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!
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!
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!
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..."
Subtle no? ;)
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
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
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
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.
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'm afraid to actually check that out. Because if that is truely his address and phone number I feel really sorry for him. For sure latter tonight he'll hear:
"Hello, Alan, Have you heard the sad news? Steven King is dead at 54! Apparently he..."
As well as, "First Phone Call!"
And of course, "Hey, I've 1) Called you. 2) Uhhh... 3) PROFIT!!!! BTW, FreeBSD/Linux/etc are dying!"
But not before, "Hey Ralsky ol buddy. I think this call just might be one of several beowulf of phone calls!"
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.
That's his old address (see also SpamHaus's record of his addresses) - if you read the article you'll know that's he's just moved house and the new address can be found in the in Oakland County real estate records.
>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!
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...
As I see it there are about 500 000 parties to a spam e-mail: the company that pays for it, the person that is payed for collecting adresses and sending the mail, 10 persons that are happy to get the unique offer and spend money on it, and about 499 988 victims. To stop spam, one group has to be removed from the equation.
The only way to remove the 499 988 innocent victim is for them to stop using e-mail: not a viable solution. Using e-mail filters may temporarily turn the flood into a stream, but mailers will refine their mail to avoid these sooner rather than later.
The persons getting payed are not going to stop. Legislation against spammers would only move the senders to other countries.
The entities paying will continue as long as it is profitable. Again: legislation would not be effective, IMHO.
The only remaining possibility is to remove the 10 morons paying. How to do that? Barring evolution (accelerated by selective violence >:) ), education of the these people seems the only possibility.
Making everyone understand that buying penile enlargement medicaiton online, is not the best of ideas is not as easy as it sounds. There'll always be someone who thinks it's the best invention since sliced bread. Can the percentage be pushed below the treshold of profitability? I don't think so.
This post is free (as in cheese in a mousetrap).
Instead of Spam Assissin, maybe what we need is Spammer Assissin
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
here its his business, err, "real" business.
I want 2D games back.
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.
The reason why file-trading, etc. is accepted here and SPAM is not is because of the intrusiveness of SPAM.
Just FYI, "SPAM" is a meat product sold by Hormel; "spam" is unsolicited junk email. The two terms can't be used interchangeably for trademark reasons.
That said, file trading is also intrusive. It's intrusive on the rights, granted by law, of the copyright holder. The only difference is that spam intrudes on you, personally, while file trading doesn't. But both are intrusive, and in the same way.
This is the irony that tickles my funny bone. The prevailing consensus of opinion on Slashdot is that file trading is okay because it only infringes on the rights of others, while spam is not okay because it infringes on the (notional, and in fact completely fictitious) rights of me.
Spam is annoying. But annoyances, in general, are not against the law. Trading copyrighted materials, on the other hand, is explicitly against the law. Yet one of these is morally okay, and the other is morally intolerable, by Slashdot standards.
Can you seriously tell me that this doesn't absolutely crack you up?
I write in my journal
Is it me, or does it seem that most spam pieces slant toward the "pro-business" aspects of it, and take everything they say at face value.
If a journalist wants to show spammers for what they are, just ask: "Do you relay your mail off of unauthorized open mail servers?" According to Ralsky's record on Spamhaus, he does, or did.
On Aug. 15, Ralsky was interviewed on NPR. It was the typical pary line, about how it's not illegal, and they don't send porn, and they honor removes, etc., all very cheerful. But, once, she asked whether he used "blind relays"....
Quietly, he answered, "I won't make a comment on that." I wish she would have elaborated on it, because most of the listeners wouldn't have understood that this means hijacking open mail servers, which is generally considered theft of service.
#1: I live in this idiots area.
#2: Who the hell are the idiots providing service to him? I think it's time service providers who allow this are dragged through the same penalties as the spammer himself.
Fucking idiots.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
What will make spam and spammers go away? Unfortunately, I don't think there's one 'silver-bullet' solution to the problem (no wisecracks about using the bullet on Ralsky, please ;))
In part, spam is a technological arms race: spammers use more sophisticated ways of getting their messages out, and anti-spammers counter by developing more advanced ways of blocking them. Building a better mousetrap will only force the mice to get smarter. Hacking is not part of the solution, either: if we complain about legislation permitting corporate hacking, we should refrain from doing it ourselves (it's a moral high ground thing...)
Part of the spam problem is money: at least a few people have mastered the "1. Send spam 2. ??? 3. Profit!" formula. An article describing "How I got rich in three easy steps" will, unfortunately, inspire at least a few wannabes, which leads to the next part of the problem...
People. The famous quote that "there's a sucker born every minute" is absolutely true. People can be dumb. People can be greedy. People can be unscrupulous. In an age where someone can blanket the planet with a new get-rich-quick scheme, a pill or cream to enhance sexual prowess, a free vacation to wherever, it's almost guaranteed that their message will find someone who doesn't even hesitate to sign themselves up.
The final part of the problem is something I've never seen mentioned anywhere else: ego. From the article, it sounds like Ralsky knows exactly what he's doing, and he's reveling in the fact that he's notorious/infamous for being one of the best at doing it.
So, how to fix the problem? Use not just one, but every tool at our disposal:
1. Continue developing more sophisticated ways of keeping spam from ever reaching user mailboxes and/or desktops, and try to anticipate how spammers will react in response;
2. Use the existing laws every country has to deal with fraud. Urge local and/or national prosecutors to go after the big fish, making them examples for the smaller ones. Develop international working groups to attack the problem when spammers move their operations overseas. (okay, that last one's a little optimistic, but hey, at least it's an idea...) Nail the fraudsters, shut down their operations, penalize their profits away. The less profit there is, and the harder it is to keep it, the less people will be tempted to try it;
3. Educate, educate, educate: spread the word on how to deal with spam (don't click the opt-out link, don't reply to unsubscribe, learn how to keep your e-mail address from being harvested, etc.) On another level, urge the (possibly clueless) people who think it's a good marketing technique that spam just makes them look like every other get-rich-quick artist they hate getting e-mail from.
4. Marginalize the big fish: the more someone like Ralsky reads about himself in the press or on the Web, the more it feeds his ego. The more dog poop he scrapes off his front steps, the more it eggs him on to keep spamming. Shame and guilt can still be two pretty powerful social-engineering methods, but allowing him to portray himself as a 'victim' of those nasty-evil hackers will only serve to help him and his cause.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
I can bench press 300lb, run marathons and did kickboxing in my school years.
Sign me up, sarge.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
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.
Problem is that the average person doesn't have any idea how to find the responsible party or to report the spam.
I'd love to see the next version of Outlook/Outlook Express include a spam button. Upon clicking the button, O/OE would parse the message header, lookup the source IP in WHOIS and contact all necessary parties to report the spam.
The only way for this to work is for MS to put in directly in Outlook/Outlook Express (or AOL putting it in). That is what the majority of users are using, and you can't expect them to know about or install a 3rd party utility.
Imagine how the admins at ISPs would react to a veritable flood of spam reports.
I'm not his mother, but I'm proud of him. Proud to be a member of the same species as him, if nothing else. Far better than being whatever nomeclature of scum Ralsky is...
He's claiming that one out of three spams that are opened in something that renders HTML get a response. I always knew the unwashed web-browser-email masses were dumb, but not that dumb...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I hate to respond to the trolls, but since a patent lawyer once told me the same thing about telemarketers I figured I give you the same response I gave him. The first amendment gives the right to free speech. The first amendment does NOT give the right to an audience. Is it any wonder the patent system is so screwed when one of their lawyers doesn't realize the difference between the two?
Some company paid this guy to send the spam. Why not just boycott those products/services ?
...if I had the resources, I'd consider it.
I would think those companies would eventually get the message, and all of our spam trouble would eventually fade away.
Think someone somewhere would want to host a database of spam ads of products and services that we should boycott ?
__________________________________
Free your mind - Flush your toilet
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