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Spam King Lives Large off Others' E-Mail Troubles

Posted by Hemos on from the eating-off-of-others dept.

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.

4 of 285 comments (clear)

  1. This guy looks set to go by FeatureBug · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  2. Countermeasures by osolemirnix · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Yeah but can't we do something about it? AFAIK, in contrast to email that comes in via someone elses open relay, a windows messaging request is a direct connection, so it's possible to get the senders IP adress.
    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.
  3. nonsense by g4dget · · Score: 4, Interesting
    You get spam mail be ordinary mail too and you pay for the delivery too (your tax money makes the USPS go!). So why don't you complain about it, too?

    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.

  4. The real problem is by tincho_uy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)$