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A Conference About Spam
zonker writes "January 17th will be the first (annual?) meeting of the Spam Conference held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The informal meeting will feature Paul Graham, John Graham-Cumming, John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper among others (possibly including ESR though he hasn't yet confirmed). The free conference will consist of a number of talks about new ways to combat the growing spam problem, after which everyone's going out and getting some Chinese food. Should be an informative and fun meeting and a chance to meet some interesting people."
What happened to Arc? I think their spam tools are (to be) written in their (paulgraham.com) new dialect of lisp called Arc.
There seemed to be a lot of activity about it months ago, but I haven't heard anything since. And the website has not been updated.
Anybody have any news?
--t
Only because there's not a -1, Wrong moderation type...
Not even remotely; you must be new to the 'Net. (Do you remember when it was called the Arpanet?)
As recently as back around 1990, commercial use of the net for any purpose was strictly prohibited and staunchly enforced. Anyone violating this principle was likely to be summarily removed from the network.
Vestiges of this old anti-commercialism can still be seen in poster's messages saying things like, I have no connection to this company, but am merely a satisfied customer.
Spam was really not a serious problem in the first 20+ years of the 'Net. Quite unlike now.
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I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
I can comment on that.... I'm in touch with some people at the FTC, including the Webmaster and their network administrator. ALL of the spam (40,000 per day) goes into a huge database. This database is made available to all law enforcement agencys, both Federal and State. So far, they are getting good prosecutions of the more prolific spammers.
/.ers is to put out as many spam honeypots as you can, or "poison" their mailing list with bogus ones, by using phony hotmail addresses and opting out using those.... the idea is to increase the odds of filling their mailing lists with BOGUS ones... So lets all band together and start "poisoning" their mailing lists... :-)
:-)
The ones they give higher priority to are DOMESTIC spammers, so don't waste the bandwidth sending your chinese or korean spam to them. Although they process it, the ones that get the highest priority are the ones with broken opt out links or ones that bounce for opt out requests. Also quantity takes a higher priority. Plus they also look at the stuff they sell, and sometimes make legit purchases to verify they are not scamming. But ONLY to the more prolific ones.
Although they DO pay attention to Nigerian spam, it is best to send those to mailto:419.fcd@usss.treas.gov?subject=NO_LOSS
I send ALL my spam to ftc, spamcop and Nigerian ones to the above address.
in my recon missions, I have indeed confimed that spammers DO share information, and opt out really just gets you MORE spam.
When sending reports to FTC, it's helpful if you are specific in your subject line. Like: "there is no opt out", or "opt out link dead", things like that.
The FTC has a rather large staff to process it, although most is done automatically and none of it's read my a human until AFTER it's entered into the database. Once in the database, it's classified and processed to make it easy for law enforcement to get good evidence on them.
My recommendation to all
Make YOUR batch of hotmail accounts today..
By the way, in doing this, you can also identify the ones that ARE selling your address, and you can then legally go after them, especially if they have a disclaimer telling you they WONT sell your information...
CC
Use POPFile instead. It's free, Open Source, multi platform and easy to use. It also doesn't use a heavyhanded approach to email (like forced white/blacklists) which can cause more headaches than they are worth...
Look at DJB's ideas
http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
Goal is to make the sender responsible for storage (and implicitly communications which is public-key encrypted).
LL
The entire keyring is available for all to download. It would be pretty trivial to do this and grab the addresses afterword. If it's actually done, I couldn't tell you.
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grep "xercist"
Two words: fetchmail, bogofilter
Who cares what his political and moral persuasions may or may not be? If he helps reduce the thousands of spam emails that hit my mail server every day I'd be very grateful for his opinions to be aired.