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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.
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.
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
All the +5 funny responses about digging up +5 insightful and +5 informative responses that have already been posted on repeat stories!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
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.
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...
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.
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?
It's just an image link in HTML formatted email to trigger an HTTP get request, eg: http://someserver/image.pl?spamee_id=HKJHS89872
James
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
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
Not only that, it's simply not true. Look at this, more zoo and "incest porn" (whatever that is) from Ralsky than you can shake a stick at.
Donate free food here
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."
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?
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