Slashdot Mirror
Another Millionaire Spammer Story
An anonymous reader writes "Here's another story about a millionaire spammer who thinks he is doing nothing wrong and can't wait to get his hands on the next generation of spamming software." See also the last installment.
To me spammers are as disruptive to internet growth and society as virus\trojan etc creators.
an angry mob will teach him to stop spamming us
FTC> *knocking*
Spammer> "Who is it?"
FTC> "Flowers"
Spammer> "What?"
FTC> "Pizza delivery"
Spammer> "Oh. Ok."
Spammer> "Hey, you're that spam shark, aren't you?
"I don't do any porn or sexual messages," he said, citing a..
can't say I've ever heard of an "ethical" spammer.....
sounds like an oxymoron to me...
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
Yet Another Spammer Story, as if we haven't heard enough.
/. readers to a frenzy
I recently saw the "Bart gets a job as a bartender for the Mob" episode. The episode ended with
Bart: "I realize now that crime doesn't pay"
Fat Tony: "Yeah, I guess you're right"
At which point Fat Tony and his entourage leave in several strech limos.
The only point of posting stories like these seems to be:
1) enraging
2) proving that crime DOES pay.
Why bother?
I like what I do, even though I have to hide from everyone, use unlisted numbers, and pretend like it's not bothering anyone. It's truly the greatest business in the world. And the dog feces that keep coming in the mail don't bother me that much, either.
Find that T1 line.
Step #2 hire some blackhats to turn the entire center into a bunch of machines with blank disks.
Step #3 Repeat as necessary
I've got $20 in my hand that I'd give to that effort in a second.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
why not fill his mailbox and lawn with canned meat product?
I can't believe it's not lard!
As much as everyone complains about spam, it's not going anywhere. The reason? It works. It's the same problem that all of the new invasive advertising (ads superimposed on football fields during games, etc) has.
As much as everyone complains about it, there are sufficient people who respond to the advertising and buy the products. As long as that happens, spam will continue.
I hope the bastard slips up and get his ass sued off. Or better yet his customers get sued. This guy is a millionaire because spam works for companies who sell this crap and pay him to spam us with it. I imagine I'd have a hard time selling pills to enlarge your penis or free xxx pornsite passwords door to door. In fact I'd probably be arrested, especially after I tried to make the sale to a minor who answered the door. I don't see how e-mail should be any different.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
why hasn't there been software that would watch incoming messages, and say if > 10,000 messages come thru with the same subject line, flip those over to a "suspect" pile for administrator review, yeah yeah I know admins don't have the time to look thru the msgs, but there will either have to be a regulation on spam so its easily identifiable (header) or software to weed them out adequately, there are some out there.....but how well do they work?
otherwise, guys like this will cash in and live large while, we whine about what a scumbag he/she is.... :)
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
"Isn't technology great?"
Firstly, can anyone envision what could possibly do this? Does your browser have to be trojoned to accomplish this feat? Could it be an IE-only kind of design bug?
Secondly, if he does manage this, he'd better do a better job of hiding his location, because he's about to piss off a *lot* of people with this stunt!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Stealth spamming?
What a retard. Those programmers in Romania sure are smart though.
I liked the comment that he's now unlisted because people kept "driving by" and someone left a box of dog feces on his doorstep.
Think of all the good in the world we can do by leaving a simple box of dog feces on all spammer's doorsteps. If enough people leave enough boxes of dog feces, maybe they'll get the hint and STOP IT!!
Can you think of any other job that is more purely evil than working for a mega-spammer?
Jeez, honestly, I almost think I see Bill Gates in a more favorable light.
It always cracks me up when I read Slashdot articles about spam. The exchange of music, movies, and copyrighted software is universally-- well, almost; there are a few dissenters, but we're a minority-- upheld as just fine and dandy, and those who try to put a stop to it are accused of being totalitarian dinosaurs who are rapidly getting left behind by the Internet age.
Spammers, on the other hand, are the lowest form of scum.
This dichotomy amuses me. If you guys want to be free to trade music and movies and whatnot, then it's pretty hard to argue that spammers shouldn't also be free to email out their billions of pieces of junk mail.
I write in my journal
I remember people mentioning this a few /. articles back when we were talking about an effective way to stop spammers and Bernard Shifman...by reporting them to the Chinese government.
:) As was mentioned in the Buckeye case from last night, they'll steal^H^H^H^H^Hconfiscate all his equipment during the "investigation"...
Earlier this month, said Ralsky, somebody told the Chinese government that a Web company from which he leases e-mail servers in Beijing was sending messages critical of Chinese policy.
Police promptly raided the business and confiscated Ralsky's servers. Although they were returned a few days later, Ralsky now tries to cover his tracks better, so opponents won't know what companies and servers he's using.
Linford said he heard of the raid. "It wasn't us that caused it," he said. "But there are a lot of anti-spam activists, and apparently some of them on their own started organizing a campaign to get the Chinese government to think that Ralsky was supporting" the Falun Gong, an outlawed spiritual group the Chinese government considers subversive. "We didn't endorse that, but it shows you how deep the anti-Ralsky feelings are."
If that worked, maybe we can find someone with a much *longer* reach to take him down.
We need to start reporting him as a terrorist to the FBI. We know how pushy they can be.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
First of all no, this is not great. Second, as soon as he talks about intentionally bypassing a firewall, I start thinking that that sounds suspiciously like "circumventing an access control" which, I believe, is no longer legal.
Nope, no sig
from the end of the article:
Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam.
It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
Is this really possible? If so how?
look up his info from county records and publish it on here? I'm sure he'd appreciate some visits :)
Here's more information on this scum bag:
scum bag info
I'm still looking for the physical adress of his *new* home/data center. If anyone finds it as well as his phone number, or his email *he* uses. Post it!
Oh please, can we? Pretty pretty please with cherries on top?
It'd get my vote.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
too bad SNL's about to dip back into the 80's dark ages again :(
Will Farrell! come back!!!
But, you know, it sure would be a shame if some /.er in the Oakland area were to go get that address. . . and a real shame if s/he decided to post that address here. I mean, what good could that possibly serve?
Ralsky used to be easy to locate, with a listed address and phone number. But his attorney, Robert Harrison of Bloomfield Hills, said Ralsky is so hated by anti-spammers that he's had to be less visible. [...] "Someone even left a package of what appeared to be dog feces." Today, Ralsky says he is trying to keep a lower profile, operating through cell phones and unlisted numbers. Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records.
You have to love the irony...a spam king going to great lengths to avoid what is essentially spam from anti-spammers.
That the reporter doesn't really like spammers either, don't you? Consider this quote:
Today, Ralsky says he is trying to keep a lower profile, operating through cell phones and unlisted numbers. Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records.
Or, in other words, "I promised not to reveal the address, but if you want to look it up, here's how to do so..."
This guy's obviously a crook. Kicked out of his previous profession for illegal behaviour. Sorry, what he does is not legal -- its stealing. He steals MY bandwidth, which I paid good money for. I have to download his crap mail wasting MY TIME and MY BANDWIDTH. But the solution to this is simple: make a comprehensive e-mail address list of all people you know, and have your e-mail program delete (or download only the header of) anything which isn't from someone you know.
As for pop-up ads and other crap, you can prevent that by a host file. I currently have images.slashdot.org on my hostfile, along with the locations of other sites that slashdot banners come from. I see no ads on Yahoo, CNET, DOWNLOAD.com, WSJ.com, MSN.com, etc. Other things to do are to disable playing sounds or animations, and to remove Flash from you're computer. As a last resort, you can just disable images altogether.
The technology that this crook described which would flash pop-ups to people connected to the internet is also illegal -- it steals MY resources (my RAM, my CPU time, my GPU power, etc). The way to stop that is to refuse non-requested pop-ups or other such information, to close off ports, and to install a firewall.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
courtesy of switchboard:
Ralsky, Alan M
5016 Patrick Rd,
West Bloomfield, MI48322-1543
(248)661-3355
What was that address?
No I wouldn't do THAT, but that would be a good place to mail all of your AOL cd's to.
You gotta love this reporter... From the article:
:)
"Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records."
So he *didn't* publish the address, just told you where to find it. Good stuff! I don't know what this says about the reporter's integrity, but in this case I think we can let that go.
"... the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy" - Janov Pelorat
" The computers in Ralsky's basement control 190 e-mail servers -- 110 located in Southfield, 50 in Dallas and 30 more in Canada, China, Russia and India. Each computer, he said, is capable of sending out 650,000 messages every hour -- more than a billion a day -- routed through overseas Internet companies Ralsky said are eager to sell him bandwidth."
I knew our dear friend Mr. Ralsky was pushing some major data, but that's just mind bogling. One can only hope that Michigan's former attorney general, and soon-to-be governor, Jennifer Granholm, may get the power to do something about him.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
If I saw a sweet-ass product on TV, hopped on the computer to buy it, and noticed a spam for this product, I wouldn't buy it in a million years.
Maybe it's because I don't need/want a penile enlargement, breast augmentation, or a mail-order university diploma (or bride, for that matter).
-kentyman
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam.
It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
"Isn't technology great?"
>=|
My thinking is that they may be making money now, with the thousands of new internet users starting daily, and not knowing any better. But eventually, won't the number of suckers decrease as the average net use per person goes up? The longer people are exposed to the spam, the more and more they just ignore it. Much like regular junk snail mail. Then what form of ultra-annoying advertising will they use? I personally never read the emails, and would never consider buying from a company that sinks that low. Just my honest opinion
Does Rasky delete the spam he gets?
Spam is obviously a profitable activity and the writer of the article is trying to emphasize the "millionaire" aspect, but I doubt this guy is a true millionaire.
Has anyone ever considered organizing a directed attack on known spammers? It seems to me that if I have to spend time deleting penis enlargement spam emails and forwarding them onto ucef@ftc.gov, I am losing productivity which in turn costs money.
Considering that that govt in the US is condsidering allowing recording companies to infect P2P networks legally, why shouldn't the same rights be given to a coalition of ordinary people to do directed attacks on spammers and their ISPs who little about the problem?
Romeo & Juliet for 1337 hax0rz! http://www.redcoat.net/pics/romjul.swf
Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records.
:).
In other words, I wont print the address, but here is where you can easily find it
Looks like I should add another email address to my SPAMMERS list. They like to dish the stuff out but complain when people return it. They are clueless leeches who are abusing the system and it is easy to call their bluff. I got an email after I started forwarding the SPAM QUEEN this junk. Their complaining made much more sense when her mailbox clogged up a few days later and I got the following response:
s ourceconsulting.com>
The original message was received at Sun, 17 Nov 2002 14:00:27 -0500
from root@localhost
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
steve
(reason: can't create (user) output file)
(expanded from: <info@dataresourceconsulting.com>)
<laura@datare
(reason: can't create (user) output file)
----- Transcript of session follows -----
procmail: Lock failure on "/var/spool/mail/steve.lock"
procmail: Quota exceeded while writing "/var/spool/mail/steve"
550 5.0.0 steve... Can't create output
procmail: Lock failure on "/var/spool/mail/laura.lock"
procmail: Quota exceeded while writing "/var/spool/mail/laura"
550 5.0.0 <laura@dataresourceconsulting.com>... Can't create output
There's always a bit of a lag as law catches up to society. Sure, some people are duped by email, but some people would also like to burn black people on giant crosses for the crime of being born with a certain skin colour.
We have laws against the burning of people based on skin colour, why aren't there laws stopping spammers yet? Just because you can do something, even to the point of making money at it, it does not mean that it is ethical or moral to do!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If someone posts an IP, I will do a quick port scan of some of the most common ports, and see what is open. Maybe someone else could run Nesses(sp?) on it.
To all you people saying "I wish I had his address," RTFA.
>Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records.
The author tells where to get the address.
I control the time!
This would all go away if we stopped responding to the emails.
But I guess people will always need a cellphone while refinancing their house and getting their penis enlarged.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I live about 10 miles from him. >:)
Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records.
;-)
Allright. Soo... I promised not to print his new address, but If someone were to check this place out..... I mean, its not like the information is not publically available. It is all PERFECTLY LEGAL
I'm starting to think real hard about Spam. Inspired, much to my chagrin, by the recent articles concerning AOLs CD spamming campaign. I firmly believe when we wipe ourselves from this rock, and our ruined civilization is discovered, that alien archeologists will assume that an AOL CD is a religious artifact. But I keep thinking about this article, trying to determine why am I really angry. Partly, I'm upset because this person is making alot of money while I'm at work. Partly it's jealousy. I'm conflicted, that hell yes, if you can make 200K+ a year spamming then count me in; and yet, I've been on the net for a while now, before it got really popular, and I also have some of that old code of ethics with me.
... and frankly that scares me.
But at least I have to hand it to this person, at least he's got some morals, or so he says. And at least Spam is environmentally friendly -- it doesn't affect the groundwater or the air I breathe.
And that's a big point. It reminds me that yes, it's upsetting, but at least it's not a lingering mess, environmentally. It's not a SuperFund site.
I'm reminded of Air-Mail delivery in this country. Airplanes were paid by the pound for mail, so more often than not, they would stuff the US mail bags with rocks to make more money. That's the essence of the point: we realize that there is money to be made in bulk. Pay by the pound, all-you-can-eat, spam-o-rama, and hope that just one sucker is out there.
The other point this article brings to light for me is the fact that, for the most part, we humans are actually brighter than I thought. The spam rate is horrendous. Something like 2 in a big-freaking-number. So Spam is casting a very wide net to catch a few sardines. I think that is quite a boost to our combined egos. We aren't as dumb as we behave in traffic.
I know many will make the point that it's clogging routers, servers, and generally a waste of time, but it's a grey area whether that's hard or soft dollars. What's the cost of one more email?
But we can change this. Why can't email be like instant messaging where only those on my buddy list can email me. The Spammer would have to guess my email address and some complicated guid to send me email.
So for me, at least until they change the SMTP/POP RFC to allow for end-user authentication, I'm okay with spam
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
I believe he's referring to the Windows Net Messenger "feature". See here for more info.
:)
It wouldn't surprise me in the least if that's what he's talking about. Ralsky is just the kind of guy to think that spamming you with pop-ups that can't be blocked by any kind of firewall or spam protection software is just the best thing in the world.
Of course, he's also the kind of guy to not know that particular "feature" can be disabled... see the techtv link to see how it's done
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
This kind of "stealth spam" he's talking about sounds a lot like the Microsoft Messenger Service spam that we've already seen, and dealt with by closing those ports off to outside traffic.
good point, although I'm afraid you'll end up as -1 Flamebait...
I live about 60 miles west of this guy. I wonder what I should get him for Christmas now, because the poop-on-the-doorstep thing has already been done.
Check him out at:
150652777
Or just search for "Alan Ralsky" in the ICQ white pages.
*Nuclear Launch Detected*
Spammers only have to get a fraction of one percent of the people they spam to buy whatever they are selling to make a profit. The costs to the spammers are pretty small, so making some money isn't that hard. A sucker signs on to the internet every minute.
Michael Loves Me!
"Ralsky acknowledges that his success with spam arose out of a less-than-impressive business background. In 1992, while in the insurance business, he served a 50-day jail term for a charge arising out of the sale of unregistered securities. And in 1994, he was convicted of falsifying documents that defrauded financial institutions in Michigan and Ohio and ordered to pay $74,000 in restitution."
I wonder how rich he'd be if he had to pay for all the bandwidth he's ripped from ISP mailservers.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
Yeah, and it can impregnate your wife, stop your kids from doing drugs and increase the length of your penis by up to 4 inches.
"Isn't technology great?"
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
I dont get it. when i come here and someone talks about regulation of the internet for whatever reasons, political, social, whatever; everyone cringes. Yet, it seems that everyone would love to have spammers prosecuted in someway. As much as I hate the spam i get, its legal. The junk mail you get in your physical mailbox is the same as your inbox. it's as simple as hitting a DEL key. I'm sorry, i would rather take two seconds to delete the spam than to introduce legislation to stop these guys. the oxymorons here just appall me sometimes.
"But you figure it out," said Ralsky. "When you're sending out 250 million e-mails, even a blind squirrel will find a nut."
I'm sorry Ralsky, anyone can see that you sir are the nut, and the worst one of all.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
...it's obvious.
Get his master list of addresses.
Then, submit them as opt-outs to his opt-out e-mail address.
Simple != Easy.
Mod parent up.
Thanks.
>Buried in every e-mail he sends is a hidden code that sends back a message every time the e-mail is opened.
Web Bugs are the largest reason I dont view html email messages.
>...that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad
I remember reading about this on slashdot.org awhile back and thinking "crazy", but would someone really waste the time/effort to port scan millions of computers just to send a winpopup? Then it came one day. "Ding!" and my game starts to flicker back to Windows. "What the?!?.. oh." Messenger service got turned off ten seconds later.
Kenny
Almost every single one of these articles includes the name of the spammer. I'm just waiting for the followup article about one of these featured spammers describing how they got the crap beat out of them a la Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, or waking up one night to find a stack of old servers burning in their front yard or soemthing.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
"There are probably about 150 major spammers who are responsible for 90 percent of all the spam everyone gets"
does this remind anyone else of the columbian drug cartels?...sure drugs are everywhere, but a small number of columbian drug cartels are responsible for a large portion of the world's drug traffic...another similarity, we're fighting losing battles against spammers and drugs...we're not making up any ground...
seriously though, why can't some senator or congressman introduce a tough anti-spam bill...does spammers have a strong political lobby like the NRA or big Tobbacco does?...then again, i guess the result would be the same as in this article, spammers would just move more of their actual operations overseas...oh well...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Then he could wind up here
I think you raise a fair Q, one I've been thinking about.
OK, spammers should burn in hell (or will, surely, if you don't like it imagine how God feels about spam clogging His inbox). But how do they rate in the great pantheon of scum ranging from, say, serial snipers to NYC "squeegee men"? Or, with a tech theme, relative to the officers of Enron or Worldcom who, it appears, lied and manipulated to deprive thousands of millions, or certain malicious hackers/phreaks who mess with the lives of honest folk for kicks?
Don't get me wrong, I want to see spammers brought under control, but I wonder if the highly emotional denunciations here are over the top or reflect an unusual assessment of naughtiness.
So -- on a scale of 1 to 100, spammers rank (?).
Do you know how he became a millionaire? By sending $5 in cash to each of the five names below. I didn't believe it at first, but it works!
It looks like it's time for tougher legislation. As a community of internet-loving zealots, we have been battling the problem of SPAM for far too long with too little result. I first obtained a SPAM-blocking meta-address from pobox.com in 1997, and was down to only one or two pieces of SPAM every two weeks; Until this January, that is, when SPAM volume began to surpass their ability to monitor and protect me.
What have we accomplished? Well, we've made spammers' jobs very difficult. We've sown public discontent and developed an extreme social pressure against these activities. We've developed tools that cause large percentages of spammers' messages to fail, or even discover their activities and shut down their accounts. The job is hard, but it's still not hard to turn a huge profit doing it.
We have laws against disturbing the peace, solicitation, and harassment. Companies that use spammers should be fined heavily, to the point that there's no way they could reasonably profit from something like this. If a spammer is found out, the government should seize property and cash in the amount of their payment for this illegal act.
The problem is that while it's socially unacceptable, there is still an economic incentive. Remove it, and you can remove the problem.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
...which package it was? I would have sprung for the PooPoo Grande.
I control the time!
Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records.
Yeah because, you know, he wouldn't want a bunch of unsolicited visitors annoying him and being a pain in the ass. And more and more would just end up showing up, enough to cause him a big headache, and creating problems in his attempts to get his daily activites done.
Sound familiar, asshole? Fucking lowlife spammers.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I must admit, I'm curious about this "stealth spam" thing he mentioned. What could it be? Are those sneaky Europeans writing some sort of elaborate VB proggie that exploits Windows Messaging Services? I admit that I've seen one of those pop up once on a friend's machine; we then promptly disabled the messaging service.
Come to think of it, Messaging really should be disabled by default on XP Home, and possibly XP Pro.
Michael C. Hollinger
I wonder if I could post some dog shit from Australia? I am sure it would be nice and ripe by the time it got there. And what better way to say I love you than a box of dog shit.
"You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything."
I'm calling this BS. Isnt this just the windows messaging thing we've already heard about?
Stuff like this really makes me want to just fall into vigilante/mob action... And he's only about two hours away from me, that doesn't help... So how about a spam-haters meet-up and then we can go 'rehabilitate' some spammers?
/dev/null... I'm thinking maybe setting a procmail rule that just forwards (or better, bounces) spam to known spammers...
e nc e> Once Spammers start 'disappearing' the ammount of spam we see will go way down... </humor>
On another note, I've been thinking about ways of getting around/getting some satisfaction other than just forwarding it to
The other thoughts I have on dealing with it get to be quite a bit meaner... and I shouldn't post things like that... But anyone in the SW/SE Michigan area who wants to go on a road trip and pay a visit to this guy? We wouldn't actually hurt him(right away)...
<humor-not-meant-as-a-threat-or-supporting-evid
If I was that drunk, I would have remembered it -- H. Simpson
Here's the guy, and here's another article about him.
the comparison doesn't hold; if i want to share something with other people i should be able to do so, but it's not the same thing as showing my mp3 collection down your throat.
and on another note; that spamming is profitable doesn't make it right, as has been suggested by some posters. i mean, land mines are profitable...
f64 : i used to be stupid, now i'm not even that.
The real headline: Career Criminal(literally) makes millions by pissing off people for a living.
Gee thanks, I'm sure everyone really enjoyed reading this on a Friday. Puts everyone in a good mood for the weekend.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Since the idea of 'high speed' is relative why do people still put the word in front of cable, dsl or T1's given the possible greater lines available? I can understand it when someone is trying to sell it to you put I would hardly use it in an article to describe a businesses internet hook-up.
Just a small pet peeve =0
As I see it there are about 500 000 parties to a spam e-mail: the company that pays for it, the person that is payed for collecting adresses and sending the mail, 10 persons that are happy to get the unique offer and spend money on it, and about 499 988 victims. To stop spam, one group has to be removed from the equation.
The only way to remove the 499 988 innocent victim is for them to stop using e-mail: not a viable solution. Using e-mail filters may temporarily turn the flood into a stream, but mailers will refine their mail to avoid these sooner rather than later.
The persons getting payed are not going to stop. Legislation against spammers would only move the senders to other countries.
The entities paying will continue as long as it is profitable. Again: legislation would not be effective, IMHO.
The only remaining possibility is to remove the 10 morons paying. How to do that? Barring evolution (accelerated by selective violence >:) ), education of the these people seems the only possibility.
Making everyone understand that buying penile enlargement medicaiton online, is not the best of ideas is not as easy as it sounds. There'll always be someone who thinks it's the best invention since sliced bread. Can the percentage be pushed below the treshold of profitability? I don't think so.
This post is free (as in cheese in a mousetrap).
Instead of Spam Assissin, maybe what we need is Spammer Assissin
So he runs all his operations from a T1 line to his house?
;)
I think we've just found the first legitimate use of a DDoS!
C'mon people...is it really THAT big of a deal? I don't have any problems hitting delete when I receive spam. And geez...the reason it still exists is because it is proven to work. I'd be willing to bet that a good percentage of people who get pissed off after reading stories like this aren't mad about spam, they're mad because they didn't think to get in on it first.
--Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records. --
Does anyone else like this info? Oakland County? Does anyone know if these are online? Here in Virgina, all court records are online. I don't know about realestate. It's county by county too.
Instead of using those free AOL CD's for coasters, maybe we could just mass snail mail them to him. Support your local post office, snail mail American.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
just set up a spammer deadpool?
1. The spammer is identified 2. People contribute $ to the pool 3. The person taking out the spammer obviously will know when it will be done, and hence has the right date/time, so they collect the $
Or a Judge could just assign Guido to do the job as part of his community service.
Ralsky, Alan M 5016 Patrick Rd West Bloomfield, MI 48322 248-661-5166 Leave a message on his answering machine stating that you do not want any unsolicited mail... Or, one could give him a taste of his own medicine and make unsolicited sales calls to his house... or even better: put large ads up on his front lawn.
...and publish it for any anti-spamming arsons out there.
Alan Ralsky is the poster boy for sociopaths. He's saying himself that he will never stop spamming.
Let's make him. He appears to be running his business from his home. Finding the home address is the first step in putting a stop to his activities.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
We need to get him where it hurts, the checkbook. He very likely has a static IP address. Rather than redirecting to dev/null return them to sender with interest (mabye a 3meg attachment that repeats "We do not want or accept mail of this type" over and over). As he is paying for bandwidth, fill it with as much of his 'product' as possible. Let him pay for it.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
i mean with the last spammer story someone posted the womens home phone number, personally i've taken the librety of calling her at 3 in the morning and just not saying anything.
ps if you do do this i suggest you use a calling card because then your number doesn't show up.
The true "cost per eyeball" for television commercials is probably unknown. At the very least, the spammer knows a) exactly who he sent the mail, b) exactly how many addresses were bad, and c) how many individuals opened the mail. OK, he doesn't know exactly how many *opened* the mail, but given how many default installations of Outlook Express are out there, it's a good bet that he knows most of the opened mails.
Contrast that with television commercials. No way to determine: a) how many viewers of the programs the adverstisements are interleaved into, b) no way to determine how many viewers didn't get up to take a sh*t during the commercial.
I know the rating services use sophisticated statistical analyses to extrapolate US viewing habits from a small set of data, but the spammer has a much better idea of the true "cost per eyeball" of his ad.
My 2c.
suck it
I wouldn't shed a tear if he spent the rest of his life in solitary confinement in prison.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
The FTC, states' Attorneys General and other crimefighting organizations need to start going after the fraud that's behind almost every single SPAM message I've ever seen. The spammers (the people sending the email) are almost always hard to get to, but in order for the whole thing to be worth it there must be some way to get to the sellers, otherwise they couldn't collect money from the rubes that reply.
Why can't we get law enforcement to start nailing the scam artists responsible for the spam being generated in the first place? I mean, putting guys in *jail*, big civil fines, and so on.
We can bitch all we want about the clowns sending email, but if the fraudsters were starting to get locked up on a frequent, regular basis it would dry up the market for spammers and they'd move on to something else.
AND if we bitch too long about spam, we're liable to end up with some icky government mandated "system" about email -- how would you like to have to get a license from the government to run an email service? It's to prevent spam, you know...
I've said this in other spam articles, but Bayesian spam filtering seems the best route to go at this point. With little setup you should be largely protected. Get a decent amount of spam to build the initial filtering list on, and as new spam gets caught update the list. It's almost perpetual motion. Then if you aren't actually seeing the mails then the spammers get less and less sucess per million distributed. Hit spammers where it counts.
Now if only I didn't use web based email, or yahoo actually gave a damn about their users other than offering other services that simply generate direct revenue.
Yo! Yahoo, if you make a good email program more people will use it and then more ppl will see all your adds. It's not always about the first level income. If you give people a reason to use your free services then they will see and use your banner ads more
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I really doubt this double-entendre was intentional, but it is very true. The only reason spam is so prominent is that people are making a lot of money from sending them out. They blanket the world in their spam, and there are many thousands of nuts who see themselves losing twenty pounds a week, or whatever else the spamoftheday is proferring, and proceed to follow a link and make a purchase of some sort.
If nobody clicked these things, they would go away. A law that would penalize people who clicked the links in spam would be much more effective than laws preventing the spam to be sent out, IMO, but such a law would also be far too controversial.
I mean, if we start passing legislation to go after the ignorant, what next? ;)
1. Find out if this guy has a web server. /.
2. Post address to another front page article on
3. ???
C:\>
I hate everyone.
I should move to F@%*$&% Canada.
Out of all of the crap that people could be focusing on, and there are groups set up just to stop internet spam. Yea, this guy is sleazy - about as sleazy as the phone company that calls your house in the middle of the day trying to sell long distance service.
If people really wanted to stop getting spam, this guy wouldn't be making so much money. People like spam in their inboxes - or at least enough people do to keep this guy with enough money to put servers all over the world.
Million Dollars? chickenshit compared to the costs involved and the time wasted.
Nope, we need what they have in Iran, but combine it all into a public display of punishment. Chop of their two hands, 500floggings, and every 50floggs, alcohol is tipped onto the spammers back to add extra pain to the punishment.
All this should be televised to shock any people thinking about spamming.
So that is pays for itself, have beats like, "how long will it be before his first scream?", "Will he be a repeat offender", "does his wife think he is a complete loser?"
Well if he can legally send us unwanted data, though email or file shares exploits why don't all of us /.'s send him unwanted data. Lets create a reverse spammer distributed computing style. Instead of one to many many to one. Just as long as the flood is legitimate data. /. ads should work well.
I wonder if he is on his own mailing lists?
http://ea2.co.oakland.mi.us/eap/index.cfm?Ua_Id=E6 ZY6aUL&Token_Id=V0E5YTM0
Because of filters,I get zero spam at work, and I ignore what I get at home. What is the big deal?
Are we going to start arresting people who send ads in the mail-- how many thousands of worker hours per year do they cost? Let's say 4 seconds per day per household on days that mail is delivered. Holy fucking shit! Society will collapse!
DDOS. This is one guy that I wouldn't mind seeing DDOS'ed out of business. I hate having to tell my email server to block every name that isn't on my accepted senders list.
What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
A simpole Yahoo! People Search reveals that there is indeed an Alan Ralsky in West Bloomfield, MI (search results are here). Looks like he's got two phone lines (presumably one for home and one for work), and he apparently has a couple of Yahoo e-mail addresses as well. Send him your spam.
Wonder if his neighboorhood is setup to allow home businesses like his...
:-)
And of course, if someone started letting his neighbors know about his little practice (by say, picketing at 03:00 in the morning).
Flamebait
Serious inquiries only.
The reason spam is so prolific is because it is CHEAP. It costs next to nothing to send a message out. But it got me thinking: is this the right solution?
What if we were charged for the emails that we sent? I don't know anyone that sends out more than 1,000 emails a month, so what if ISPs charged a LOT for sending out more than 1,000 emails per month? Would this work in eliminating spam? Would it be helpful?
It's already intuitively obvious he's an idiot in some ways; He probably swallowed some salesman's pitch for their new software.
The salesman wouldn't even have to be clueless.
(If you think people who send spam are unscrupulous, just imagine the people who develop and sell software intended for that purpose.)
What's this Submit thingy do?
I say more power to him. As much as I hate getting spam, it still is only a minor thing to me to delete them, and sometimes I do find a useful product, the literal gem in the ruff.
We have to remember that it isn't just geeks using the web anymore, and people from all walks are going to us the net for what they know. It is silly to say to that group that they can't do it because we, as geeks or whatever, just don't like it.
Osam Bin Spammer must die! Release the predator drones!
Live web cams
Does he get his own spam?
what ultimately this boils down to is what your parents have been telling you for ages, "dont talk to strangers", well, granted that on the net you cant keep *not* talking to others
slashdot has a cool way to ensure email id's dont get picked up by bots, still on other sites one cant be so *sure*. I maintain one id for personal stuff, one id for professional purposes........ and one id that i use all over, in every website that needs me to enter an id, to which the *Confirmation* will be sent, and that is ALL that I use it for. I hardly check mail in that, but the last time i did, there were 983 mails unread, talk about privacy !!!
until we can find a better way to workaround spammers, guess they are here to stay, its up to us to figure out ways to avoid them.
pends.
co(g)ito, ergo sum : I get screwed at school, so i must be alive.
Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam.
It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
"Isn't technology great?"
Would you want a reference to this on your tombstone?
sHi
I could have a small("tiny")amount of respect for the guy if he was developing his own software. his "spam of death" or whatever it was). I mean I like hearing about people doing innovative stuff, not hearing about people paying others to do innovative stuff. This guy hiring some programmer in india (nothing against india) to write his softwae is really sad. Do it yourself yu moron. What obothers me is that his spamming takes no skill whatsoever. Just a little time and a few computers. A 5 year old could run his operation.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
That's the same reason most people were drawn to Linux in the first place, they wanted a free handout.
The difference with SPAM is that it's something they don't want. Music, movies, warez are all fine and dandy. Advertising is the root of all evil.
If you complain of being constantly bombarded with spam all day long, then you're probably spending too much time at the computer. If you work at a computer all day and complain of this, relax...spam is easy to spot, and can be skipped over in your inbox, or better yet, filtered.
What bothers ME much more, are the advertising methods which force me to take time away from what I'm doing...such as door-to-door sales, and telemarketing. I'd much rather see these people put away for a couple years.....and these methods have been in use for DECADES.
Are you a psychopath?
Ok. You hate spammers, I hate spammers, everyone hates spammers (even other spammers I guess)- but for Christ's sake, you don't go and FIREBOMB people's homes because they sent you some spam!
Get some perspective on life and get your head sorted out man.
You ever hear of filters? Use em. Spam assassin catches 99% of the spam I get, straight to /dev/null. Add 'resume' to a mail filter subject and body and it goes up to 99.9%. You people should be more worried about something that is far more damaging - junk snail mail. No one here complains about that. And that is not something you can remove from you life with a simple program.
is eather that someone gave him the poo bag... or"Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records." so how do i find him again?
or naieve, but what is MMF? Is this some kind of inside joke?
This is funny....a junk mailer commenting on a story about a spammer...
http://www.empower.com/Proximity/index.htm
From the article:
"..Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records."
Would someone in or near Oakland be so kind as to dig up this guy's new address and post it on the web?
This May Sound Naive. But anyway. Is there any way that people could ban together to fight these spammers.
It would have to be legal too. Something like reply to all these spam emails. If thousands of people sent emails back to the spammers wouldn't that cause some sort of Bandwidth/Server space problem for them? I know this probably sounds stupid but I am just so fed up with this shit.
What if there was a website that posted a couple of spam email addresses every day. Then people could go to this web site and email the spam addresses. If we could get millions of people to email these addresses wouldn't it cause some sort of problem? I don't know just curious.
We have here a protocol with no encryption, no user authentication, and message relaying. If you use if, of course you'll get unwanted messages. If you can't deal with it, use a better protocol. If you can't be bothered, you deserve everything you're getting.
For some reason, companies really like pretending email is safe and secure - that way they don't have to do anything. I once had a bank employee assure me that since their e-mail system is secure, it wouldn't be a problem for me to e-mail here sensitive data. She really believed it too.
Any 5 random comp.sci graduates could design a system to replace e-mail in a week, but nobody would want it.
Tell the Department of Homeland Security that this guy is an Evil Terrorist Hacker(tm).
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Why haven't these people been killed yet?
Kill a few and publicize it in themedia and I'm sure the spam will slow down.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
he response rate is the key to the whole operation, said Ralsky. These days, it's about one-quarter of 1 percent.
"But you figure it out," said Ralsky. "When you're sending out 250 million e-mails, even a blind squirrel will find a nut."
Does anyone think that this response rate is several orders of magnitude too big?
one quarter of one percent of 250000000 emails is 625000. I;m sure there is MUCH more then 250million spam emails sent around the world a year. By his calculations every person in the country has bought several penis enlargements by now!
dan.
I used to rail on spammers with the reluctantly held position that passing laws was the only way to hit them where it hurts, give them some jail time, etc.
... UNCLE!)
...) Mozilla mail is getting junk-mail filters, too. And SpamAssassin users all seem to swear by it. Even hotmail is doing a better job of it these days.
:) Just not one set up on my behalf without my consent.
I'd still like to see some spammers go to jail, it's true, but I am getting happier and happier with filters -- and I'd much rather see the spam phenomenon answered that way. (OK, ok, I give, I give
I set my mom up with Mac OS X, and the famous junk mail filtering system within it really is great. I've been adding filters to PINE; they're not Bayesian or otherwise learning-type filters, but they cut down on the junk quite a bit. (Hey, I should add some screenshots to make that a better HOWTO
The increasing usefulness of filters (at various levels) is I think a good reason to be less hasty to call for legal remedies; I am starting to regret my former attitude about it. Yes, there should be laws that protect people from force or fraud, but they should be as limited as possible, should err in favor of free speech (not that most spam much deserves that label). Despite hating spam, I don't want email to have to pass an official censor board and be "approved as legitimate." My *own* censor board (filters), fine
This leaves people who are even further left than I am on the bell curve of computer savvy a little bit in the cold (because it takes some cleverness and free time to counter the clever malice of the spampigs), but on the other hand it gives good incentive to ISPs and other intermediaries (including makers of 3rd party software, mail clients) to make their products better and thus more popular. Popularity is important even when money is not the prime mover, as with Mozilla / Kmail, or Evolution.*
Cheers,
timothy
*Sure, Ximian is a company, and they would like money, but the fact is that you can use Evolution for free.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
There is software to stop mass mailings. It's just that there are loads of dumb schmucks out there who haven't bothered to see if anything actually exists to do the job.
r ceforge.net/c c/h an.com/itymbi/archives/000656.html
Course, it's the same dumb schmucks who get all the spam mail, which suits me just fine.
The *real* problem is all these bloody spam stories on Slashdot. You only get spam these days because you want spam or are too dumb to do anything about it...
http://pyzor.sourceforge.net/
http://razor.sou
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/d
http://www.spamassassin.org/
http://www.zant
etc etc etc etc.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
"Maybe it's because I don't need/want a penile enlargement, breast augmentation, or a mail-order university diploma (or bride, for that matter)."
Jeebus! All in one shopping! A life, shipped to your door, in a box!
I used to work for a similar guy, who ran a hotel in mexico. I'm sorry to all the people who i hurt, because i made it so that no one could complain about him. If you ask, i'll tell you the full way how, and how its always going to be near impossible to get spammers of that high level in trouble.
SORRY EVERYONE!!! DONT GO TO CHATEAU MANZINILLO IN MEXICO!!
"Martha Stewart can lick my Scrotum......do i have a scrotum?" -- Sharon Osbourne
proving that crime DOES pay.
It isn't a crime in most places. If everyone wants spam to be illegal, sure, I'll vote for it. But I really don't think it is the most serious antisocial behaviour on the Internet at present. I'd put viruses and DoS attacks a lot higher, for example, and I don't think I'm alone in this.
Spam is annoying, but is it actually that serious?
OK, spam is not a good thing, but aren't we getting a little carried away here? Personally, I find website pop-ups much more annoying than spam, especially when they crash Mozilla...
Virtually serving coffee
1)Gives the FBI other people to go after, besides modem uncappers in Toledo, OH. If the FBI is going to take computers, let them take computers owned by a fucking SPAMMER, not people that uncap cable modems and *don't* spam.
2)Go after jerks like this guy.. and that other "spam queen." Seize their assets. This is the second story in as many weeks telling how spammers have these nice 1/2 million dollar homes and stuff. Makes it seem rather glorious, doesn't it? Perhaps a law in place would make them look like what they are - thieving criminals that care about nothing but money.
Though I hate spam the last time I checked is is not Illegal? There is an edict of not spamming but this is really just like the honnor system. How is this any different then tele-marketers? The reality is that we are stuck with it. We are an advertising country and this is just another form of it. If you do not like it get filter or better yet stop getting email.
He is not getting money from the revune from the junk e-mail he is just getting paied by other companies to send the junk out.
So all those companies who are not technically savy are probably loosing money to this guy to send out the spam, but they may not nessarly be recieving responces in return, and thus small companies loose money. But that Spam Guy is making a ton of money off the buisness owners. Some buisness owners think because they are seeing more SPAM in the E-Mail that it is an effective way to advertise. So they jump on the bandwagon and loose money. So the only person who is really making money with SPAMMING are people who actually who just give up their computing time to other people to send out SPAM. I only wish I had real numbers to prove it. But that is what I think is happening.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
now I know were to send the subpeona for the lawsuit he'll face after I track 100 spams to his operations, at $500 each it kind of gives me the incentive to sue him. Who wouldn't take up a good cause for $50,000. Washington state also allows class action for these cases.
h tm l
see links to the good stuff:
http://www.wa.gov/ago/releases/rel_spam_091302.
Thanks, for once I look forward to all of my mail boxes crammed with spam.
Karma: Censored (mostly affected by decency laws)
From spamcop.net: Aliases and Addresses Name: Alan M Ralsky 5016 Patrick Rd. West Bloomfield, MI 48322 248-661-3355 AKA: Jeff Kramer 6567 Long Lake Road Birmingham, MI 48009 US Domain Name: cambridgewater.net Jeff Kramer (COCO-227918) aral54 AKA: Additional Benefits 2121 Richard Ave W. Bloomfield, MI 48322 248-200-3492 AKA: Creative Marketing Zone Inc 5016 Patrick Rd West Bloomfield, MI 48322 AKA: Sam Smith (MAILSVC2-DOM) 200 W. Long Lake Drive Troy, MI 48332 US Domain Name: MAILSVC.NET Smith, Sam (SS9752) aral AKA: William Window (template COCO-265759) 4512 Westside Royal Oak, Michigan 48098 US William Window (COCO-265759) aral54 +1 248 544 4314 AKA: Alan Ralsky, (AR1574) aral Sav-Rx (RXPOINT-DOM) Domain Name: RXPOINT.COM 9439 N Leamington Skokie, IL 60077 (847) 677-5516 (FAX) (847) 677-5329 AKA: Alan M Ralsky, (AMR43) amr1 Additonal Benefits 5016 Patrick Drive West Bloomfield, MI 48322 1-248-661-3355 (FAX) 1-248-661-3054 AKA: AB Internet 528 S. State St. PMB 523 Ann Arbor, MI 48104 (There is no building face with that address on it. There *is*, however, a building that accepts that mail - the University of Michigan Student Union, and the Mailboxes, Etc. that is housed therein.) AKA: rxpoint.com 5016 Patrick Rd. West Bloomfield, MI 48322 AKA: MPI Global 5016 Patrick Road W Bloomfield, MI 48322 (248) 661-3355 AKA: mpiglobal 25514 Graceland Dearborn Heights, MI 48125US AKA: Ray Esseily mpiglobal.com 25514 Graceland Drive Dearborn Heights , MI 48125 1-313-278-8845
Idea 2: Track down the T-1 lines and just destroy the servers, obviously this would have to continuously be repeated, for many spammers...
Idea 3: Just burn the place down... See this.*
* I don't actually condone the idea of arson.
Maybe that's the way he does it.
No, no, no, no. Oh...did I say NO.
Charging for email is NOT the solution.
1. Even at a threshold of 1000. So he breaks up his sending into lumps of 999.
2. You then screw all the listservs, hobby groups, non-profits, etc, etc.
3. Junk snailmail costs, and you still get that, right?
4. So it costs. Cut down his profit by 50%, and he STILL makes money. And sends out twice as many.
5. He hijacks some unsuspecting user, and uses THEIR act to send it. THEY get the bill.
No. The answer is...get him on something else. Deceptive marketing, tax evasion, misuse of telephone services.
But charging for email screws US, not him.
Here's a picture, from a story about him settling a lawsuit with Verizon last month.
Kind of amusing that the article mentions the "new" messaging spam system being development by the Romanian programmers.
The spam king seems so pleased about it but I don't why. You can easily prevent this kind of spam just by disabling windows messaging. Just disable messaging in your windows services.
I don't see what the big deal is.
You don't see a whole lot of European spam, do you? This sort of thing could be why:
.gov.uk domain; that page is a quick summary of British data protection law. This is Britain's implementation of a European Union law (I posted the British one because it's in English :-)
http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/principl.htm
Note the
Theft of something as insubstantial as bandwidth and CPU time is difficult to build a case around, but what would happen to spammers if the USA had this sort of law? Never mind the spam, they obviously have a large pile of personally identifiable information - if selling your CDs of e-mail addresses is illegal (because they're being used for purposes other than the one they were collected for), there goes the address sharing for a start.
here its his business, err, "real" business.
I want 2D games back.
...find why the provider is letting the asshole HAVE the T1, knowing that he's using it for SPAM.
Then get his personal e-mail address and opt that in.
It would be a shame if someone took a hatchet to his brand new T1 Line.....
"Someone even left a package of what appeared to be dog feces".
Who wouldn't want unsolicited dog feces delivered to your house? Besides, if you don't want it, you merely have to move it to your trash (or recycle bin.)
"Hi My name is "Osama Bin laden". I like what I do, and I'll never quit, despite being the worlds most hated man, having most of the worlds armies after my head on a plate and chaffing my testes on my ridiculus beard daily."
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam.
It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
"Isn't technology great?"
Okay. I swear, if I was interviewing this guy when he said that, he would have gotten punched in the face. I am one step away from pulling out my 357 and blowing the computer screen to pieces after reading that. For anyone who thinks that this guy should still be allowed to stay in business for complete invasion of someone elses privacy just so that he can have a $750,000 house and live a life of luxury needs to stop huffin' gasoline and prevent our private lives from being invaded further.
Let me lay down the facts: Spamers steal from other businesses in order to deliver messages cheap. I've said this argument before, and I'll say it again. If you pay the Post Office to deliver a package, between the time it is given to the Post Office and the time it is delivered, it is in the possession of the Post Office 100%. Their handling of it, their processing of it, their delivering of it, is all being paid for by the Post Office. When you pay postage to deliver mail / packages, it is because the Post Office is compensated for all the time it takes to deliver the package.
Spammers do not do this. They do not pay for the bandwidth that they use up. They do not pay for the storage space on servers that their spam waits on. They do not pay for delivery of the messages beyond what leaves their servers. They STEAL. This guy, and every other single person who thinks that they can make a mint off invading the privacy of one's own home should be thrown in jail.
This is an outright exploitation of what the internet was set up to be. Stoic advertisements are one thing, because the webpage that a web surfer views is there for free, so the owner of the website is trying to compensate himself for the services he offers. But Spam, as well as this hell-born Son-of-Satan spinoff that our featured spammer friend concocted, is an outright solicitation. Send it all back from which it came, and jail these people who think that this level of exploitation is legal.
This guy gave his full name, and an almost-specific location of his new house... Would you have if you knew you were one of the most hated people on the internet?
The world belongs to the go getters. So someone is sending spam. The technology already exists to filter spam in any email program! Get some open source A-Team together and do it for everyone! What have you been doing the last 20 years, jerking off?
net send? Phew, thought I had something to worry about for a second!
sheephead
7d9e63e9501751ff4bf9307989d5623d *SheepHead
Start lifting weights now!
I'd like to punch that guy in the face.
Fill my mailbox with your shitty advertisments of Betty Blowjobs and Hanna Handjobs and not even have good links on top of that?
Thats like advertising for christianity and leading people to a jehovah witness church.
I mean obviously you're going to get punched in the face.
[cx]
A lot of spam as a web link to click to take advantage of the great offer. Why not build a database of these links and have slashdot "feature" a link each day. Then we can slashdot thier servers.
Here's a map to his house.
Thank you Yahoo!.
I look up the domain listed in the WHOIS registry, and I personally call the person responsible for that domain. I tell them they'll be receiving a phone call from me for every future spam email that comes from that domain. I haven't missed yet. Obviously the volume of spam I receive outweighs my desire to contact each person directly, but for the most offensive spams, this is the technique I've found works best, and with free long-distance and a zillion minutes in my cel plan ... it costs me nothing but a few minutes of time.
Wow, buddy, you've got mejore cojones mentioning ssasination-Ay olitics-Pa or im-Jay ell-Bay on an open line in this day and age. I seem to recall the feds weren't too amused with that modest proposal pre- 9/11.
Why did you quote "loose" in the final sentence? Where you intentionally taking a jab at slashdot standard grammar?
Disconnected. I live in this area, so I figured I'd see if that's where he really lives, but it seems that is not so. Oh well.
Ok, here is an idea. How about a class action suite against this guy from the /. community.
/. Which means we get on average one e-mail from this guy a day. /.
- If he is sending out 650,000 messages every hour that is 15.6 million a day.
- There are about 15 million readers of
- We spend about 30 seconds a day to delete this trash. That's about 125,000 hours a day between all the members of
- At an average rate of $50 per hour that's $6,250,000 of our time per day. 365 days that's $2.2 billion is wasted time.
Now if I did my numbers right, even with the Lawyers fees, we could all end up with a small payday. What do you think? Any takers?
Add to that the issue of "bugging" the e-mail. From what I understand, this may be considered an "illegal wiretap". Bugging 117,000 people a day. Sounds like the FBI would be interested in this.
Someone might just set up a website that advertises itself as a registry of email addresses that don't want spam. And the "list" page might just have that newly reported format c: IE hole. >:) Maybe, but what does dewkie know? Dewkie know nuttin'.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Why have the providers of free web email and the creators of email clients not created email software that allow users to reject all unauthorized email? The process would be similar to managed email lists where unauthorized email addresses get their email rejected and there is a simple way for people to request authorization. It should be simple to prevent spam software from figuring out how to send messages requesting authorization.
Any volunteers to set up an central fund for collecting and distributing the donations? You could probably host it here.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Thankyou
Look at your state's laws. Mine? Has a lot of very specific requirements. One of them, I've never seen a single piece of spam actually fulfill. This means every single person who's sent me a piece of spam email since that law was passed... has, in fact, broken the law.
That last paragraph worries me. Just being online and having a popup pop up would be annoying. I know from experience that my neutered Grokster will pop-up ads while I'm doing something else even when it's minimized and I'm running Popupstopper. It's especially bad when I'm gaming and just about to frag a lamer or finish conquering Europe and the game exits to Windows. If I have to put up with that crap even when I'm not filesharing, I might have to do something drastic.
99% of slashdotters HATE this man.
:P
:P
Like me
What percentage does envy this same man for the money he "earns"?
What if someone was to point an email harvester at these "make money from home" and "i'm a self made millionaire" sites and harvest there emails. filter them as best as possible to make a list of just the fools who runs the sites and then start sending them paypal bills for wasting my time?
Ave Molech Setting
It is NOT Windows Messenger. Windows Messenger cannot bypass firewalls!!!
It is a trojan of some sort.
Do I hate spam? Of course I do, its annoying to delete and sort through and it has gotten so bad some times I have needed to change e-mail addresses. My current solution is to have one primary email address and a SPAM address from a free e-mail server. Anything I register for on the web gets the SPAM address.
America's legal system works with people pushing the law. There would be no judicial branch in government if people did not stretch the limits of the law. Until them, getting unsolicitaed e-mail, phone calls, and mass mailing will occur. Personally I find mass mailings annoying as hell because I have to carry my junk mail, credit cards applications, coupon books, and newspapers up three flights of stairs which in turn fill my garbage which I need to bring down three flights for no apparent reason. Until it is outlawed, let the government fight the fight, I would think you would want the same rights as an individual, whether you make the decision to program for a living or make porn sites or be a police officer.
Is it me, or does it seem that most spam pieces slant toward the "pro-business" aspects of it, and take everything they say at face value.
If a journalist wants to show spammers for what they are, just ask: "Do you relay your mail off of unauthorized open mail servers?" According to Ralsky's record on Spamhaus, he does, or did.
On Aug. 15, Ralsky was interviewed on NPR. It was the typical pary line, about how it's not illegal, and they don't send porn, and they honor removes, etc., all very cheerful. But, once, she asked whether he used "blind relays"....
Quietly, he answered, "I won't make a comment on that." I wish she would have elaborated on it, because most of the listeners wouldn't have understood that this means hijacking open mail servers, which is generally considered theft of service.
Oakland County Michigan. I live there. I actually live about 6 miles south of his intersection, so I will wander up there and see what I find. As far as records... so far I managed to find his old address on Patrick St. however it has already been posted on here.
Whoops! Correction: host it here.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records.
Now, what someone needs to do is send out millions of copies of his new address to his spam lists, and the problem will correct itself.
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
That will teach him to fill my mailbox with crap
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
How is this different from publishing the address/phone numbers/etc of abortion doctors? I'm not making a moral statement here, but seeing the comments here about firebombing his new house, I'd say that it only takes one wacko.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
Anyone know? Just curious! :o)
That is a red flag to the IRS, saying, "Audit me please!"
They look for that, and it is really hard to get their approval once you are audited.
I've got a few mailing lists I'd like to sell his name to.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
Ha! You've gotta love reporters sometimes :-D
if someone dumped about a hundred tons of spam in this guy's front yard. ..
Uhm, are you insane AND trying to insult people? Stop rambling and go play with yourself.
a dead goat head in his bed, perhaps?
Ya know, I do think a tax on OUTGOING mail would be very good. I'd pay up to $.05 for each email I sent out. Shit, that'd only add up to $1.00 a month for me. Small price to pay for curbing spam.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
that left the dog feces?
'Hey. that's me! I got mentioned in the article. I need to call mom and show her. She'll be so proud.'
Windows has a windows messaging service, if you're sniffing a network you can tell which machines have it enabled. Try doing a 'net send "foo"' from a command prompt. This is what he's talking about. The fix is to disable the windows messaging service (different than msn messaging), but this is beyond most average users w/o explicit instructions. Behold! The wonder that is Windows strikes again! (why I use os x)
A locked-out mail system whose gatewaym ",
a) rejects all incoming mail with message
"403 Payment required, url= http://www.paymentsystem.com/user@mynospammail.co
Token=ABAAS66554452"
Then message with token from payment system and this token in X-payment header will be accepted.
b) Internal mail requests payments immediately
c) You can put your friends IDs into payment system so the mail from them is free.
And one wacko is all we need.
That's right, not FP
YOU FAIL IT
Step 1: fp
Step 2:
Step 3: Respect
Step 1: Not FP
Step 2:
Step 3: FAILURE
Step 1:- Troll Step 2:- Step 3:- Profit!
I think that O'Really's Tracing Spammers says everything that we all think about these wonderful folk.
Are you paranoid if you know that they just want to know everything you say and do?
Why change smtp/pop? Just add access controls to your mta - a little hacking in postfix/qmail (a lot of hacking on sendmail), bingo - only get email from those you want to. This doesn't fix the bandwidth problem, and it does somewhat reduce the effectiveness of email (send anything anywhere to anybody), but... no more spam.
This sucks, this guy signed me up on quizyourfriends.com using my personal email address. DANG IT.
No one has had that address for the past 3 years.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
In the olden days, folks had to take the law into their own hands.
I say we crucify him!
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I have to refute this. Yahoo's spam filtering catches about 80% of the spam that I receive on my account there.
Just now I checked my Yahoo account, and I had 78 emails in the bulk folder and 15 in the Inbox. Of that 15, 14 were SPAM. That is 77.5% just for today.
This is good. I use my Yahoo account primarily for things that I suspect might clog up my real email account.
DFossmeister
No Not Again! Its whats for dinner.
Here's the problem with stories like this: spammers lie. So, just because this guy says he's a millionaire, doesn't mean he is. Spammers have been trying to 'legitimize' spam for years by telling everyone how successful it is, how much money they make, how much people really really WANT spam.
But saying it don't make it so. I find it hard to believe that there's really any long-term profit in spam. The cost of running around from isp to isp has to be high and, with so many spammers out there competing, the total profits of the industry are going to be spread pretty thin.
Maybe I'm wrong but, as a sysadmin and entrepreneur, all the offers I've received to do spam have never amounted to much. I turn them down for ideological reasons but, even if I had no ethics, I still wouldn't do it because it doesn't look financially viable.
Seriously, I know that it is not just nerds who get pissed off by spam, I wonder how many organized crime participants are pissed off enough about spam that they would put out a hit, or at least threaten him in ways that those of us without connections can't...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
In addition to being a spammer, he is probably also a frivolous lawsuit filer. :-)
evil adrian
Rooting around on the interweb superhighway looking for info on radionics/psionics/Charles Cosimano, I encountered this: http://www.keelynet.com/interact/Arc_7_98-12_98/00 001970.htm In which I would like to draw your attention to the following passage :
"There are some mailing list dedicated to this:
[Note you HAVE **NOT** BEEN ADDED TO ANY LIST's, these are
just what the original messages said when I subscribed to
these lists!]
{Also note that once you get on Charles Cosimano's list, it
is litterly impossible to get off. The unsubscribe command
does not work, and the moderator has not been heard from for
years to do it manually. So if you post all you get is
nasty complaints from the people who can't get off the
list.}
"
Please note the key points -- 1. weirdo freakazoid mailing list, 2. seems impossible to get off, you can hear the wails of the damnned.
Know the email of any enemies that would deserve such abuse?
Further research could probably turn up other moribund/rogue mailing lists that may be more appropriate for other marks.
THIS IS INFORMATION IS INTENDED SOLELY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Why can't the FBI seize this company's computers? Seriously, couldn't companies (or individuals) claim that they've suffered materially?
Or is the FBI too busy protecting big business from the little man?
Ralsky said he includes a link on each e-mail he sends that lets the recipient opt out of any future mailings. He said 89 million people have done just that over the past five years, and he keeps a list of them that grows by about 1,000 every day. That list is constantly run against his master list of 250 million valid addresses.
...and this is one of the least honest, although if he's only using it to verify effectiveness (open and respond vs. open and delete vs. delete outright), then I suppose that's acceptable.
I'm not so sure I believe him, frankly. If it's true, though, this is one of the most honest things a spammer can do, and I'll congratulate him for it.
Ralsky has other ways to monitor the success of his campaigns. Buried in every e-mail he sends is a hidden code that sends back a message every time the e-mail is opened. About three-quarters of 1 percent of all the messages are opened by their recipients, he said. The rest are deleted.
I hate spam. This comes as no surprise, but at the same time, I must grudgingly acknowledge the spammers' right to do business the way that they do it. Publishing a phone number invites telemarketers, publishing my address invites junk mail, and publishing my email address invites spam; it's the cost of that convenience. The spammers have their tools to get through to me, and I have mine to combat them, and that's all fair.
However, I think a certain integrity is encumbent on the profession. If you must send spam, I expect you to honor my unsubscription requests and not redistribute my address after I do so. Don't use my computer as a mail server without permission. Don't use dirty tricks to get my friends' and family's email addresses from my account. Don't pretend your advertisements are anything but what they are.
Do this much, and I'll at least respect your business. Lie and cheat to get further ahead, and you just might get another box of feces on your doorstep.
Whenever I read about one of these spammers, a quote from Lester Bangs on the movie Almost Famous comes to mind:
"and they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it."
Change rock and roll to the Internet and I think it fits.
This guy is way out there
Ok, so lets combine the stories!
Test out the HERF devices on spammer's computers.
At worst, nothing happens.
At best, cooked spam.
The Oakland County Register of Deeds' site is:
http://www.co.oakland.mi.us/clerkrod/
The number there is:
Register of Deeds: 248-858-0605
There is no online search.
1. This guy is not rich! He's living paycheck to paycheck, he has several huge loans and he has a lot of credit card debt.
2. It doesn't matter that he doesn't own anything he has. He knows how to take advantage of the system. If his spam business starts to go sour, he just declares bankruptcy again and gets to keep all his stuff. Then he sells some of it and moves on to his next scam.
3. He's always made his money by stealing from other people. Look for words in the article like "bankruptcy", "insurance", "defrauded", and "marketing".
Why we allow people like this to live, I'll never know...
...just my 2 gil.
here?
Look for 740,00$ (the price listed in the article) -- It's the only one listed for the last month or so.
#1: I live in this idiots area.
#2: Who the hell are the idiots providing service to him? I think it's time service providers who allow this are dragged through the same penalties as the spammer himself.
Fucking idiots.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
What will make spam and spammers go away? Unfortunately, I don't think there's one 'silver-bullet' solution to the problem (no wisecracks about using the bullet on Ralsky, please ;))
In part, spam is a technological arms race: spammers use more sophisticated ways of getting their messages out, and anti-spammers counter by developing more advanced ways of blocking them. Building a better mousetrap will only force the mice to get smarter. Hacking is not part of the solution, either: if we complain about legislation permitting corporate hacking, we should refrain from doing it ourselves (it's a moral high ground thing...)
Part of the spam problem is money: at least a few people have mastered the "1. Send spam 2. ??? 3. Profit!" formula. An article describing "How I got rich in three easy steps" will, unfortunately, inspire at least a few wannabes, which leads to the next part of the problem...
People. The famous quote that "there's a sucker born every minute" is absolutely true. People can be dumb. People can be greedy. People can be unscrupulous. In an age where someone can blanket the planet with a new get-rich-quick scheme, a pill or cream to enhance sexual prowess, a free vacation to wherever, it's almost guaranteed that their message will find someone who doesn't even hesitate to sign themselves up.
The final part of the problem is something I've never seen mentioned anywhere else: ego. From the article, it sounds like Ralsky knows exactly what he's doing, and he's reveling in the fact that he's notorious/infamous for being one of the best at doing it.
So, how to fix the problem? Use not just one, but every tool at our disposal:
1. Continue developing more sophisticated ways of keeping spam from ever reaching user mailboxes and/or desktops, and try to anticipate how spammers will react in response;
2. Use the existing laws every country has to deal with fraud. Urge local and/or national prosecutors to go after the big fish, making them examples for the smaller ones. Develop international working groups to attack the problem when spammers move their operations overseas. (okay, that last one's a little optimistic, but hey, at least it's an idea...) Nail the fraudsters, shut down their operations, penalize their profits away. The less profit there is, and the harder it is to keep it, the less people will be tempted to try it;
3. Educate, educate, educate: spread the word on how to deal with spam (don't click the opt-out link, don't reply to unsubscribe, learn how to keep your e-mail address from being harvested, etc.) On another level, urge the (possibly clueless) people who think it's a good marketing technique that spam just makes them look like every other get-rich-quick artist they hate getting e-mail from.
4. Marginalize the big fish: the more someone like Ralsky reads about himself in the press or on the Web, the more it feeds his ego. The more dog poop he scrapes off his front steps, the more it eggs him on to keep spamming. Shame and guilt can still be two pretty powerful social-engineering methods, but allowing him to portray himself as a 'victim' of those nasty-evil hackers will only serve to help him and his cause.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
I can bench press 300lb, run marathons and did kickboxing in my school years.
Sign me up, sarge.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
It occured to me that if anyone does something like this it may be more effective to go after the ISPs rather than the spammers. If ISPs realized that hosting spammers could cost them a lot of money they might be a little more selective about who's money they take. A massive DDoS stream of several gigabytes per second consisting of the string "just say no to spammers" might do the trick.
Still, I wouldn't like to be one of the innocent legitimate customers of the target ISP or one of those whose machines are hijacked to act as zombies for the attack.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Read the FIRST POST! by myself in this story...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
The story made me thing about the way the internet works. It's clear to me that it promotes creativity and innovation, even if the purpose of such creativity and innovation is aiming at doing something that is considered WRONG by most people: from pirating software to promoting pornography and sending spam mail. I sometimes wonder if complete freedom is a good thing for anyone, as my rights end where your rights start. I think freedom is good, and the way in which media corporations can beat piracy, and we can beat spam is by outsmarting our enemies. Kind of like in a jungle, but instead of tearing spammers to pieces we can use our code to stop them. I wonder if there is any group working on open source solutions to stop spam. Anyone? Decameron
diegoT
why can't spam look more like this
In the US 'fag' refers to a 'homosexual man', not a cigarette.
Just thought you might like to know that. I know a lot of people consider it wrong, but I was wondering how faggotry could be considered profitable...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Only in America could this cunt brag about being a spammer and a convicted criminal while sitting in a 750k house
want to block 99.999999% of spam and are not american ? simple , make a rule
if(anyField.contains("$"))delete it
you americans need to stop fucking, that way you wouldnt have the stupid race of people you have now
I have a feeling that if we ever bought a product from a telemarketer, we'd be put on the 'sucker' list and get bombarded with even more telemarketing
I think that at this point in the development of capitalism, every inhabitant of the planet is born in the sucker list. And there are fewer ways out each day...
Did you like his comment about a web bug that tracks whether the e-mail was opened or not? A little 1x1 pixel image that an HTML reading mail program has to read to open the message is quite an easy way to see what messages are opened and by whom (ip address anyway).
So does anybody else think that using a simple text e-mail reader is now a good thing? If you are reading html, you are giving away information, and I'd rather not do that with spammers.
No really. He's got to be making tons more money to piss off that many people. Come on...
No, what if, say, 10% of his victims will send him a can of real Spam(TM)? Or gather with the cans into a nice projectile delivery action?
I'd recommend to have the cans open. And matured in a warm place for a few weeks.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Interesting...
n _2 0021117.htm ...listings of recent real estate transfers in Oakland County. Now, we don't know exactly when he moved in, but at least this is a place to start. It looks like this feature comes out every Sunday, so the URL can be renamed close10n_20021110.htm, etc... Is there anybody who is familiar with Oakland County that can parse through this info, looking for an approx. $740k house in the right area? (Halstead and Maple)
From the same paper:
http://www.freep.com/realestate/oakland/close17
It shows an effect of the confusion of law and justice. The spammer states that he doesn't do anything illegal. As if that made it good. Using his response rate figures and about 1 or 2 seconds people need to decide to hit delete, one might easily consclude that every return he get's is paid for by an hour of other people's work. So his house has a price to be build, but the price all these others pays certainly is much, much higher. So he uses the term "not illegal" to hide his egoistic and parasitic behavior. This is typical for a techno culture that doesn't favor thinking about the morality of one's acts.
I mean when was the last time you got spam and actually sent off for that free Viagra or gave your bank account details to a Ugandan businessman who can't get credit?
;o)
It isn't even targetted - bloody Koreans sending unreadable Email, or women getting "enlarge your penis" spam (if it worked on women, it'd be quite impressive though!)
All the spam that I get (that which gets through procmail) is rediculous - you'd have to be a total AOL user to believe any of it
The same with popups - all that "your computer is spying on you" crap with buttons made to look like it's Windows telling you this and not a website.
So the only way I can see that spam works is by collecting Email addresses to sell to other spammers, which is the dumbest form of pyramid'ing I've ever heard of!
#include <sig.h>
Sign him up in their list... nuff said
I don't know about you, but if I started receiving e-mails from "friends of friends" trying to sell me stuff...I'd have a serious talk with all my friends that are giving away my e-mail address to people I don't know.
If I know someone who wants to sell something, I'll pass the request to my other friends myself...and I won't just send an e-mail to all the friends on my list either...I'll send it only to those that I believe would have some interest in the product...for one reason or another. That's in the interest of helping both my friends, not just the seller. One needs to get rid of it, the other needs (or at least I think he/she does) to aquire one. If I don't think about this, I'm spamming, whether it's directed to a friend or not.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Ralsky said he turns down many who want his services.
"I don't do any porn or sexual messages," he said, citing a promise he made to his wife, Irmengard. Instead, he sends e-mail come-ons for things like online casinos, vacation promotions, mortgage refinancing and Internet pharmacies.
How many times have I read this one? The "I don't spam XXX emails" is a tired line (and I don't really believe it).
Just for fun, let's see an article about a porno spammer defending their business practices. If someone knows of one, please reply.
Also...aren't Internet pharmacies illegal in most states? In that case, wouldn't advertising them be illegal (for example, you can't advertise crack)?
Why don't we all call up Buckeye Cable and tell them he has uncapped his modem?
In windows you would use 'net send' and then something which I forget
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
one thing that i've noticed is that i've never seen the email address of a spammer in the articles on the subject.
if they don't believe that spam is bad why don't they include their own primary email address in the news stories?
What's with all the posts mentioning the interviewer hinting at the location of the spammer's home address getting modded up?
I have never seen such a gross misuse of moderation privileges. You should all be ashamed of yourself! *wags finger*
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
So the spammer doesn't want to give out his address. He doesn't want to be spammed in real life. It's kind of ironic.
Is spamming a form of terrorism? That depends on how you define terrorism. The biggest differences I see in the definitions of terrorism are in whether those taking the actions are intending to cause the fear or not. Certainly the fear of opening your mailbox to find spam, or even the fear to open your ISP bill to find surcharges due to mail volume, do not rise to the level of fear of being shot while pumping gas. But spam is certainly causing people to fear doing things like signing up for things they do want to get in email because of the perceived (in most cases) or real (in some cases) that the email address might end up on more spammer lists. And while that isn't a fear of bodily harm, it is the kind of fear that is hurting the economy. And I really do believe it is at least partially to blame for the slump in the economy in the US and Europe.
Most spammers probably aren't actually intending to cause fear of email. I'm sure they'd rather there be no fear of is, as then their goals of getting rich are easier to accomplish. But still, that fear happens, and the spam is the principle cause of it.
Technically, many real terrorists are probably not really trying to cause terror so much as to cause some effect. The sniper in the area of Washington DC might well have done it more for the kicks. It's related to causing terror, but not exactly. But we might never really know his true motives. Still, that's no comfort to everyone reacting in that fear.
What we need is a new word (or phrase) to effectively call spamming a form of terrorism, while still not trying to equate it to bombing busses of school children, or slamming airplanes into tall buildings. The goal should be to get it well understood that spam is hurting business and the economy. Maybe something like: promophobia?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
He's claiming that one out of three spams that are opened in something that renders HTML get a response. I always knew the unwashed web-browser-email masses were dumb, but not that dumb...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
HERE . He's not looking so good.
al@rxpoint.com
John Susek
If slashdot stopped printing all the "Crime Does Pay" stories, where would we go for our Microsoft news?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
And no matter what laws we put in place, as long as the MARKET exists, the problem will persist.
The only hope is to make spamming unprofitable... which is highly unlikely in America, but one can hope that we'd eventually evolve to the point that we don't drool over every marketing scam that hits our TV, Mags, Newspapers, Buses, Billboards, Popups, etc., etc.
This newsgroup article describes what happened to one of Ralsky's associates in China when someone complained, included the message "thank you for your support of Falun Gong" in the complaint, and CC'd it to someone in the Chinese government.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
C:\>net send ?
/DOMAIN[:name] | /USERS) message
The syntax of this command is:
NET SEND (name | * |
C:\>
~~~~~
That'll work as long as the recipient's messenger service hasn't been disabled. We used to have so much fun here putting that inside of a while(1) in a VBS or in a BAT loop. Really fucks up a game of Q3, hehe.
foe me, freak me.
Hmmm, my ISP connection has been crap lately. I wonder if it has anything to do with other people on the same ISP downloading pr0n/mp3s/warez all day and using up the bandwidth?
How is the incovinence to you any diffrent then if they were paying for movies with Movielink.com or something? Your example is the most idiotic use of logic I've seen in a long time. In other words, no, it is not the same thing.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
See, that's your opinion. Others' opinions differ on this matter. That's why the line between communication and spam is not clear. While it may be easy for you to delineate, it is quite impossible to delineate for everybody.
I write in my journal
Maybe that would stop this spam madness. Mailing lists can be sold only if the entity owning the lists is bought-out; and mailing lists are purged when a company goes into insolvency. And while the legislature is at it, maybe they can make "opt-out" features illegal too.
I've taken to using different email accounts to sign up on different websites (and actively opting out of the stupid mailing list option) just to see who is selling my info to whom despite the opt-out. I figure, at the end of the day, when I get enough names of companies that think nothing about violating the privacy policy, I'll just sue all of them for intentional infliction of emotional damage and laugh myself to the bank.
haha suck on that [state]..i wasted your time plus your judge reduced my fine..so suck on that..and suck on that some more
Until this problem is dealt with at the protocol level - it will remain a problem.
People just need to realize that the whole POP/SMTP non authenticated - forged friendly mail protocols that have become the UNBENDABLE standards are flawed and need to be changed.
Much the same way that Ford had to redesign the fuel tank locations on there economy cars thanks to the fireball friendly Pintos. When the Escorts came out -- they could not get away with saying -- "the fuel tank location and fuel system is the same as the Pinto, because it is our standard."
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
You only get spam these days because you want spam or are too dumb to do anything about it...
/.'ers use the word "dumb" or "stupid" to describe people who don't know how to update a CVS tree or install linux or, in your case know 5 spam-blocking tools off the top of their heads.
I've seen
Being a computer geek doesn't make you wise or even intelligent.
luxury home near Halsted and Maple in West Bloomfield .....
I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records
The reporter found the address in public records. Can't someone who lives in that county do the same? The address should be widely publicized. This is perfectly legal, and will probably cause some annoyance to the spammer. For example, some annoyed recipients of spam might stuff a lot of junk mail in his mail box, or something.
Mr. Spammer, you swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of
filth. As they say in Texas. I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a
boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't
go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.
You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little
worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a
cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a
revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.
You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared
richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into
this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned
by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed
themselves in recognition of what they had done.
I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species
as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very
thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid
you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a
fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?
You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive
its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to
fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame
of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of
your own trite, foolish beliefs.
You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid,
nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an
ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you.
You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land
that reality forgot.
And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important
statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What
fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted
tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat,
spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are
a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious.
You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a
meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you
puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.
On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are
deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of
wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You
are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow
wherever you go.
You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock.
You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted
boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless
crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You
cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff.
You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You
dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill.
You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are
degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you
exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I
cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid.
Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond
the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are
trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that
even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no
intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on
Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire
galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll.
Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid.
Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of
stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else
as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go
on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you my not hear
from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride
your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant
trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.
The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. Maybe later in
life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will
have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us
"normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of
mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons
in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known, that
this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just
wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I
wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that
seem to be placing such a demand on you.
P.S.
You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly,
deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent,
opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted,
racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged,
imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous,
byzantine,conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious,
splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful,
destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist,
narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic,
idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling,
restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic,
stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting,
censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous,
flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile,
clueless, and generally Not Good.
In other words, go away.
A bunch of uncoordinated extremely over/underweight dorky slashbots aren't beating ANYONE up
Wrong. One (or a few) uncoordinated extremely over/underweight dorky slashbots aren't beating anyone up. A BUNCH, however, that's a different story.
Or maybe they would just pay the neighbors kid $50 a week to scoop the shit into a wheelbarrow and spray off his deck every morning?
Something tells me money isn't a prob for this guy.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Does anyone notice that neither the reporter or the spammer have a clue?
"Stealth reponse" that notifies him when people read messages.. Right... I bet that works about 1/10000 mails. Some Romanian (how come it's always the Romanians, Bulgarians, etc.. that are credited with this sneaky stuff) came up with a super-spam that can practically popup adds on your forehead without you knowing it?
Freaking ridiculous. A scumbag _and_ an idiot both at the same time.
The parent post highlights two of the most salient attitudes of this community, and juxtaposes them in a new way.
The moderators predominantly downgrade him as "troll" and "flamebait".
A little bit touchy are we? We should at least be able to laugh at ourselves.
MUUUUUUUHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
According to this which shows only one house that was sold for $740,000 in Oakland Count, MI this past month.
The address?
836 Mohegan St
Birmingham, MI 48009-5667
740k for an 8,000 sq ft house is pretty good for considering the area west bloomfield.
"I like what I do. This is the greatest business in the world." But of coruse he's gonna say that if he can afford a $740,000 house.
Bullcrap. That is all.
$45 per U Colocation Special
Why not just tell the feds about a way that terrorists could send their encoded messages over the internet and just put the idea in a few public forums, so we know that the idea is publicly known and could be getting used by (GASP) terrorist networks.
The idea...
Put the addresses of all of your cell members on the internet, so that the spam harvesters get the address, and then BL hires Ralsky and other spammers through some front to send email (with a hidden message) to his entire list. The feds can no longer tell which receiver of the email was the intended one, and have no idea how to pursue this primary recipient of the email. Spam has no become a possible channel for terrorist communications, and Ashcroft will have it made illegal...
I know it is a stretch, but so is most of the crap that Ashcroft wants done.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I'm in the area too. Maybe we could organize a bunch of us and we could all carry the camera to his door (live feed of course).
Might be too little for a whole series, but certainly enough for one episode.
Slashdot: Liberal News for Nerds. Liberal Stuff that Matters.
..was the "I can't reveal his address, but here's how to get it" line. Nice touch.
Seriously, when are we going to get some legislation to help fight spammers? We have an operations team of about 10 people. At any given time, at least one of them is cleaning out the mail relays, blocking spammers, etc. Over the course of a year, these resources dedicated to fighting spam (say that in a real deep voice and you can sound like a spam fighting superhero!) add up to some insane number of dollars that we have to spend, just to keep afloat. I don't care what software yo u have to help you out, "SpamAssasin" etc, there has to be human intervention at some level. I say we get a senator, teach him how to muck with sendmail, and sit him in front of a mail relay console for a week fighting spam, then see how they feel about spam.
If this article confuses you, don't worry. It was posted yesterday in a much clearer fashion.
He moved, as stated in the Fscking Article!!!!
Sure, spam doesn't come close to (say) creating a Superfund site on the Big List O'Evil. However, it generates much more emotion because it is in all* of our faces each and every day. Furthermore, it's a tech-related problem, which sets off that "well, just FIX IT!" nerve in lots of geeks.
:)
I only get maybe 10-20 spam messages a day, so Just Hitting Delete is still an option. But it irks me that I have to spend time downloading these messages -- and I am reminded of that every time I check my email, each and every day of the year.
* Those with spiffy and 100% functional spam filters excluded, of course.
Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries!!!!
J.
Since he lives in west bloomfield and his lawyer (who probably lives near by) lives in bloomfield hills, I was able to find this map to his house, and the following from spamcop.
Aliases and Addresses
Name: Alan M Ralsky 5016 Patrick Rd. West Bloomfield, MI 48322 248-661-3355
Aliases and Addresses
Jeff Kramer 6567 Long Lake Road Birmingham, MI 48009
Domain Name: cambridgewater.net
Jeff Kramer (COCO-227918) aral54
Additional Benefits
2121 Richard Ave W. Bloomfield, MI 48322 248-200-3492
Creative Marketing Zone Inc 5016 Patrick Rd West Bloomfield, MI 48322
Sam Smith (MAILSVC2-DOM) 200 W. Long Lake Drive Troy, MI 48332 US
Domain Name: MAILSVC.NET
Smith, Sam (SS9752) aral
William Window (template COCO-265759)
4512 Westside Royal Oak, Michigan 48098 US
William Window (COCO-265759) aral54
+1 248 544 4314
Alan Ralsky, (AR1574) aral
Sav-Rx (RXPOINT-DOM) Domain Name: RXPOINT.COM
9439 N Leamington Skokie, IL 60077
(847) 677-5516 (FAX) (847) 677-5329
Alan M Ralsky, (AMR43) amr1
Additonal Benefits 5016 Patrick Drive
West Bloomfield, MI 48322 1-248-661-3355 (FAX) 1-248-661-3054
AB Internet 528 S. State St. PMB 523
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
(There is no building face with that address on it. There *is*, however, a building that accepts that mail - the University of Michigan Student Union, and the Mailboxes, Etc. that is housed therein.)
rxpoint.com
5016 Patrick Rd. West Bloomfield, MI 48322
MPI Global 5016 Patrick Road W Bloomfield, MI 48322
(248) 661-3355
mpiglobal 25514 Graceland Dearborn Heights, MI 48125US
Ray Esseily mpiglobal.com
25514 Graceland Drive Dearborn Heights , MI 48125
1-313-278-8845
200.73.181.100 Please slashdot this spammers site. He not only spams, but uses MY RETURN ADDRESS as the originating message.
Sym doesn't count.
In general, no client-side filtering is a solution.
IT STILL USES MY BANDWIDTH TO DOWNLOAD.
This isn't a problem with broadband, but for those who can't get broadband, spam takes too long to download before filtering.
The problem is magnified massively by wireless devices - It's almost impossible to buy a phone/get cellular service that doesn't allow you to check your email from your phone.
The problem is, thanks to the small screen of the phone, you *can't* check your email.
If you have an integrated PDA phone like mine (Kyocera 6035), you're somewhat better off. Theoretically you could do client-side filtering.
Problem is:
a) 14.4 connection
b) None of those solutions exist for PalmOS.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Yes it is our fault because we have not tackled the issue of how to design an email system that (1) only functions between AUTHENTICATED participants and (2) incorporates accountability.
There are billions on the net. It is truely amasing that there are as few spammers as there are! As I read the artical I was amased that so many people are willing to sit and bitch about a problem rather than actually do something about it.
Systems like Spews, ORBS, RBL's and spam filters do help. But IMHO the problem is that the email systems we use are generally far to trusting.
Suppose email was an opt in system that required a sender cert before it would receive mail. This cert could cost real money (firstly) and could identify the sender (secondly). Furthermore it could be tied to a fair use contract where the participants agree to NOT send spam. They could agree to forfeit their connection rights and compensate for damages in the event they breach the contract.
This creates a situation where legitimate users can get their cert at a minor cost to themselves. On the other hand, a spammer will _usually_ find his cert is pulled probably within hours of abuse. For a spammer trying to use 100's of domains, the cost of the certs may prove prohibitive. If not, the contract can always be written so that abuse on one set of certs by an organisation prohibits them from getting a replacement.
Such a system IMHO should be purely optional. If people really do hate the spam they get then they would have the option of switching to a system designed to prohibit UCE. I'm sure the leading email clients would implement an interface to such a protocol relatively quickly.
Who knows - maybe a critical mass would develop and the majority would opt out of what we have now.
I think the programming would not be all that difficult so if such a project is not already underway then maybe a group of opensource programmers should band together and see if they can come up with ways to kill the abuse.
I hate to respond to the trolls, but since a patent lawyer once told me the same thing about telemarketers I figured I give you the same response I gave him. The first amendment gives the right to free speech. The first amendment does NOT give the right to an audience. Is it any wonder the patent system is so screwed when one of their lawyers doesn't realize the difference between the two?
5016 Patrick Rd
West Bloomfield, MI 48322-1543
Now i need three items....
1. a pair of two-man bolt cutters
2. a volunteer to help use the cutters
3. a driver
We putter on over to his barn in the dead of the night, *snip* *snip* his T1 cable in two places and let him scream bloody murder at his provider trying to get his T1 repaired in due order...
I get this right, his CO is ameritech operated, so it'll take 3 days or more to get the repairs done.
If it's fiber that he's got, those two cuts will force the telco to replace the entire segment to the pole, costing both the telco and ralsky money that he dont have.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Stop up the pipe vents on his roof. All kinds of interesting things happen when he flushes. Preferably stop them up permanently, like with rags saturated with epoxy stuffed 2-3 feet down.
Spell out SPAMMER in his front yard using Round-Up or similar grass-killing product.
Spread Deer Musk throughout his landscaping. (Skunk musk is even better if you can get it)
Tie a large carp to his exhaust manifold.
Spread several pounds of thistle seed throughout his lawn. He won't notice until next year, but what the hell.
and your name is Axe. Clearly all we have to do is how up at his house and announce, "Axe here would like a word with you, sir." Wow! It'd be like living in a UserFriendly strip!
This is my favorite part of the article. I'm sure mr. spammer can appreciate keeping an agreement to the letter:
"Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records."
That which does not kill us makes us... st
Ladies and gentlemen, we have touched a nerve...
Some company paid this guy to send the spam. Why not just boycott those products/services ?
...if I had the resources, I'd consider it.
I would think those companies would eventually get the message, and all of our spam trouble would eventually fade away.
Think someone somewhere would want to host a database of spam ads of products and services that we should boycott ?
__________________________________
Free your mind - Flush your toilet
Either that, or it is and he's severely misinformed as to its capabilities.
Specifically, " "This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything. "
Past firewalls? I don't think so... Definately not Windows Messenger Service.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Ralsky was back up within a few days.
In my opinion, the best solution for Ralsky is a cranial injection of a lead pellet via a combustion-based device.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
A Different option... If a fire takes out Ralsky's server and he doesn't have an offsite backup...
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
The two things that I have found to help are:
spamgourmet - http://www.spamgourmet.com/ As they say on their site "self-destructing disposable email addresses, titanium strength spam blocking". I now never use my real e-mail address. And if you organize your disposable addresses right, you can tell who sells their list to the spamer scum.
And Spamcop - http://spamcop.net/anonsignup.shtml I have taken friend's yahoo accounts that were getting 20 - 25 messages a day, and after a week or two of reporting every message to spamcop the spam *almost* stops.
Its a pain in the ass but it works.
- The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind. -- Humphrey Bogart
If this guy can send a billion pieces of spam in a day, then he's costing others at least $15 million a day. Figure it takes 3 seconds to open, read, and delete spam (low). Figure the average salary of $24,000 a year (low). Figure there are 50 work weeks a year (low), 5 work days a week (typical), 8 hours of work a day (low), and 3600 seconds in an hour (average). That amounts to 7.2 million second a year on the job, which works out to $0.01 per 2 seconds of time. So with time being valued at about $0.005/sec (low), a billion pieces of spam that takes 3 seconds each to delete costs the economy $15 million a day. So while Ralsky takes in a few grand to make that spam run, he's causing an economic loss of several million dollars. And that's per day. Imagine if he did that every day (he tries to, he wants to, he approaches it). Now figure in the other spammers and the fact that for some people these estimates are way way low. Basically, spam costs the economy several billion dollars a year. So yes, spam is theft. It's already illegal. It just needs to be enforced now.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I can bench press 300lb, run marathons and did kickboxing in my school years.
You weigh 300lb, you run out of breath on the way to the fridge, and you kicked a cardboard box in school?
There are a number of services that will send someone a box of poo for you, for a price. :)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Steal a little bandwidth...
Here's to there being a hacked cable modem somewhere in this guy's house.
"First you get the Linux, then you get the power, THEN you get the women"
I'm continually surprised that so many people have problems with spam. I rarely receive spam. It's really not too hard to avoid if you follow a few simple rules.
First, pick a single e-mail address and designate this your master or primary address.
Second, register a few free e-mail addresses with forwarding capability (not too hard to find if you know where to look) and point them to your master address.
Third, whenever you give out your e-mail address, whether for a program registration, message board account, irc, whatever, always give one of these junk addresses, Never your master address. Naturally, if you can help it, don't give out your address at all or simply enter some random garbage.
Fourth, if perchance you do begin to receive spam from a particular address, simply delete or change the forwarding of the address you received spam on.
Pretty straight forward. To recap, use temp addresses forwarded to a single address and don't give out any address unless you need to. When spam happens, delete the temp address responsible.
Of course, there may still be other problems, such as with addresses posted on sites for strictly utilitarian reasons like a webmaster/help/info address. However, an e-mail form can be used to help cut down these types of abuse.
Oh yeah, and try not to buy too much stuff from spammers. Keep it below $50 if you manage.
Actually taking the quiz would verify your email address as valid. If you ignore the quiz, you might escape as a possible bad email address... I don't know how their system works, but it seems to me that an unverified email address is worth less than a verified one. I bet that one rakes in the email addresses though... it's fun!
Was that a typo?
Use uce@ftc.gov for forwarding fraudulent emails.
People will have different opinions about any subject, I agree with you, of course. The intrusion occurs exactly when these opinions aren't respected. The sender of spam, who believes spam is alright, is sending those e-mails to many of those who believe it is not. When you know a person, you're able to gauge whether or not something will anger them. I've read your posts, and your replies respect others' opinions, so let me ask you this: Would you still feel fine about sending those "would you like to buy a lawnmower" e-mails to your friend, if you *knew* he didn't like to receive this type of communication?
I don't know about the man in question, but in many cases the "reply here if you don't want to receive more spam" actually generates more spam when they have confirmation that somebody does indeed check their mail.
I don't have a problem when I go to register in a website and they give me a choice, in the form of a checkbox, "would you like to receive information about our products?" They asked how I felt about it before sending me those e-mails. They respected *my* opinion.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
The article says he sends out a billion spams a day. Over the course of a year that's 365billion. Assuming 5 seconds just to delete, that's 5 * 365billion = 1.825trillion seconds. The nominal lifespan being three score and ten, that's 70 * 365.24 * 86400 seconds, which is 2.2billion seconds. Dividing 1.825trillion by 2.2billion, we get 826 lifetimes per year - more than two per day.
And this guy has been at it for many years now. To make his one life a bit more comfortable, he's taken the equivalent of thousands of lives
Is it any less evil because, instead of throwing away all the rest of somebody's time (which is, after all, what murder is), he takes little bits of time from everybody? Or is it because the little bits of death he gives everybody amounts to killing them softly?
Looking at it this way, Ralsky is the worst mass murderer of modern times.
Okay, I hate spam as much as you or you or even you. I know the mess it creates, the inboxes it fills. Etc.
However, what about junk mail that ends up in my mailbox every single day (you remember, the paper kind)? Use your credit card and start receiving catalogs from every single retailer on the planet.
If we are going to slam the spammers, we should slam the junk mailers as well. But unfortunately the USPS stands to lose entirely too much money if unsolicited traditional mail were to be regulated.
As for the angry crowd remarks, hey guys, it's not like he is raping children or anything like that. Spam is a real economic problem, personal nuisance, etc. but it is not threatening the fabric of our society in any way shape or form. I find politicians to be just as annoying as spam but you don't see me ranting how we should storm their homes.
If we are to condemn the spammers, we should condemn the junk mailers too. This includes the latest ten pounds of catalogs sitting in my mailbox as I write this.
-Donald
Just make a mechanism such that the reciever can send a 'refund' code to their ISP if it's not spam mail. That way, legitimate messages are not charged. What to do with the collected money? You could let the recipients keep it, or donate it to some charity.
~Ben
You seem to think there's an unlimited capacity and market to send to. Wrong.
Spammers are already effectively targeting as much of the email-accessible population as they can. I've run stats from multiple, widely seperated addresses and domains, and have seen loads of largely identical patterns, trends, and mails received.
As several more critical articles have revealed (the WSJ one referenced as history in this article), spam is marginally profitable. Where it is profitable, it can be lucrative -- at least sufficiently so to leverage the ill-gotten gains to some impressive electronics and real estate. But raising costs will impact the bottom line
And that means:
Spam is economic activity. Attack it on economics. You'll see success.
Junk snailmail costs on the order of $1-$5 per item, with items such as circulars and flyers being considerably less, though there's an implied geographical targeting occuring. Yes. I've worked for outfits which considered a large campaign to be 30k pieces, and a large part of the effort was selecting the target group (blanketing the US or any other country is not an option), and measuring the results.
The result is that you receive a limited amount of such mail. Note too that payment methods (the USPS, in the US, is taking payment) means that there are audit trails available. And there are legal means, operating through the USPS, for blocking junk postal mail (including the pornography exclusion method). Very useful for, say, keeping a PO Box useful w/o requiring daily checks.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
A lot folks spout off about creating laws to stop these spammers.
Do we really want to have our Congressmen/woman making laws regarding the Internet? They don't have a very good track record for making laws period, much less laws dealing with technology. Not to mention the fact that US laws usually only apply to the US, usually.
I think that the fight needs to be waged at the ISP level. ISP's need to be booting these lowlifes off of their networks. If these people are constantly forced to move servers and get new connections for their servers, it will become unfeasible. We can start with this guys T1. Who provides that T1? File complaints to that provider? Where are his email servers, someone has to be providing access to the 'net for those server. You will be suprised what a few letters can do?
We don't need to kill anyone or even work that hard to stop these pricks. Just find out where they live and kill them...um... I mean tell their ISPs to either start cutting off connections or else...
LoRider
He must have an ISP providing connectivity to his house. He can't control his hijacked Chinese servers by telepathy. Either get him cut off, or go in there and cut the cables.
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
Why? That's easy, it's because it must work already in order for this guy to be getting paid for it. If it didn't actually work, then it wouldn't be worth these peoples while to spam like mad.
Laws like the ones you are suggesting do nothing more than cripple peoples abilities to do what they want with the internet, an ostensibly (although not for long) free and open medium for information exchange. If you don't like spam, get a joke email to give out, or better yet, spend your twenty dollars supporting someone who is fighting these people on a technological grounds. You're guaranteed to never win, but as cases continue to show, passing laws to restrict this or that activity on such a fast changing medium as the internet are not effective either.
1: Set up a mailserver .com-domains which points to your server
:)
2: Get some
3: Generate a lot (millions) of email-adresses
4: Sell the email adresses to spammers
5: When spam arrives, ddos the source into oblivion
6: Goto 5
This way you can harass spammers AND make a buck!
Seems like his biggest exploit is using public bandwidth for his own exploit. If we went to a model where internet expenses were a function of how much routing resources you used, he would be paying it out the ears running his operations from China. my 2 cents
It isn't a crime in most places.
Condoning spam actually encourages spammers, not just to continue their business at everyone else's expense, but sometimes even to sue people who refuse to pay for receiving the pitches for their scams.
This means that as long as spam is considered a legitimate business, fighting it can be dangerous, even though it is spying out your personal data and usage patterns as well as inundating your entire families' inboxes (including those of children!) with UCE for all sorts of fraud and porn.
Fortunately the voices of reason are finally being heard, therefore much of this is changing:
Spam has just become illegal (article 13) in the entire European Economic Area.
Soon spam will swamp everything else. (...)
OK, spam is not a good thing, but aren't we getting a little carried away here?
The one point you're forgetting could actually be seen as implied in your own statement: Spammers spam everything, everyone, every address, everywhere, all the time. If it's legal, their numbers will continue to rise.
Digital convergence brings eMail addresses to phones, and pagers have also had them for a long time (now tell me how you click "opt out" on any of these!). If the phone or pager of a doctor becomes unusable due to this "perfectly legal activity", it won't be long before people are dying. If the same happens to the device of a firefighter, a hospital's or an airport's system administrator, people are dying all the same, in the name of spam.
If you think this threat is greatly exaggerated, Japan is a few years ahead in mobile technology (page 3), and with spam making up more than 80% of all messaging, their experience with what will globally become everyone's future of electronic communications is just devastating.
Make sure there will be a federal law against spam - and you'd better speak up before it's too late...
Your congress(wo)man is waiting for your mail.
Just now. And tomorrow. And all week/month/year through, until they finally stop the spam.
Ralsky Alan M
Minnow Pond Drive
W Bloomfield MI 48322-2663
Property ID: 18-31-177-002
He says that anyone can opt-out who doesn't want to receive his email. I say he's lying. I've had good luck opting out of unsolicited mail from major companies, I've never had a link on a sleazy message work. Most people I know say that attempting to opt-out only confirms that your address works, and will lead to more spam.
I just go an idea reading this article:
... this spammer actually removes canceled email accounts ...
One of them, Ralsky's list man, concentrated on finding new names to add to the 250 million e-mail addresses in his database and weeding out canceled accounts.
So
Thus if you set up a software like spambuster and configured it to answer "this email address is no longer valid" they would take you of his list right ?
Does this already exist ? Has someone else already thought about it ?
Would you still feel fine about sending those "would you like to buy a lawnmower" e-mails to your friend, if you *knew* he didn't like to receive this type of communication?
Well, that's a tough question. If I know that you don't want to get an email from me asking if you want to buy my lawnmower, I probably wouldn't send you one... but that's simply a matter of pragmatism and courtesy. I don't know you, but I feel compelled to be at least basically courteous to you, just because that's the kind of guy I am. But more importantly, if you don't want to hear the question, I can be reasonably sure you won't give me the answer I want, either.
But I don't feel like I have any particular obligation to respect your wishes on this matter. If I send you an email you didn't want, I've succeeded in annoying you, but I haven't hurt you at all. I'm not infringing on you in any meaningful way. I'm not stepping on your toes. So if I sent you an email that you turned out not to have wanted, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
So I guess the answer to your question is more complex than a simple yes or no. Put as plainly as I can, I might or might not send you the email, but if I did, I would feel just fine about it.
I write in my journal
"They're spammers, so they're lying thieving pig-licking toilet blockages with feet"
mi save tingting long peles bilong mi long Niu Ailan.
But you obviously don't post much to newsgroups and expect the occasional response via email from someone interested in the topic do you? Because once the spam on a temp address gets bad enough, and you delete it, bye bye to the time-independent direct responses that were part of the internet before.
And coding an email form as oppose to a simple mailto tag? Why are you willing to settle with accomodations like this?
And spam filters? Half of the comments I've about these mention inadvertantly losing legitimate message in the noise.
Make no mistake about it. The more you have to dodge unsolicited crap, the less open you are to geniune open communication. And that, my friend, is plenty cause for frustration.
Email me directly if you disagree. Oh, wait, nevermind....
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Ralsky's list man is named Charlie Brown. That's his real name, he said, describing himself as a native of Louisiana who travels the country working as a consultant to bulk e-mailers, developing custom software called harvesting programs that constantly scour the Internet, gaining access to millions of Web sites and mailing lists every day in search of any and all e-mail addresses.
Here the guy we need to hunt down!
"Your a bad boy Charlie Brown!"
SCO (noun.)- A Slimy Corporate Ogre. Often seeks free money.
I think I'll start faxing everyone. I'll make quintillions.
Wait...its not illegal, is it?
150 people eh? that would be one case of bullets by my reckoning..
At least the war on the environment is going well
Yah, I didn't actually take the quiz and I put a call in to them to call me back hoping that I can actually talk to a person that will destroy any record of it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
...I never said I wanted to kill this spammer. I said I wanted to punch him in the face, and shoot the monitor I read this article about. Seriously, it sometimes helps to get things off your chest by going out into the woods and shooting inanimate objects (shaken-up cans of Diet Coke are wonderful with a 30-06...the things explode like you wouldn't believe).
Anyway, this spammer, if he would do what he was planning on doing, would shove advertisements into our own home further than they've been pushed before. My car has a little "Oldsmobile" logo on the back that I see every day as I leave for work. Before I leave for work, I see logos all over my kitchen cabinet advertising what I eat. The morning paper I read is littered with them. But I take it all in because I'm paying for all these conveniences. I pay for the internet to, filled with all its advertisements that have formed over the years, but I have remained tolerant to them. Why? Because ALL THE INFORMATION that I have received on the internet has been more resourceful than anyone could ever dream of thirty years ago.
But if you had someone who waltzed right through your front door and into your living room to try and sell you something, I would hope that you'd be pissed. This guy is dreaming of the same thing, only through a computer. And he ISN'T PAYING anybody other than his own ISP a dime for all the services he needs to use to get his advertising into my face, bypassing every single checkpoint along the way.
My own ISP could do this, and I'd either have to accept it or get another ISP. But he has no right to abuse my computer, my ISP's server, and every other electronic gateway across the world just to live a happy life. Oh, and by the way...
I may be wrong, but I'm 90% sure in my own mind that our trigger happy friend hasn't done much to prevent the hated "spam" he claims to be victimized by.
I forward as much spam as I can to CAUCE. I've spoken out about it on campus, plus I've let a local legislator know about it (believe me, they get a ton of it themselves...their email addresses are publically available...all their caseworkers and interns have to sort it out). The last bill that even considered limiting spam in my state got shot down.
There are legal measures to take if anyone (organization, individual, etc.) repeatedly and consistantly harrasses you against your consent. Take them.
As I said, my state has no legal measures. Even though I could make the clame of interstate commerce, the US also has no laws against spam. I cannot even directly link any spam I get to this guy since it bounces around between at least five servers both here and overseas before it gets to me. He hides his business just so he can claim to be making an "honest buck?" He is harassing me against my consent (assuming some of his spam has been sent to me), and I can't touch the guy.
If you see an advertisement that appears fraudulent, file a report with the local police, and ask them to check it out.
Excuse me, who's the guy who hasn't tried any "legal measures?" If I walked into a police station and said, "Some guy's sending me false advertisements via email," they'd tell me to delete it and forget it.
Spam is just like floor of a movie theatre. It's full of sticky-pop and stale popcorn, but so many people come for the movie that they just ignore the mess and wipe their shoes on the carpet as the leave. The only problem is that no one's cleaned the floor since the theatre was built, and the mess is about chest-high now.
So excuse me. I'm pissed, and I'm not afraid to say so.
The Windows command is "net send" the syntax is:
net send computername Whatever message you want
The spammers have software to automate it. Only work on NT/2000/XP systems, and you can disable recieving it by shutting down the Messenger service on your computer.
6747 Minnow Pond Dr, West Bloomfield, MI 48322
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
"can't wait to get his hands on the next generation of spamming software" ... I wonder
if that too is funding this tool.
"racks of computers instruct scores of other computers halfway around the world to fire off millions of e-mails every day."
;)
Ok, but if this was kiddie p0rn that'd still be illegal, and since SPAM is illegal in many states how come someone can't shut him down??
"Ralsky said he's frustrated by attacks on his character by the anti-spammers."
No shit.
Here's an idea: If anyone finds his new address please post it. I'll fill out some of those magazine subscriptions with "bill me later" check marked
"In 1992, while in the insurance business, he served a 50-day jail term for a charge arising out of the sale of unregistered securities. And in 1994, he was convicted of falsifying documents that defrauded financial institutions in Michigan and Ohio and ordered to pay $74,000 in restitution. "
SWEET!! One more strike and maybe we'll never hear from his SPAMMER again!
""This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything. "
Just try it buddy, if that's not illegal I don't know what is.... actually I have been getting some strange pop-ups recently when I wasn't even surfing.... ?
by forwarding each individual spam you get to both of your senators and your representative and any other political figure you can think of. Just put on a new subject line and include a short message asking them to pass laws against people like the aforementioned ass hole.
This could have one of two results. They listen to our bitches, moans, groans, and complaints, and they start passing some better laws. Or they fire one of you guys because they don't understand why a few million emails a day is more than the server can handle.
If I drive fast enough at the red light, it'll appear green.
Name: Alan M Ralsky 5016 Patrick Rd. West Bloomfield, MI 48322 248-661-3355
AKA: Jeff Kramer 6567 Long Lake Road Birmingham, MI 48009 US Domain Name: cambridgewater.net Jeff Kramer (COCO-227918) aral54@hotmail.com
AKA: Additional Benefits 2121 Richard Ave W. Bloomfield, MI 48322 248-200-3492
AKA: Creative Marketing Zone Inc 5016 Patrick Rd West Bloomfield, MI 48322
AKA: Sam Smith (MAILSVC2-DOM) 200 W. Long Lake Drive Troy, MI 48332 US Domain Name: MAILSVC.NET Smith, Sam (SS9752) aral@ADDITIONALBENEFITS.COM
AKA: William Window (template COCO-265759) 4512 Westside Royal Oak, Michigan 48098 US William Window (COCO-265759) aral54@hotmail.com +1 248 544 4314
AKA: Alan Ralsky, (AR1574) aral@INFICAD.COM Sav-Rx (RXPOINT-DOM) Domain Name: RXPOINT.COM 9439 N Leamington Skokie, IL 60077 (847) 677-5516 (FAX) (847) 677-5329
AKA: Alan M Ralsky, (AMR43) amr1@CONCENTRIC.NET Additonal Benefits 5016 Patrick Drive West Bloomfield, MI 48322 1-248-661-3355 (FAX) 1-248-661-3054
AKA: AB Internet 528 S. State St. PMB 523 Ann Arbor, MI 48104
(There is no building face with that address on it. There *is*, however, a building that accepts that mail - the University of Michigan Student Union, and the Mailboxes, Etc. that is housed therein.)
AKA: rxpoint.com 5016 Patrick Rd. West Bloomfield, MI 48322
AKA: MPI Global 5016 Patrick Road W Bloomfield, MI 48322 (248) 661-3355
AKA: mpiglobal 25514 Graceland Dearborn Heights, MI 48125US
AKA: Ray Esseily mpiglobal.com 25514 Graceland Drive Dearborn Heights , MI 48125 1-313-278-8845
How is it that all of these spammers somehow rationalize their actions by saying they'll never do porn or adult content? As if porn is somehow less ethical then stealing other people's resources and innundating inboxes with unwanted crap.
Looking at it this way, Ralsky is the worst mass murderer of modern times.
LIke I said, I think we are getting a bit carried away here. I'm all for making spam illegal, but, until we do, I think there are worse problems out there.
Virtually serving coffee
If the phone or pager of a doctor becomes unusable due to this "perfectly legal activity", it won't be long before people are dying.
Fine, let's make it illegal, I'm OK with that. But if the reason for doing so is the one you give, let's ban joke emails, fine people who forward hoax virus warnings, tax people who send email with redundant html attachments...
Your congress(wo)man
Not sure they would pay much attention to a letter from a British citizen living in France. Which of course is one of the problems with attacking the people sending the spams. Patent infringement is illegal in the EU and the USA, but I haven't noticed this having a huge effect in China. I still reckon that fining people who respond to spam would be a lot more effective, though totally unthinkable politically.
Virtually serving coffee
Hmm, let's try this. If they were paying for the movies they would be downloading less, unless they had infinite $$$? As far as I can see, the only conceivable way anyone would be constantly maxing out the bandwidth they had available is if they are pira^H^H^H^Hsharing files.
Your example is the most idiotic use of logic I've seen in a long time.
Why does he think this can't be blocked by a firewall? That's the bit I don't get.
I see Taco and others applaud anti-spam laws every time they are proposed/passed. I see people decrying spammers like this guy as evil bastards. What are you guys smoking? Don't you realize that heavy-handed government regulation of the internet is a bad thing? Isn't freedom important to you? I have no problem with anybody sending me spam. Bring it on! Let him get his great new technology, and try all the harder to spam me. I don't hate him, and I don't want to see him forcibly stopped. If we petition the government not to interfere in one area at the same time we demand that they interferein another area, then we are hypocrites and they are right to ignore us. Spammers can be beaten by technology. Don't like spam? DoS spam servers. Blacklist spam servers. Develop software to filter spam in a smart way. This is the internet, we don't do physical harm to people here. We flame them, we shame them, and we amke sure the really obnoxious ones can't play if they don't want to play nice. We deal with these matters internally, and we welcome attempts to subvert us with better technology that subverts the subverters. You're idiots! Leave the spammers alone, just concentrate on making the fact that they spam irrelevent. Wake up: their freedom is your freedom. If they can't do something you don't like, then you can't do something a random MPAA executive doesn't like. It's that simple.
I want my Cowboyneal
Idea (perhaps not new): Give them some of their own medicine.
Would it be possible to dilute their mailing lists with billions of seemingly valid e-mail addresses, spam to which would generate mail-openings and responses, but, in the end, no sales for their end-customers? Their costs would rise. Simultaneously, the customers would be increasingly unwilling to pay for false leads. Oh so sadly, some spammers might be squeezed into unprofitability.
Would this be a practicable approach?
Fine, let's make it illegal, I'm OK with that. But if the reason for doing so is the one you give, let's ban joke emails, fine people who forward hoax virus warnings, tax people who send email with redundant html attachments...
Let's reserve criminal law for curtailing the most sociopathic patterns of behaviour (such as spam).
(Anyhow I can't believe that protection under most states' civil law is really supposed to have become so weak that one could not sue the spammers out of business anymore...)
Minor annoyances don't come to your PC quite as relentlessly, anonymously as spam does, and their authors could usually be held accountable (actually no need to even do so, they are already making fools of themselves). Even the most stupid people (trolls aside
Your congress(wo)man
This is not about whether Europe has got any real power (yet I wouldn't bet on their patience while letting spam get out of hand), but also e.g. whether the 300+ million Europeans will continue to "buy American" if Herbal Viagra, hidden shower cams, phony mortgage refinancing and mile-long penis enlargements are allowed to become the most notorious and frantically advertised sectors of this country's economic activity.Not sure they would pay much attention to a letter from a British citizen living in France. Which of course is one of the problems with attacking the people sending the spams.
The U.S. economy has got a lot to lose vis-à-vis UK & France either: being considered a spam haven jeopardizes every country's role as a trading partner of Europe since Directive 95/46/EC: This is an issue that does matter to the US, and the administration is taking it very seriously, because losing Safe Harbor status (which was not easy to obtain in the first place, given the state -or in many sectors rather: lack- of U.S. privacy law) simply means this:
So, do write your letters/make your calls (up to the equivalent of $20, everyone!) to the representatives and senators now (even more so as a U.S. citizen of course) and I'm pretty sure you will get a reply, and get the right people concerned about the problem (it also seems to have worked the other way round as e.g. Americans announced to spamblock European sites when the a misguided committee of the European Parliament prepared to legalize spam by adopting an "opt-out" scheme earlier this year).
All I want to know is how does this 'new technology' somehow send a notification back to the spammer when you only OPEN a spammed e-mail?
Most (well, some) of us are smart enough not to open any attachments from strangers (and sometimes, even from friends and associates). But I never thought that just opening an e-mail would set off a response, unless it is something I had to voluntarily acknowledge the transmission.
So how do they do this?
According to someone on NANAE, here's a picture of the building site of his house.
popfile! :p
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
I'm hoping that "you" doesn't include me. Since I'm not an American, and last time I heard one of our gov't members was being shit upon for calling him a moron in public (regardless of whether the majority of the population agreed, I suppose it's bad politics to speak what's more or less globally accepted).
LIke I said, I think we are getting a bit carried away here.
Only because you, like many, look at the problem in terms of the one spammer * one recipient hit, rather than the totallity of the damage done by one spammer (or even the totality of damage to one recipient). It is meaningless to look at "just one message", because the one copy to one recipient is not representative of the problem
Viewed objectively and mathematically, there is no reason for murder to be any higher on the list of evils than a major spam operation. If you are putting murder higher, it is because of a social predisposition to abhorrence of murder, not due to any objectively justifiable view that the damage to society is worse in the case of murder.
Unfortunately, my government tends to "follow the leader" as well. But every now and then we get the impression that they feel the same way. Unforunately, as soon as such comments are made, they get stomped on... but perhaps it's a start to standing up and saying how we actually feel.
Seems to me that even a lot of the American population on slashdot realized Bush's lack of intelligence in many areas, and that 9-11, while tragic, was a foreseeable situation.
Viewed objectively and mathematically, there is no reason for murder to be any higher on the list of evils than a major spam operation.
I think your definition of objective is somewhat subjective. What formula are you using to arrive at your evil quotient? Any way I can think of doing the calculation, murder gets a rather higher score. For example, a spam might stop me reading my real mail for x seconds, or bring down my ISP for y hours, whereas, according to all major religions, being dead prevents me from reading mail for a very long time. If you have an objective way of doing the sums that supports your conclusion, I would like to see it.
Virtually serving coffee
Buried in every e-mail he sends is a hidden code that sends back a message every time the e-mail is opened.
Err, what exactly does this mean, can anyone tell me? I really, really doubt that opening a mail in, say, pine will send back any message without action on my part.
So, is this something which triggers MS Outlook? Or is this just some BS that spammer told the poor journalist?
Alex
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
There is software to stop mass mailings.
Which only cures the symptom not the cause, it still travels the backbone and costs you, me, everybody.
With ~96% of email beig UCE/UBE it means you pay over 30 times the real cost of email to subsidise these thieves.
Any way I can think of doing the calculation, murder gets a rather higher score. For example, a spam might stop me reading my real mail for x seconds, or bring down my ISP for y hours, whereas, according to all major religions, being dead prevents me from reading mail for a very long time
Precisely as I said, you've completely missed the calculation, because you've only looked at the impact of one spam on one person. But a spam isn't sent to one person, it's sent to millions. And the spammer sends more than one spam. You need to look at the totality of the actions and their consequences, not the isolated impact on a single individual, as the spammers would have us do. When the totality is viewed, objective mathematics shows that a major spammer is clearly worse than a murderer.
As long as you view the isolated impact of a single spam on a single individual, your comparison is entirely invalid. The act is the thing that's evil, and you must view the entire consequences of the act. And if it's a serial spammer, this means the cumulative consequences of all their spam.
When you view the acts of a serial spammer with their consequences in their totality, there is no way you can make the objective mathematics add up to make a single murder worse than serial spam by a major spammer.
There is no way you can make the objective mathematics add up to make a single murder worse than serial spam by a major spammer.
Of course I can. It simply depends on the value you place on human life, and how you rate the reduction of quality of life caused by spam.
If you take the insurance value of a murder, and divide it by the insurance value of receiving a spam, you get infinity or a divide by zero error. Actuaries are not often accused of being overly subjective.
Your posting assumes that '5 seconds wasted' equals '5 seconds dead', which isn't my personal experience: I still feel very much alive as I click on the delete button, I still have my rights, I am still a father to my children. Maybe the spam reduces my quality of life by a small fraction of one percent for 5 seconds...
Virtually serving coffee
Your posting assumes that '5 seconds wasted' equals '5 seconds dead', which isn't my personal experience
Precisely - this is a subjective evaluation, not a objective one. And while you can still do the things you cite in the future when you're spammed, the time you're actually dealing with the spam you're not in fact doing those things, so the difference you describe is really quite illusory, objectively speaking.
If we're going to look at "my personal experience" - I would rather lose five seconds from my time on earth than five seconds having to merely delete spam, because in fact the five seconds deleting spam is a significant negative, causing aggravation both throughout that time, and afterwards, whereas during the 5 seconds of death there is neither pleasure nor displeasure.
In any event, before you resort again to an emotional comparison that suffers from the fallacy of relevance (even if murder were objetively worse it wouldn't mean spam isn't a heinous crime, nor would it mean that spam is something that shouldn't be dealt with as a serious matter), you should consider that this is Slashdot, not the Tampa Mother's Association - a comment based on an irrelevancy in an attempt to trivialise a serious problem is going to be subjected to some logical analysis to expose it as the irrelevant emotional appeal that it is.
Incidentally, while it's not normal in most circles to compare the detriment of "being dead" to something else, courts have long had to deal with the question of comparison between being alive and suffering some detriment, and being dead. They actually value the "being dead" for a time experience at close to zero because when you're dead you are neither in a positive nor a negative state of happiness*. They value time spent suffering a detriment as a significant negative value because this is spent in a negative state of happiness. This is because the courts evaluate these things by reference to objective criteria, not to the subjective criteria arising from abhorrence of murder. By this standard I was being extraordinarily generous in evaluating the two as the same.
* They even value it as close to zero when compared to being alive because while alive many people, if not most, have a close balance of positive and negative experience. Living a life with significantly more positive than negative actually qualifies somebody as relatively privileged in world terms.
Precisely - this is a subjective evaluation, not a objective one.
If you like, but so is your's. Much of the world doesn't reason in terms of calendar time at all. And I have a significant number of customers for whom anything which breaks their email permanently would be considered a godsend :-)
Courts evaluate these things by reference to objective criteria.
Hardly. I would love to see your objective evidence for the statement that 'during the 5 seconds of death there is neither pleasure nor displeasure', for example. The majority of people currently alive would disagree with you on this point.
Attempt to trivialise a serious problem
Here's the heart of my concern. You start from the untested assumption that spam is serious, and then use that as the reference point from which to evaluate everything else. I'm applying the scientific method, assuming a null hypothesis that spam is no more or less serious than any other background nuisance, and asking for evidence that supports the hypothesis that it is uniquely serious, when compared, for example, with joke emails, pop-ups, DoS attacks, misdirected emails and so on. And virtually all the responses I have received have evaded that question.
Now in terms of /. karma levels, it really doesn't matter, your position is going to carry the day every time. The only trouble is that the people who draft legislation sound more like me than you, so, unless the idea is to rant and rave without making any difference to anything in the real world, the anti-spam lobby needs to start making sense to the real world. And getting any of your postings on this theme published in the Washington Post, for example, would set back public opinion on the matter by years. Because the Tampa Mother's Association lobby is more powerful politically than the /. one.
Virtually serving coffee
| |-sshd---tcsh-+-dpkg-buildpacka---rules---sh---mak e---make---sh---make---sh---make---sh---make---sh- --make---sh---make
-- While packaging XFree86 for Debian GNU/Linux
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Just like the good old days...
It's nice to see some people defending the right to have a useful e-mail account--maybe one day (far in the future) we can reclaim USENET and the web too...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
ISP and email servers are being used by outside organizations to make a buck and they are not seeing a cent from this. It's time to file a lawsuit against them for every peace of junk mail. I don't know about you, but if I ran an ISP or email service I'd sue any bozo who tried to send spam through my system and shut down any account that sent spam from my system.
- Floyd
I may or may not encourage you to sign him up to mailing lists using this information (I may or may not have already signed him up for the first 20 listed on google that is why the link starts at 21-30):
Al Ralsky
5016 Patrick Drive
West Bloomfield, Mi 48322
1-888-531-4793
al@rxpoint.com
This info was found here
She wanted it.
Mod the parent up! Let's all send mail to Alan Ralsky.
Cara Hart chart@eNOSPAMfurn.com Systems Administrator eFurn.com, LLC. and ARITEK Systems, Inc.
It mentioned that he's already been owned by the US gov doing this so he moved the email servers off US soil. Granted people can 'spoof' email addresses somewhat, there has to be a way to block all email not originating from a server on US soil. What do you guys think? That would solve the problem realy quick.
You mean a BeoBunch?
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.