Slashdot Mirror
Meet the Spammers
DaveAtFraud writes: "It took a little digging to find an on-line copy of this article that I first saw in my treeware daily newspaper. Thanks to the Salt Lake City Tribune for having it on-line. According to the Spamhaus project, a handful of people are responsible for 90% of the spam that clogs you in box. This is your chace to hear from them and what they have to say is quite interesting. If you don't think the filters and blacklists work, one spammer whines, "My operating costs have gone up 1,000 percent this year, just so I can figure out how to get around all these filters." Stopping spam is simply a matter of economics. When its uneconomical to send spam, people will stop sending it."
I don't know why people think laws against spammers would be ineffective. Even a threat of legal/finacial action against them would be a huge deterrent in sending spam. Heck, if it reduced it 10% wouldn't it be worth it?
Of course, intelligent filters and the like are the best way to treat the symptoms, but they don't treat the problem.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
"My operating costs have gone up 1,000 percent this year, just so I can figure out how to get around all these filters."
And yet he persists.
In the great tradition of slashdot, I haven't read the article, but I assume he's making enough money to cover his costs and then some, else he wouldn't continue. Now, I'm also assuming that companies are paying him to send spam - there's no way he'd make enough of responders.
This has probably been said before, but why are we getting pissed off at spammers? It's the companies we need to "educate" as to the evils of unsolicited e-mail. That's where the money and motivation comes from. Maybe we should e-mail every company in the world and explain to them why they shouldn't spam...
Maran
Well, operating costs are more than just money. If it takes 1000 seconds to send his bulk mail instead of 1 second, then his operating 'costs' have gone up. If it takes him 6 hours to find a new tool to get around a new filter, instead of 1 hour, then his costs have gone up also. Granted, the return for that time spent is still obscene, but any increase in their operating cost is good. Plus, the sheer visceral pleasure that we enjoy seeing the spammers having a 'hard' time is a bonus also.
{pause to let my boiling blood cool down}
Lets see:
1) you send mail people don't want.
2) they have to pay for it
3) it's legally questionable
4) (if you send porn) objectionable stuff will end up in front of children
5) And you're confused when we get pissed off.
DUH!
{goes rummaging for his clue-by-four and for the sourcecode for spamassasin... I need to tune my procmail filters anyway.}
Zapman
Stop the brainwash
Quote: "These people will go to the lowest depths," said Cowles, of Bowling Green, Ohio.
Try telling that to a mother whos 5 year old son has just opened a "Chicks with d**ks" spam e-mail and followed the friggin link!!!!
These people make me sick!
The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and Stupidity.
And Thomas Cowles isn't exactly of "high moral fibre", even setting aside his spamming.
Tom Cowles, who heads one of the world's largest bulk e-mail, or spam, businesses, ought to be a happy guy. By his account, his company makes $12 million a year e-mailing billions of advertisements, mainly to folks who don't want them. It's an easy job, the way Cowles and others describe it:
12 Million? I am in the wrong business. Amazing that there are actually that many stupid people in the world that these guys can make a living off of sending out crap....well, wait a minute....we have politicians who do the same....
I think a law needs to be established that if a person DOES NOT want to receive this garbage, they should not receive it. All these "so-called" businesses should HAVE to be registered and LEGITAMIZED to where there CAN be legal recourse. I know for a fact that I bounce hundreds of "Bad Spam Email" from my server, and that and the residue left from Nimda taxes what limited bandwidth I have.
(Insert Schoolhouse rock theme here) "You are right, there oughta be a LAW!"
You keep going until you die..."Me".
I social change though, a "word on the street" that buying into the spam business is a sucker's game, will greatly reduce the amount of spam. It won't eliminate it, but it will greatly reduce it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Why exactly is he trying to get around spam filters?
If someone has a spam filter in place, there is not *way*
they're going to buy your unsolicited crap. There's no point!
A "paltry $250"!? That's more than most programmers (the ones who can still find jobs) make. The really sick part of this is that these guys are complaining that they're making only 90k a year sitting on their ass when hard working programmers can't find jobs.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I agree!
It should really be illegal to send you marketing information without telling your real identity, may it be a corporation. It must be everyones right to get a proper person or organization to sue if for example the information is illegal in your country.
$250 per mailing, at one mailing a day, is still more than $90k per year. We've got a lot of work to do if we're going to stop spammers.
Considering that the home addresses of spammers are now published, I have a novel idea for making them feel how we do.
Have everyone snail mail them one bag of kitchen garbage. 4th class mail. Once a month.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear to be bright. Until you hear them speak.
Parents shouldn't have to screen their kids email. if it werent for the spammers you could let your kids check email all day long without the worry of them getting a quick blast of nasty wet teenage girls sent to them
Not to mention the operating costs of having to constantly find new isps and the time needed to constantly try to keep the current ones from dumping you.
Or the sheer of having to have an unlisted number with privacy options and even then having to constantly change your number.
Ever call Alan Ralsky? You have to leave a 5 second message(only your name) just to get him to answer his phone.
How exactly do you get new buisness when your affraid of who the next caller might be?
Expensive? VERY. It only looks cheap when you don't look at the hidden costs.
So is there any reason why we can't use existing laws against them? It may not be a federal crime, but at least under some state laws, it's a crime to show objectionable material to minors. Get the information on the spammer and report it to your local law enforcement authorities.
What about wire fraud or mail fraud, or just plain old fraud? If these spammers are registering for accounts under false names, why can't they be prosecuted under fraud laws?
Vigilante tactics have their place too, of course. Any ISP that claims to have an anti-spam policy but in reality cooperates with these spammers should have their entire IP range blacklisted. After their legitimate customers (if they have any) can't get to websites or send e-mail, and cancel their accounts, those ISPs will either go out of business or rethink their policies.
Finally, grass-roots operations are all well and good, but the anti-spam movement won't make any serious progress until we get some money in our corner. Find some large corporation that hates spam as much as we do. You can't tell me that workers in these corporations aren't getting spam - some of them are probably even reading it. In an era where every dollar counts (especially if you overstated profits for the last two years), some corporation somewhere must want to put an end to this as much as Joe Everygeek does.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
can be found at http://www.toledocybercafe.com/ivtg/ Check yer facts, reporters!
Learn how a CPU works before you learn to program. Seriously.
Weeeeelll..., not quite.
It does, as you noticed, quote exactly what the spammers say and claim. It does not explicitly call them liers. It does not extensively detail the position of the anti-spammers. All that lends itself to an article that primarily informs the reader of the position of the spammer.
But, it does not actually say that what the spammer is doing is right, legal, moral or anything else. It simply passes along their views. That is what unbiased reporting is about. If I read an article that outright calls spammers scum and claims they should DIE DIE DIE, I'd read that as a biased article.
There are plenty of articles around that detail how spammers annoy people, how they should be stopped, how they cost money, and on and on. most of these articles do not provide voice for the other side (the spammers). Would you call them bad reporting because of that?
Bias is not about supporting your position. Bias is about supporting any one position over another. Just because it doesn't support your bias does not mean it has the opposite bias. The middle ground usually looks hostile from either end, sort of the "If you're not for us, then you're against us" mentality.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Dave Codding, president of Internet Direct, an Ohio-based ISP, said his company struggled for a year to get Cowles off his network. Codding said Cowles used a false name to open an account and threatened to sue if he was cut off.
It is well-established law in the US, and probably most civilized nations as well, that using a false name for a fraudulent purpose is illegal. Specifically, it's illegal to use a false name to hide relevant information about your past (e.g. lousy credit, criminal record), which is precisely what these slimeballs are doing.
Somebody needs to convince a local DA to make an example of one of these crooks. Once it becomes too risky to use a pseudonym, it will be a simple matter of convincing ISPs to black-list them.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I've been a journalist for over 8 years. I see a lot of misconceptions in the two lines of your post.
Maybe it's the TV's fault. Maybe you've grown used to think about Dan Rather or Barbara Walters as journalists. They're not. They're celebrities. A journalist walks his beat, watches, listens and reports the facts. Just the facts.
I've interviewed murderers and rapists. I've also interviewed way more politicians than you'd ever care to meet. And when I come back to my desk and write the story, I simply report what they said. Nobody cares what I think about it; my job is to tell you what they said.
So, taking their words at face value is NOT shoddy journalism. It's real journalism. You, the reader, should decide what to make of their words.
Shoddy journalism would be to assume spammers lie, and mocking them, distorting what they said. It would be a lot more gratifying for antispammers, yes, but it would also be the worst kind of journalism: A distortion of the truth.
"This is what the Internet is supposed to be," said Michael Jay, whose Houston-based company, America Find, sends several million messages per day advertising $99 background checks. "This is free enterprise at its finest."
Funny, I thought it was a communication tool and a network infrastructure. I had no idea that it was to sell prick embigenator cream.
Carpe Deez
institute a nice, fat $1000 fine and forfeit all prepaid fees, and let'er rip.
Great, if you can actually collect the judgement..
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."