will be a day when there is a representative we can stand behind- the only way we can get there is for all of us to make our voices heard, and to use the system to fight the system. as many have said before, make phone calls or write actual letters spelling out WHY you feel something is bad, and rational reasons as to why they as your elected representative should be against something.
my 2 cents. have a good weekend!
EOM
It's not theft, it is an innovative way to acquire resources.
It's not murder, it is an innovative way to use a gun.
I call it "proof by I call it something else so it isn't bad"
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
In a new state record, Candiate Bill Jones received only 1 vote. Many blame his poor showing on the fact the he hired his campaign spokesperson because he promised to "Get Vote$$ fa$$t"
TODO: Something witty here...
Shouldn't this be under the category "Its funny, laugh"?
But many who received Jones' e-mail are not California residents. Some aren't even U.S. citizens. Evidently, the address harvester used by Jones' vendor assumed that all e-mail addresses containing ".ca," a suffix that identifies a Canadian domain, belong to California residents.
Well, clearly if he could get the much coveted Canadian vote he'd win by a landslide..I bet the Canadians aren't voting for any other Californian Politicians. I don't know why no one has ever tried this before. How innovative!
air and light and time and space
It will be interesting to see if the effects of this SPAM will have negative result on the number of voters voting for Bill Jones. I would say that if you are against SPAM then this is a very good reason to vote for someone other than Bill Jones
-- Find the Truth...
Unfortunately for us, this may turn out to be a good thing for the candidate.
Anyone in the public eye gets their name out to the public, and it sticks in some peoples' heads. Bad publicity or good, this happens. Unfortunately for us, this can translate into mindless votes on election day. Knowing a name often translates into thinking that person is the best candidate, and voting for them.
I hope I am wrong about this...
Mark
Well, I'm actually registered to vote in California, so I can let him know how I feel about spamming me in a way that might have some impact. I have a feeling that some other people around here might feel the same way; if your primary name recognition is as that spamming bastard it's not likely to win many votes. (Though this raises the spectre of forging spam from an opponent in an attempt to smear him.) Of course I wasn't planning on voting for him anyway, but it's one more reason not to like him.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
what if every one of us sent a message to his primary email address with an image of something random and telling him some way to get rich in the next 24 hours, every day for the next month and see how innovative he thinks spam is after that.
If this moron gets elected, then we can expect every political candidate everywhere, in every country, state, and district, to spam each and every one of us. Obviously, then, He Must Not Win. Who is he running against, so that I may I donate money to them?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
... Politics are honest...
Mr. Ng claims that spam is 'unsolicited commercial e-mail.' Unfortunately it seems this definition is held by all, but shouldn't we really say that spam is 'any unsolicited mass e-mail for personal gain?' That way, we cover political sharks, over-eager charities, AND commercial enterprises.
This story claims that it's all okay because a) it's within the law, and b) he provided an unsubscribe link. Hello? Does anyone actually EVER use unsubscribe links on unsolicited e-mail? I've learned that it's a great way for a spammer to validate your address is real and that some idiot is reading the mail. Even if the unsubscribe button isn't legit, aren't most tech-savvy folk going to think the same?
P.S: I got this e-mail when he sent it. What sending his political BS to someone sitting in the countryside in the United Kingdom achieved, I'm not sure.
mogorific carpentry experiments
young getting in on politics... from the article "The e-mail, purportedly sent from an MSN.com address, was actually routed through the server of an _elementary school in Chonnam, Korea._ "
But wait, I digress...
However, ask yourself, why do you vote for a candidate; do ad campaigns effect how you vote? (really... do they)
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
I submitted my page on Bill Jones's spams a couple days ago, and it was rejected:
2002-02-28 00:58:56 California Gubernatorial Canidate Resorts to Spam (articles,spam) (rejected)
Anyway, I'm not bitter. Check out my page on it anyway: http://polpo.org/jonesspam/. Basically, I pick apart the mail and the "click here to remove yourself from our list" page (which involves some novel Javascript-based HTML obfuscation) and find out who one of the spammers might be.
After talking with some people about this and doing a simple Google search I found that he's been doing this for a couple months now, with MSNBC doing this story on it in December. They have a followup story here.
By the way, don't count on Bill Jones's office writing you back when you complain to them about the spam. I haven't recieved a response yet.
Ian
I think the "market" (i.e. voters) will take care of political spam just fine by reacting negatively to its use. Remember that spam works for scammers and hucksters because a tiny portion of those targeted will send money to the sender; ergo there's no disincentive to pissing off all the other recipients. Political elections, however, don't quite work that way...
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Spampaign. As in, "in 2004, many candidates are expected to spampaign for president, but only one will win".
To be fair to Jones (and as a Californian I hate having to be fair to one of our Republican candidates :-) it isn't unsolicited commercial email. Of course I'd still consider it spam but technically he's right, especially in the context of CA's spam law which does explicitly define it as commercial email.
However the Wired article does mention the spams are using forged headers and were sent via an elementary school's servers in Korea. Now this is pretty despicable, even if it is not technically illegal (I don't know relevant Korean law). This would-be governor is stealing server resources from Korean school kids in his bid to get his political message out. That's a low tactic indeed. I do hope Mr. Jones doesn't support laws that make using someone's computer resources without permission illegal...
Sailing over the event horizon
The hell? I though Canada was ".ca.uk", or possibly ".ca.fr". Everyone knows that ".ca" is California!
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
If your computer has a fax modem attached, a printer attached, and fax software, then it is a fax machine for the purpose of the federal definition.
What you should do:
Lets make an example of this SPAM scum.
This is not legal advice until I go to law school, graduate law school, pass the bar, and confirmed that your retainer check cleared.
Fight Spammers!
was actually routed through the server of an elementary school in Chonnam, Korea
Seems obvious to me - the guy is for better relations with china as well as furthering education! Damm where do I vote? Such an innovative speaker!
On a serious note, I hope this guy gets his head put on a pike and placed on display as a warning to the next ten generations that some things come as too high a price.
Not everday you get to use a B5 quote now is it? =)
ISPs should block port 25 (TCP/SMTP) to all servers other than their own. This prevents lusers from using open relays to email their spams.
Most major ISPs I think already do this, but there are many smaller ones that do not.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
"...we're going to see much more of this kind of mentality" is right, and the reason is: "'There are a number of California anti-spam laws but, like all laws, they were passed by politicians. So there is a huge loophole that permits politicians to spam,'" --quote in the article from anti-spam activist Laura Atkins (emphasis added).
And "politician" is one of the word-oriented professions that has most difficulty adapting to computers or anything cyber at all. Lawyers, preachers, journalists, professors, politicians, writers, and a few other types predictably resist learning and using computers. I learned about this pattern when I was doing ISP tech support.
A properly filled-out ballot is an innovate way to show your disgust of these practices.
Pronounce it like "Ing", but minimize the leading vowel as much as you can. It's a common Chinese name. Sometimes it gets spelled "Ing" or "Eng" or "Ang", but "Ng" is closest to the actual pronunciation, unless you're a real idiot and try to pronounce it as "Nig".
It's Chinese -- basically, a "nasal" sound. "n" with your tongue against the top of your mouth.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
+2 Funny????
In English it's generally pronounced "ing".
The sound in Cantonese is vowel-less like "tongue" minus the "to." There is no direct transliteration using English phonetics.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Jones says that the mail is fine because it isn't commercial. Does that mean that if I send him 50,000 copies of a piece of mail expressing my ire - and perhaps including an entire dictionary in each one, so he can look up the word 'spam' - that this too is okay because it isn't commercial?
It used to be, before the web, that hosing an offending ISP that refused to chastise a spammer was considered to be a perfectly acceptable response. I say - given the obvious effectiveness of legislation against spam - that we return to those days once again.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
IANAL but I think that forging headers is a deceptive practice and he should in the least have a class action civil lawsuit used against him.
He could have taken a page from former Vice President Al Gore's book and claimed to have INVENTED Spam! ;-)
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
Too bad it was South Korea they routed it through. If it was North Korea we could get the press to jump all over his ties to a country with nasty human rights issues. You know they'd love that. It sells papers.
I don't see how theft is innovation. As far back as recorded history theft has been with us and considered a crime. The only "innovation" is that these thieves have so far not been subject to any criminal proceedings.
I think an appropriate punishement for SPAMMERS would involved kneecaps and baseball bats
ENOUGH already, My penis is TOO long as it is
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
If this guy had the balls to stand up and say "this is political free speech, it's not spam, get over it!" a lot of spam fighters would give him a bit of room. We understand that there are no simple answers when dealing with politicians (and political issues in general) that are often excluded by a mass media that is focused on ratings, not public service.
But this idiot doesn't even know the first rule of politics - no matter what you did, you can make it far worse by trying to cover it up and failing. He spammed header information - he should burn in Hell for that regardless of the merits of the content of the message! I hope every person who got that spam writes a check for $5 or $10 for his opponent, telling the opponent exactly why they got that donation... with copies send to this moron and the local TV stations. Let him learn that forging headers means that's he's not fit to pick the dog shit up in the city parks, much less represent a district.
(Of course, if it turns out that the opponent forged the headers and got checks... suddenly that's fraud by misrepresentation. Criminal indictments tend to put a stop to that *very* fast.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Uhh, this isn't a troll, it's a true story and it might shed somelight on how spam operators do their dirty deeds.
About 2 months ago I had the chance to take a road trip with one of my best buds to go see his father down in bakersfield. For those that don't know what bakersfield is, it's a shithole of a dirty little town somewhere between Sacramento and LA on the I5.
Now if it's a shithole of a little town, why would I in my right mind want to go there, sleep on a floor for 3 days, and eat crappy food. Well, my friends dad *supposidly* had a T1 line going into his apartment and was running spam operations from that. I told my friend that's bullshit, Ma bell don't run T1's to anything but businesses, i've ordered enough of them to know.
We got down there, I was expecing to walk in, and find a wirespeed DSL modem or something. Upon closer inspection I found a CSU/DSU and a cisco 2500 router. Holy shit this guy really did have a T1 line. I started talking to him about the legal/social ramifications of his business. After about 30 minutes of talking to him I could tell, he got a hair up his butt one day thinking spam was going to be a big money maker for him, paid someone to set him up and that was it. Not only did he not have a clue that hijacking someones SMTP server is bad, but he said SMTP servers that don't run open relays are interferring with his ability to do business and started screaming "ITS MY RIGHT TO SPAM AND ANYONE WHO TRIES TO STOP ME IS INTRUDING ON MY AMERICAN RIGHTS TO RUN A BUSINESS"
I stopped talking to him after that. He just would not accept that using someone elses server without their permission is just plain wrong. Anyways...
He started trying to talk me and my friend into getting into the business with him. I told him it would be a conflict of interest for me because I am a sysadmin of course, but I would be more than happy to watch him work to learn for myself.
His network consisted of 6 win98 machines, 1 BSD box that he had no idea what it did. They ran some windows GUI based tool called SMTPscan. Basically it had 2 boxes to input your IP range into, it would scan that range and report back usable servers. I can't remember the actual name of the program he used to send the mail with, but I remember him pasting that list from SMTP scan into it.
Also to note was his lack of a true list management system. His remove e-mails pointed back to a hotmail account so his main server would be isolated from any attacks. He would manually go into his hotmail account. These removes did nothing though, let me explain it from his point of view.
Basically when your remove yourself from a spam list, it's just for that spam. The spammer still has a list for some new product that he hasn't sent out yet, if he hasn't sent it out how can you be removed?
So this guy maintains a list of 4,000,000 e-mails and ALLWAYS spams to all of them. Legally he's found a loophole to cover his ass and can happily spam the same list as long as he's selling something different.
I just wanted to post this so everyone would know, spammers aren't really the most technically minded people. To them it's
1. Spam
2. ****
3. Profit
While to us it's
1.Spam
2.Flood someone elses server, slander some legit company by relaying pr0n spam. Eat Bandwidth
3. Profit
I hope you enjoyed this post, please mod accordingly if you did.
--toq
Not only does this not surprise me, it will be no surprise that crap like this is only going to get worse.
I have noticed a *very* disturbing trend in the reams of spam I receive. More and more of it is coming from seemingly legitimate BigCos.
In the last week I have received spam for several different forms of service from AT cellular and long distance. I have also received three different spams for the Columbia House CD/DVD club.
I'm fairly certain that a number of these spam have been merely a test; just a dip of the toe in the pool, so to speak.
Can you imagine what would happen if an AT&T or a Columbia House (Sony, isn't it?) were to decide the spam was a 'legitimate market channel'?
Implicit in spam is the idea that the spammer wants to sell you something. Politicians don't sell you anything, they simply take.
On a serious side. Think of all the crap that politicians receive in the mail. The stuff our representatives and senators get make your 80 pieces of spam a day look like a cake walk. For that matter, Tom Daschel gets Anthrax. I would rather get ten thousand offers for a fake university degree than a single bomb.
Not only do they run tons of commercials on TV and radio, I'd say the very nature of kickbacks, bribes, and fundraising makes it quite commercial.
Infuriate left and right
My only concern would be that the email doesn't reach people who are out of the voting district (I can't vote in the FL gubernatorial election) and that it isn't excessive. I, for one, would like to get information about all of the candidates via e-mail. One e-mail per candidate. If I get any more, he's just lost my vote...
You can't say "get the money out of politics" and "don't take advantage of this free form of advertising" and expect to get away with it. Now excuse me while I don my asbestos suit.
-bugg
The really telling thing is the forged headers. Even if you could argue the points of political mailings being spam/not being spam, as far as I'm concerned, using a fake email/forged headers makes it spam. Forged email/headers trumps all other arguments. It is spam.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
It might be amusing for Wired, or one of Jones's opponents for that matter, to get in touch with the Korean embassy on this issue. I know (believe me, I know) that a lot of Korean sites are doing precious little about their open relays ... but what, I wonder, would the Korean government think about its educational resources being stolen for the furtherance of an American politician's campaign?
"We've replaced this antispammer's whack-a-mole mallets with axes of evil. Let's see if he notices ...."
Since billjones.org is down (either slashdotted or still disabled because of his upstream ISP) I have created a petition. If you are a registered California voter and want him to know why he won't get your vote, please make your voice heard.
Bill Jones is not a U.S. Congressman. He's not even a member of the California Assembly or Senate. He's the California Secretary of State, an elected official.
In other words, calling him ``Rep. Bill Jones'' is wrong.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase
Just guessing, but the list may be available under some open election laws.
Fight Spammers!
No flame, simply strong dissagreement.
The problem is that spam isn't free for the recipient. The primary argument against spam is not simply that it's annoying or that it clogs an otherwise useful communication medium with noise but that it's a collect call that the receiver can't refuse.
If you're on the end of a pay per X pipe, like many wireless net plans, then spam actually costs the receiver money. Some internet mail hosts charge users per X of storage, once again spam costs money. There are more and better examples which other people can cite who understand the situation much better than I.
Using spam in this way shows just how out of touch the candidate is. He's ran past the "I'll buy your vote" argument all the way to "You'll pay for my sales pitch".
916-349-2002
they tried to support their actions, citing 1st amendment and an unsubscribe.
I told them to go to hell.
1-916-349-2002
they tried to support their actions: 1) by citing 1st amendment rights and 2) by including an unsubscribe button.
People should flood them with complaints.
Bill Jones is California's secretary of state, not a US Representative. He's running for the Republican nomination for governor.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
Hey, doesn't his actions now mean that he is a 'HACKER' and now qualifies for a potential maximum life sentence in jail???
--jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
At this election, you're probably worried about how your government is going to spend your money, whether your child is going to get a decent education, whether your candidates actually cares about the issues, or will do anything to get elected. What would you say if one candidate decided to use a primary school's facilities to send out thousands of publicity messages to electors worldwide, many of whom couldn't even vote in that election? What if that candidate didn't pay that school a penny, despite disrupting that school's ability to use its computers while the candidate exploited them? What if this kind of behaviour wasn't just immoral, but probably illegal too in this country, and so the candidate had evaded American law by using a school in a third world country to send out his publicity? And what if that school had never given him permission, but he'd hacked into the school's computer systems anyway, like a common criminal? Representative Bill Jones did exactly that. And what's more, he called his abuse of third world primary children "innovative". At this election, you might want to innovate in your own way, and elect XXX XXXXXX for YYYYYYY, telling Bill Jones that you want someone you can trust. Not a penny pinching computer hacker.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
While Korea government officials are busy whining about a little dog eating joke, their country is getting cut off from the internet because its servers are remotely harboring e-terrorists. Korean government officials and bureaucrats need to get some clues. A lot of clues.
Maybe Jay can do a joke about how the Koreans use dogs to run the treadmills for the generators that run the Korean spam servers in all the schools and government offices ... before they chop 'em up to be put in little cans to be sold as meat.
Seriously ... block Korea ... I do ... and I don't regret it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...and i live in galway ireland.
and here i thought florida had the weirdest voting laws...
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Before I write to my congressman proposing this, I want to toss it out on /. to see if it's a valid idea.
Should forged headers be illegal?
The exception being anonymous remailers. In which case the remailer identifies itself as such.
But forging headers to make the email appear to have originated or been processed by a machine that wasn't involved in the delivery is, IMO, a malicious act.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
Here's a bit of synchronicity. Just this morning I received a spam in my personal mailbox. I have 5 addresses: work, personal, and 3 spamtraps that go to trash by default. Whenever my 2 real addresses get spammed, I go medieval. Headers revealed the spam was sent through an open relay at ... Naju Noan Elementary School of Chonnam Province, Korea.
What's the deal with the Korean school system? Did someone donate a few thousand default-setup NT servers to them after the dotcom bust?
According to NameSpace, the class-C block belongs to Soonhwa Cho (jeonnam3@soback.kornet.net), and the class-A belongs to Korea Network Information Center (hostmaster@nic.or.kr). I've written to KrNIC before, and they flatly disavow any and all responsibility for net abuse in their subdomains. They refer me to their WHOIS server.
Now, there are a few problems with that position. The most important is that NajuNoan's whois entry belongs to yang yeon ho (noan1@edunet4u.net), and that address bounces back as invalid.
So what to do? AFAICT, the only answer is for some off-white-hat hackers to 0WN the whole damn Korean edu network and secure those servers remotely whether they like it or not.
Let's hope Mr. Jones doesn't set a precedent. The next article at Wired talked about how the Catholic church sees the Internet as a great opportunity for evangelism:
... the positive capacities of the Internet to carry religious information and teaching beyond all barriers and frontiers. Such a wide audience would have been beyond the wildest imaginings of those who preached the Gospel before us.... Catholics should not be afraid to throw open the doors of social communications to Christ, so that his good news may be heard from the housetops of the world."
Foley also quotes the Pope as saying, "Consider
I can see it now, hundreds of "Get Eternal Life FAST" and "Jesus and his horny college teen friends want to see you in church" from HotPope@blasphemy.nu all sent via open Korean servers. Sigh.
Sailing over the event horizon
Forging an email address is a criminal activity in California, regardless of whether or not it's commercial. It is a crime to:
"Knowingly and without permission uses the Internet domain name of another individual, corporation, or entity in connection with the sending of one or more electronic mail messages, and thereby damages or causes damage to a computer, computer system, or computer network."
Whoever forged the MSN address while really going through a Korean relay would seem to be a criminal.
any more annoying than all the political ads that used flood the airwaves right before an election.
Notes:
1) Now, thanks to the campaign finance reform bill (and Tauzin-Dingell), we don't have to watch any of this.
2) Right. (and it'll pass the senate. The conference committee will slip in some extra uglies to "compromise")
3) The candidates are actually paying the networks for the airtime, and if I don't like it I can vote with my Doritos and Pepsi somewhere else.
4) Uh, the networks don't own the airtime, I do. Refer back to Telecomm Act 1997, etc.
That depends entirely on the definition of "damages" wouldn't it? I'm sure all of *us* would consider the time it takes to hit the delete button as damaging, but it didn't do any damage to our *system*.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
I've heard "uncolisoted political email" (UPE, I guess) refered to as Tofu.
Just passing allong the meme.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The sound in Cantonese is vowel-less like "tongue" minus the "to." There is no direct transliteration using English phonetics.
Well, wouldn't 'ung' be an english version?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Half of my spam now says on it "THIS IS NOT SPAM, we are strongly opposed to spam". Apparently, if you just declare your spam non-spam, it is no longer spam.
Who do we write to to get this jerk's membership in the Republican Party rescinded?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The buzzword is 'spampaign^TM'.
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
I'd like to gently remind people to think of the potential consequences to our society of banning any form of political speech, regardless of how tacky it might be.
For the last goddamned time, spamming is NOT a free-speech issue, it's a PROPERTY RIGHTS issue.
I don't give a damn whether the spam is this asshole shyster trying to get elected, or some idiot cult member trying to save my soul, or the run of the mill porn pusher trying to sell me stolen MPEGs of Tammy Faye Baker fornicating with Pete Wilson, the issue isn't the CONTENT, it's the theft of services from me, and everyone else the spammer sends the crap out to.
I am getting bloody tired of people getting the right to speak confused with the PRIVILEGE of using someone else's property.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Maybe spamming by a politician is innovative, but so was crashing an airplane into an aircraft carrier when the Japanese invented it.
It would also be innovative for this scumbag to advertise his campaign by hiring punks with spray cans to write his name across my windshield.
I just hope this asshole's political career goes down in flames, but I'm afraid I have very little hope of that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
2. They have a policy that all their clients should have fully qualified (opted in) lists, any client found to be breaking this rule becomes an ex-client. As they are in Australia this would be in breach of the privacy act, and they have no wish to be associated with criminal activity no matter how petty.
This is the critical point. If one "opts in" for mailings, then by definition it isn't SPAM as it is not "unsolicited." If I check "send me notices of good deals" on some web site I'm buying something at, then I've opted-in, ie solicited, the bulk emailings.
SPAM is unsolicited bulk email (mostly, but not always, commercial, but again, the emphesis is on unsolicited bulk email).
If someone uses my servers, and my hard disk space, to store their unsolicited advertisments then as far as I (and several states, but alas, not Illinois) am concerned they are guilty of tresspass and should be treated accordingly: with stiff fines and some jail time. If, on the other hand, they are sending a mass, but soliticed, mailing (for example, I get mass mailings from AOPA all the time, which I have explicitly asked for), then there is absolutely no abuse and all is kosher.
You claim to not be in the habit of sending unsolicted bulk emails. Excellent. In this case you run a legitimate, inoffensive business and I wish you the best. If, on the other hand, this claim should turn out to be untrue, then I would be the first to cheer for the legions of system crackers tapping at your electronic Windows and smashing your servers.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I think it would be just TOO great if the owners/operators of the mail server that was used to relay all this spam came in and sued the ass off of this guy for server theft, hacking, and whatever else they could think of. In this case (and this case ONLY! ;) I'd love to see slimy ambulance-chasing lawyer go after him on their behalf. :)
$0.02 (CDN)
This story claims that it's all okay because a) it's within the law
Spam is already defined and illegal, according to the junk fax law (47 USC 227). The law defines "fax machine" so as to include any computer with a telephone modem.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Umm.. interesting that a candidate for governor would violate his state's own laws in such and open way. The California anti-spam law expressly prohibits forging e-mail headers as I read it.
Wouldn't such blatant disregard for the law disqualify him from the race?
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
That works nicely if enough people do it, especially if they spread around lots of spambait addresses. But what about an active response - if you receive mail from an open-relay machine (either on the RBL, or one that you test, e.g. yet another Korean school box), you could send it ten simultaineous messages, v...errr....y...s....l...o...w..ly. Not enough to flood it, or kill it permanently, but enough that if it's trying to spam N destinations at a time, it will have some fraction of them tie up a few percent of its incoming SMTP capacity, and therefore quickly block its relay capability.
It's a bit dodgy, and you need to check your ISP's acceptable use policy to make very sure you're not violating it, but it's basically a scale attack which won't harm any systems that have real people sending out real mail, might bother real systems sending out real mailing lists (so obviously don't do this to systems you subscribe to), but will interfere with abused machines being abused by spammers as well as with spammers using their own machines directly.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But 90% of the other"opt-in" mail I get is from liars claiming that either I've opted in to their service or somebody else opted in for me - especially if they have "opt-in" or "marketing" in their domain names or email addresses :-) Many of them say they'll continue sending me opt-in mail unless I opt-out (which at best seldom works, and may confirm to them that my address is correct.) I view this as a direct threat to spam me further, and actionable by any means necessary.
(I've been rereading Vernor Vinge's excellent novel "A Fire Upon The Deep", so I'm motivated to comment "Death to Vermin" about these spammers :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Spam is annoying, but doesn't really deserve the death penalty. A *much* more appropriate traditional punishment is the "pillory" - tie the guy up in public and let the public laugh at him and throw rotten vegetables. The Internet makes it possible to virtualize and democratize this service - you don't even have to be in town to email a rotten tomato to the guy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you propose it, you might want to make an exception for address mungers where the message contains sufficient information (e.g. simple instructions in the signature, or an obvious munging scheme) where a "reasonable person" with minimal effort could identify the correct e-mail address.
And probably a forger should be liable for damages incurred by the holder of the forged addresses and systems (this especially goes for spammers who use the e-mail addresses of people who pissed 'em off, as the "From:" address of their next spam).
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The DNC is spamming using cheetahmail.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Bill Jones, Karma -1.0e40: Troll
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
actually, as another respondent to you points out, not a lot of them use email. this is not usually because of "not knowing how", though- it's because email is subpoenable. remember Iran-Contra and Ollie North's emails? President Bush (Shrub Jr) has told all his correspondents, family and friends that he no longer will be using email solely because it could be subpoenaed later down the road (and it also becomes a matter of public record.)
Any politician faced with having his/her "personal" correspondence becoming public record will stop using it immediately. anything can be taken out of context!
Imagine if Dick cheney had discussed his plans for Enron's energy plan for the US via email. what would happened? we might have know the truth about what was going on, for goodness sakes!
silly comments aside, this is a very real fear among politicians and their hangers-on. having your own words put the sword in your back is painful, and having your waffling pointed out in hard copy is never fun.
EOM
I got 4 of these spams in 2 days.
The thing that I found equally offensive and hilarious, is that it said "Your email was selected off the Internet based on your voter demographics." My voter demographics?!
Okay, anyone who knows me at all knows that I am about as far from Republican as you can get, and I am about as likely to vote for Bill Simon as I am to cut off my own leg.
So what exactly were they going for, by targeting my "voter demographic"?
I'm usually strictly opposed to "vengeance spam" because it hurts the involved routers and ISPs, but if this guy thinks spam is innovative (and tries to push laws based on that), maybe the only way to LART him is to get him singed up to some more spam lists. I wonder how innovative this ***** will find his mailbox being swamped with 500 spams a day.
Please post a mailto: link to his address in clear form...
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
I'm inclined to say that this is a perfectly legitimate business, based on your post, however there is one thing you didn't make quite clear. You say they require clients to run opt-in lists only. Do they require true opt-in procedures, what spammers call "double opt-in?" Or, to put it another way, do they require a procedure that prevents one of these lists from being used to spam by a third party - i.e. if I go to a client of theirs and sign you up for the "opt-in" list, do they immediately start spamming you, or do they simply send you a confirmation mail and wait for you to confirm that you really did want to subscribe, sending nothing more until and unless you do?
This is a very important distinction. If it is permitted to use unconfirmed "opt-in" procedures, then it's really permitted to spam. However, if you insist on a true opt-in system, then it's a perfectly legitimate business and a good netizen, not a spammer at all.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Need to know what IP addresses to block? Find out here.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's .ca.ca
...)
(Read this if you don't understand
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
I think the parent post is not offtopic, I thought there was a typo in the slashdot post.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
... "This isn't spam!" then it is. Pure and simple.
It is SPAM by definition! Noone complains about receiving email that they requested, knowingly. Think about it! If you have to trick them into "requesting" it, then it is spam.
As for "remove me" links ... I'm sure somewhere there's a hooker who gives it away for free, has no disease, and is a virgin. But guess what? She looks like all the others. You'll never know. Same with "remove me" links.
1) The mail lady came by every few hours and put mail in the box instead of once per day, and we were expecting important mail. Thus running to the box every few hours and getting junk.
2) I was paying for my mailbox connection
For what it's worth I despise those obvious scam snail mail junk just as much as it's email counterpart.
While I agree with the sentiment, there's an obvious issue:
The exception being anonymous remailers. In which case the remailer identifies itself as such.
If there's a law against forging headers, the first thing the Staats^H^H^H^H^H^H FBI is going to do is use that law to shut down all the anonymous remailers they can find.
So, does anyone have a procmail recipe that chain-tests headers?
-Z
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
I don't vote, but I voted for the other party that time around.
Is this the new version of "I don't watch TV" or "I only watch PBS"?
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
The advantage of this approach is that you're not handling the volume of the spam yourself - you're just handling the DNS services, and you can set your timeouts so a given relay machine only bothers you every week or two. (Or you can give them a short TTL for the first time a given machine sends you spam, so you can give it a quick response with some relay you now and then check out whether it's a known open relay or run your own relay check on it.) If it is a relay, you can report it to the RBL, but meanwhile you can set your real mail server to reject everything from the spammer.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Quite possibly blackholed, too.
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E_NOSIG