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
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!
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.