Slashdot Mirror
Mapping the Spam
demaria writes "The folks at cluelessmailers.org have made a map of spam. It shows the relationships among spammers and other entities (legitimate or not), including organizations that track spam, advertises with, shares addresses, emails through, and all sorts of other data. I can't imagine how hard it was to put this together, it looks like a giant circuit design layout, but shows just how big and interwoven the spam problem is."
The country of spam is surrounded by the "White Gelatin Coast", it is divided into various sovereign mystery meat nations. How this country was formed is unknown and best left a mystery.
I got this sick feeling of joy, and the hairs on the back of my stood up... Maps to the companies which send out spam?
I'm driving to each and every one of em, and hurling bricks through their windows...
errr wait...
dmarien
But where are all the Asian spammers? I'd guesstimate that I get 30 or 40 foreign-language spams apparently from Taiwan, Malaysia, and India every day. It's more than half of all the spam I get now.
you have the map,
weve located the enemy,
now take them out!
do it for the good of the net, and may the Force be with you.
I want 2D games back.
Well, I'm happy to give up some bandwidth for these guys, it's a cool map. Here's a mirror.
http://www.cetan.com/mirrors/spammap.html
No need to mod me up, I'm not a karma whore.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
So I've mirrored it.
-ted
spam maps
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
It seems to me, that you comment is really extra lame.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
The map is incomplete - I don't see Bernard Shifman on there anywhere
I forwarded it to all my coworkers, plus a few people that I don't know, but I have their email address. ;)
He did no such thing. Shannon's law demonstrates that the information bearing capacity of a communication line is limited by the signal to noise ratio.
It is quite amusing to see how such basic observations are transmorgaphied by the game of Internet chinese whispers.
Spam will be addressed as a problem as soon as the pain barrier becomes high enough. With PKI it is possible to identify an email sender by means of a digital signature. The current problem being that there is no good way to locate public keys bound to email addresses. There is a lot of good work going on in this area, in particular the W3C XKMS group recently discussed a working draft that describes a mechanism for accessing public keys via DNS SRC records.
So under this system what would happen is that when you get email from them the email client would scan your address book to see if they were on your approved sender's list. This would probably include the individuals you know (Cmdr. Taco etc.) and also whole domains (ai.mit.edu) you might trust. if the mail is not in the list it goes into the 'low priority' pile.
There are email clients that do this at the moment but the spammers are using counter measures, such as scanning email list archives and sending out SPAM with fake sender addresses taken from the archive. With PKI and a means of determining whether the person actually has a public key or not this type of filtering becomes much more robust. Incidentally the mechanism does not require S/MIME to work, it can also be used with PGP.
To deploy the solution all we need to do is to persuade email client writers to support XKMS register and locate functions and ISPs to provide XKMS services along with their existing SMTP server. Oh yes and finish the XKMS spec I guess.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I agree. Instead of pinging and scanning my servers 24/7, go after the real assholes of the Internet. Script Kiddies, you have the tools, you have the time, you have the disregard for the law, do something worthwhile for a change.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
There is no way to "fix the spam problem".
.
There certainly isn't if you're fatalistic and don't look for solutions.
Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications
Ignoring the abundant misunderstanding of Shannon's research (hey, go read here and you'll already know more thant he poster), to call spam noise on the data network is an amazing stretch. Spam is not noise. Spam is data. If you took the spam off the network some other crap that nobody wanted wouldn't magically fill the spot.
I also deeply question your off-the-cuff nlogn value for spam. Let's just take my Hotmail account as an example. It receives roughly 200 spam emails a day. They average 8k each. So that's 1.6MB of spam per day per user. Now, there's 118 million Hotmail accounts. Assume that a mere 1% of them get this much spam. That's 1,888,000 MB of spam. Daily. To Hotmail alone. That's nearly 2 terabytes of capacity. Daily
Now lets start throwing in Yahoo! mail, AltaVista mail, juno, excite, etc. etc. etc. and start counting numbers. It's scary. Very, very scary.
If anyone can actually provide real numbers for how much bandwidth is consumed by spam, please do. I did a Google search a couple weeks ago and came up empty. Lots of sites referring to it consuming "great amounts of bandwidth", but no hard numbers.
OK, /., here's a question for you:
I'm not a real network geek (just a regular joe programmer), but recently my email address has been co-opted by a spammer. That is, I've received spam from my own email address. (I of course did NOT send it.)
The question is, how can a regular joe like me prevent this from happening in the future so my domain does not appear on some future version of The Map? I know about the guy who hacked into the spammer's laptop and got all their personal information, but I don't have the skills or access for that.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
Spam is not "noise". It is e-mail abuse. It is not randomly caused by electromagnetic or other interference. It purposely injected into the e-mail stream. It contains specific messages and is delivered to specificied recipients. You act like it is some kind of natural phenomenon. It's not.
Claude Shannon said that communications channels have a source of noise (i.e., interference or distortion) which changes the message in unpredictable ways during transmission. What a spammer sends to me does not change other messages in unpredictable ways. It does not distort other messages. Spam is simply a source of unwanted messages.
If we stop complaining, we reduce the cost of spamming and it increases. Period.
Did anyone see Kevin Bacon's name on that map? I bet you could draw a link through association to him. Once that is done the map will be complete. Then we will know that Kevin controls that too.
The wages of sin are unreported and back taxes are hell to pay.
You think that is bad. I just "Trolled" myself according to a moderator on the parent post.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.