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 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
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?"
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?
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
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
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
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.
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!
>Is this really possible? If so how?
Why, Windows Messaging, of course.
But let's get to the heart of the matter. As much as you can hate this guy for what he's doing, the reason he's making money (and the same reason telemarketers stay in buisness) is because they're are idiots out there responding to spam with their wallets. If everyone would adhere to the minimum essential committment to never buy anything as a result of unsolicited commercial advertisements, commercial spam would not exist.
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"
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.
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.
"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.
>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
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.
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
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?
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
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).
Na, I say we have more fun. If someone finds his address, and posts it, we could all send him a polite letter asking him to stop his activities. Not an email, but a real letter(no threats, just a polite please stop), with a stamp on it and everything. Basically, we'll /. his mail box.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Instead of Spam Assissin, maybe what we need is Spammer Assissin
--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.
<example>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?</example>
Same thing, no?
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
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.
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
For bulk email, a bulk delete key is needed. Find out where Ralsky is at the moment and pipe all traffic from that ISP to /dev/null.
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.
Or because they remember the days before spam? We are the Noldor who have seen Aman defiled by the Enemy, and now pursue him to the ends of the earth; hatred he shall have undying who doth spam us, be he Vala, Elf, or Man unborn, or any other creature that Eru shall cause to come into being until the end of days.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Good god, one of those sarcastic bastards who loves mentally masturbating about his superiority over the rest of the human race. You're a hundred years too early, punk.
Let me put this very simply. I know it won't get past your ego, but I'll try anyway: Communication between two consenting adults is different than unsolicitated advertisement.
Communication between adults therefore has certain safeguards of privacy and freedom--things fundamentally incompatible with a scheme that blocks file trading. Unsolicited advertisement does not have the same legal protections, nor has anyone (except you) ever claimed that it should. Moreover, unsolicited advertisement in the form of spam or telemarketing calls or junk faxes is generally not a thing that has been consented to by the recieving party.
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. Hint: It's not censorship...
So, let me see if I understand your argument. Spam, which is annoying to you, is bad and wrong. Trading copyrighted material, which is both annoying to the people who own the copyrights on that material and illegal to boot, is okay. Because... because it doesn't annoy you personally?
Free is free, man. If you want to be free to trade copyrighted materials-- and it's not clear that you do, but most Slashdot posters hold that position-- then the spammers have to be free to send you junk mail. If you accept that limits on freedom are sometimes necessary and just, then it seems like there's a much stronger case against the file traders than against the spammers.
(BTW, what is this "troll" of which you speak?)
I write in my journal
...is it really THAT big of a deal?
Yes. Like many of you, I own my own domain.
I used to be able to enter a specific email address
(slashdot@ _ _ _.com) when I signed up somplace.
All email to my domain comes to me. It was a handy tool.
Yesterday, I reached a new record, 2078 spams
trapped by my filter. That guy should be strung up.
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.
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?
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.
Good one. If you're on a shared connection-- either shared in the cable modem sense, or shared in the upstream provider sense-- and somebody spends all day and night downloading The Two Towers, you're being deprived in precisely the same way as if you were getting hit with gigs and gigs of spam. The only difference is, after it's all said and done, you don't even get to keep the spam.
I write in my journal
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.
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.
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
Isn't it ironic that he doesn't want to be bothered by people driving by, leaving crap at his door, calling his phone all day, and so forth...yet it's perfectly alright for him to do the virtual equivalent via e-mail.
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.
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.
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.
For the average home user disabling this service may be a bit difficult, especially on a 9X derivitive. Personally I feel the better method is to install a software firewall of one sort or another. Personally, I run Zone Alarm. Its a nice, simple, easy to install firewall. It may not be the best protection in the world, but its a start. On top of that, I use a router with a builtin firewall, and lock down every port that I don't need open. But at the very least, a software firewall will stop most of the simple hacks and its easy enough for the average end user.
Also, one question I had running around the back of my head about this whole Messenger Service hack: On a Win2k machine, when someone NET SEND's you there is usually an entry in the Event Log, which, I believe, usually includes the sender. Does this hold true to messages over the internet, and if so, can this information be used to track down the sender's IP address?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
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.
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.
If this is accurate, mod this up.
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.
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
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.
Boy, if that doesn't sound reminiscent of certain events in Salem I'm not sure what does.
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.
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.
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
Morals aside, there is a big diference betwen the two, in one casse a person or group of people are trading information. In the other one person is pushing information down a very large group of people.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
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.
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.
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.
I use junk mail as kindling for my fireplace...
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
Copyrights are draconian remainders of the original laws that existed centuries ago. This is why most /.'ers today do not wish to support them. Spam is simply an intrusion.
/.'ers may support them.
Thus, from a utility point of view, spam is evil, and copyright infringement isn't.
If Copyright laws were reestablished as they were centuries ago, with reasonable limited times, and requirement of publishing the works (The source code, etc.), then
Lastly, there is a case to be made against the RIAA/MPAA/etc use of copyright to try and grasp the remainder of their market by the nails and the teeth, using primitive distribution technology and techniques that made them money in the past, simply because they aren't willing to move to a new model of making money, with the rest of the world.
People do not want to stay behind, wasting car fuel to go and get a bunch of data bits, when those bits can more efficiently travel through their internet connections.
That's trivia. The mechanism doesn't matter; the real issue is annoyance. (By the way, I'm not talking about trading information. I'm talking about trading copyrighted materials, like movies, TV shows, music, and so on. Huge difference.)
Spam is an annoyance to its recipients. Some people say, therefore, that spam is bad and wrong. Some of those people say that spam should, in fact, be illegal, or prevented through technological means.
File trading of copyrighted materials is an annoyance to the copyright holders. But the same people here on Slashdot who say that spam is an annoyance and that it should (possibly) be banned or stopped reject the premise that file trading should be banned or stopped for the same reasons. I find this ironic, and funny in its irony. Basically, the reasoning goes, spam should be stopped because it annoys me, while file trading is okay because it only annoys others.
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.
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
Yours is the first sensible response to my post that I've seen so far. I don't agree with it, entirely, but I think you make a good argument.
All too many Slashdotters seem to oppose copyright on principle. You, on the other hand, seem to disapprove of the current implementation of copyright law. I find it much more interesting to hear about ideas like yours than to listen to obviously uninformed souls argue that copyright-- indeed all of intellectual property-- as a concept must be abolished.
I write in my journal
Anyone know? Just curious! :o)
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 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)
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.
You seem to have ignored your original statement about file trading in your response. Unsolicited (or solicited) commerical speech has fewer protections than normal speech. That's a matter of law and common sense.
Just because there are few cases where it is hard to distinguish betwee unsolicited commercial advertisement and between communication between two consenting adults, does not mean that there is no difference at all. That's simply dumb. I wasn't joking when I wrote that stuff about your ego. Courts have found it rather easy to distinguish what is and what is not commercial speech for years. Your argument is akin to saying 'sometimes it's hard to whether someone is sane or insane, so there is no difference at all between insane people and sane people.'
And the whole commons side-issue you bring up is as silly as it is a desperate attempt to change the subject. If the state can only regulate 'the commons' why can they make laws against junk faxes? Again, it's because the laws regulating commercial speech are different than the laws regulating normal (1st ammendment protected) speech.
I am dissapointed that you ignored the personal attacks. I included them in order to make you less of a snobbish idiot. Not that I had much hope.
Except that that user, by license via the ISP, has the right to use the ISP's resources to download that movie (MPAA concerns aside)... or, his favorite Linux distro, or whatever it may be.
Conversely, the spammer has no right to use the destination user's ISP network for something against their terms of service if they have explicitly stated it's not allowed (and even moreso now that there are laws protecting this in some states/countries).
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
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
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...
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.
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.
#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.
There's a sucker born every minute. Spammers who reach enough suckers with good enough pitches get rich. Con men, pirates, and dirty politicians get rich, too. Crime pays. What's the shock?
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.
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.
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...
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.
I wish you had posted this as yourself rather than anonymously, so I could put you on my "friends" list.
Oh, well. At least somebody gets it.
I write in my journal
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.
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.
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.
Can you think of any other job that is more purely evil than working for a mega-spammer?
Being a murderous dictator?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
He moved, as stated in the Fscking Article!!!!
I wish I was getting your spam and not mine then. The only mail that I automatically get rid of is stuff I have filters set up for.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
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.
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?
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?
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!!!
It's not as if he doesn't know how to filter.. and as somone who worked for one of his many previous ISPs (quit over ralsky) I can tell you he has a pretty good yet souless tech.
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
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?
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.
I must disagree the fact that someone is trading or even seling copyrighted material does not anoy anyone, ib fact the copywright owner must go throw a some work to find out that hes work is being traded or selled. Who is anoyed is the cartel of content providers who wants to control who, what and how content is traded and most important selled.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
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
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!
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.
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
the fact that someone is trading or even seling copyrighted material does not anoy anyone
No. It annoys the copyright holders greatly. If you want to use loaded language and talk about a "cartel of content providers," go right ahead. But that's just meaningless rhetoric. The point stands: spam, though legal, is bad because it annoys you, while trading copyrighted material, while illegal, is okay because it only annoys other people.
I write in my journal
My last apartment (actually a co-op) had a local network that was constantly maxed out, and subsequently unusable, because somebody in disregard of the network AUP decided to run Napster, or download a DVD rip of The Matrix. Yeah, this was awhile back.
The same principle applies to those fellas uncapping their modems. It affects other people on the cable link. File trading is damn well "intrusive".
I don't get how everybody thinks cable uncappers should get off w/a slap on the wrist, while spammers should be shot. (Yes, it's because /.'ers are differently opinioned and unique. Just like everyone else.)
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
uninformed souls argue that copyright-- indeed all of intellectual property-- as a concept must be abolished.
Copyrights are not intellectual property, and I don't think I'm uninformed, and neither was Thomas Jefferson, but both of us think that there is no such thing as Intellectual Property.
Equating intellectual output with "property" is a rather recent thing, done by strong copyright holders who want to get "property rights" (permanence, etc.) on their intellectual output. I think that such ideas should indeed be abolished.
Also, while I do believe that it is probably a bad idea to abolish copyrights altogether, I am not at all sure of that.. I am too agnostic to claim to know this -- however I am pretty firm in my belief that restoring copyrights to their original proportion would be beneficial for society - and may even eliminate a few monopolies.
...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.
There is a rich and deep legal tradition of intellectual property, not only in European, English, and American law, but also in the tribal law of most Native American tribes (the Iroquois and the Tlingit in particular, but not exclusively), and even going back as far as the Stele of Hammurabi. Among the Tlingit, for example, singing a song belonging to another clan was strictly forbidden; it was considered theft in the same way that the taking of an object was considered theft.
Whether you like it or not, intellectual property is not a new idea at all. You're certainly free to argue against it, but don't argue that it's a recent thing.
I write in my journal
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
It may not be recent globally, but it is recent in the states and Europe.
Again - making 'property' out of it is bad - because it doesn't advacne the real goal of copyrights - which is Promoting Science and Useful Arts.
'Property' implies it never enters the public domain, and is under the permanent and complete control of someone - which is a concept which should be abolished.
He doesn't hear the tiniest thing from ME, even if a spam gets to me and I open it (social engineering can work on anybody, I've had subject lines that happened to correlate with stuff I was doing)- because I use an old version of Eudora Light which is a dumb program that knows nothing of HTML or making use of web bugs etc. By the same token, it won't understand requests to open whatever html activeX window etc. because I'm also on a Mac.
I'm sure there are lots of people who are vulnerable, though. People do still use Windows, you know ;)
I'm not saying Slashdot people ARE so completely amoral and unethical as to murder this character- I'm just saying, if you accept his perspective on the obligations of a person to society and those around them (balancing self-gratification) then it's a no-brainer: kill him. Considering that he has a right not to be murdered would be the same as accepting an obligation to society and choosing to be true to that obligation.
I'm glad as hell I'm not him, because by his very existence he proves that people can exist with no such sense of obligation- and, therefore, he is at high risk of being murdered by another person who is equally unethical- but is mad at HIM.
Only the social contract protects us from such acts of brutality- and even then it's more a goal to be sought after, rather than taken for granted. I can't feel very sorry for the guy even if he does get murdered, because he sabotages that social contract and tries to persuade other people to abandon it as well.
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.
ohh wait a minute here, I agree with you 100%. I was in fact bebating with the original author of the trhead, that the two issues, spam and file sharing, are if fact two diferent things. In his opinion the two are the same, but with spam the user is anoyed and with file sharing the owner of the copyright is the one anoyed.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
You wish. People willing to violate the social contract usually do so in their own self-interest rather than to enforce the social contract.
It may not be recent globally, but it is recent in the states and Europe.
That statement doesn't make a whole lot of sense. US law, and the laws of the various European states, are based on traditions of law that came before them. A significant portion of US law, for example, was inspired by Iroquois law. And a significant portion of the various European bodies of law was inspired by US law. So there's a direct connection between the Iroquois tradition of intellectual property going back a thousand years and the copyright law that governs this very comment today.
Again - making 'property' out of it is bad - because it doesn't advacne the real goal of copyrights - which is Promoting Science and Useful Arts.
Absolutely it does. It promotes science and the useful arts in two ways. First, it attaches a profit motive to the creation of new inventions, which, as history has demonstrated, promotes the heck out of science and the useful arts. Second, it promotes original work. If person X wants to develop an invention based on IP owned by person Y, and person X doesn't want to pay person Y's asking price for a license, then person X will go out there and find a new and different way to accomplish the same goal. That's a good thing for science and the useful arts.
(While we're on the subject, please explain to me how the entry of "Steamboat Willie" into the public domain will do anything to promote science or the useful arts. I've never really understood that assertion.)
'Property' implies it never enters the public domain, and is under the permanent and complete control of someone - which is a concept which should be abolished.
Did you use the "Preview" button? Are you seriously saying that you believe the concept of property ought to be abolished? I'll just assume that you misspoke, and I look forward to reading your clarification.
In any case, remember that we're not talking about pure intellectual property here. These are not simply ideas. These are works, created through the effort of individuals. Just as I wouldn't expect my exclusive right to sit in this chair-- which I bought, but I could just as well have built myself-- to end after 14 years, neither would I expect that my rights to "Steamboat Willie," the film, would end after 14 years. (Assuming I was the person who owned them, that is.)
When you remember that copyright protects not just ideas but actual works as well, it sort of throws the whole idea of an expiration date on rights into question.
I write in my journal
That statement doesn't make a whole lot of sense. US law, and the laws of the various European states, are based on traditions of law that came before them. A significant portion of US law, for example, was inspired by Iroquois law. And a significant portion of the various European bodies of law was inspired by US law. So there's a direct connection between the Iroquois tradition of intellectual property going back a thousand years and the copyright law that governs this very comment today.
The connection is less direct than you may think. The copyright law was presented in the constitution of the united states after independent discussion and thought, and as a solution to their own intellectual output problems (secrecy and NDA's of the times).
Absolutely it does. It promotes science and the useful arts in two ways. First, it attaches a profit motive to the creation of new inventions, which, as history has demonstrated, promotes the heck out of science and the useful arts.
You have a different view of what promotes science and useful arts than what I, and the framers of the US constitution have/had in mind.
The idea is that Copyright is for limited times and only in this case is it promoting science and useful arts - because only works in the public domain are promoting science and useful arts. Works that are not accessible to society and are not readily available to inspire and be learned from, are not promoting science and useful arts.
Copyrights, as the US consitution defined them, promote Science and Useful Arts by securing for limited times exclusive copying rights to inventors - and then placing them under the public domain.
Second, it promotes original work. If person X wants to develop an invention based on IP owned by person Y, and person X doesn't want to pay person Y's asking price for a license, then person X will go out there and find a new and different way to accomplish the same goal. That's a good thing for science and the useful arts.
It seems you are confusing copyrights and patents here. Copyrights are on expressions of ideas, not on ways to do things. So if person Y wants to express the same idea, he merely has to re-express it in a different way - not find a different idea.
(While we're on the subject, please explain to me how the entry of "Steamboat Willie" into the public domain will do anything to promote science or the useful arts. I've never really understood that assertion.)
I don't think that anything is about to enter the public domain due to the time limit in the next 25 years or so, because of the reoccuring retro-active extension of the copyright length. This means that any release into the public domain is probably going to be meterial worthless to its creator - and likely to be worthless to society.
I've never before heard of this specific content, but now that I've googled to find what that content is all about - its enterance into the public domain may help artists be inspired and learn from these works, obviously.
Did you use the "Preview" button? Are you seriously saying that you believe the concept of property ought to be abolished? I'll just assume that you misspoke, and I look forward to reading your clarification.
I was talking about the idea of "Intellectual Property", giving exclusive copying rights to individuals indefinitely, limiting the freedom of everyone else with no intention of giving it back to them (with the enterance into the public domain), as a concept which should be abolished.
In any case, remember that we're not talking about pure intellectual property here. These are not simply ideas. These are works, created through the effort of individuals. Just as I wouldn't expect my exclusive right to sit in this chair-- which I bought, but I could just as well have built myself-- to end after 14 years, neither would I expect that my rights to "Steamboat Willie," the film, would end after 14 years. (Assuming I was the person who owned them, that is.)
The idea is - that once you choose to release and distribute what you have created, the information naturally "wants" to propogate for the education and advancement of human kind. Disallowing its propogation is evil (yes, necessary evil), and thus should be limited to the minimum that is required to encourage creation.
I don't believe in any natural inherent "ownership rights" of the universe or such - I only believe those which contribute to society as a whole. If a 14 year period copyright is enough to get people to create meterial - and still allow people virtually unlimited freedom to distribute information, its the best of both worlds.
When you remember that copyright protects not just ideas but actual works as well, it sort of throws the whole idea of an expiration date on rights into question.
I disagree - because I don't believe in inherent rights as you do.
The copyright law was presented in the constitution of the united states after independent discussion and thought, and as a solution to their own intellectual output problems (secrecy and NDA's of the times).
Yeah, yeah. Licensing Act of 1662, Statue of Anne, and all that. What's your point? The fact is that the idea of intellectual property is not a new one; it is, in fact, a very old one. Arguing that IP is a new idea, and therefore not worthy of respect, is rather silly.
The idea is that Copyright is for limited times and only in this case is it promoting science and useful arts - because only works in the public domain are promoting science and useful arts.
But as I've already demonstrated, this assertion is false. Works that are protected under copyright still serve to promote science and the useful arts.
It's pretty clear at this point that you're misinterpreting the Constitution. If the government lacked the power to grant copyrights, then all works would automatically be in the public domain. By your reasoning, this would be the best possible scenario, because all works would immediately start promoting science and the useful arts.
Only that's not the way it goes. Copyrights-- limited monopolies-- are issued in order to give authors incentives to create new works. That's how science and the useful arts are promoted. Dropping works into the public domain only helps one group of people: the publishers who print copies of public domain works without having to pay the authors a penny.
Copyrights are on expressions of ideas, not on ways to do things.
Exactly! Which is why leaving works under copyright does not diminish the ability of other authors to be inspired by them. Anybody who reads them can be inspired by the ideas in authors' copyrighted works. The only thing that's protected is the expression of those ideas.
I've never before heard of this specific content, but now that I've googled to find what that content is all about - its enterance into the public domain may help artists be inspired and learn from these works, obviously.
(For those of you just joining us, we're talking about Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon.)
Artists have been inspired by, and learned from, Steamboat Willie for decades. The fact that the cartoon was not in the public domain made no difference in all those years. So your argument that only works in the public domain benefit society is clearly a crock of poo.
While we're on the subject of film, I submit to you now that leaving Steamboat Willie under copyright will do more to serve society and posterity than releasing it to the public domain. How, you ask? Preservation.
Steamboat Willie is a film. Film must be preserved, lest it decay. It must be stored in a climate-controlled place, and, depending on the nature of the stock, possibly in an inert gas environment. This is not inexpensive; whole companies-- FotoKem being one-- exist solely to store motion picture film. (Well, okay, not solely. FotoKem was founded as a film storage company, but they've since expanded quite a bit.) These companies do not do this for free; they charge the owners of the films a lot of money for the service. Why does Disney continue to pay for the storage and preservation of Steamboat Willie? Because it has value to them. What would happen if that value were to vanish overnight? You can be sure that Steamboat Willie would end up on the top shelf of a broom closet somewhere. In a few decades, it would literally crumble to dust, lost forever.
Keeping Steamboat Willie under copyright gives Disney an incentive to store and preserve their work. Removing that incentive would result in a net loss to society.
How ya like them apples?
I write in my journal
I wasn't referring to the acts of 1962, but to the trade of map-making of the consitution-writing days. Map-makers were signing NDA's of secrecy so as to make money from their work. Copyright was created as a means to allow making works available while still being protected.
I'm not misinterpreting the constitution - It explicitly states that the copyrights should have limited times, and in the discussions prior to it, they explain it is because copyrights, as limitations on freedom, are the necessary evil - that should be minimized.
No, people were not inspired by a film just as much before and after it entered the public domain - because fewer people had access to the content. Now, everyone has free access to the content, and anyone can be inspired by it.
Film preservation is easy when stored as digital content.
You seem to think I'm claiming that everything-in-the-public-domain promotes science and useful arts more, simply because it does so immediately. But ofcourse I never claimed this, and only superficial analysis can result in such a flawed conclusion.
The longer it takes something to enter the public domain, the more incentive it gives to creating works, but the less valuable these works are to society (Since people have limited freedom in regard to those works). The shorter it takes something to enter the public domain, the less incentive there is to create it, but the more valuable creations are to society (the information is free to inspire everyone, and anyone can pass it on to anyone to learn from). For example, a teacher can copy meterial from the public domain to all of his students freely, to teach them about music, or novel writing, or such. On the contrary, he cannot require them to buy a book, or a music piece, or a movie.
Thus, a balance should be found, to maximize incentive and the value of the work to society. The original balance that was decided was 14 years (plus an additional optional 14 years if the author was still alive). Copyrights have been prolonged again and again since, and they are now Author's life + 150 years, which is an absurd amount of time, obviously contradicting the "For Limited Times" phrase in the constitution.
Map-makers were signing NDA's of secrecy so as to make money from their work. Copyright was created as a means to allow making works available while still being protected.
Read up on your history, friend. Copyright, when first codified in law, had nothing at all to do with maps. It was for the prevention of book piracy by printers in England who had taken to the habit of reprinting books without the permission of their authors.
Here, for your enrichment, is the relevant text of the introduction to the 1710 Statute of Anne.
An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.
Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted, and be it Enacted by the Queens most Excellent Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons in this present Parliament Assembled, and by the Authority of the same, That from and after the Tenth Day of April, One thousand seven hundred and ten, the Author of any Book or Books already Printed, who hath not Transferred to any other the Copy or Copies of such Book or Books, Share or Shares thereof, or the Bookseller or Booksellers, Printer or Printers, or other Person or Persons, who hath or have Purchased or Acquired the Copy or Copies of any Book or Books, in order to Print or Reprint the same, shall have the sole Right and Liberty of Printing such Book and Books for the Term of One and twenty Years, to Commence from the said Tenth Day of April, and no longer;
The law then goes on to talk about penalties for violating the copyright (the pirates have to turn over all sheets to be destroyed, and pay a fine of one penny per sheet produced, which was quite a steep fine 300 years ago).
Notice the most important bit: "For Preventing therefore such Practices ['Printing... Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors'] for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books." The law says that piracy was a serious problem, and that the purpose of the law was to prevent it and to encourage people to write useful books. Says nothing at all about the public domain, friend. The purpose of copyright is now what it always has been: to grant authors a monopoly to encourage them, with the promise of financial reward, to create new works.
Film preservation is easy when stored as digital content.
Don't be ridiculous. The storage and preservation of digital content is even more difficult-- or, at best, exactly the same as-- the preservation of film. Film reels have to be stored in temperature-controlled warehouses, possibly enclosed in an inert atmosphere. Digital copies of film, apart from being poor copies of the originals, must be stored on computers; those computers must also be stored in temperature-controlled warehouses, but to make things worse, they consume electricity and require a high degree of active maintenance. If you instead commit the film to data tape or a similar offline storage medium, you're back where you started from: storing films in temperature controlled warehouses, possibly in inert environments.
Who's going to pay for that? What's more, who's going to pay to convert the now-public-domain films into digital copies in the first place? There's no reason for the former copyright owner to do so. Do you expect the government to do it? Money is tight enough as it is; an expensive program like that won't go over well when we're running a deficit already.
No, people were not inspired by a film just as much before and after it entered the public domain - because fewer people had access to the content. Now, everyone has free access to the content, and anyone can be inspired by it.
Bullshit. Public domain does not guarantee free access. I've used this example before; The Birth of a Nation has been in the public domain for some time. A copy of it will cost you $40. You can get copies of last year's new releases, which are still protected by copyright, for considerably less than that. Your theory that putting works into the public domain increases public access to them is demonstrably false.
The longer it takes something to enter the public domain, the more incentive it gives to creating works, but the less valuable these works are to society (Since people have limited freedom in regard to those works). The shorter it takes something to enter the public domain, the less incentive there is to create it, but the more valuable creations are to society (the information is free to inspire everyone, and anyone can pass it on to anyone to learn from).
Oops. You just tripped yourself up on your own logic. You're saying that shorter terms of copyright provide less incentive to authors to create works, even though those works are more valuable to society. So if copyright terms are shortened, some authors will choose not to produce works, and the loss to society will be greater, because those works, had they been produced, would have been more valuable than had copyright terms been longer.
That's okay, though, because your argument is basically fucked up. A work does not have greater value to society if it's in the public domain; the value to society is the same whether the author holds a copyright or not, because access to the work is the same whether it's copyrighted or not (see above). If copyright terms are shortened, authors will have less incentive to write; you've admitted this yourself. Therefore the world will lose out on works that would have been created had copyright terms been longer.
Shortening copyright terms, by this line of reasoning, would be a tragedy.
For example, a teacher can copy meterial from the public domain to all of his students freely, to teach them about music, or novel writing, or such.
A teacher can copy material from copyrighted works, too. That's spelled out in Title 17, section 107: "...the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." Emphasis mine. If a teacher does not want to provide copies for classroom use, or if it's not practical to do so, we have this wonderful thing called a library system. Students' access to teaching materials is not restricted by copyright in any way.
Copyrights have been prolonged again and again since, and they are now Author's life + 150 years, which is an absurd amount of time, obviously contradicting the "For Limited Times" phrase in the constitution.
Actually, the author's life plus 150 years (Where'd you get that figure? The law calls for life + 70 years.) is a limited time, and is therefore completely acceptable under the Constitution. There's nothing absurd about it at all. It's just different from what you think it should be.
If you think life + 70 years (or life + 150 years, or any other figure) is inappropriate, then please tell me why another figure is more appropriate. You advocate 14+14; why? You'd better have something more convincing than "because that's the way they did it in the 18th century," too, because it was arbitrary then and it's arbitrary now. So what's your reasoning?
I write in my journal
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
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
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.