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Spam King Lives Large off Others' E-Mail Troubles
An anonymous reader writes "Those who are fighting spam will tell you that one of the most notorious spammers out there is Alan Ralsky. Well, the Detroit Free Press has a very interesting article on him. This guy is about as unrepentant as they come, and he's saying he wants to branch out into delivering pop-up spam via the Windows Messanging service present on most Windows boxes. If you sysadmins out there have been wavering about whether to block spam-friendly networks, read this article, then go to The Spamhaus Project and SPEWS and start getting IP ranges to block." Update: 11/25 12:35 GMT by H : Yep, it's a dupe. Nope, I haven't had my coffee yet.
Must be the same guys who sold him that "uncrackable encryption" for hiding links he one thought would keep my former employer's buisness free of spam complaints.
You would think he would have learned by now.
So if Blocking Popup Ads is Theft, anyone wanna bet he has a good business model?
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
The bit about the 2 romanian programmers writing something that will pop up messages on your screen. How will that work exactly? Is he being taken for a ride (we can only hope) or are these romanians going to exploit a bug in Windows (unix is safe unless someone is dumb enough to allow all hosts access to their X server) in which case it will be a crime and this f*ckwit can be busted for hacking?
I think people who copy the interview and then re-post it on slashdot as the first reply are great!
That said, From that response, Ralsky can monitor the effectiveness of his pitch and the subject line on the e-mail to make sure he's getting maximum return. Does this mean we should start opening e-mails that we are certain not to buy the product of?
Instead of firewalling the port, hack a small script that listens on the port and launches a "countermeasures" against the source IP adress.
Would some kind Windows hacker please program this?!
Yes I am aware that there may be legal implications, I'm just thinking about the tech here. That's why I'm saying countermeasures and not counterattacks, e.g. some kind of teergrube
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
The USPS has not received tax money for operating expenses since 1982 (see here). Furthermore, people who send real-world junk-mail pay for the postage and the mailing. It's probably one of the bigger money makers for the USPS. If they didn't, it would have been stopped long ago.
E-mail spam is theft of service, pure and simple: the people sending the spam aren't paying the full cost.
I hate government intervention in the markets and involving the FBI should be an absolute nightmare to anyone with even a bit of libertarian in his heart.
So, libertarians now endorse theft because stopping it would restrict the liberty of the thief? I guess that sums up the internal contradictions of libertarianism as well as anything.
that spam actually works... If scumbags like this can make millons it's because there are enough clueless users that actually buy the shit they advertise.
If hotmail, yahoo and the likes started using a more agressive filtering default policy (bayesian filters, and the like), and most mail clients had this kind of filters on, it's almost certain that the success rate of spam would go down.
As a side note... This guy being a known spammer, and spam being illegal in the states...Why the heck doesn't somebody put him away???
just my 2x10^(-2)$
As an Englishman with a Hotmail address, it has always annoyed me that all of the spam is advertising American companies.
Of course, all spam is annoying regardless of its source.
However, is this an American problem, or does anyone ever get any remortgaging/sex offers from Europe?
Actually, there may be a bit of a tax in the sense that first-class subsidizes bulk rate. The USPS is only quasi-independent politically (they're not an agency, nor are they private) and has been much more solicitous of the bulk mailerts "needs" when price-hike time rolls around. Or such is my impression. I don't think bulk mail is a money-loser, but possibly not as profitable as it could be. USPS would certainly hate to lose bulk mail, and they promote the heck out of it if you look at their materials, the ones they don't put out at the local P.O.
But otherwise, carry on!
I wonder if his homeowners' insurance provider knows how hated he is, and whether that would affect his rates?
netmails had a very brief stay with a web hosting company that i used to work for. i suspect that they know exactly what they're doing, as the server they bought was hosting the sites that would be accessed after the dialer was downloaded and used. they didn't even configure domain names on it - they just programmed the site ip addresses into the dialers.