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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
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.
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
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
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.
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!
A properly filled-out ballot is an innovate way to show your disgust of these practices.
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 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
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.
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.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase
916-349-2002
they tried to support their actions, citing 1st amendment and an unsubscribe.
I told them to go to hell.
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.
...and i live in galway ireland.
and here i thought florida had the weirdest voting laws...
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
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
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.
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."
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
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
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"?
you are correct, but they DO NOT have the right to forge headers. That act in itself says to me they knew it was wrong and were ashamed to be connected.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?