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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."
I'm not sure if I want it to become an annual conference or not. While combating spam is always good, and the list of those involved looks decent, if the conference becomes a regular thing, it means that spam is still a big problem.
Yeah, yeah. I'm probably being over-idealistic again to try to imagine that spam would become any less of a problem, no matter what measures are enforced.
So while I really hope something somehow gets done (Maybe that *cringe* AOL thing will help...) I'm not throwing out my spam filter just yet.
~The Incredible Xan~
"Saying that men can't be lesbians is gender discrimination."
slashdots being over-run by spam first aol now this, sounds like a good idea though hopefuly they will find out how to at least get rid of some of the spam, which by the way is getting very bad, I registered a new hotmail account the other day and normaly when you finish creating an acount there is one message, a welcome to hotmail from msn not this time nope there was two one was the welcome the other was a porn mail.....things are getting out of hand
MIT (who is hosting this conference) has a key server that presumably hold millions of mail addresses.
This is the guy who brags on his website that he doesn't have a credit card. The same guy who helped "steer" VA Linux to the biggest dot com stock flameout in history. The same guy who runs a blog that is so right wing that his solution to plane hijackings is to arm all the passengers. The same guy who brags he has no formal training in software development. The same guy who was pretty much run off the Linux kernel developer mailing list.
...
Who exactly gives a shit what this guy has to say?
Just asking
Does anyone know what happens to the hundreds of emails I forward to uce@ftc.gov each month? Someone mentioned to send them there, and I tried to read the stuff on the ftc site, but they just say its their "database" for spam. What does that mean? Do they actually do anything with the stuff? Not that the 20 seconds to forward with headers really kills my day. But I just want it to be useful to someone...
And out of curiosity, what are some other people's ideas on trying to prevent it? Basically right now I just try not to have my email address anywhere online (without some sort of word in it or something along those lines). And I watch what I might sign up for and their "privacy" policies. And I don't reply to the spam I get, since usually that apparently just confirms your address and makes you more valuable.
So any more tips?
being that the conference is about Spam, where Ralsky et al. have set up shop.
Is there such a thing as premeditated Pavlovian response?
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Hmmm... I'm thinking (-1, Spambait).
I opened up my Inbox this morning and had like 50 emails about this conference...
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
Try this on for size: If your received just one e-mail from every business in the US, you would get 1,200 per day.
Say it with me. Just hit delete. 1,200 times. Oops! Just deleted the e-mail from your (mother/father/brother/sister/spouce/SO/boss/once in a life time confidential offer).
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
All the anti-spam team concentrated in one place. What's the chance of a certain prominant spammer `accidentically' causing the building to collapse?
there aren't enough 'offtopic' mod points to go around....
now you've posted that site and they'll get thousands of click-throughs from /.ers wanting to see what the fake website looks like!!
Hey... you sure this isn't some cunning spam advertising method to get us to go to your site? Is Yusaku Godai even your real username or is it really cafecutie21?!?
One idea that occurred to me was requiring the sender to do some nontrivial computation (for instance, the receiving mail server sends the product of two (large, but not RSA-large) primes, which the sender must factor and include with the message to be accepted.
Now, unfortunately, such a scheme has some problems. The huge variation in performance between machines out there means any computation substantial enough to crimp a spammer might cause grandma's 486 to become unusable for sending email. More to the point, it could greatly increase the cost of running webmail services (not to mention mailing lists). Now, the big webmail providers might be prepared to play along - they might even build some dedicated hardware for the purpose of running the protocol fast. However, there's nothing to stop spammers building exactly the same kind of hardware, enabling them to continue to send out spam by the bucketload!
So, anyway, I don't think my idea is the answer, but surely the whole area of improved mail protocol design would be worth exploring.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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.
--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
spam costs the receiver money. magazine ads, TV commercials, and billboards do not. the first of those three are completely opt-in, as well, since you have to buy them or watch TV to see the ads. the third is fully paid for by the billboard owner. why is this concept so hard to grasp?
Of course there are idiot. Its called culture jamming and its alive and well all round the world. Its not all left wing polemic. A lot of people are just tired of the overwhwlming amount of and stupidity of the ads that assult them from billboards, magazines and tv's.
As well, there are laws about where you can put billboards and how offensive you can be in tv and print ads. And if the public complain enough about ads the CEO listens and takes them off.
Why should spam be any different to other advertising.
I run my own business. I rely on e-mail heavily to communicate with customers and clients (I get orders via e-mail, support questions, contract inquiries, etc.) I spend upwards of 5 non-billable hours each week having to take care of the crap that fills my order inboxes, customer support inboxes, and my main mailbox. This crap includes both spam and e-mail worms. I spend that 5 non-billable hours a week AFTER everything goes through filters (if I didn't have filters, then I'd be spending more like 20 hours a week) - and it's only getting worse.
So, to sum up - it's not just a few e-mails. And yes, e-mail is about communication, and spammers are destroying the value of e-mail as a communications medium. And, by extension, since my business relies on e-mail, spammers are destroying (or at least seriously disrupting) my business. I pay business taxes, my bottom line is being affected by these criminals, and I really wouldn't mind if we just outlawed spam altogether.
You want to know what's anti-american, anti-business, and anti-innovation? Scum who abuse public resources - namely, spammers.
What if you were a CEO? How would you feel about all this bad press?
I'd fire the asshole in the marketing department who decided mass-mail was an acceptable practice, and I'd lobby Congress to outlaw spam.
For the last goddamned time:
This is not a free-speech issue, it's a property rights issue. Advertisers are no more entitled to use my computer to send me an ad at my expense, than they are to break into my house and paint a billboard on my living room wall.
No, advertising isn't illegal, but using other people's property without their consent is indeed illegal.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Technically, billboards (and to a lesser extent, other said forms of advertising, too) are not opt-in. I don't remember ever paying to read spam. Your logic must be twisted as hell if you meant to imply "well, if you don't want to look at giant advertisements placed every 20 feet along the road, then you should move way out in the middle of nowhere and not ever come into the city."
As far as I'm concerned, billboards are far less opt-in advertising than spam, because you pretty much have to look at billboards, but you don't necessarily need to use email to communicate (there are still people out there that don't check their email 50 times a day, you know). Email, television, and magazines alike all are similar in that they offer information and communication but at the price of abundant uselessy information by way of capitalism from legitimate and not-so-legitimate sources.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
While anyone will be welcome, we're hoping most of all to make this an opportunity for hackers working on spam filters to get together and compare notes.
Filters. That's a give-away. Filters are damage-control after the thief has left. Block them at the first HELO, block them after their ISP refuses to handle complaints to abuse@, block widely, block often. Talking heads, I've said it once.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
There are over 24,361,450 businesses in the US
Ah yes, I forgot:
"According to the MPAA, there are over 65,744,682 businesses in the US. They actually found 24,361,450 but some of them were big corporations."
I code, therefore I am.
And what do you say to the ISPs whose mail servers fall over due to the load imposed by spam attacks?
What do you say to those who have to pay for Internet access based on the amount of data they transfer? They certainly never asked for the spam that's costing them money.
And you certainly can't claim that relay raping is anything but network abuse.
Spam is not welcome. I never asked for it. My having a mailbox is not an open invitation for unsolicited commercial email.
noah
Are there conferences on billboard ads? Do people lose sleep over magazine ads? Is there an anti-TV commercial movement?
Advertisers lease space on billboards. They give money to the owner of said property (the billboard) in consideration of its appropriate use by them. This is a legitimate contractual exchange between consenting parties, all of whom enter into said arrangement of their own volition.
Advertisers pay publishers to have their adverts printed. This is a legitimate contractual exchange between consenting parties, all of whom enter into said arrangement of their own volition.
Advertisers give money to networks and local stations to run their adverts. This is a legitimate contractual exchange between consenting parties, all of whom enter into said arrangement of their own volition.
Spammers use network and computing resources that do not belong to them and for which they have not paid anything in consideration of use, often relaying through other networks (and hijacking bandwidth and CPU cycles that would otherwise be used for legitimate and probably profitable tasks) in an attempt to hide their origin. The processing of UCE on the receiving machines takes CPU cycles and ultimately otherwise useful and profitable time away from the owners of those resources. There is no legitimate contractual agreement there, anymore so than if I spraypainted my company's logo on your garage door in the dark of night and left it to you to bear the cost of cleaning it up. It's just advertising, right?
If I feel sorry for anyone it's the companies whose million dollar ad campaigns get shut down by "spam-blocking" email filters, portable video recorders (like TiVo) that allow "skip commercials" functionality, and other anti-America, anti-business, anti-innovation tactics.
Print and broadcast advertising are what keep publishers and networks in business, and what keeps the cost at the point of consumption of print and broadcast media in the range of free to a few dollars per unit for the consumer, but there is no binding agreement between the consumer and the network or publisher requiring the consumer to watch or read the adverts in consideration of consuming the product (the content of the magazine or TV show).
Freedom of speech != a right to a captive audience, and most certainly not at the audience's expense.
And, as an aside, if the profitability of a product or service rests solely on the success or failure of its "million dollar ad campaign," one surely must question just how innovative it could possibly be.
"We're an apex predator with the fecundity of a base level herbivore... We're a virus with shoes..." RazorJAK
If this is a conference on spam, then shouldn't about 1000 random people show up and tell the hosts that they could make big bucks by charging everyone who attends one dollar, but let them in for free if they bring ten friends?
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
***BZZZTTTT*** I'm sorry; the correct answer is "It's called theft of service".
Thank you for playing, and don't forget your lovely consolation prize.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
If you run a business, for example, you'll frequently (if you're lucky) get queries from potential customers who want more information. You WANT those unsolicited e-mails. Or you might get e-mail from someone you worked with 10 years ago but never thought to add to your whitelist, perhaps because you don't even know his or her current e-mail address.
I have whitelists set up for my e-mail accounts, but I face both these issues on a regular basis. I can't afford to discard an e-mail from an unknown sender without first verifying that the sender really doesn't have something useful to say. Fortunately, most spammers use obviously retarded e-mail addresses or subject lines that make it relatively easy to skim and filter them out quickly (and of course I use a blacklist for known offenders as well).
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I'll agree, I'm well past 99% accuracy with POPFile on several hundred messages a day. I can still quickly scan the messages labeled as spam to catch the rare false positive and then forward the spam to the ftc.
Bleh!
It is a conference AGAINST spam instead of a spammer conference.
Lucky I didn't fire my nuke yet...
Great - now your saying that you can make email better by making it slower! Not only is that one-dimensional but its the wrong vector. There are plenty of legit reasons to have to send out a few thousand solicited messages to a list - think of the bands that want to tell their fans about tour dates and all the nerd techie lists (no offense intended) - We don't want to collectively punish the rest of the internet because of spammers.
,But it too is a solution the collectively punishes the rest of the net (and imagine how up in arms we all would be if somehow "they" started charging for email!)
I'm thinking based upon reading these posts that the best immediate solution is going to be smarter filters and more of them. But this is a technical solution - perhaps there is another angle..(dimension?) Hey- and this is largely the focus of the SPAM Conference. cool. The only thing about filters I still want to be able to get the REAL EMAIL from my girlfriend when she sends me a message saying "I WANT YOUR HUGE C**K TONIGHT" We don't want SPAM filter to become SMUT filters - cause while we might all know SPAM when we see it, we still all have different ideas about smut.
SPAM for FUN and PROFIT?
the market itself will(should?) eventually do some sort of self-regulation (nice thing about free markets) - I don't think there are terribly many people spamming for the fun of it. Somewhere there is an econmic incentive - some dismally low percentage of people who are ordering Growth Hormone or Penis Enlrgers from unsolicited mail they receive will either make it worthwhile to continue spamming for customers or will lead anyone who can add (or subtract) to attract customers in other ways. Solutions which propose a charge for outgoing messages are heading towards this idea
Marketers are just like little kids (something they actually share in common with techies!) -- when they get a new toy they love to play with it more than the old toys. Email is still a newish toy for them. much more fun than doing direct mail.
anyone know the click through or sales rates for any unsoliced mail? Unfortunatly there will probably be a similar reaction as when ad-banner CTR dropped - make more of them and make them bigger.
yrs. cyberRodent
Talk is cheap. Supply exceeds demand.
They're going out for some Chinese food? That has to be the funniest thing I've seen in the last 3 days! (The Great Firewall, etc....)
C|N>K
Egads, hasn't that windbag been discredited enough.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The ratio of people with pages on SourceForge or having nick's like Cap'n Crunch compared to politicians is still too bad... If you know what I mean... :-(
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Due to the excessive volume of robotic responses to the emails I spend time and effort to send to people I have not known to prior to this, have been forced to do this robotics test.
If you do not run a robot, please ignore this message. I will only send it once. Its purpose is to check someone's mailbox to make sure that I am not communicating to a robot, either some whitelist robot, or a vacation program, or something equivalent. I value my time: Nothing is more annoying than to spend an hour carefully writing a message to you about a subtle technical flaw than to have an obnoxious robot tell me my effort was a waste. Now, if this email is sent without resulting in a bounce, my 'AEIOU ('Avoid Egocentric Ignorant Obnoxious Users') will inform me to not write the message. Otherwise, please reply to this message to confirm that you do exist and this message is read. Only then will I proceed to write the message I wished to.
So, if this email arrives in your inbox, my apologies. It will only happen once. I've been forced to such extremes only because of the widespread use of such robots. You have my apologies, but I have been left with no choice.
I do have some good news however. In the future, we'll have constructed a realtime blackhole list that anyone can check to verify if an address runs a robot or not. This way, people not running can be looked up to verify that they're not running a robot and will not see these messages. If you wish to voluntarily add yourself to this list to state that you are or are not a robot, please see http://aeiou.losers.example.com/addlist.html
Female Prison Rape in NY
Out of curiosity and boredom I clicked on the link
They didn't expect you to join or pay anything. They wanted you to follow the link on their fake girl website so their advertiser pays them for the click-through to the online dating service. It looks you followed the link just like they hoped. (you did click on the link to see where it went didn't you?)
You didn't see the obvious. Ker-ching $$
P.T. Barnum was right!
The truth shall set you free!
And I demand to be renumerated for all of my expenses for all unwanted communication.
At $20/month for phone usage, I *DEMAND* my $.000015 for twenty seconds of *STOLEN* phone time.
Worse, the costs to me for the garbage truck to haul away a single postal pamphlet ar far worse. $.00166 (at 1/30 pound/letter, $.05/pound disposal fee).
I don't know about you, but those cost me 10x and 100x the cost of receiving a single spam. Where is the cry about *that* supposed theft of service?
I'm not for spam at all, but at least I'm not hypocritical and irrational about it. Each postal letter you dont' want costs *you* more than 100 spams, in terms of the cost to you. I don't know about you, but I get a couple fliers every day in my mailbox, costing me 10x as much as the email spam I get.
If you disagree about these prices, please give me numbers. I've been looking for numbers for over a year, and NOBODY has given me anything that wasn't outright bullshit.
Are there conferences on billboard ads? Do people lose sleep over magazine ads? Is there an anti-TV commercial movement?
1. The fight over bill boards has a long history. Ladybird Johnson officially started the fight with her work on highway beautification. Many large cities now have a moratorium on billboards. The content of billboard, like all advertising, is heavily restricted.
2. Magazine advertising is also restricted and people lose sleep over how to circumvent those restriction. However, because magazine ad campaigns cost real money, and the advertiser and magazine are liable for those campaigns, people generally behave.
3. Again, the fight over TV commercials are at a very mature state, but they are still skirmishes. A few years ago it was over underwear in commercials. Now the liquor companies want to end the voluntary ban of hard liquor advertising on TV. Of course we cannot directly promote tobacco on tv.
Which is to say it is extremely naive and ill informed to claim that advertising is not illegal in America. It would be very easy to put together a campaign that is illegal, and even professional mess up every once in a while. What makes non-internet advertising manageable is that the rules are known and it is assumed that the advertiser will always be held accountable. Contrast this to email where the advertiser assumes that the laws of the land do not apply because they can cowardly hide behind fraudulent headers.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I'd suggest reading my post again. I did not say billboards were opt-in. Thank you.
No kiddin'. I would have deleted my VA software IPO offer if I hadn't read about it on Slashdot first.
It sounded like a lot like a Nigeria scam. ;) If only I had the good sense to sell all my stock that first day...
Yes. To provide another analogy. It is illegal to FAX ads to people with FAX machines. The reason is that the recipient must pay for paper and toner, and is therefore paying for your advertising. Similarly, spam uses ISP network resources and disk space, which is an expense for the ISP that they should not need to deal with. Free speech does not mean you get your venue for free as well.
Vote for Pedro
or are they baiting stupid spammers into showing up as well, so they can beat the crap out of them?
Vote for Pedro