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WLANs As Spam Conduit
Saint Aardvark writes "According to this article, a honeypot was recently set up on two wireless LANs. 25% of the connections observed were deliberate, and 71% of those were to send spam. Even more reason to take care of your ether." These statistics should be taken with a salt lick...
It's easy for the home and business admin to secure his/her AP. But how do public access places like airports and StarBucks counter drive by spamming?
Any ideas?
Sleaziness. Penis enlargers, teen sluts, and porn of questionable legality. If I had young kids, this would really piss me off if they got sent this crap.
Fraud. This is somewhat related to the above. Most of these products are most likely frauds, or of questionable value. Masking your identity through forging headers, using open relays and the like. If your product is so great, you shouldn't have to hide yourself. Spam is the snake oil of the new century.
Intrusiveness. Embedding images in HTML email that the client fetches and confirms your email is "live", so it can be sold and put on more spam lists. I am still in the stone age and use pine and never HTML mail, but most non tech people use Outlook, which has this as default behavior. Also, claiming that I opted in and now I need to specifically opt out, with some form that probably just confirms my address is pretty low.
Volume. When I get 50 spam mail messages a day, and 10 or so legitimate messages, email as a communications medium is seriously flawed in it's present form. Many get hundreds of spams a day. Blacklists and Spam Assassin help some, but there are too many false positives.
Commercial email is OK, provided that I signed up for it and the company doesn't try to hide their identity. Some of this is actually useful at times. It would be nice if there could be an analog of a do not call list for email, but that is not technically feasible at present with the current protocol. A new protocol needs to be implemented. As much as I hate spam, I prefer technical solutions rather than handing control to the government. Even if there were spam laws (I know some states have them), they are ineffectual.