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Fighting Back Against Messenger Popup SPAM

Posted by Cliff on from the next-generation-of-annoyance dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "I recently re-installed XP (out of boredom and not necessity) and forgot to turn off the Windows Messaging service. Things were going fine, until today. I started getting those annoying popups again. I realize that I can turn off this service and I'll no longer get the messages, but, I want a way to 'take back the internet' and not have to worry about others getting these messages either. Normally, these messages are the typical University Degree spam, but the last one I got was for a piece of software that turns off the messaging service. And as everyone knows, there are some people on the net who'll pay for this. So, how can the people of the net fight back to ensure that these messages stop, and more importantly, these people stop preying on the less-technically inclined?"

3 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Fight back! by ceejayoz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Get a copy of the program and start sending out announcements on how to disable the Messenger service.

    Just don't make it read like typical spam, or people will ignore it too.

  2. Re:short answer by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've explained this to you before. Commercial speech in the U.S. does not have the same protections as other types of speech. You are being intentionally obtuse. It is true that the Thai restaurant does have a 'right' (though city ordinances against liter can come into play from time to time) to go up to your door and put a menu on your doorknob. Funny, though--but that is not what the original poster stated. He said: People don't have the right to go up to the windows on your house and tape an advertisement to it. And they don't. At a certain time speech becomes a public nuisance. Communities can protect themselves--especially if ordinances are content neutral and restrict themselves to commercial speech.

  3. Re:short answer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The purpose of a networked computer-- well, one of the primary purposes, anyway-- is to receive messages. Trying to draw an arbitrary line and say that these messages are okay while these aren't is tricky at best.

    Following that logic, answering each and every message is the right thing to do. Answer it by contacting their webserver, with a very slow machine. One which needs to keep the socket open for minutes to get a simple html-file. One which therefore gets timeouts and needs to retry a few (dozen) times. Their computer is a networked computer too and its purpose is to listen for your messages and deliver their content, right? If all network connects are equal, is there no line between "normal" use and even deliberate DoS-attacks either?