Slashdot Mirror
CDT Releases New Report on Origins of Spam
Carnth writes "CDT has released a new report based on a six month project entitled "Why Am I Getting All This Spam?" The results offer Internet users insights about what online behavior results in the most unsolicited commercial email and also debunk some of the myths about spam." A very good report - read it. There's also a story about yet another sleazy spammer in Ohio.
Spam comes in the form of unrequested text, right? So saying "FIRST POST" every time there's a new topic is simply a way of spamming Slashdot?
Chuck
I'm still wondering why when I have my hotmail filter set to "exclusive" (only recieve from those in my address book, which contains 10 addresses), I continue to get loads of spam each day in my inbox, including some very embarassing things that would cause my mom to faint if she walked in.
In other news, it was announced today that after careful study, researchers confirmed that fire is hot and pointy objects hurt.
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
I never saw anything in their methodology about how the spam was analyzed. It would have been interesting to see what effect actually opening spam e-mail in a web enabled browser had on the recurrence rate.
I bet the web bugs would have kept the recurrences high even for addresses that were removed...
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
All these damn spam fanboys are ruining the net!
I am sorry, smack me down if you must, but... Aaaahhhhhhhh!!!! Die Spammer, Die! Friggin White Trash sonsabitchin spammers. I feel slightly better now. Ready for Karma extraction.
If this article confuses you, don't worry. It was posted yesterday in a much clearer fashion.
I managed to grab the PDF before the server was trampled by the swarming masses.
Mirror is here.
I just got a new domain. ;-)
Which means that every email to that domain goes to me.
Every time I give my Email online I give a diff name, for instance if I buy at yahoo I give "yahoo-shopping@mydomain.com".
If I get spam to this address I know who gave it to the spammers.
- only been doing this for a week, no spam so far but there is still hope
Note: I am not actively looking to be spamed, just doing my usual stuff.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
1) Sign up on an internet gambling site.
2) Register a domain name.
I have multiple domain names and I know for certain that much of my spam originated from either scanning the whois database, or someone selling the e-mail addresses from there.
I don't gamble, but I noticed that the java applets that were used for 99% of the gambling sites were all from the same place. In other words, if you want to start a gambling site, but you don't want to write software - you can pay to use the java applets of this one company. There is some rebradning that goes on - but in the end, it all goes through their servers and uses their code.
Because of that, I figured if there were any holes in the software, that would mean a whole crapload of open spots out there. So out of curiosity I registered at a gambling site and then looked at the source (you can get the source from a java applet).
After that, my spam increased exponentially - the immediate group was spamming me, as well as selling off the address - which then gets repeated over and over.
I use spamassassin now and I have it tweaked to the point where out of over 100 spams a day, I only have 1 get through - and that is because the code times out and lets it through, not because SA hasn't caught it.
I first installed it in January and in that time have only had it once grab mail that it shouldn't have - from my mom. I added her to the whitelist and have never had a problem since.
I use one of the more recent 2.60 versions, have the spam threshold lowered to 3.5, and I have tweaked a few of the score settings. Workds great for me.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Would he also say the same thing if a bunch of people hacked his email server and redirected all his crap toward this guy's own personal email box? Or if he was sent those 2 mil AOL CDs? Also, the places where he has his server's, are they protect against hmmm.... "accidents"?
Hate me!
Because your penis is small, you'd like to work from home and everybody loves baklava?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
In the debate over how much spam really costs, one factor that almost never gets discussed is the impact on behavior and openness. How many of us refrain from using our real email addresses in public forums or in correspondence with companies because of a fear of receiving more spam? There may not be a direct economic cost, but it makes the Internet less useful to all of us. Spammers have essentially driven all of us to have unlisted phone numbers on the Internet, which reduces the usefulness of the medium. Off with their heads, I say.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
I was considering moving into the spam market, but decided that was too controversial. I opted to start pornography business instead.
The FTC already filed a complaint and had a preliminary injunction against Childs back in April. See the press release for more information. The article mentions he lives by Riverside drive in an apartment, could be with Linda Lightfoot, the woman mentioned in the complaints with him?
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. - Anais Nin
a good thing, whether you like it or not. How else would I know that with a single pill, I can elongate my small intestine through a small incision in my lower abdomen, creating a fully functional artificial 18 inch dong?
Let's all go register for online lotteries with our new Hotmail accounts. Then we'll give our e-mail address to the airport on that little frequent flyer card because I know they're going to send me only useful info. Oh yeah, let's not forget Kazaa registration, seedy computer retailers, and mail-in rebates.
I participate in none of these activities. I have my email address on my website, but I spell it out instead of using the at@symbol.com . I've had two e-mail addresses since Summer 2001 and the only spam I get is from Windows e-mail viruses, which aren't compatible with my operation system. Yes, it *is* possible to have a public e-mail address that doesn't get spammed.
In the long run, we're all dead.
The promised junk mail control for Mozilla is finally here and I'm loving it. The wait was almost unbearable because all the other guys in the office have had spam filters with their OSX email client for months. I was tempted to switch. But now mail comes in and gets whisked away to the junk folder almost immediatly. It's a beautiful thing.
Oh god, here we go with the old "waah why isn't everyone as tough as I am" complaint.
I wonder, does he have children? If not, would he relish the idea of them constantly being hit with sex ads? How about elderly relatives?
spam comes from tins.
I have no idea why they have that daft pig icon for spam stories though.
of Godless phonIE bullonly payper liesense stock markup fraud/spam college can be found at trustworthycomputing.com(post).
fuddles' new' "learn to be a spammer for only $49.95 a month"(tm), is about as useful as va lairIE's PostBlock(tm) device.
lookout bullow.
don't forget to consult with yOUR creator frequently, during times of evile deception, etc...
Karma's practically free, but that's not a reason to reduce the signal to noise level.
So whining to someone about signal to noise level is a reason to reduce the signal to noise level?
*cough*hypocrit*cough*
The above CDT finding is mildly surprising to me. Is there a reason people haven't built 'smarter' Web scrapers that filter and convert character encodings of things like the '@' sign in email addys? Doesn't seem too difficult, but if the report is to be taken at face value, it seems a simple precaution to take (still). I had always considered it a low-tech defense easily overwhelemed. Guess I was wrong?
An interesting read, altogether. I know I'll be obsfucating my email adress when it goes on my website (not that the spammers won't figure that one out soon enough).
Still, notice that they received more than 10,000 emails... and more than 8,000 were spam. That's around 80% spam, and it includes the accounts that actually took some measure of protection against it. Naturally accounts that didn't bother to protect their email addresses got a much greater proportion of spam.
It's a shame we have to protect ourselves from what should be an open and valuable exchange. I know 80% spam would just swamp me altogether.
For geek dads: Contraction Timer
"We do we blame spammers for spam? If NO-ONE ever completed a transaction through an unwanted solicition, then spam would go away completely."
Spammers are 100% to blame for the spam. Your argument is like saying that mugging victims are the cause of robberies because they dare to have money in their wallets.
Childs blamed the mix-up on a programming accident and said he has since apologized to Smithson [for using her site as an open relay].
Reminds me of the old saying, "I might have believed it was an accident if you hadn't stopped twice to reload and once to chug a couple of beers."
Someone you trust is one of us.
you can get the source from a java applet How exactly did you "get the source"?
These fucking spammers. Fucking DMA preventing tough anti-spam laws. I don't know about you, but I never buy anything from telemarketers and I'm more likely to just throw out any physical mail advertisements, after hitting the 'delete' button so many times.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
there's another one that has house/offices located near Tontogany, Ohio and also in Toledo. He lives in a LARGE house located in a richer area in the country. Their house is full of expensive toys, computers, LCDs, and furniture. He looks something like Marilyn Manison having a good day. He chain smokes. He doesn't get up till 2 oe 3 in the afternoon. He claims he is completely for "mass mailings". He wants people to believe that his emails are making their day.
I wish I remembered his name.
He is a fucking asshole. Die you spamming fuck.
Geez, I sure hope he's right. It sure would be a shame if his physical mailbox overflowed with a gazillion free catalogs.
Did anyone explain to him what happened to Alan Ralsky?
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
This is true for me, as well. Along with spam targeted to generic accounts (info@... is a favorite for domain-related services spam). Unfortunately, this class of unasked-for email falls outside the scope of the posted CDT study.
Well, when I set my spam-filters to exclusive I didn't get a single peice of email. of course I didn't have anyone in my address book.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Some blowhard wrote a story about spam and thinks he has all the answers!
/., for keeping me up to date with the whinings of every know-it-all jackass 'pooter expert'.
This is a once in a lifetime event!
Thank you
Look into things such as Jet, Mocha, Dj, etc.
Many newer editors have it built in.
There are ways around it - but for the most part, Java is just bytecode and therefore you can go backwards and get the source - it isn't truly compiled in the sense of C/C++ exe code.
You don't get comments, but the code is there.
This is why you need to be very careful about how you do things in Java applets if you want security. Not really an issue if your code is server side - but in the case of a client side applet - once they have it, they can go through it all easily.
For the most part, the way around it is to have anything that needs to be secure done server side over an ssl connection and have the applet as dumb as possible - only relaying what has happened to the server or the user, depending on which is needed. Also, the server should keep track of what "should" be happening, that way if something comes back to it that doesn't match what it is expecting, it can be suspicious that the data has been tampered with.
In the case of the online casino code - they had done this in all of their newest code, and in older code it looked like they had hacked it in - so I presume at one point it wasn't done this way and they likely ran into someone winning too frequently as a result.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Charles F. Childs, Dayton Ohio.
Can anyone narrow that down a bit?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I don't want to get myself into any possible legal trouble, so please excuse me if I'm somewhat vague in some respects. IANAL.
About 2 or 3 years ago, my wife visited a store in the Lansing, Michigan area and gave them my email address. From time to time, I would receive email from them. Eventually, I asked them to stop. They stopped.
On November 21, 2002, I received an email from them asking me if I would like to begin receiving advertisements and marketing offers from them again. There was a link to click on, if I didn't want to opt-in. I clicked on that link.
Approximately 2 months later, I received an email from them. They had an option to unsubscribe by sending an email to their unsubscribe address. It said I would be removed immediately. I even received a confirmation stating that I had unsubscribed. For the next month, I continued to get 2-3 emails from them per week. Each time, I clicked unsubscribe and was told that I had indeed been unsubscribed.
After the 2nd email, I contacted customer service and reported the problem. No response. After the fourth time, I contacted them again, and threatened legal action, if they didn't stop. No response. I called customer service, talked to a live person, and was told that I would be removed from all their lists. But the email continued to come.
I filed a lawsuit in Michigan small claims alleging violations of the "junk fax" law, having heard about a Michigan man who had won by doing so. 6 violations for $500 each, resulted in $3,000, the maximum allowable under Michigan Law for small claims. As evidence, I have nearly all of the advertisement emails as well as my requests to be unsubscribed, and their acknowlegements stating that I had been unsubscribed. Additionally, I have the emails I sent to customer service, which never received replies.
About 2 weeks after filing suit, I received an email from their customer service stating that they were finally looking into the problem. I haven't received an email from them in the last 2 weeks, so I assume that I'm finally off their list, and it only cost me $36.50 ($32 small claims, $4.50 certified mail).
However, now their attorneys have demanded that the case be removed from small claims and placed into general civil court (which is their right). Unfortunately, I plan to do just that.
The FTC has publicly stated that not honoring removal requests is illegal. However, I'm not sure I have a private right of action in this situation. Using the Junk Fax law in general civil court is probably a bad idea, and I think I would likely have to claim actual damages in order to pursue it in general civil court.
I don't really want to get in over my head. I'm sure they realize this, which then makes me WANT to get in over my head. However, I'm still not sure that I have a legal basis for my case. Even in a state like Washington, where anti-spam laws exist, half of the cases get dismissed by the judge.
I called a local attorney and was told that I should dismiss, or risk being counter-sued for a frivolous lawsuit. Essentially, what they did is illegal, but there really isn't much I can do about it other than contact the FTC and the state attorney general, and if I pursue my case against them, I could wind up paying them.
--
Slashdolt
A former Dayton police officer who was fired in 1996 for selling drugs on the street, Childs said he doesn't rise most days now until 1 p.m.
So let me get this straight. Not only is this Childs guy a commercial spammer who says people should "Quit your whining" about receiving spam, but he was also a drug dealer and a corrupt cop.
So now, my question is how the hell isn't this guy in jail? You'd think between dealing drugs, being a corrupt police officer, and being a spammer this guy would be behind bars, wouldn't you? Apparently not!
Furthermore:
The Federal Trade Commission, however, has questioned the honesty of at least one of Childs' Internet ventures. The federal agency sued Childs in federal court last year for operating an Internet chain-mail scheme that enriched a few early participants at the expense of others.
So now he was basically running a pyramid scheme as well. This is just revolting.
Let the internet take care of itself.......I"m sure as we speak, someone who lives in Charles F. Childs area, is tracking down his address, and some forum somewhere will post his address, then as happened to the other spammer, his snail mail box will be filled with every catalog, etc you can imagine!
What was the first spam? AFAIR it was "Make Money Fast" on Usenet when AOL came on line, must've been 1994 or 1995. Everyone's first reaction was anger; that's never really changed.
:-))
Anyone else remember their earliest encounter with it?
DOS TIP: Mozilla 1.3 Bayesian spam filtering =
Yeah, this guy is a real success story to be immitated.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
On the first day, the Lord created email, and it was good.
On the second day, the Lord created spam, and it was bad.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Obscuring an e-mail address is an effective way to avoid spam from harvesters on the Web or on USENET newsgroups... ("example at domain dot com")
I thought for sure by now spammers would have figured out regular expressions and e-mail address verifying modules, and I'm glad they haven't.
But doesn't that prove that there's never been a smart programmer who's worked on an e-mail harvester?
I think that says alot about the profession.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
When i registered my domain, I gave the address archos@myprivacy.ca. Any mail sent to this address is is held while a challange is sent to the sender. The sender just has to reply to the challange email, and the original will be sent to me. Automated spammers won't reply to the challange. myprivacy.ca is a free service provided mainly for .ca domains, or for domains registered with a participating registrars.
Does anyone know of any other services like this?
Very true. But in fact, it doesn't just apply to Java. Even in other languages you can disassemble the code and work out what it does. It takes longer than it would to decompile Java bytecode, but it can be done, and if security is important to you then the mere fact that it is 'difficult' to reverse engineer the code shouldn't be enough.
In other words: you cannot trust any code that runs on the client side.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Spam needs legitimization. Hear me out, now, before you add that -1, Troll. By legitimizing spam we put ourselves in control. We need laws on a national level defining exactly what is valid spam and what is illegal.
We need the ISPs to work WITH the spammers ( or vice cersa). Make it trvial to filter, and only send it once. Give everybody a shared "Spam box", as place to go and see if they really need to acclerate their dialup to new levels, or a vacation, or whatever (I'm assuming 18" Penis and XXX TEEN LESBIANS will not be considered legit). We need stiff penalties to those who violate the law. We can't enforce the law in other spammer friendly countries, but we can enforce the law in our own. The company marketing should also be held responsible for violations, preventing American companies from just outsourcing their spam. Any spammer friendly ISP's either deal with their spammers or risk the entire range being blocked (voluntarily) by American ISPs. I know 99% of service providers would have no problem blocking out spammers voluntarily, especially if they are being good Americans while they are doing so. Let's not forget that as rapidly as it's changing, a majority of popular sites are American based. I know all you Norwiglians out there would probably drop your ISP if you couldn't get to slashdot just because your ISP supported spam.
The DMA has too much money to let spam die, and apart from the slashdot crowd a majority of people don't find spam to be a big problem in their daily lives (albeit mostly thhanks to us busting ass). Some people actually enjoy getting spam. I don't understand it either, but to each his own. As an option in a recent poll said, grey areas definately exist.
I think spam is a fact of life. Sometimes I get emails from business friends who include a small ad as their sig. We can't kill spam but we can change the face of it to be ever os less intrusive. We're going to have to compromise our "FUCK YOU AND YOUR GOD DAMN SPAM" attitudes if we plan on giving our credibility to our cause.
We want complete restriciton, and they want no restriciton. Somewhere in the middle there's a feasible solution for both of us.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Which means 5% want to receive spam? I'm surprised there's anyone at all that doesn't loathe spam except the spammers themselves.
A good way to prevent spamming is to use javascript to generate your address. So rather then writing "me@wherever.tld" you write
<script>
document.write("me");
document.write("@");
document.write("wherever");
document.write(".tld");
</script>
It works pretty well, I've found.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Waiting for the gub'ment to take action is like expecting the local politicians to care about your best interest. (aside - the local turkeys just raised the taxes again because their "revenue" is down.)
We need to deal with this ourselves. Anyone who is connected with email software (especially the relays) needs to make sure the software is shipped with everything turned off. This will prevent the doofi out there from accidentally breeding open mail relays. While it won't fix the immediate problem, it'll stop propagating it in the future.
To really stop the spammers, we need to upgrade the email system to support something more robust than SMTP. It was great 30 years ago, but the world has changed. We need to take the painful step of upgrading the email system.
Yes, there is a cost associated with it. Yes, it will be painful for a period. Yes, it is necessary.
It seems to me that the origin of spam deserves a really good goatse.cx link, but I've trolled enough this week.
Thats why we're all posting replies as to a modded down post - this whole thread will be ignored.
signal to noise level rejoices.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
How come nobody's posted this guy's address yet?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Yes, I've posted to usenet, and with only a couple of instances excepted, I've munged my address both in the from header and in the sig.
Yes, I've used the address when shopping online, registering shareware, signing up for other services, etc. Some of these actions have been followed by noticeable increases in spam.
One of the things that really bugs me is web services who solicit email addresses for their service (such as a greeting card or "e*kiss"), and then sell those addresses to spammers.
My ex-girlfriend once sent me an e-greeting using some unknown service, and addressed it to my earthlink account. I strictly use the ".net" tld when I give out that address, but for some reason, my ex used the .com tld for this greeting card. Before I even viewed the card, my inbox was flooded with spam addressed to me "@earthlink.com"
Needless to say, I was pissed. I sure wish I could remember which e-card website she used. Bastards.
I can see the fnords!
Hope it is thousands. This company basically kept harassing him after being told to stop. There is no excuse for that.
Short of changing my email address, is there any way I can stop them?
I keep thinking Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). With the topic being spam, it would make sense.
Their server is totally slashdotted. I'm mirroring the article at my personal site.
/<en
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge....
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
YASS = Yet Another Sleasy Spammer
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
okay the address again is...
Charles F Childs
and Linda Jean Lightfoot
4132 Pompton Court
Dayton
Ohio 45405
Lets see if we can stuff HIS mail box like the last spammer recieved!
On my PC (win 2k, using MS Outlook (not express)) I've managed to get almost all my spam filtered out. I still get 1 or 2 a day, but that's way better than the 30+ I used to get. All it took was spamassassian (to catch most of the spam) and cloudmark spamnet (which catches many/most of the viruses that seem to find their way to me). Works great.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
After rereading my message, I removed a line of text. It was supposed to read something like:
"They're trying to get my to dismiss. Unfortunately, I probably do just that."
--
Slashdolt
Here's what I presume to be home address of the spammer named in the article.
ABUSERS: C. Fielding Childs
cf_childs@yahoo.com
Bulker's Paradise
4132 Pompton Ct.
Dayton, Ohio 45405
FAX: (937) 275-3741
ALSO: Charles Fielding Childs, Jr.
"MAIL ORDER ALLIED COMPANY"
2936 Melbourne Ave.
Dayton, OH 45417
... a user with a common or short name may want to modify or add to it in some way in his or her e-mail address.
For further information, please contact... ari@cdt.org.
Not taking their own advice?
I didn't request your text. Stop spamming me, asshole.
I have the same email address that I've had since 1994 (basically firstname@lastname.com). Unfortunately I used it on the Usenet many years ago, before this was considered to be a bad idea. Nowadays, Google Groups (and perhaps others?) have my postings, and email address, forever immortalized.
I imagine that harvesting software would crawl Google groups regularly. Is there anything I can do about this? This study makes it clear that after an email address is removed from the web, the amount of spam it receives drops off dramatically. It makes sense that removing my email address from google groups (the last remaining place it exists on the web) could help substantially.
So the question is, will Google remove my email address from their site if I ask them? Has anybody else tried this?
- j
No text
Sure, spammer X knows that someone who spells out their email address in an attempt to avoid spam is not going to buy anything.
.003 cents for the email address for each spammer they sell to and buy a silk kimono and leather slippers and sleep until 1 PM. Bastards.
But, many spammers exist solely to sell other spammers email addresses. So, an obscured email address is just as valuable to such a spammer as any other email address.
Of course, they won't tell their spammer clients that the email address is for a spam-averse user, they'll collect their
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
Is that maggot-eaten sack of whale drek still getting a gazillion pieces of snailmail every day?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Here is a link that Slashdot previously posted about a guy who successfully used 47USC227 to sue spammers. You can do it too. Go for the money, or gonads, whichever turns you on the most.
I've come up with a solution to the spam problem that is fiendishly clever, but I lack the programming skill to implement it. What I propose is every email is automatically deleted unless it contains the following in the body.
"This email is intended for x@y.com. This paragraph is copywrited by the owner of that email address. Reproduction or redistribution of this paragraph without the owner's express permission is forbidden and punishable by law."
Finally, a good use for the DMCA. If someone sends you spam, you can sick the DMCA on their ass to force them to reveal their information and where they got your address from (assuming they didn't just guess). Then you can sue the spammer and the seller of your address for copywrite violation. Plus you can root around in their networks, etc. in case you THINK they might be hiding other copywrited works... The real key to this is to write a program/filter/whatever that only accepts emails matching the format, and then to get everyone to use it. You could even have the program automatically add the format to outgoing emails (assuming you have the recipients permission as well...). So, who wants to write it? Open source, free as in beer, etc. etc.
-Will
The first large-scale spam was the infamous "Green Card" Usenet spam from the Cantner and Seigel (sp?) "Law Firm" way back in late 1993 or early 1994. The outcry was deafening. They got tossed off of every ISP they could find and were harrassed for weeks, possibly months.
Now I wade through mountains of spam in my favorite Usenet groups (spam is still being sent to dead newsgroups like alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die for Pete's sake!) and don't even bother trying to get the bastards knocked off their ISPs. Sigh.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
One of the funnier (to me - others likely hate it) things I've seen are those "somebody has a crush on you" sites. you then have to "guess" who sent you the thing, so you put in emails and it collects them. I don't think that anyone ever really sends you anything, it just says that, then collects all the emails that generates and then tells those people that someone has a crush on them, etc etc.
Then that list can be resold.
I have my email address up on slashdot, I have it on my webpage (current and an old school one). I have posted to various discussion boards, yahoo groups, newsgroups, mailing lists, etc. I have purchased online from literally hundreds of online stores (I pretty only buy anything aside from dinner online).
Our of all of those, I definitely saw increases in spam coming in - but it wasn't huge increases until the two things that I mentioned up there - the online gamling and the domain registration.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I was getting more spam because the other penis enlargement products I ordered don't work.
Vote for global prefs bug
I just got a new domain ... Every time I give my Email online I give a diff name, for instance if I buy at yahoo I give "yahoo-shopping@mydomain.com".
People without their own domain who still want to do this can use a free Spam Gourmet account.
The Dayton Daily News article discusses Charles F. Childs, an Ohio native. Last year I testified before the Ohio Senate Commerce Committe regarding a proposed spam bill. That bill was later passed into law . Among other things, the bill has opt-out requirements, requires a pre-existing business relationship, and makes it a feleny to forge headers and/or abuse open relays or proxies to send email. I would imagine that Mr. Childs, and another Ohio spammer, Tom Crowles, are in violation of some or all of the provisions of the Ohio spam law. Here's a new get rich quick scheme for you: hire an attorney and start collecting damages from these scum (up to $100 per email plus legal expenses).
That doesn't change the fact that you're still getting spammed!!! So what if you know who did it? Great, you won't do business with them again because they sold your address.
Your still getting spammed because in most places, it's perfectly legal for them to do so. Your bandwidth is still absorbing spam. Your mail server still deals with the spam/bounces.
Just making a cute address doesn't solve the problem.
Subtle like a brick to the head.
One of the good, rare times a first post has made me chuckle.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
I was seeing so much spam because of this (over 500 a day) that I just setup my server to redirect any mail that comes in to an address that doesn't exist to /dev/null. That brought me down to the "reasonable" 100+ a day.
I'm on a shared server (pair.com - I highly recommend them) - so my scripts are only allowed to run for a max of 30 seconds. They don't run the spamassassin c daemon, so I have to use the spamassassin perl script. With the default settings, it was getting slow going through my mail - so it would timeout, and then when that happened, the mail it was looking at would just get dumped into my inbox, unscanned.
I've adjusted the settings of SA so that it doesn't talk to the RBLs and it only autolearns on 20 or higher scores. I also set the bayes_90 and the bayes_99 to higher scores (3.5 and 4 respectively) just because I personally had never seen those be wrong on my mail.
With those settings and whichever version of the 2.60 I have, I'm loving it right now.
It saves caughtspam out to a "caughtspam" file and I also have yesterday's caughtspam in another file.
I can then just run "frm caughtspam | more" and see it formatted out to the screen in an easy way to read. If I have free time I will glance over it to make sure I'm not missing anything.
I also have scripts that run against it as well to warn me of things that might be things I'd want to keep - but those can only be so smart - but are better than not reading through it at all.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
No metion of Al Gore in that Dayton article, they must not be researching in the correct "manner".
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
> I first installed it in January and in that time have only had it
> once grab mail that it shouldn't have - from my mom. I added her to
> the whitelist and have never had a problem since.
Why would your mom try to sell you a penis enlarger? That's just creepy.....
Very true. And to be fair, just because something is server side, that obviously doesn't mean it is secure either. :)
All kinds of generalizations I made there - I was just trying to get ideas out
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
LOL
well, that's just how mom is. always wanting more more more. their her damn genes in the first place.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Found the address to this spammer
Childs, Charles F.
5407 Hoover Ave
Dayton, OH 45427
Not that I'm complaining but I don't receive email at my primary account anymore. I use it for a lot of things and at one point I was receiving spam constantly. I used to request a removal from the system and then I'd still get spam from certain spammers. What did I do? After some stealthy research and a ton of time spent, I was able to find legitimate emails to people and threatened legal action of harassment or something. I know that's a b.s. thing but the last thing anybody wants to see is the threat of a lawyer regardless of what they would be charged with. I tell ya, I don't know about you but we should all do what the guy in that commercial does; fly over to the company headquarters and smash the phone of the telemarketer. Just a final thought: SPAM BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD! FREE INTERNET PORN GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!
Like move it to a civil court, then you should oppose. IF they want to do that, then they think that there is an advantage to doing that. As it is, if they demonstratably broke the law then they have no claim that your lawsuit is frivilous.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Al Gore said he invented the Internet. This is a correct paraphrasing of a wild claim by Al Gore that is not true.
In the actual quote, he said he created it, which means the same as inventing it in this context. Also, is is a big lie (or big dumb error) since it was around and it was called the Internet before Gore was ever involved.
Their bandwidth is pretty low, so here's my copy.
/me wonders how the school server will respond to the /. monster
-- Bill "Houdini" Weiss
There is no way to "legitimize" unsolicited bulk e-mail. Spammers are, by their very nature, sociopathic scum whose existence is a waste of carbon, oxygen and water. They won't play by the rules, they will do whatever they can to evade filters and they will seek out crime-friendly ISPs like Verio, VDI and Qwest to commit whatever felonies they want. The fact is that I should not have to tell someone not to use MY resources to create advertisements that I DO NOT WANT. "Legitimizing" spamming in any way will simply give the scumbags yet another excuse on which to fall back when someone complains about their unsolicited garbage, yet another reason for them to launch legal threats against anyone who complains about the spam.
Heck, spammers still quote the failed bill proposed by Frank Murkowski as "proof" that their spamming is legitimate (not only citing a non-existent law, but also completely misstating what the law would have done had it passed), and threatening people who complain because they "followed the law". We don't need to give them any more ammo.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I found a nice unicode converter so you can disguise your email address with "HTML numeric equivalent" like the article mentions http://www.mikezilla.com/exp0012.html
add
< A href="
mailto 8; [your unicode email address] "> Send Me Email </A>
to your web page
mailto 8; <-- says mailto:
Like the beaver, it's just Dam one thing after another
I've also noticed that lately spammers have been putting a 1 pixel wide image in the email message itself. (I.e. img src=spammers_server/pixel.gif?email=youremailaddre ss )
If the message gets opened or previewed - the pixel is pulled from the spammers server and a web log is created with your email address in it. Even viewing a potential spam email can verify your email address to the spammer as a valid account.
A man, regardless or age, is old when regrets of the past replace hopes of the future.
This is not the behavior I would expect from a Functional Obedient Replicant. Had your fill of Online Xenocide?
What surprises me is that they didn't test any fandom newsgroups - you know, rec.arts.anime.* or anything with "furry" in the name. I'm curious as to how much spam that would have generated.
This sig no verb.
Spammers aren't a complete waste of skin. I know this is hard to believe.
We just need to remember that when we strap their heads into the kill-device, that the bolt-gun sends the bolt crashing through their head, pulping their brains. After all, this does destroy the one rotten organ in their body, leaving the rest of the body harvest-worthy. This is much more humane that what they have planned for us, because unlike our daily RTS-inducing spam-deletion cycles and the stress of having to deal with bandwidth fees and inappropriate porn content we're just going to shoot them in the head _once_.
And think of how they could give back to the non-spamming populace; retinas, eyes, livers, heart/lung, and kidney transplants.
OTOH...treating them like war criminals wouldn't be a bad thing either. It's just the whole "normal" execution thing is such a waste.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
I wonder what happens if you follow all "unsubscribe" or "remove" instructions that are attched to some spam. People say you shouldn't do it because it lets spammers know that the advertisement is getting noticed, and thus they will hit you even more. However, this seems like speculation to me. Hard evidence that this is the case would be useful.
I would think that falsifying your email address to avoid blacklisting would be considered fraud. I would also think that you could argue that using someone else's email server to relay your spam would be a violation of private property laws. Of course if your email server requires authentication, even clear text authentication, I would think that logging in as a user who you are not would definately be fraud.
NR
Wether the image is one pixel or larger, to avoid that, never enable html while reading mail or read your email offline or read your email in html but whithout downloading anything.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
I am one of those people who has all mail for a domain delivered to him.
slashdot's fucking worthless email munger changed my email to username-COLA@domain.com
Real fucking smart. Bastards.
So I turned it off completely.
I read the report and was immediately struck by the fact that email addresses posted to us.jobs newsgroup received ZERO spam. Don't try this in alt.sex.erotica, however, as that newsgroup received the most spam. Further proof that pr0n really is the driving force behind the internet... p.s. now you know where to post email addresses of thy enemies
pot.kettle(black);
PGP keyservers. Those who use PGP or GPG will understand.
This sig no verb.
Well, you know you can turn off sigs if you want. But it's not like I'm going around posting nothing but advertizing. Seeing a few ads attached to content isn't so bad (IMO). And after all, why should VASoftare get all the advertizing revinue from my comments?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
yet another sleazy spammer
Redundant.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
I have posted an HTML version of the report at http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.sh tml . Thanks for your interesting comments, I am collecting them for ideas for future research projects. Mike
Why cant I go directly for the jugular? Why isnt there legislation that would let me sue 'free-teen-sex.com' or whatever for sending me unsolicited and extremely ofensive material? Or 'xyz.com' for stealing my bandwidth for rubbish and unwanted promotions? Etc, etc...
"What he said was this: During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet
In this context, the meaning of create is the same as the meaning of invent. He took credit for something he didn't make.
"His wording could have been better, but he was not trying to take credit for actually creating the Internet"
Yes, he was. The meaning of "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" is awfully hard to spin. He is claiming to create it in his sentence, so of course he is trying to take credit for creating it.
What this amounts to is a simple matter of:
Person A: "I did Action A"
Person B: "Person A did not credit for Action A"
"For more on this, see snopes.com's writeup [snopes.com]."
Snopes is not a good source on this one, it is too much like spin since it leaves out many facts (the most important of which being that Gore claimed he created the Internet, and that the Internet was around before he got involved.)
The Snopes thing attempts to get around the facts by padding their claim with lots of information about how Gore helped the Internet long after it was created.... which has nothing to do with his claim that he did create it.
Look beyond Snopes, look beyond the spin. Look at the actual dates of creation of the Internet, naming of the Internet, Gore's appearance in Congress, and Gore's involvement with the Internet.
Here is an excellent example of Snope's spin: "he was responsible for helping to create the environment (in an economic and legislative sense) that fostered the development of the Internet". This is their translaction of "I took the initiative in creating the Internet".
More spin from them "Any statement about the "creation" or "beginning" of the Internet is difficult to evaluate". The fact is that the exact years of the invention/creation of the Internet are known, as is the year that ARPAnet was named "Internet". Such statements are very easy to evaluate!
The Snopes article is also self-contradicting: it's tone is "he did not say it and it is true anyway", but it also includes the Vint Cerf quote that states that Gore did not create it and his statement cannot be validated.
They are clearly distorting things to make Gore look better. I have no idea why, as it is not democrats.org
The reason this comes up again and again is the people like you who go into bizarre lingustic somersaults rather than admit the man made a false statement.
----------------
I took the iniative in creating this Slashdot message, by the way.
123greetings.com? They spammed me massively, and I wouldn't be surprised if they sold the address too... :-(
Unfortunately, one of my female friends sent me a card to my new address. Haven't got spam from 123greetings.com itself to that address, but I can't trace it if they sold it.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Oh, say, no more stressful than pulling the trigger on a high powered rifle...
Some people just don't get it. Spam is an invasion of a personal space - it's the intrusion into our personal lives by a stranger that we resent, not the fact that we have to hit the delete key.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised that these guys are still alive. Spam is something that really angers people, and I can imagine someone unfamiliar with the 'net getting scammed and taking a high powered rifle to some spammer's house. Not everyone believes in the sanctity of life, you know, and if you blanket email the U.S., you're bound to put spam in the inboxes of criminals... But hey, the risk is up to you.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Fax +1 937 275 3741 per http://gerald-dietze.de/spammer/spam.html http://www.openldap.org/lists/ietf-ldapext/ 200203/msg00088.html
It sounds as if it would be easier to pass, and the spam filters will probably add the feature "auto-reply to opt-out messages" very quickly.
--- BEGIN QUOTE ---
A friend and I had an idea one night that the best way to seek revenge on someone is to post their personal information on the internet, for everyone in the world to see, and let everyone seek revenge on that person for us. Thus, The Dox Depot was created. If you want to get revenge on someone and ruin their life, post their personal information on our page. Put their phone number so they get thousands of calls. Click here to get revenge
http://www.doxdepot.com/
To be removed from our mailing list please send an email to us admin@doxdepot.com
--- END QUOTE ---
This report is great, but it doesn't mention email authentication systems like spam interceptor. It's an absolute shame that the media overlooks this new technology consistantly. I know a lot of SI users have even tried getting stories posted on slashdot but it doesn't happen because it's not an open source project. Yet microsoft gets a lot of press attention everywhere and they suck. I guess you have to be extremely good or extremely bad to get noticed.
The pdf is also mirrored at si20, you can get it from the home page on bottom right.
Ace
1. E-mail addresses harvested from the public Web are frequently used by spammers. By an overwhelming margin, the greatest amount of spam we received was to addresses posted on the public Web.
They have forgotten to mention the very mailto: tag in their research. IMHO this might have been a crucial factor to their research.
Although on the majority of web pages you have the mailto: link to be the same as your email address (duh), for research purpose it would have been interesting to separate the visible email address and the one in the mailto: tag. I am confident that whatever is in the mailto: link is what attracts spiders, and the email address displayed on the page gets less.
Can someone with knowlege of harvesting get back to us and tell me if this assumption is correct ? Better yet, does someone has any data ?
I ask because my experience directly contradicts the study. I have had the same Yahoo address on my web site since 1998. The Yahoo account was created specifically for use on the web site. The address is a simple mailto link - I'm doing nothing to hide the address. That account gets 4 or 5 spams a day. Another address I used only for Internet.com / ZDnet newsletters is overrun with spam, 50+ daily.
Tired of your legislators not doing anything about spam? Then perhaps they need to see just how much fun it is... send an email with their return address to several of those "remove me from your mailing list" links, and see how long till they come around. Of course, you should only do this where it is legal to do so, but I'm sure if you repeat this many times over, that should change soon enough :)
http://bike.stu.ph/rides - free GPS routes available for Garmin, Magellan, GPX and Google Earth
This article tells you how to set up a rule that will detect HTML mail in Mail.app:
Add an HTML filter to catch more spam in Mail.app
It works great!
This is really just a test to see how long it will take.
ghislain.leblanc@videotron.ca
what happens when Yahoo decides that mydomain.com is a spam domain and sends a bounce message for each of your spliners? The only solution is what yahoo is supposed to stand for, "You Always Have Other Options". So, if Yahoo is obnoxing you it's time to learn not to do anything with yahoo and tell your friends.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
When I sued my former landlord a few months ago, the only reply I got from her lawyer was a form type letter threatening removal to general district court. It seems to me that this is the first thing lawyers do when contending with laymen. I did not reply. Two days before the court date the lawyer called me and we settled out of court. While talking to him I was given the distinct impression that they cannot interfere with the small claims case (indeed, in VA they cannot even enter the court), but of course can counter sue in general district court. Go for a settlement.
For those of you who are not familiar with this, it's how Ebay forced some bid watching web sites to quit their constant scanning of the ebay site. It's worked in other places. I'm suggesting that we band together and file class action law suits against them and shut them all down. I have had excellent success with sending out a "Cease and Desist" notice that my lawyer drafted. My spam complaints is very thorough, and include the open relays (if any) and all of their upsteam ISP as well as the spammer's site and all of his upstream ISP's as well. This has worked well even for overseas spammers because sooner or later, the ISP is stateside.
Over & Out,
Queen BHDGary secures my bank
...just my 2 gil.
At least some harversters decode the page before searching it for addresses, and several advertise the ability to get through the "bob at domain dot com" subterfuge.
But, we also have several domains that have no mail address set up, except those required by RFC. They routinely get spammed, even when no email address was used in creating the domain.
Lots of good advice, though!
I think its almost over for the DMA. A huge number of technical people are upset about spam. Its consumming roughly 50% of corporate networks. If spam isn't legistlated soon I think there will be a move away from SMTP to another mail protocol. Its pretty easy to end the ability to send mail anonymous. Once the "sent by" address is always correct I think its over for the spammers.
We are probably in the last 2 years of spam.
Logical Error.
"A" has been defined as a Person.
"A" has been defined as an Action
Please refrain to use twice the same letter in the same example. This post is going to create Chaos and Confusion.
Are you sure you don't want to preview again? (y/n)_
In version 1.3:
Edit > Preferences > Privacy&Security > Images: Do not load remote images in Mail & Newsgroup messages (check!)
also, in Preferences >Advanced > Scripts & Plug Ins: Enable Javascript for News & Newsgroups (uncheck!)
This, along with whitelisting sites with popup windows and Bayesian email filtering should make your life easier.
Cheers
-- Andre
Those bounces will be forwarded back to them, so whatever floats the spammers boat, they can have fun with it.
I detect recursion of a sort that might quicly eat all of your bandwith.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
This was fun and good for the SpamKing...
/.
But we gotta be careful with that.
Let's do a test in (insert famous online magazine), and post the link to
Let's see.. jonkat's jokes have made a comeback, no?
"Hi, My name is Jon Katz. I'm a spammer. I used to be a regular at (name board X where I posted kat's address a few months back) and I'm happily sending 200 billion messages per month, all from the server room of my mansion in (insert state to confirm address found above) where I also test various products on cute furry animals with big sad eyes. (throw one or two insults), I sell drugs in kindergarden, etc.."
And there you go. Just made someone's life very miserable.
Of course, in this case, there is proof.
Thing is, there's always proof.
It could be ANOTHER Charles F. Childs.. but I guess it's too late to check.
Shouldn't it be the CDC, not CDT?
Ok. I may not have beleived this myself...
BUT! Just before resorting to a filter, I went ahead and tried the 'opt out' link at the bottom of a spam message that was part of a 4-5 message a day flood from a service calling itself "Opt-In" email service. After a couple of days, I never heard from them again.
Funny thing is, tho: the very next day, a new flood began from a company calling itself "YourMailServer"...
CONSPIRACY?!
3.E-mail addresses harvested from the public Web appear to have a
relatively short "shelf life." When e-mail addresses we posted on the public
Web were removed, there was a pronounced drop in the amount of spam they
received each day. The change was not absolute -- on a given day, an address
might receive a few spam messages even months after it had been removed
from the public Web. But such spam was on the order of 2 or 3 messages per
day, compared to the thirty or more messages received by addresses still on the
public Web.
That right there, folks, is the nugget of wisdom inside this report. Take note.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict 'vars';
use vars qw( $addr $flag $count );
print "Please enter your email addr: ";
$addr=<>;
chomp $addr;
print "\n\nMy email addr is : \n\n";
$flag=0; $count=0;
foreach (split(//,$addr))
{ $count++;
print "," if $flag;
print "\n" if $count % 10 == 0;
print ord($_);
$flag=1;
}
print "\n\n";
print <<EOT;
Decimal - Character
| 0 NUL| 1 SOH| 2 STX| 3 ETX| 4 EOT| 5 ENQ| 6 ACK| 7 BEL|
| 8 BS | 9 HT | 10 NL | 11 VT | 12 NP | 13 CR | 14 SO | 15 SI |
| 16 DLE| 17 DC1| 18 DC2| 19 DC3| 20 DC4| 21 NAK| 22 SYN| 23 ETB|
| 24 CAN| 25 EM | 26 SUB| 27 ESC| 28 FS | 29 GS | 30 RS | 31 US |
| 32 SP | 33 ! | 34 " | 35 # | 36 $ | 37 % | 38 & | 39 ' |
| 40 ( | 41 ) | 42 * | 43 + | 44 , | 45 - | 46 . | 47 / |
| 48 0 | 49 1 | 50 2 | 51 3 | 52 4 | 53 5 | 54 6 | 55 7 |
| 56 8 | 57 9 | 58 : | 59 ; | 60 < | 61 = | 62 > | 63 ? |
| 64 @ | 65 A | 66 B | 67 C | 68 D | 69 E | 70 F | 71 G |
| 72 H | 73 I | 74 J | 75 K | 76 L | 77 M | 78 N | 79 O |
| 80 P | 81 Q | 82 R | 83 S | 84 T | 85 U | 86 V | 87 W |
| 88 X | 89 Y | 90 Z | 91 [ | 92 \\ | 93 ] | 94 ^ | 95 _ |
| 96 ` | 97 a | 98 b | 99 c |100 d |101 e |102 f |103 g |
|104 h |105 i |106 j |107 k |108 l |109 m |110 n |111 o |
|112 p |113 q |114 r |115 s |116 t |117 u |118 v |119 w |
|120 x |121 y |122 z |123 { |124 | |125 } |126 ~ |127 DEL|
EOT
I'm sure this has been suggested before, but why don't we utilize the dread Slashdot Effect for good? We could have a "Spammer of the Day" feature where a link pulled from a random (or not-so-random) spam message gets posted to the front page. The only way to actually stop spam is to remove the financial incentive to send it in the first place. If enough of the 0.01% of users who actually click those links can't buy the product because the commerce server in question is being gang-banged by a zillion /. users, then perhaps that would at least discourage some of the more faint-of-heart spammers. We could rank spammers by the moral bankruptcy of their tactics, so that spammers who use unsubscribe requests as address confirmation, subject-line obfuscation, and other sneaky/deceptive tricks would get reamed more often than the lesser evils. Higher-volume spammers should get hit more, too. The smarter rodents might start blocking requests by referrer, but there *has* to be a way around that, maybe a mailto: link with the spammer link pre-coded into it. You want traffic? You got it!
There should also be fines for unsecured mail relays, imposed if not by the government, then by the ISPs, who have a vested financial interest in the non-wasting of their bandwidth.
email is not meant to be in HTML form. It's text and should always be text and never allow HTML Mail at all. Man I love mutt!! Many email programs (Entourage on the Mac, Ximian Evolution and I THINK MS Outhouse) have options to not d/l images from the net so this is easily defeated.
-- DuckWing
You wanna maybe post the contents of said letter? Spread the love.
Or, spread the SPAM hate?
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
Once of the best ones I have found is a series of spaces. Spammers will have a subject header like:
Buy my stuff %20 %20 %20 %20 %20 %20 %20 HXDHEWSEW
with a bunch of spaces (due to lamenss filter = %20) to separate the contents of the subject line from the random characters that are used to avoid some filters. If they stick in enough spaces, it usually will push the junk random characters out of the viewer's sight in order to disguise the Spam a bit.
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
We have email addresses that have not been valid since before web pages were popular... last used in May 1995, to be exact, when we shut down our internet-connected BBS system. Addresses like "ftpmail" (remember having to do that?) were discontinued in 1993. And yet, they would be getting spam every day, if our filters weren't keyed to block it.
Within the next month or so, I believe CDT will find the spread between active web addresses and ones they've removed will flatten out. Those old BBS addresses get more mail each day than I do!
Here's a question. The report says:
E-mail addresses harvested from the public Web appear to have a relatively short "shelf life." When e-mail addresses we posted on the public Web were removed, there was a pronounced drop in the amount of spam they received each day. The change was not absolute -- on a given day, an address might receive a few spam messages even months after it had been removed from the public Web. But such spam was on the order of 2 or 3 messages per day, compared to the thirty or more messages received by addresses still on the public Web.
Is this just referring to recently-posted email addresses which don't exist on the web for more than a couple of weeks? Do the address harveters focus their attention on web sites which change often?
Or are those of us who have been on the Internet for many years and have our email addresses all over the place just screwed, even if our addresses aren't appearing in any new places?
My email address shows up most frequently in discussions on web sites, and on Google's newsgroup archive. I don't want to have to go asking them to delete all of my old news postings...
"In December of last year, Ralsky told the paper that anti-spammers had been flooding his postal mail with coupons, brochures and ads. Others have left threatening voice mails, he said, and one person left a plastic bag of excrement on his front doorstep."
Im disappointed on USA, I had hoped that he was shoot by now.
And spammers should be treated no less harshly than any other virus creator.
-- Boycott Shell
While not really spam, telemarketers are much worse in my opinion. I check my email maybe 3 times a day, but answer my damn phone anytime it rings. With email I can just click the handy del key, but with the phone I have to amble over to it, pick it up, and listen to it for a few moments. Spam is imediatly identifiable, a telephone marketer is not.
Bringing me to my question: If we are always so gung-ho about spamming the spammers, and go and find their addies, why don't we do the same for telephone people?
Lately I have been harrased by this one company that call roughly 3 times a day (always at 3:30ish, and 9:30ish, and sometimes at 9am), they have a timed message (the recording waits for answering machine pickup), and it is always the same. "We have been trying to reach you with an important..."
The rub is, they don't give a phone number until the last minute of the message, and that phone number isn't real. It is an 866 number that hasn't been connected yet. Never in the message do they say who they are, or what they want.
Any advice on tracking these bastages down?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
http://www.menendez.com/convert.cfm
A master was explaining the nature of Tao to one of his novices.
"The Tao is embodied in all software -- regardless of how insignificant,"
said the master.
"Is Tao in a hand-held calculator?" asked the novice.
"It is," came the reply.
"Is the Tao in a video game?" continued the novice.
"It is even in a video game," said the master.
"And is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?"
The master coughed and shifted his position slightly. "The lesson
is over for today," he said.
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...