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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.
They cause people to distrust each other. I am very cautious about giving a web site my email address for fear that it will be abused.
They both make email less pleasant.
Their creators all seem to be unremorseful. If only we could send viruses and trojans to them all.
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.
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!
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
what happened to that million aol discs that was kicking about ? forward em to this guy.
mind u lots of things are morally dodgy yet make lots of money - look at fags'n'booze.
(BTW. all you 'phobic colonists know fag is something different in the uk ? right ?)
Acid House saves Souls
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.
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"
"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.
"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
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.
I've got $20 in my hand that I'd give to that effort in a second.
I'm sure I've got a spare $20 around here somewhere.
Though I would also be happy to see someone throw a firebomb in this guy's new house. This idiot is very pleased with himself, and is completely remorseless, maybe its time to show him why you don't piss off a mob.
Sadly, in the end I don't think there is anything we can really do to stop him. Sure, it might be possible to find and wipe his system, but what good would it do? I'm sure this guy backs up his lists constantly, and if he has half a clue, he probably has all of his servers imaged/ghosted. He'd be spamming again within the day.
As for the firebomb idea, while it would give me a warm fuzzy feeling to see this guy made to pay for being a parasite on the internet, please no one do it. All its going to do is hurt his home owner's insurance company, not him. Not to mention that it really is a bad way to deal with the problem.
What we need to do is start pushing laws that will prohibit this sort of BS. Sure it'll be an uphill battle, and there will probably be a large number of laws that get killed by the courts, but all we need is for 1 good federal anti-spam law to stick, and we win. Look at the fight to enforce filtering in libraries, they have lost a dozen times, but they keep passing more laws. Eventually, the courts are going to let one of them stand, its just a matter of time and patience. That is what we really need to do, we need to get us a couple of senetors to start introducing anti-spam legislation, and getting it passed. Eventually something will pass, and the courts will let it stand, then we'll be able to shut this idiot down.
So, instead of spending your $20 getting this idiot's system wiped for less than a day, we should start pooling that money to buy a senetor. It worked for Disney.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Nice troll, pretty troll. :)
Last time I checked, nobody just sent me copyrighted software, music or movies without my permission or request. Maybe spammers should start mass-sending copyrighted materials, then at least we might find something useful taking up all our disk space...
"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?
We have laws against the burning of people based on skin colour
That's strange...I thought we just had laws against immolating people period. So if I burn someone alive not based on their skin color, it's fine by you?
When people see that you can buy 8000-sq ft homes, this only encourages others to do the same. He truly is not doing any thing illegal and I think that's where the problem is. Why not write to your congressman/congresswoman and see if you can get legislation passed. That would be more helpful in the long run.
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.
Spam is bad, bad, bad. But...
When you turn off advertising including all banners, you are stealing from your favorite websites. How do you think THEY pay for all of their CPU time, RAM, etc?
You are pushing legitimate sites toward more annoying forms of revenue generation. Maybe Slashdot should refuse your non-requested site access.
File-trading isn't intrusive. That's the difference. If P2P applications FORCED you to receive any file that anyone wanted to send you, then yes, people here would then lump it with SPAM.
It's not a question of legality, it's a question of access control to your system.
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.
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
He's claiming to be 'ethical', but remember Rule No. 1: Spammers lie.
Also remember Rule No. 2: Spammers are stupid. As such, spammer lies are always stupid.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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
You have a particularly naive outlook on life if you think that working for a spammer is as 'purely evil' as it gets.
I suggest that you join the military and get involved in a war (plenty of options coming up!).
This will give you some idea of what 'evil' actually means (and no, it doesn't mean irritating junk marketing).
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.
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.
Man, what an asshole. In the interest of being friendly, I'll just ignore your flames and respond to the actual content of your post instead. I know, it's a radical idea, but I'll give it a shot and see what happens.
.009 just bought a new house with a big yard, so he might be interested. Here's his email address." I send you an email-- unsolicited, with no prior relationship, for commercial purposes-- asking if you want to buy my lawnmower. Is that spam? No, because our mutual friend had a reason to think that you might be interested, so it was reasonable for him to give me your address, and reasonable for me to contact you. No spam there.
.009. He might want it." Is it spam then?
Communication between two consenting adults is different than unsolicitated advertisement.
True. Or is it?
Let's say you and I are friends, and I send you an email that says, "Hey, how are you?" Even if you're not expecting the email, that's surely communication between consenting adults, right? I mean, if you and I are friends, it's silly to think that I should be required to ask permission before sending you a social email, right? So that's okay.
Other end of the spectrum. I'm a spammer based in Hong Kong. I get your email address from a web-scraper, or other indiscriminate source. I send you a message, using carefully forged headers, advertising nasty kiddie-animal porn. That's not okay, right, because you never consented, even implicitly, to receive that email. And, given the choice, you never would have consented to receive it. So that's obviously bad and wrong.
Now let's blur the line a bit. Let's say we're friends, and I send you an email-- which you are not expecting-- that says, "Hey, how are you? I'm trying to sell my lawnmower; would you like to buy it?" That's obviously an advertisement, albeit an informal one between friends. You don't know that I'm selling my lawnmower; you've never expressed an interest in buying my lawnmower. My email to you was completely unsolicited. But it's still okay, because we're friends. You wouldn't try to get my ISP to shut off my email account for that-- unless you're just a complete and total asshole, a possibility based on your response that I'm not willing to rule out yet.
Now let's blur things a little more. What if I'm a friend of a friend. I don't know you directly, but I'm asking around about selling my lawnmower and a mutual acquaintance of ours says, "I don't want it, but my friend Henry V
What if our mutual friend had no particular reason to think that you'd be interested in my lawnmower? What if he just said, "Try Henry V
What if I'm simultaneously doing this same sort of thing with everybody I know? Is it spam then?
Some things are obviously spam. And some things are obviously not. But in the middle, you have lots of stuff that's not obviously either. In deciding which is which, you have to make a judgment call. Which, it seems, puts the lie to your statement that "communication between two consenting adults is different than unsolicitated advertisement." In some cases, communication between two consenting adults is, in fact, just barely distinguishable from unsolicited advertisement.
Ever been in Japan? Ever heard the vans with loud-speakers that go around town campaigning for a certain candidate? Notice how a politician in the U.S. would go to jail if he tried it.
Nobody would go to jail. Disturbance of the peace is not an offense that warrants being taken to jail. If you play your stereo too loudly-- either because you like loud music or because you want people to hear it-- you'll get a citation, nothing more.
This example, of course, has nothing at all to do with advertisement or communication. It has to do with the idea of the commons, over which society has jurisdiction. Same principle that makes littering on city property a crime. Because communication has, as you say, "certain safeguards of privacy and freedom," it's pretty tough to argue that the conduit of communication-- in this case, the network that connects computers via email-- can be treated as a commons by the state.
I write in my journal
The reason why file-trading, etc. is accepted here and SPAM is not is because of the intrusiveness of SPAM.
Just FYI, "SPAM" is a meat product sold by Hormel; "spam" is unsolicited junk email. The two terms can't be used interchangeably for trademark reasons.
That said, file trading is also intrusive. It's intrusive on the rights, granted by law, of the copyright holder. The only difference is that spam intrudes on you, personally, while file trading doesn't. But both are intrusive, and in the same way.
This is the irony that tickles my funny bone. The prevailing consensus of opinion on Slashdot is that file trading is okay because it only infringes on the rights of others, while spam is not okay because it infringes on the (notional, and in fact completely fictitious) rights of me.
Spam is annoying. But annoyances, in general, are not against the law. Trading copyrighted materials, on the other hand, is explicitly against the law. Yet one of these is morally okay, and the other is morally intolerable, by Slashdot standards.
Can you seriously tell me that this doesn't absolutely crack you up?
I write in my journal
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.
Well that's fine if your ISP charges you for emails numbering 1000+. I'll just start an ISP with no limit to undercut you and make more money. I win.
Sadly, this is how the business world works.
Can't we all just be engineers?
To me spammers are as disruptive to internet growth and society as virus\trojan etc creators.
Actually, according to the article, I don't see much distinction:
And then later:
So, let me get this straight. This guy sends a trojan to 250 million people per day, is actively working on intruding onto protected computer systems, and he lives in a $750,000 house? People who do those things out of intellectual curiousity get incarcerated, but this guy lives it up!? WTF? Between this guy, MS, Cisco, et. al., I am beginning to wonder if it's even possible to make an honest living in this world anymore!
How about if everyone in the Detroit area who hates spam would find the guy's address, go to his house, and go up and ring the doorbell. When he answers ask him if he wants to buy something. Strive to make the product annoyingly inane. Make the price exhorbitant so that he can't call your bluff and agree to buy your product. If enough people do this, and they space themselves out, time wise, so that he can just get settled in from answering the door before the next ring of the doorbell, the annoyance level can be maximized. Best of all, it roughly duplicates the annoyance of spam.
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..."
Violence is very rarely a good idea. Harassing spammers as much as they harass you might, though. Leaflets in their mail, rallies outside their doorstop... perhaps somebody could sneak a dead fish or two into a hard-to-find area of their cars. Ah yes.
We're geeks, let's use our brainpower to solve such problems... or at the very least our very sick and twisted imaginations.
I'm not his mother, but I'm proud of him. Proud to be a member of the same species as him, if nothing else. Far better than being whatever nomeclature of scum Ralsky is...
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.
Ummm... What's wrong with being a crack dealer?
Duh, because a perfectly ethical and honest politician said that it was wrong. Don't let that nonsense about it being a transaction between two willing participants fool you. Uncle Sam knows best.
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?
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
People these days.... no imagination.....
Let me paint a picture
Flyer....
Window.....
GLUE....
Normal people worry me!
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
Consider that the spammer's tactic to avoide RBL-style blocking is to shift his services off shore aand then from ISP to ISP in China. This forces the rest of us (anti-UCE types) to play whack-a-mole with the spammer's email servers.
Why not take the game to his front door, quite literally? He pretends to be an ISP catering to customers (thereby excusing him for having 50 phone lines), so why not start a lobby with the state PUC (public utilities commission) against him as an abusive service provider?
Granted, the PUC moves slow (well, at least they do where I come from). It may take years for them to literally force the local telco to remove the lines to the spammers home. But that is exactly what they have the power to do. This guy has been at it for years; he says he won't quit, so let's sick the gov't at him in a way that we can.
If this guy was my neighbor, I'd be doing everything I could to give him the boot, and attacking his livlihood right smack at the telco box into his three-quarter million dollar home would be a good start.
Cheers,
-- RLJ