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Spam Conference in Boston
bpfinn writes "Are you working on your own anti-spam solution? Would you like to compare notes with other coders? You'll get your chance at the
Spam Conference in Cambridge on January 17, 2003. Among the speakers are: Paul Graham (of "a plan for spam" fame), ESR, John Graham-Cumming (of "POPFile" fame), and Matt Sergeant from MessageLabs. According to the homepage, this conference will be very informal: "no fees, sponsorships, proceedings, luncheons, contests, etc. Just a series of quick, concentrated talks, and then we all go off and get Chinese food." Slashdotters who are peeved about spam can register here."
is a nationwide spam database
Can't everyone at least try SpamAssassin before saying spam is a problem?
What they should do is to advertise the event using popups.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
The conference was promoted and advertised through an unsolicited mass mailing to over 100 million email addresses.
"Are you working on your own anti-spam solution? Would you like to compare notes with other coders?"
If you are, and would like the NATIONAL EXPOSURE only email can get you, call the number listed below. You will be giving MILLIONS the opportunity to receive your amazing breakthrough via email.
To unsubscribe (suckers!!) please click the link below.
Sent from your iPad.
A conference where they actually confer and (As implied by going to eat together) discuss what they're talking about rather than just visiting booths. It's about time some of that hacker-ethic efficiency made its way to the computer conference world.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
umm...
since spammers and advertisers always stay one step ahead of technology, shouldn't users register to get in?
i know there's a few spam artists out there i'd like to keep out. any open source software or ideas they come up with and speak about may be directly spoken to the enemy.
granted, this is worst case scenerio, but oh well
Runnin' On Empty
Whatever happened to that idea where any message sender (with a white list to op certain ones out) would have to make a nummerically intensive calculation before delivering the message? Easy for single messages, but hard for a million.
vipul's razor.
happy now?
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Isn't this a report from a while ago? I distinctly remember cracking a hilarious joke about the conference invitations being sent as unsolicited email. It got moderated as -1: Flamebait after a while.
Please tell me this is a repost and I am not making this up, otherwise I am in for psychiatric treatment. (with wild look in his eyes) Ma, I see unpublished Slashdot stories!
The better spam filters get, the more horsepower these fuckers are going to put into plying their trade. That 100 million herbal viagra batch didn't work? Oh, OK, let's send out 1 billion messages then.
Their capacity to add processing power to their operations will grow exponentially as the efficiency of spam blocks increases. But there's only so much bandwidth to go around. Ergo, suffer the ISP (mine and yours, not theirs). Something's gotta give.
I shudder to even contemplate it, but unless their revenue stream is cut off, this is going to continue. And that means educating users to NOT FUCKING BUY ANYTHING SOLD THROUGH SPAM. Until then, well...
I use various methods for filtering spam but by far the most effective one is to just randomly delete files ;)
:P
off topic
Ps: also replying to the emails promising to eliminate spam aren't a good idea
can anyone recommend free spam filters that work with windows 2000? either upcoming or already here is fine.. i hear mozilla is coming with something
Because we're having a conference on spam to begin with already means that the spammers have won. Besides, what keeps spammers from attending the conference and figuring out how all the spam guarding stuff works?
Its ironic that this conference (and other discussion groups) are focusing on dealing with, filtering, and otherwise trapping SPAM. It appears that the only solution to eliminating SPAM is to develop a completely new architecture for handling email which would simply not provide mechanisms for the broadcast of SPAM, and the hijacking of mail servers. Spammers are just as ingenious as the folks valiantly trying to filter it. Until we consider a new approach, we will just be battling an ever growing volume of SPAM mail.
There is no such thing as anti-spam, thank goodness. If there were, and if the spammers sent it spam, the spam would be gone, but copious gamma rays and neutrinos would result, and the bystanders would all die from the radiation.
This problem is not difficult to solve. All you need is a "conference" of enraged global villagers marching up the road to Alan Ralsky's house equipped with dynamite, pitchforks, Bayesian filters, and burning torches! We could bring some diplomas from prestigious nonaccredited universities to get the fire going. And afterwards everyone gets Chinese food.
OK, maybe it wouldn't solve the problem, but it would make great reality TV. Wouldn't you rather watch a spammer get lynched than sit through yet another gold digger beauty pageant on FOX?
could it be here?? here?
oh well since it's about spam only makes sense to post it more than once.My Verizon wireless keeps on getting spam sent to it. Is there anyway to control the spam without turning off the email feature entirely?
Doesn't this seem just a bit fishy to anybody else?
if the attendees started receiving spam after signing up for the spam conference?
"Make money with anti-spam!(c)"
"Work from home creating spam filters!"
etc.
I use SpamAssassin, combined with some scripts available here. Since I implemented this system last month, I have gotten exactly one piece of spam, and it got through because the body contained nothing except a URL.
2. Fly a C130 "Ghost" Gunship over their house.
3. Open Fire.
4. Enjoy "Miller" brand beer in a Spam Free world.
... Slashdot editors plan a conference on combatting spam postings on /. for those involved in developing their own dupe filtering solutions
While I am sure that a new mail system would solve the spam problem, your new problem is getting even half of the mail servers out there to switch. Doing this back in '86 would have been easy, but now, it would be a bitch.
Michael Loves Me!
What is so difficult about blocking spam and e-mail worms? Just have a shared word that must be in the subject line (or else it gets filered out) and give that word to anyone you want to allow to contact you. Here on slashdot you could tell people about it in your sig, and never get a single piece of spam again, and what makes it better than whitelisting, even your friends, if infected with an e-mail worm, will not pass it to you, as the worm has no way of knowing the shared word.
And people are spending millions to block spam and worms why?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Then we could destroy them all in one place.
Finally a cause the entire internet community could rally around.
Username taken, please choose another one.
www.cloudmark.com
It uses a moderation system not dissimilar to Slashdot (but maybe without the weird 2+2=5 maths) and in my experience DOES work. YMMV. I've yet to have it filter a legitimate message, and it picks up about 70% of spam into my Inbox...
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
I've been promoting this notion for a couple years at least, while at the same time offering a spam filtering tutorial for Pegasus users. I've seen others also promoting the same general concept, sometimes with more details. However...
To see this happen, somebody needs to do it rather than talking about it. A technical demonstration, at the very least. And if I'm missing something and there's something like this in the works, it needs publicity, development support, testing, etc. to take it "out of the lab" and moving toward common use.
No Laughing Allowed!
I'm particularly looking forward to the session titled "Punishments: Corporal or Capital?"
Find free books.
If this conference is anti-spam, why are they using slashdot to spam for this conference ?
This thing must have been featured 3 or 4 times on slashdot now...
You really need a girlfriend.
I would suggest a second and parallel email channel be introduced. Leave the current sendmail system in place. Those desiring better email and no spam will migrate to the new channel. Those who don't care can remain on the SPAM channel.
What could be better for a professional Spammer than attending an Anti-Spam Conference? Learn all the techniques and issues you will have to encounter in the upcoming months. I would be on the look out for people wearing too many gold chains reaking of hottub clorine wanting to make your penis larger in less than 7 days while offering you a Micro RC Car.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/17/005624 9
"I'm pink, therefore I'm Spam"
It appears that the only solution to eliminating SPAM is to develop a completely new architecture for handling email...
Not true. The simplest solution is economic. If raise the cost of sending e-mail by as little as one penny / thousand e-mails, most spam becomes uneconomical. Poof, the spammers go out of business.
That is the only way it would/could work. The start would be a pain. But, once a sizable portion of the internet (getting some big ISPs to go along would help) used it, it would grow. This idea has been talked about for a long time, but no one will be the first to start using the new protocol.
Michael Loves Me!
Where are my moderator points when I need them!!! Thanks for this. :)
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
I've heard this before, but I'm not convinced. Right now I use an old version of spamassassin which until recently filtered about 95% of all the spam I recieved with 2 false positives over the last 6 months. I just upgraded to the new cvs version with bayesian filtering and now expect even better results.
Maybe we should give filtering software another chance before we do something as drastic as uproot the entire email system.
... an anti-spam conference. Nobody would want to exchange business cards at pro-spam conference.
conferences anti-spam you!
Sending a few kB does not cost a penny. End of story. Any system which adds arbitrary cost on top of the real cost is doomed user-acceptance-wise, even without taking into account the problem that there is no micropayment system which wouldn't add several times the cost of the stamp.
Now if they could just get Bernard Shifman to show up...
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
I actually publicize my email address to get more spam now, just to watch PF smack it!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Ding!
Get out those AOL CDs and bags of dog poo!
hehe...
Happy New Year Ralsky.
It appears that the only solution to eliminating SPAM is to develop a completely new architecture for handling email which would simply not provide mechanisms for the broadcast of SPAM, and the hijacking of mail servers.
How about just properly configuring the existing mailservers?
The hijacking problem is mainly with mail servers misconfigured as open relays.
No switchover needed.
As was pointed out in the last round of spam-article comments, you can't eliminate the header-forging problem, as at some point you have to trust the server that's supplying you with mail. So a new scheme would not help with this.
In summary, I don't see how switching to a new scheme would help.
I would watch out for spammers crashing the party and trying to cause serious problems. If you read some of the rants from these people on nanae, you can see how they would be capable of causing trouble for the anti-spammers gathered at the convention. There are a ton of spammers and it only takes a few of them to file false police reports, harass attendeees, etc. They've shown again and again that they are immature. Just look at how Ralsky harassed that guy who took pictures of his house. Many prominent anti-spammers have received death threats, this shows the level of hatred that some spammers have.
> Slashdotters who are peeved about spam can register here.
For which they want your email address--and add that it shouldn't be too heavily shielded against spam. Hmmm....
Chris Mattern
Again and again it's been proposed, and every time it is calmly explained to the proponent why it's totally unworkable. What's your idea, micropayments, public key authentication, etc.? People are always glad to hear someone's solution to all spam, but understand it's probably been posted and debunked already.
Can anyone recommend a Bayesian Spam filter that (a) works with Outlook and Outlook Express, (b) is dead simple to install and use, and (c) works really well? I'd love to be able to point them at a URL.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
What could be better for a professional Spammer than attending an Anti-Spam Conference? Learn all the techniques and issues you will have to encounter in the upcoming months.
... have to contain spam.
How would this help them? People have known how the RBL, for instance, works for years, and yet it's still quite effective.
Likewise, filtering based on content still works despite being around for a while because spam mails
In summary, I don't see what they'd learn that would be of use to them.
Popfile works reasonably for Outlook and Outlook Express.
One approach would be to use TLS with certificates signed by trusted anti-spam certification agents, and give TLS mail priority over plain-old cleartext SMTP.
Basically, nearly all current anti-spam techniques (one exception being whitelisting) work on the concept of "marking down" certain messages or sending hosts as being less trusted. Our goal is to use TLS and other approaches to apply the concept of "elevating trust", of elevating the trust level of certain hosts and messages.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Someone 4 posts down was modded +4 Insightful for saying the same damn thing. Geez, wake up..
Anyway, this is correct. Spammers already troll anti-spam lists looking for information on new anti-spam techniques just so they can slip around them.
Ditch the crappy mail client and get a real one :-)
Not quite what you're looking for, but the upcoming 1.3 release of Mozilla runs on Windows, imports contacts & messages from Outlook / Outlook Express, and will have Bayesian spam filtering.
I transfered over to the alpha recently, loving it so far.
Hey, how come everyone else on the panel is 'from such-and-such' or 'of blah-di-blah fame', while Eric of Raymond is just plain old ESR?
Surely that should read:
ESR, of copkiller fame?
>And that means educating users to NOT FUCKING BUY ANYTHING SOLD THROUGH SPAM
Why the carrot and not the stick? Imagine spam honeypots luring the people who answer spam into giving up their credit cards and posting them publicly. Or listing names of people who visit honeypot sites like animalsexxxxxxx.com through a spam click. Make sure to report them to their employer if this is done during 9-5.
Then we'll see the obligatory news articles about hackers co-opting spam. Something tells me that all the spam marketers and companies that use spam won't be much of a problem when Joe Blow is worried about hackers and losing his job over spam.
According to the website, postini is a spam filtering company. Doesn't it seem a little bit strange that they'd host a spam relay? Exodus (postini's primary provider) doesn't seem to care too much, since postini is a well to do business. Postini sends an automated response that says "this message is only passing through postini's mailserver. it's not our problem". My first thought would be that postini is running open mail relays as a form of gaurilla advertising to spam busters, but it seems a little bit far fetched. I don't keep a list of addresses or domains, but postini is the only one that i've noticed for about a month that keeps reacuring.Is this sort of thing normal?
If you email me, and you're not in my whitelist, you get a message from my "secretary" asking you to confirm your email address. If you're a spammer, you never see that message. If you're a human being, you either reply to the confirmation request (if the message was important) or you ignore it (if the message wasn't important, in which case I'm happy not to hear from you).
The only problem is those damn Nigerian bank scammers. They actually read their replies. i've heard from two of them in the six or seven months I've been running this whitelist contraption.
But anyhow, spam is no longer the annoyance it once was. I still look forward to strong laws against spam, because I know my bandwidth is being wasted (and other peoples' too), but at least I don't have to see it.
I used to look down on the whitelist approach, because in a sense it is admitting defeat - they're still out there burning up bandwidth, and this doesn't help catch them. But, I'm so glad to be free of spam... Every time I check my email and find no spam, it feels like victory. For me, the great annoyance of time wasted dealing with spam far outweighs the minor inconvenience of increased bandwidth consumption.
Y'all can play games with spam and spammers if you want to, but for me, for now, it's yesterday's problem.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
and Happy fucking Assumption.
I have gotten over 200 spams from this one guy/company in the last 24 hours. all efforts of contacting him have failed.
:
ryan theil of roadwearyfilms.com
the spam:
--------
Greetings Riders, we' re trying to let people know about our company and how we are becoming involved in the community. Here's an e-mail we've been sending out. Thanks
STURGIS 2002- VOICES OF THE CULTURE
Hi, my name is Ryan Thiel and I'm a director and editor for Road Weary Films Inc. My brother Scott and I have been directing independent films in Chicago, Ill. Most of our family is from South Dakota so it only seemed natural that we would make a Sturgis Doc. What a party this last year was. The film is jam packed w/ lots of chrome, hillclimbs, dragraces, coleslaw wrestling, scenes from the major bars, beautiful women and late night rides, as well as segments on the Buffalo Chip, Glencoe, Huelett, the rides in the hills, etc...We also take a look into the culture through numerous interviews and the introduction of new characters (people we meet and followed, obtaining the true essence of the biker) that will be seen in following films. We will be releasing the film on DVD, VH
Ryan Thiel
roadwearyfilms.com
------
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
If you get it into Sendmail and Qmail, I think, you've got your protocol at quite a chunk of the ISPs. From there the commercial server-software will follow (it's another checkbox, that they can check). Deploing it dosen't seem to difficult.
An email message (or packet) should be authenticated at its source as coming from a valid, certifyable and traceable source. The authentication would be checked at each relay to make sure it isn't a bogus email. If authentication fails, the relay would discard the email. The destination then verifies that the email is from a certified source. The idea needs some work, but there is no reason with encryption technology coupled with the authentication information that computer generated SPAM can be differentiated from real certified email.
My original point was that we are currently dealing with the wrong end of the "pipeline." Instead of dealing with the mess flowing out of the pipe, we should be looking at ways to keep SPAM from entering in the first place.....
Try Spambayes, even though it is early in development I didn't have any problems getting it to work. After some initial training it catches about 99% of my spam without one false positive.
t ml
http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/applications.h
Why compare notes when a joint effort would work even better? Come together for a little conference and go your own ways?
Let's start taking advantage of the resources offered by sites like http://www.spamarchive.org and other such services that allow for effective filters to be created.
I don't need no steenking spam conference. Here is the spam killer to end all spam killers. I don't get spam any more.
on the page to register for this conference...
"A confirmation message will be sent to the address you enter.
(Don't use an address with over-aggressive spam filtering set up on it, because if the confirmation bounces, you won't be registered.)"
yup, spambayes get's my vote too. the integration with outlook is excellent and once you've got it set up you don't even notice it (apart from the fact you're not getting all that spam anymore).
see tagline..
victorsertzel9909@earthlink.net is a spammer.
I've just noticed BlueBottle and their Spam prevention system. It looks promising to me. Has anyone tried it yet? Any problems?
(If BlueBottle.com works, then I'll just have to figure out how to get Internet Explorer to quit prompting me to install that damn Macromedia Flash plugin and I will enjoy the Internet again!)
Get the spammers to attend the conference. My guess is that none of them will make it out alive.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
> only solution to eliminating SPAM is to develop a completely new architecture
Take a look at DJB's im2000 concept
http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
LL
popfile. Absolutely. The current release is good. The up-coming release currently working its way through the cvs is going to be _amazing_ Rick
An email message (or packet) should be authenticated at its source as coming from a valid, certifyable and traceable source.
The problem with this is twofold: First, you're going to have a very difficult time getting people to agree on trustworthy sources, and second, you get the same problem as we have with DNS - the people who hold the keys have far too much power.
And unless all servers on the planet agree on a set of athentication servers, you'll still be able to inject spam into the system from remote relays (c.f. the china problem right now).
I'm not convinced this approach is practical. It's great in principle; I just don't think any likely implementation would work very well.
City by the sea
Cradle of revolution
All spam overboard
If there is going to be a Spam conference there has got to be a representative from Hormel, the makers of Spam. They even have a Spam Museum, Spam Recipes and much more on their Website. You can even order online, if you don't want anyone to know you are a closet Spam Freak, or read Spam Trivia.
Regardless of what you think of Spam, someones eating those 6 BILLION cans they have produced since 1937.
I've installed 3 weeks ago, and only 1 spam went through, and I've got only 1 false positive, out of over 700 messages received in that time.
Squeezing the whole thing into a tiny non-resizable frame, so you have to scroll horizontally to view the screenshots, is pretty stupid, if you ask me.
I say we all get out torches and pitchforks and go on a good old-fashioned witchhunt.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
Ok, so this is a "Spam Conference"! Does this mean we can all head down there and see all our best friends that send the emails to us? I've got a two by four with a certain spammer's name on it :) J/K
-Joe
If we're all god's children, what's so special about Jesus? - Jimmy Carr
this letter i give to you so that you may review it further.
What I don't get is since when did they think this was the best way to get people to run a virus ??????
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
They distribute a set of MD5 hashes of E-mail addresses, as an opt-out list. Bad idea. Now, a spammer can get that list, run their lists against it, find all the people who opted out, and use that as a mailing list for stuff like phone line blockers, alarms, and similar products that would appeal to the anti-spam demographic.
Its pretty good too with only a few getting through once and a while.
Realistically, most mail accounts are Hotmail/MSN, Yahoo, Earthlink, various broadband providers, and large companies with pro mail admins. That doesn't leave many people on standard SMTP.
The 'secure' mail channel is the only realistic solution, and I can't wait for it to happen.
VeriSign and the other "trusted roots" already have all the power over WWW e-commerce. Giving them control over mail certificates doesn't make the situation significantly worse.*
Of course, you'd need various private lists of "untrusted" certificates. But that's a fuck of a lot easier than tracking every open relay in the world.
* note that 99.9999% of people don't consider DNS a 'problem'. But even so, any MCSE can create their own cert root, which is more than you can say about heirarical DNS.
Since Microsoft controls the largest number of e-mail accounts in the world, Bill Gates heartly approves.
Are you working on your own anti-spam solution? Would you like to compare notes with other coders?
How about "are you a user with a well thought out opinion on what you'd like to have for tools to use?"
I see the bulk of effort these days on tools to detect spam, which is semi-useless to me(esp since it rarely works perfectly)..ie Computer:"This is spam!"...User: "No shit, sherlock."
I can tell within a second whether something is spam. And it pisses me off. I want to be able to DO something about it, and filtering it off into neverneverland is exactly what spammers want- they want everyone, save a small percentage, to delete or filter it off.
What I really want is a tool that -I- can run, not spamcop(which is almost universally ignored by ISPs, particularly chinese ones) and assists me in reporting the spam(as well as submitting the ISP to the open-relay testers and such.) I want spammers and ISPs to get it through their thick skulls that spamming is NOT ACCEPTABLE.
Spamcop is easy to block. 10,000 pissed off users aren't. I'm sick of ISPs ignoring abuse/spam reports...IMHO, everything's fair game if they do- sales contact addresses, tech support email addresses...hell, google under the company's domain name and harvest addresses of the employees, etc.
It is time we inconvenienced spammers and the ISPs that support them as much as they inconvenience the computing public. Given the # of people spammers reach in just one mailing, the math works out to one hell of a lot of 'inconveniencing' they're due...
a.
For rmail in emacs, once you've got http://spamassassin.org on the system, like the system at the university here at this end, how do you sort the hundreds of spam commercial messages now with spamassassin headers?...
b. What functions for rmail in emacs are there?...
c. what other features of spamassassin are there?...
that neophytes might try to get to their preferred correspondents messages more easily?...
Spam really started to annoy me for about 1 year now. Been online since 1995 (no longer newbie, but no veteran either) and having settled with the same email address since 1999 resulted in ever increasing unwanted messages, but it got ridiculous in the past few months. Now I'm even getting bounced emails from spam sent in my name, outrageous. ;)
So for the past few days I started thinking of ways to avoid this problem. Filters seem effective, but I feel it's fighting too near your front door. New email protocols that stop SPAM at the sender's side (discussed in previous comments) seem like the way to go, but probably not to be seen in the near future.
So below I will flush my incomplete thoughts, and contribute to open-brainstorming
BTW, this is related to MY problem, having my own domain name and with the ability to have whateverIwant@mydomain.com, so it's not THE solution for global SPAM:
1) if I change my email address, SPAMers will not have it for some time (as little as it may be), so I'll be SPAM-free for that period
2) when I change my email address, I have to notify all those who I know have it (probably almost all in my own contact list, and a few more)
3) doing 1) and 2) every week/month is tedious for myself and my contacts, so automation is required
5) if 3) then my email address doesn't have to be 'human readable', ie. can be a computer generated hash of some sort: someRandomHash@mydomain.com
6) if 3) then problem will be that my contacts need to use the same system, otherwise it will be tedious for them to change manually every update
7) creating different email address to each contact would help identifying where address 'leaks' are happening
8) if 7) then updates are only necessary to the address(es) 'found' by SPAMers
9) all above doesn't cover public email addresses (say, in the contact me section of one's web site). These can be protected by using the anti-bot 'picture' method used by email registration sites (where you need to write the passphrase encoded in the picture). Passphrase to be written in the subject line, otherwise email auto-ignored.
10) these things could be implemented as plug-ins to existing email readers, but that's still fighting it in your PC (you already wasted the bandwidth), what we want is these added as a service in your mail server.
Probably this ranks low in the heap of ideas thrown at SPAM, but then perhaps the answer to SPAM is not ONE magical trick, but the combining of them all. In the end, if SPAM doesn't reach the end-user it will eventually die out... (fingers crossed anyway)
yes indeedly rick it will be. =)
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Nice that /. is supporting this conference, but jeeze, you'd think they would keep a better eye out for dupes. I posted this *same article* on the 16th... Have the readers of /. such a short attention span? I suppose it is all of the flashing lights in all that anime you kids watch that is slowly deteriorating your memory... =)
P.S. It would also have been nice if the poster would have researched his/her links a little better. For instance, the current page for POPFile is at http://popfile.sourceforge.net/
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
The obligatory
6. ???
7. Profit
Sorry, I had to...
One of my accounts has a pretty serious spam problem - was getting about 50 spam / day. In response, I cooked up my own anti-spam software - SpamButcher. It's similar to other anti-spam products - except that it actually works. Using "fuzzy logic" it kills about 97% of my spam. Currently only supports Windows users using POP3 accounts. It is "commercial" software - but there's a 30-day trial you can download (it's $29.95 if you want to purchase). I don't want anyones money unless they're already 100% satisfied with the product. There seem to be a lot of people who think using client-side anti-spam products is the "easy way out" and doesn't actually help solve the problem. I disagree - if everyone used an effective anti-spam product (mine, or others) - spam would become unprofitable, and subside. I'm posting this because I believe it's relevant to the article - if you think this post is spam - send the hate mail to rich@spambutcher.com I also run an anti-spam "blacklist" of major corporations that support spam at www.spamcrusader.org Rich Olson rich@spambutcher.com Chief Butcher SpamButcher - www.spambutcher.com
What are you talking about? It looks fine and there's no horizontal scrolling needed for me in either IE or Mozilla...
You trying to view it on a PDA or something?
Good job, Stuart.
load "windows7"
I highly recommend Jumbo Seafood (in Chinatown but nearer the South Station subway stop than the Chinatown stop) if you're going out for Chinese food in Boston. The Fire+Ice restaurants are also excellent - one is at 50 Church St near the Harvard Square T stop, the other is at 205 Berkeley St in the Back Bay area. See their website at fire-ice.com.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Some spammers have realized that the outrage that follows their mailings is a resource that they can use against their enemies.
They do this by forging the headers in such a way that it appears that a "white hat" has actually been responsible for the spam in some way.
Then when the zealous, but unsuspecting user examines the headers, they end up directing their perfectly understandable opprobrium towards the spammer's enemies (anti-spam groups and companies, usually) instead of the spammer themselves.
It's called a "Joe Job" and it's the new price of admission for anti-spam activists.
Poof the Linux Kernal Developers List Server goes out of business.
Line up here to buy your New Windows YP.
You're forgetting that spam has all the "substance" of an electron on a diet. You'd be lucky to light a match with the energy released by even a million spams a day colliding with anti-spam.
So why should I opt out?
In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.
I use spamassassin, and other people can use whatever works for them, but none of that will stop spam. It only stops spam going to you, not all the spam on the internet. The "a plan for spam" article argues that blocking 99% of spam will change the cost structure of the spammers and make them unprofitable. I dont agree. 99% of spam is going to people who will not buy the product anyway, so it doesnt matter if we block it or not. There are still 0.000015% of people out there who actually want the spam product and who reply and fund the whole effort.
To make spam unprofitable, we would have to drive up spammer's cost of processing orders. One way to do this would be to turn the tables on the spammers and send false replies to them. Basically, launch DoS attacks against any contact information (reply-to, URL, phone number, etc.) listed in spam emails. That will mean that spammers will get 1,000,000 responses when they send out 1,000,000 emails, but only 15 of those will be real customers, the other 999,985 will be bogus junk that the spammers will have to sort through or make the spammer sponsors sort through.
Didn't this start out as a spam filter conference? Glad to see the broadening of focus.
Is there anyone planning to attend who advocates and understands open relay honeypots and open proxy honeypots? There should be. I'm trapping spam from Taiwan, to Taiwan, on my home system in Wisconsin right now by running Jackpot. What I trap depends on which spammer finds my "open relay" and on what he sends.
At work I got spam from all over, including from top spammers like Ralsky and Rizler. Spam for millions of recipients, stopped dead at the relay. By an obsolete Vaxstation 4000/90.
See: http://jackpot.uk.net/
Sorry, but it had to be said by somebody....
Thanks for the feedback. The inline frame is relatively new and there is already an alternative for browsers that don't support inline frames. A way to manually bypass it for a browser that supports inline frames but does so in a troublesome way is a worthwhile idea (even if rudely presented). I'll add that when I get a chance. It might be useful for my short stories as well, as they gain illustrations.
No Laughing Allowed!
They've got a web site. They've got a press relations person named Joann joann@postini.com, and in Cyberspace, everybody's the press. They're ostensibly looking to hire people. You've got expertise they obviously need. And either they're Evil, in which case you won't mind blocking them, or they're Good Guys but have some bad customers they haven't caught, in which case they probably want to know, or they're clueless or overloaded, in which case their PR person ought to know.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Different ways to help spammers find them are to put them on web pages, or to have a spider-trap just waiting to generate them for web crawlers, or of course to be sure to unsubscribe them to all the spam unsubscribe addresses you've got, as well as the yes-tell-me-more addresses. They're more fun if you've got a lot of domain names to play with, but even if spammers kill off dangerous domains, you can trick some of them by doing addresses from lots of different thirdlevel domains, like alice@aardvark.example.com, alice@aardwulf.example.com, ... alice@zymurgy.example.com, bob@aardvark.example.com, ... And just to make things fun for the harvesters, you might as well make sure they've all got web pages pointing to a couple of other subdomains on your system.
If you want to get fancy with DNS, you can also set some of your subdomains to point to known open relays, if you happen to know anybody. Instead of having the spammer deliver all the email directly to aardvark.example.com, you can tell them that aardvark.example.com is at an IP address that's that misconfigured machine in Korea that's been spamming you, and have _them_ get teergrubed also.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the
system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine
some of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very
sharp, probably not someone here on campus.
-- Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, in
Georgia Tech's campus newspaper after the Internet worm.
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This "brain-damaged" epithet is getting sorely overworked. When we can
speak of someone or something being flawed, impaired, marred, spoiled;
batty, bedlamite, bonkers, buggy, cracked, crazed, cuckoo, daft, demented,
deranged, loco, lunatic, mad, maniac, mindless, non compos mentis, nuts,
Reaganite, screwy, teched, unbalanced, unsound, witless, wrong; senseless,
spastic, spasmodic, convulsive; doped, spaced-out, stoned, zonked; {beef,
beetle,block,dung,thick}headed, dense, doltish, dull, duncical, numskulled,
pinhead; asinine, fatuous, foolish, silly, simple; brute, lumbering, oafish;
half-assed, incompetent; backward, retarded, imbecilic, moronic; when we have
a whole precisely nuanced vocabulary of intellectual abuse to draw upon,
individually and in combination, isn't it a little to be
limited to a single, now quite trite, adjective?
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