Slashdot Mirror
Did You Really Want To Read That Spam?
Henn writes "The BBC is carrying
a story about computers that track how much attention you are paying and the "worth" of individual messages. Based on these criterion, it adjusts how intrusive to make the alerts. The story is fairly short, however you can find more depth
over here." Interesting ideas, but for me it's becomming less about time- my filters catch 80% of my spam, meaning it only takes me 10-20 minutes to deal with it, and more about bandwidth. At home, on my modem, downloading several megs of spam seriously interferes with my ability to work. Yay spam!
CmdrTaco, lovechild of the Internet dotcom explosion, uses an analog modem? This isn't April Fool's Day anymore.
If you can kill 80-90% of your spam on the server end, and end up with 2 or 3 spams per day, even on a modem its tolerable. Geesh.
Go drink more coffee.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
At home, on my modem, downloading several megs of spam seriously interferes with my ability to work.
So how do you think operators of websites feel when their sites are brought to their knees and/or they are hit with huge and unexpected ISP bills, because of an article posted on your company's website ? How do you think these operators feel when said effects become little more than a running joke on your company's website ?
If you can't see the parallel between spam and slashdotting, then you're not being fair. What's that old saw about the goose and the gander ?
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
What's to get? My business depends on putting my contact information on the web so that potential customers can get in touch with me. I use orbs, spamassassin, ipchains based blocks, a host of other heuristics, procmail filters and even honeypot aliases to automatically block robots. Sure, it's easy to keep a personal email address free of spam -- don't register with that name, don't give it out to anyone but trusted folks, don't let anyone who has your email fill out some web form to "send this joke/animation/picture to your friend", etc... But imagine if people you don't know need to get in touch with you. You need a valid, non-munged email address What would you have them do? Fax everything? Send a letter? Just because you don't get spam doesn't mean it's not a problem for lots of other people.
No, you really don't get it, do you? I receive over 100 spam emails every single day - so on average over 90% of my personal mail is now spam. This is NOT because I publish the address all over the web - nor do I use it to sign up on any websites or mailing lists.
The reason is that I use demon internet and so have a unique hostname (and fixed IP address) - the spammers frequently launch dictionary attacks against demon customers since it's simple to get a list of the hostnames. Of course, I have sendmail configured to bounce anything not sent to legitimate users, so I see almost nothing except the huge amount of mail in root's mailbox. I actually run cron every week now to clear out the crap in there.
Since I'm on ADSL and use fetchmail to periodically pick up the mail for my server I don't notice the bandwidth use. However, I'm sure it would now be almost impossible to use my account normally if I were a modem user (as many demon subscribers still are).
Seriously, I'm at the point now where I believe we need to take some sort of action against the scum spraying this stuff around the net while laughing in the face of the law (such as it is). It's a shame the script kiddies with armies of infected drones don't turn their attention away from IRC and onto DOS'ing the hell out of the known spam-servers in Asia and the US. A few weeks/months of continuous attacks might well put some of the crooked ISPs out of business for good and disuade others.
Before you dismiss me as just another anarchist, I'm really not - I have no idea of how or where to get the software required to attack systems. I'm just fed up with sitting back and taking this shit from a few scumbags who're getting rich on the misery of millions of people (and bragging about it). The legal methods are not working, and as far as I can see, will not work any time soon without the political will/interest to push them harder.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Spammers will always try to out do filters and such like. They will get more devious and its a continual game of one upmanship. The only 100% solution is to go live as a hermit in the mountains but hey even then I would guess that you would get leafleted
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
"If you follow the letter of the spec, you really are supposed to reject email which comes from a server who's forward and reverse lookups don't match, or who are missing either"
What spec is this? I don't remember reading anything about reverse lookups in the SMTP RFC's, especially consdidering that relaying was designed as a feature, not a bug.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
Why is that, exactly?
So in other words, while spam itself isn't a problem for you, the fear of getting spam has severely limited the ways in which you feel confident in using the internet.
And I guess you're confident that a dictionary attack against your server will never succeed.
Still think spam isn't a problem?
Sean
The assumptions that seem to be built into the system just aren't accurate for me, and quite likely aren't accurate for many other creative folk (writers, programmers, etc) either. As for the rest of the world, aside from the folks who download Bonzi Buddy for Web-surfing company, I'm betting that folks will either become very uncomfortable with being "watched"... or will find a way to screw with the system, amen, selah.