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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.
Read the original version if you want
This Alan Ralsky?
8 25 6&tid=111
2 .h tm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/22/165
As described here, quite recently?
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend22_2002112
Furrfu... So, what's new? Now we know it's SMB popups for sure, then? What were those two Romanians doing telling him that would get through people's firewalls?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
This guy Ralsky sends a billion spams a day, which has got to be costing the unwilling recipients a huge amount of money in wasted resources and time, but the FBI is busy busting a few people who uncap their cable modems in Toledo Ohio.
C'mon, I know this guy deserves to be hung, drawn, and quartered, but let's not repeat the exact same link.
Oh well, time to go to work.
Nice house. I'd like to throw him a housewarming party.
I have nothing better to do. I'm three years away from being eighteen. Obliterating a spammers computer network? Fun.
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.
Hehe. Looks like someone is going to get some hatemail. Nice of Mike Wendland to slip that in there like that.
The response rate is the key to the whole operation, said Ralsky. These days, it's about one-quarter of 1 percent.
"But you figure it out," said Ralsky. "When you're sending out 250 million e-mails, even a blind squirrel will find a nut."
Has he never figured out that if he spewed out less shit to people not wanting it, he would have to spend less dollars on hardware, bandwidth and personal security.
Also, it looks like he is trying to hide (stealth spam, etc.). Why does he do that as he is claiming that his business is legitimate. Why not admit that he is a shit-bag, sending loads of e-mails nobody wants, eating bandwidth from research and serious commercial sites.
I'd like to part him with a warm house. ie prison.
"I don't do any porn or sexual messages," he said, citing a promise he made to his wife, Irmengard.
Thank *god* we have a man of such impeccable character handling business like that!
Mmm. SPAMNet, I love you. I get 1-2 SPAM e-mails a day, down from 20 or 30. Windows Messaging Service has been turned off by me minutes after installing XP, thank you. He'll do this, it'll be a pain for a week, then Steve Gibson at GRC.com will slap some binary together that will turn off WMS for those people that don't know how. It'll then show up all over the web and people careful about their computing environment won't be bothered by this SPAM shit. There should be laws against this!
Regardless of what Mr. Ralsky says, I don't feel that this new breed of Spam will ever come close to the problem e-mail Spam has. It seems to me that this type of spamming is just too easy to block. If this starts to become widespread, ISP's will likely ban any offending account. Any halfway secure corporate intranet should already prevent Windows messages to be passed in from the outside.
Ultimately, it's a lot harder to hide the identity of the sender here. There's no spoofed headers to fool people. Furthermore, most of the public doesn't _need_ Windows Messenging but they do need e-mail.
-- Brinko
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?
All the +5 funny responses about digging up +5 insightful and +5 informative responses that have already been posted on repeat stories!
that he's getting paid for it. Perhaps if people stopped paying for spam to be sent, there would be no more spam.
>I pay a fortune to providers to do this, and I'd
>much rather have it go to American companies. But
> *I have to stay in business,*
I beg to differ...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Now Just imagine if all of us did this, a different person, every week, for years. Eventually he'd get repentant.
What might be even better: take the spam out of the can and splat it against his car window...
Okay, individually some of us will get caught and fined, but really, isn't it worth it?
The USPS doesn't get revenue from taxes, it gets it through selling postage. It may get shots in the arm from tax dollars, but so does any other corporate welfare recipient. With snail mail the costs associated with sending out a BILLION pieces of mail is astronomically high and no one would ever do it without expecting an equally high rate of return. With spam there is virtually no cost with throwaway dialup accounts. The cost is transferred from the sender to the receiver with e-mail.
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.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Spammer / entrepeneur Alan Ralsky was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Lots of the spam recipients are just fed up, and after each spam run thousands of annoyed people slashdot spamvertized accounts on Netmails.com until it blows the whistle. With the effect that "paying customers" look for a new hoster with better performance and will no longer supply Netmails.com with money. Hosting costs (traffic) on Netmails.com's side are growing, income is shrinking - so finally Netmails.com will have to change their spamfriendly business model or go down.
If spammers and spamfriendly hosters will make the experience of each spam wave resulting in an enormous amount of network traffic and server load, they will have to think twice whether their infrastructure withstands the next spam run...
(This is crossposted from the Nov 22 story)
"Buried in every e-mail he sends is a hidden code that sends back a message every time the e-mail is opened."
Err, what exactly does this mean, can anyone tell me? I really, really doubt that opening a mail in, say, pine will send back any message without action on my part.
So, is this something which triggers MS Outlook? Or is this just some BS that spammer told the poor journalist?
Alex
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
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.
If he does that, then I think it is ok to hack into his machines. Since he is doing the same to ours. And since we will hack his machines we should bring them down and make them self destruct....
He started the battle not us!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
As much as I dislike spam (2/3 of my daily mail
is spam), I dislike spamhouse/spews as well. Their
idea of blocking complete netblocks is IMHO
an utter failure - the damage is done to many small
websites that are on the netblock perchance.
The 'bad guys' are too high up to care if one of their
C-class netblocks has some problem. After all,
it is the webhosting companies on that netblock
who will loose customers, not the network operators.
... let's fight spam instead!
> Isn't there some type of indecency law against sending vulgar spam i.e., porn to anyone/everyone including children?
I don't know, I certainly hope so.
If I had kids, I wouldn't let them read their e-mail unless it was heavily filtered first. Yes, you may call me Cencor Dad, but I wouldn't expose unfiltered e-mail to my son or daughter.
And as it was mentioned in a previous article on the same subject, spammers invent new words to avoid triggering spam filters. Like "viagra" becomes "viagrea" and "vieagra". "University diplomas" becomes "u.n.i.v.e.r.s.i.t.y d-i-p-l-o-m-a-s" and so on.
The e-mail protocol should have been slightly modified. When accepting e-mail, the server should notify the sender wether he or she accepts unsoliced/bulk/spam or not (configurable by the user). If the spammer ignores this and sends anyways, the receiver should be able to, with the law in his hands, sue the spammer, and/or any producers of the products mentioned.
Or the user can simply ignore mail servers mentioned in the ORBS database.
Just a couple of thoughts.
-skurk
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
The Messenger Service hole was patched by MS weeks ago. Anyone running automatic updates, or anyone who does it reasonably often won't have this problem.
(The rest is special offers from Nigeria.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> This guy Ralsky sends a billion spams a day, which has got to be costing the unwilling recipients a huge amount of money in wasted resources and time, but the FBI is busy busting a few people who uncap their cable modems in Toledo Ohio.
Yeah, they need the bandwidth to download all that spam as fast as it arrives.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Yep, you got to love it. In America only two things are considered when in business. 1. Can it make money?....Duh. 2. Is it legal? The question never gets asked. Is it the right thing to do....? We have become a totally amoral society.
I feel so sorry for the poor bastard at that address if it is wrong.
Redundant
Now, the real question comes when you consider, is it fair to mod ME down?
- Shadow, the Laughing Orc
http://bomns.sf.net/
they steal our bandwidth, resources.
they steal our time.
surely something in here can be prosecuted for? I doubt that even if we put him in jail that the spam would stop. there are too many of them and the only solution I see is pressure on isps and the SBL soon isps arent going to want the negative publicity. perhaps a spam operation to promote awareness? anything to educate the public to not buy what they read about in email. you have to hit them where it hurts, in the pocket. they will move on.
Wrong one. That's his former address, apparently - it currently belongs to someone else.
m ag e.aspx?t=1&s=10&lon=-83.4306683068011&lat=42.53497 71549766&alon=-83.43067008&alat=42.53497312&w=1&re f=A%7c6747+Minnow+Pond+Dr%2c+West+Bloomfield%2c+MI +48322
The one you're after is:
Buyer: ALAN M RALSKY
Buyer Mailing Address:
6747 MINNOW POND DR, WEST BLOOMFIELD, MI 48322
Seller: BING CONSTRUCTION CO
Property Address: 6747 MINNOW POND DR, WEST BLOOMFIELD, MI 48322
Sale Date: 8/28/2002
Recorded Date: 9/12/2002
Sale Price: $ 740,000 (Full Amount)
And a picture of the location is available at:
http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com/addressi
Makes a perfect target for Tomahawk.
Now we should figure some way to link Ralsky with Al-Quaeda and the War on Terror will take care of the rest.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
How about an active DOS campaign against spambones. Serverwars if you will. It's time to take back cyberspace!!
As I have very little server skills, and different priorities, I'll be in the Texas National Guard instead of on the front line.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Nonsense. It is the FBI's job to arrest thieves when they fall under federal rather than the usual state jurisdiction. The only civil liberties issue is that the investigation and arrest must be made in a manner consistent with the rights of the accused (and anyone else who might be involved).
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
That's handy. Not that I'd advocating it, of course, but wouldn't that be a ideal fake address to use if you had to use one registering for a pr0n site?
Just a thought...
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
found this at http://www.spamblocked.com/
J u1 Eg45fdtL0I1l7A%252bRXryNLPs0tgSXSzgCSYyXdlhnNA5GuI mU26ugsD9TleE3bAJDCkCeR1KHPRAN3eOguDm6GJlXfBQ%252f %252bytAvtEFOk1KIRMQrYhzhCb2%252fQQoDd%252bv6en1TF YgC5qnNLhyvhLoB5SGUpVu6iKfCDtashTT43qqVZrXSD8%252f RiCttILGiR53V3Ej9PwP%252b2eBXeaOfUXhC%252f2kGv9gBL BEbjZkBT5BZE1jokd0tLX47qLUho9KLPMBh4MrQoqSQSTCxhKt LbVavysiAwiD%252f0%252bB0Fw1YlrXnHnr%252bajvdQO%25 2bMJbh0QsBcTlXRdSAMEAAe4%252fdBTKr6X75XKoOdqokT1th 4hOTrPl0cjmcP4pjqlTs48gqJepStYr6ONr59CQFSw%253d&cl ick=center&mqmap.x=159&mqmap.y=88
6747 Minnow Pond Dr, West Bloomfield, MI 48322
The Mapquest search seems to bear out what Mike Wendland's column
reported since Minnow Pond Drive is very near to Halsted/Maple.
http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?mapdata=yN
I hate spam as much as the next person. And I dont like what the dude does. But seriously, as long as there are people willing to pay his salary, he'll be very successful.
So rather than blame this guy for finding a nasty niche market. Why not go after the companies that are paying him. If you ever get spam from him/them/whoever, just make a note to not buy things from a company that uses such an annoying form of advertising. Tell others not to buy from the company either. Don't whine, organize!
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Just take the basic information from the article, and you can locate him.
Oakland County Realestate listings and closings
Closing in Oakland County for '02
I want to go shove a whole lot of prawn shells in his letterbox and see how he likes it
-- james
That pinpoint makes it look like a tempting target for a smart bomb? Anyone got a laser to paint the target with and a spare bomb to drop on it?
Granted this guy is in a shady business, but still it's perfectly legal. 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?
If someone sends stuff through the post they have to pay for the paper, envelopes, printing and postage (possibly two lots of postage if they include a reply paid envelope). They have some financial incentive to only send the stuff to people who want and who can make use of the offer.
Email spammers cost the recipients money and frequently misuse other people's computers in order to send the stuff in the first place. Since there is little cost to the sender they don't much care about who the send it to. Including sending stuff to people who couldn't buy their product even if they wanted to, assuming them can even read the language used.
I was living in an apartment complex while I was attending University, and I got on my neighbours last nerve a few times by playing music too loud in my apartment. A couple of times I got a visit from the local Police, kindly informing me that I was disturbing the peace. They had every right to get angry with me. I was disrupting their lives, in one way or another.
Sharing the Internet with SPAMMERS is a lot like living next door to an inconsiderate neighbour. Sure SPAM is "commercial", but just because something is commercial doesn't make it ok. Would it have been ok for me to blast commercial messages from my stereo into my neighbours apartments? I think not. And just because SPAM can be blocked if you don't want it doesn't make it ok either. My neighbours could have worn ear plugs to block out the sound, but they shouldn't have to.
I wonder how Alan Ralsky would feel if a few inconsiderate neighbours moved in next door to him.
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)$
Nice house. I'd like to throw him a housewarming party.
How warm?
if spammers were treated by the law in the same way as breakers of the DMCA.
Or anyone the US government dosn't like.
Sure he would be shut down PDQ if GW was convinced that spam is the way terrorists keep in touch.
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!
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Ok,
I was talking with a colleague about the best scatter deliver system for spam, the meat.
In terms of High Volume/High Pressure, we have decided that the best delivery mechanism would be via truck using the same sort of spray device that grass maintenance companies use.
Anyone happen to have a source for bulk quantities of SPAM(the meat)?
What I don't understand is, there's a small # of /. editors, posting a small # of stories in any given 3- or 4-day span. How is it possible that so many stories get reposted ? In other words, how is it possible that editors are so frequently unaware of what gets posted ?
When I am dialed up to XO Communications, I receive 1-2 pop-ups a day via Windows Messaging Service. The solution is to turn it off, since its fairly useless anyways.
Very simple. One act is against federal law, the other act is not.
:-) your congress person. Call them. Do anything.
It's a Good Thing(tm) when the FBI/Police are allowed to only enforce laws that exist.
What we have to do is change the laws. Write (spam
During the recent campaign/election I had the opportunity to talk with a couple of candidates. I made sure that I understood their stance on my current pet peeves (H1B, DMCA, Copyrights), and voted accordingly. I also informed them as to *why* I was voting the way I was.
Might not do anything.
Might change the world...
www.christopherlewis.com
I do this with all of my junkmail. My goal is to make them pay twice for sending me anything unsolicited.
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
I wonder how many people would buy a game where the entire premise was hunting down spammers. I'm envisioning a cross between Rainbow 6 and Grand Theft Auto. We can call it "SpamHunter: Hero of the Internet".
Dupe posts are
With all of the instant messaging tools available out there, is there any reason to run the messenger service to begin with?
This is why I really don't understand what the big deal is about the messenger spam. Just turn the damned thing off.
The same thing goes for spam from the 3rd world. I don't know anybody in China, Rangoon, Nigeria, so I see no reason to accept e-mail from these places. In fact, I would be willing to make the argument that the best way to prevent spam is to ONLY accept email from networks owned by companies that strictly forbid spam. If everyone were to do this, the market for spam hosted on legitimate servers would essentially dry up. That doesn't solve the problem of crackers breaking into systems and setting up spam-relays, but then that problem will only be solved by the owners of the boxes being competent and taking responsibility for securing and updating their systems. If people were keeping an eye on security holes and being vigilant about closing them off, most of the cracker activity online would cease to exist. Lets just see some "1337 d00d" try and break into a system that has been locked down properly and kept up-to-date.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
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.
Someone go look it up and post it!
OK, clearly people need to start dying over this if we want spam to stop. One of you in the audience has to be an ex-marine with a stockpile of guns. Everyone knows that murderers are only caught if they want to be caught. Pick the top 3 spammers and go out and kill them.
In a trust-metric based world, spammers would be considered so disgusting that you would actually gain karma by killing them.
Lets see how quickly new spammers take their place when spamming runs the risk of having someone explode your head over it.
That or write "MAKE MONEY FAST" on a cinder block and drop it in his mailbox.
Is it legal when he bypasses security systems for these popups?? Is that not Illegal acccess of computers? Is that not hacking and prosecutable? Ride the wild Bull through the internet.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BF
The article says he's got a T1 going to his home. Can we figure out who he got it from and petition them to shut down his connection? Without that, he can't run his business from home. Can someone local also check and see if he's in violation of any zoning laws for running this operation out of his home?
One of the ways SPAM manages to propogate so readily is the fact that it is often bounced off systems with open relays. This is done unknown to many of the remote sysadmins, who either don't know or don't really care about their open relays. "I've gone overseas," he said. "I now send most of my mail from other countries. And that's a shame. I pay a fortune to providers to do this... This article does indicate that there are a certain amount of foreign ISP's willing to allow the spamcrap through though, some in Canada no less (which means me, as a Canadian, very unhappy).
Is there an equivilent "open relay" for Windows Messaging Service? If not, addresses could probably be much easier to block via IP, as they would have to be broadcast by "willing" recipients (or those trojan infected, etc). As above, I suppose some scummy ISPS would be willing to host the infectious service, but hopefully they wouldn't be as hard to blacklist as the fluxuous number of open relays?
Does this go on the client machine? This the only way I could think of that this would work. In such case, sounds like a trojan to me, and I'm fairly sure the Kazaa people already figured this one out...
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.
....and which version of "morality" do you suggest we use? Southern Babtists? Raging Liberals? Staunch Conservatives?
You see, therein lies the rub. Defining what is moral and what is not is a subjective guess -- at best.
Write (spam :-) your congress person.
Since congresscritters tend to do things for their own benefit most of the time, maybe we could make things more personal. Grab their e-mail addresses (the public ones are probably OK, private ones better but more shady) and include them in your signature when you post to newsgroups, e-mail lists, what-have-you. Something innocent, like:
I participate in the legal system, you should too!
E-mail your representatives! Mine are:
Sen. Bribetaker: bribetaker@senate.gov.fake
Sen. Moneybags: moneybags@senate.gov.fake
Rep. B.S.Artiste: artiste@congress.gov.fake
or whatever. Then post furiously in public forums, let the address grabbers pick up on the addresses, and wait until pure annoyance causes anti-spam legislation.
-SablKnight
Will the Congress show the same headlong rush when it comes time to take the blame for what happens?
Yep, but a headlong rush away from whatever it is.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
We already receive windows messaging ads about getting diplomas, in case the typical network administrator dropped out before he/she acquired one. They really need to consider their audience with this particular annoyance.
I'm not here. This isn't happening.
Unfortunately, Spammers like this will continue to make gobs of money. All one can do is block as much spam as he/she can to try to make one's email experience better. People will continue to buy from spammers, and also continue to get taken by their schemes. And as long as that happens, spam will be around. Has anyone thought that maybe there is a big spam lobby? I mean, think about it, spam is a serious problem, many of us have contacted our legislators about it. And there is no federal law against it or regulating it, and the state laws that are in place, for the most part, suck. Spammers are making *millions*. It stands to reason they could be swaying the powers that be to table spam legislation.
Instant Karma's gonna get you...
I'll pitch in.
I think we have found out what the updated business model is. Whoops.
Sounds like a legend in his own mind or perhaps his victims. Never forget the Net.Admin.Net-abuse.Email rules :
NANE Rules
Rule #0: Spam is theft.
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
Sharp's Corollary: Spammers attempt to re-define "spamming" as that which they do not do.
Rule #2: If a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see Rule #1.
Crissman's Corollary: A spammer, when caught, blames his victims.
Rule #3: Spammers are stupid.
Krueger's Corollary: Spammer lies are really stupid.
Pickett's Commentary: Spammer lies are boring.
Russell's Corollary: Never underestimate the stupidity of spammers.
Spinosa's Corollary: Spammers assume everybody is more stupid than themselves.
news.admin.net-abuse.email Rules
Now reread the original article, amazing how similar it sounds to the last get rich scheme you encountered. [See #2]
That is because it is in order for their dodge pyramid schemes to work these junk emails must convince both the advertising companies & their own pyramid's lower tiers that it 'works' and the market for spam is increasing. It is not it is just steadily stealing more and more bandwidth the cost of which is shared out by legitimate email users. 96% of the email received at one of my drop accounts is junk email; 3% not, that means we pay 32 times (yes times/not percent) more than we should for email.
Angry ? You should get even not angry, don't rant and rave here: tell *everybody* you know UCE dirty little secret.
Send him a nice hand written note, maybe it should
say Hey Al! on the bottom in the attn section. Maybe on the back it should say, '..finally got around to sending you the money I owe you.'
While the above information is marginally interesting to bring business to his local pizza, flower, dildo delivery guys, what i'd really like to know is:
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
More time is spent reading and writing about Spam, than actually dealing with it. My work email never gets spam, and my personal email is set to exclusive. Anyone who really has to deal with spam has to be asking for it, or at least not careful enough to prevent it. Get over it. It's part of life.
PT Barnum is attributed to saying:
"There's a sucker born every minute"
but from the success of spam I'd say more than one every minute. There's alot of just plain STUPID people out there.
I'm somewhat embarassed to admit how many I'm related to as well. Several family members have forwarded me the "FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE" to get a free Disney vacation, case of pop, etc.
On eBay I saw some selling a link to a web site that would let you buy a "High-End" laptop for only $25, and they were getting bids for that "Top-Secret" link. It was over $50 when I saw it.
As long as those suckers are out there willing to give there money away then the spammers are going to be there, in one form or another.
i do think it *is* him. His middle name is Murray. Alan Murray Ralsky as i've also found him on another listing.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Given this link http://www.spamlaws.com/state/summary.html , I belive California has a SPAM law in place. If Ralsky operates from his home in Oakland, regarless if the SPAM is directed through China I would think the simple fact that the SPAM goes though and returns to US backbones and its eventual delivery to US e-mail boxes, isn't his SPAM illegal. Why not take this guy to small claims court, or better yet launch a lawsuit against him representing every internet user in California. Rack this guy up in debt and take him out of business permanently. You'll do us all a favor.
The catalog people say USPS discriminates against bulk mail -- but see a bright future, as bulk mail becomes a larger fraction of all mailings, their muscle will increase. Yippee.
There are lots of sources arguing that first-class subsidizes bail; assuming everyone is honest, the difference may a question of one's accounting practices. Remember Enron?
Cato has an interesting and, unsurprisingly, highly critical profile of USPS going back to the 18th century.
One note: Americans like to savage their postal system, but many don't know how cheap their first-class stamps are relative to many or most other nations, especially consider you pay one rate from one end to the other of a physically large country. Also, the furor over each penny-or-so price increase (and I'm not kidding, at least they always find someone to fulminate on the news) generally ignores the effects of inflation that erode the real price.
They're not perfect, but they're not that bad, either. There is a long list of other governmental functions I would criticize more harshly, anyway.
But no, I don't like junk mail. Be sure to sign up for the Direct Marketing Association's "Mail Preference Service" -- I think it helps, I hope.
now, could someone figure out what his e-mail address is *and* any and all ip addresses routed to the nice T1 connections going to his house?
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
A couple of levels of irony here. Not only has this person's home address been posted here, not only have those posts been modded up, not only have people posted suggestions for harassment, assault, and murder of said person for the crime of "making money while being very annoying and probably wasting resources," which have also been modded up, but to ice the cake, we also see posts about how amoral businessmen are!
It's a beautiful day for hypocracy,
A beautiful day for hypocracy,
Won't you be an accomplice?
Maybe this guy Deserves to Lose, at least financially. But if some wacko kills his family, I hope you realize you helped.
Now, to be honest, the chances of someone killing a "spam king" are remote. Wackos generally have more important things to worry about.
Butr it's still pretty pathetic behavior, and the most pathetic part is the relative lack of "and lack of modding of) objections.
Come on, guys. The "spam your congressman" stuff is cool, the "hack away the spam" stuff is cool, the "somebody murder this guy" stuff is ++ uncool.
Nah, that's not the URL you want. Try this one. :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Has anyone else confirmed this address?
Wouldn't it be horrible if somebody sent snail mail to all His Neighbors on Minnow... telling them what their new neighbor does for a living?
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
This can also be used to protect you from Goatse.CX, Comp-U-Geek, Rotton.Com, and other material you don't want to see.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
[Runs to CRC ..., mumbles inchoenterly about newfangled CRC's ..., runs to google...]
:)
I'd say about 700-800 degrees would be the perfect tempature for a true house warming party. Any cooler and it might not stay warm
"If a quarter is two bits, then a dollar's a byte." -R Deric Miller
I've come to the conclusion that the advertising mediums that you see advertised are the ones that don't work. For example, a billboard or a mall map that says "You too can rent this space!" are obviously examples of advertising mediums that don't work (the "Rent this space!" ad is obviously not working because it's still there). Even ClearChannel is trying to fill up radio advertising time slots (that they obviously weren't able to sell) with "Advertise with us!" ads.
With that being said, how many of us have gotten e-mails telling us about the wonders of spamming?
What was his ip subnet again? My filters need a new entry.
Yeah, I just wish spammers could at least check the conuntry TLD of people they're sending to :/.
.co.uk e-mail address. Still, maybe they think the UK is somewhere in the middle east?
Several times I've recieved "Dear Fellow Americans" e-mails on my
I actually was getting a few (three total) SMB windows popup spams on a vanilla XP box i ahd running. I killed the service pronto.
This tactic made me so angry that i'd probably be in shackles now had that spammer been within any damagable distance at the time.
The spam wasn't happening because of a hole in messenger. That's exactly how the thing is supposed to work, it's just mostly useless outside of a network.
As revenues start to decrease in the spam business (legal fees, increasingly complex technology), and as advertisers realize that a clickthrough != a sale, the best way to make money is to sell the dream to pensioners. I'd be surprised if that's not what he's planning.
My bits. Both of em.
You can send him some snail mail. /. his mail box!
lets
Alan B Ralsky
5016 Patrick Rd
West Bloomfield, MI 48322-1543
I wonder if his homeowners' insurance provider knows how hated he is, and whether that would affect his rates?
Know all those 'free info' mailers? Fill some out in his name, mail 'em in...Let him get spammed the REAL way, and then they'll share the info with other '3rd parties'
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Idea (perhaps not new):
Would it be possible to dilute their mailing lists with billions of seemingly valid e-mail addresses, spam to which would generate mail-openings and responses, but, in the end, no sales for their end-customers? Their costs would rise. Simultaneously, the customers would be increasingly unwilling to pay for false leads. Oh so sadly, some spammers might be squeezed into unprofitability.
Would this be a practicable approach?
Update: 11/25 12:35 GMT by H: Yep, it's a dupe. Nope, I haven't had my coffee yet.
More like:
Update: 11/25 12:35 GMT by H: Yep, it's a dupe. Nope, I have no journalistic integrity.
http://about.me/paultenny
Wow that's very useful! On a completely unrelated note, did you realize that there are well over two hundred gardening catalogs that can be mailed to home, completely free of charge? Mr. Ralsky knows this, or at least, he's going to in about 4-6 weeks...
And then I read this story. :)
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
wanna see some people that deserve the slash-dot effect to crash their site? http://thegreatsoftware.com These colossal asshats are selling email addresses quite openly. The only reason I know about them is because they sent an email to a friend of mine saying that he had bought 2 million email addresses from them!
Personally, I regard a major-league spammer as simply a declared enemy of humanity, making his income across deliberate harassment of people en masse. I see no moral problem against people striking back against them by any means necessary. They're at war with the rest of us.
Apparently I'm not the only person who thinks so, that news article with how-to info on locating its subject was checked at least by an editor before it got printed and in this case, probably all the way up the newspaper hierarchy and by legal counsel as well. They obviously didn't have a problem with the content, what's yours?
If anything unpleasant happens to one, I'd consider throwing a party to celebrate, and I think there's be celebrations around the world. I wouldn't participate in violence against one, but it's quite possible I'd put in a few bucks towards the legal defense fund of anyone who got caught doing so.
If he actually has a family... it's called collateral damage. Of course, if they're old enough to know what he does for a living, I'm a lot less sympathetic. Usama bin Laden has a family, too. Does he get sympathy points over it? Only from the weak-minded.
Tech Public Policy stuff
We have a medium where the sender is explicitly trying his best to prevent the origin of his communications from being traced, where the sender is trying to bypass firewalls and content filters wherever possible, and with mailing lists in the millions.
We have senders who by definition have no personal ethics and presumably have no problem with payment via grocery bags full of $100 bills for content ranging from scans to kiddie porn.
Let's say you're Abdul "Joe' Sixpack wanting to communicate to your worldwide network. Go find Alan, tell him to send your message and add this disk full of names to the list.
As for content, it has to look like ... spam. Names, product names, telephones, or those random alphanumeric strings could be used to convey codebook type content, and I've even seen multiline strings in these e-mails... perhaps these ARE crypto content.
I was joking when I started this. I'm not kidding anymore, this is a very real possibility.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'm sure that would violate some sort of federal mail-tampering law or whatnot. I don't see the harm, though, in seeing if he's interested in some special offers, though, do you?
This article hits really clost to home for me. I live in Bloomfield Hills. (less than 10 min from West Bloomfield). I read the article last week before it made it on /. Now, I have a client in West Bloomfield and the other day, just for kicks, I decided to drive by the house. It is very real, and very big. One who knows the area can tell you EXACTLY where the house is from the article. The papers stopped just short of giving you the actual house number. They tell you RIGHT where he lives.
/. should send him a postcard!
Now, of course I think what this guy is doing is dead wrong and am TOTALLY against unsolicited email. But reguardless of what this guy does, isit responsible for the press to tell everyone exactly where he lives? I think this just opens the door for a violent attack. Sure, SPAM pisses me off, but I know people who REALLY get in a rage over it. (I wouldn't be at all supprised if someone takes action).
My suggestion? Everyone on
Non sequitir. What does one have to do with the other?
OT to this particular spammer, but I just got a spam selling McAfee crap online. The order form says it's secure, but nowhere does it go to anything https! And of course it asks for a credit card number.
:)
How can we bust the crap out of these retards?
For one thing, I filled out their form with "CUT THE SPAM YOU BLITHERING RETARDS" as my name, and "dslkfjsdlkafj" type data in the other fields, and 4111 1111 1111 1111 for the credit card #. And the hit submit repeatedly.
www.wholesale-software.com is the offender.
One thing this can be consider as is a DoS attack. But isn't that what he is doing? Denying us from using our email?
Privacy is important on the Internet. We put sensative data on our computers, our trends and habits can be easily tracked, we need money to afford our bandwidth, space, and resources. An email is a private thing. Without our consent, what gives him the right to use us as garbage disposals? If so, we should get a % of his dirty profits
[Newbie eyes: "Click here to remove yourself from further email notifations"
Seasoned eyes: "Click here to add yourself to 10 additional spam lists. By clicking, you agreed to let us spam you even more and we do not need your consent to continuously spam you until you have a full email account and then we can fill your email queue with more spam."]
I agree
Though I must say that is only easing the pain rather than curing it. It all depends on how people will look at it. I guess I can think of it as a bike. You can still ride it without the seat and have the point sharp metal up your rear, but it still works.
Some people will stand up and ride in order to continue their journey, some will get a new seat. And some simply get a new bike.
Did you notice the thing about one of his Chinese "hosts" getting raided on suspicion of Falon Gong activity.
I remember when somebody on Slashdot suggested mentioning the Falun Gong in spam complaints about Chinese spammers. The idea would be that it would harrass the spammer AND tie up the Chinese censors in knots. It apparently worked...
Anybody know of any other organizations the Chinese secret service considers subversive?
I'll bet sending encryted data to the Chinese spammers would have a really cool effect, too.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Maryland Internet Marketing LLC, George Alan Moore Jr, 300 Twin Oaks Rd, Linthicum MD, 21090-2154, 877-655-3438, 410-963-8226.
His domains include softwareincorporated.com and ultimatediets.com. He usually sells McAfee VirusScan. If he's spammed you since October, you can sue.
if you're running winxp home or pro enable the paltry firewall that blocks msn messenger pop-ups which is actually the successor to winpopup which no longer exits in xp.
.: not the nine o'clock news
ok this is something isps, mail companies should take note on: "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." our isps could do us all a favour and demand that each and every domain is listed on there, so that we wouldn't get the mail in the first place. its nice to hate the guy but you have to remember he's a business man, like gun manufacturers (if you dont like guns). they might be used to kill (defend) but its a valid industry (no i dont live in the states) and dont forget think how many spin-off businesses spaming has produced, if 2 million users decide to pay $25 annually to prevent spam from reaching them thats alot of money.
.: not the nine o'clock news
...some of the sites that claim to list "spam houses" have exceedingly liberal definitions.
Remember: reputable organizations will provide evidence when requested (mere whois listings do not suffice; actual copies of spam are needed to determine one's culpability). Beware of anyone who refuses to even provide contact info.