Slashdot Mirror
Will Bounties Cure The Spam Problem?
An anonymous reader writes with a pointer to a piece in today's Mercury News about Lawrence Lessig's proposed spam-bounty legislation, excerpting: "If the law passes, citizens could be eligible for rewards of thousands of dollars or more if they're the first to provide the government with proof and the identity of offending spammers."
show me the money.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
"Prisoner Dilemna"
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
SADDLE UP, BOYS!
I'M PUTTIN' ME TOGETHER A POSSE!
We're gonna round up them bandwidth rustlers and get us the bounty!
but what proof must the prompt geek provide that he hasn't 'trespassed' on others systems? would this type of legislation just create a lot of crap civil-litigation?
Fnord.sig
Sounds pretty much like outlaw bounties from the old west. This system has been successful for over a hundred years and there is a large modern day bounty hunter business. The same could work for spam.
Mike Wendland - public enemy number 1.
Now where do I pick up that check...?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I'm off to get me some booty! what? oh. yarr! bounty it is!
It could cause a lot of problems to those who spammers masquerade as -- since most spammers don't use their real emails. We could end up with innocent individuals with bounty charges because the spammer forged their emails.
Massive networking attempt for friends
Proof? What year do they think this is?!
Hasn't it already been established that the act of accusing them is proof enough? Send them to Guantanamo Bay, they'll confess in due course.
And then how long before this plan is turned against p2p file sharers?
Do you really want the government to go there?
Nope... this is a waste of time for them to even be talking about.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Isn't that how Jango Fett got started???
Let's remember that business spam has to offer some way for a victim to buy the item which is being advertised. That invites a subpoena to search that business for evidence that they hired the spammer...if laws accept that as sufficient evidence.
There is the problem of a competitor sending spam which advertises stuff from someone else, to cause problems for someone else.
And some things are distributed -- like spam which promotes some worthless stock and tries to make the stock price rise. Any of the current stock holders could have hired the spammer.
Average Joe is just starting to realize that the "From:" field on e-mails is like the return address on an envelope, you could write whatever you want.
But there's no reason why electronic mail cannot be better than snail mail in that respect. Make the "From:" field unspoofable!
'm off to get me some booty! what? oh. yarr! bounty it is!
Dead or alive?
Well I can see it now: "Tonight on America's Most Wanted, spammers." or in Canada "I'm Constable Bob of the RCMP, we are requesting your assistance in solving the spam problem."
Not likley. Rewards will not work any better than penalties. But I do like the idea of 2 year sentence of no telecomunication devices for spammers.
Nah, Never mind.
I believe this will bring and end to the profit motive of spam -- break the law and it will cost you. And it will not cost you a piddling $50, as in the California, Washington, and other state laws. Oh no. It will cost you a thousand PER OFFENSE.
You better believe spammers will want to do things the legal way.
Dead or Alive I think spam would quite possibly be a thing of the past from citizens of the country. It may take a few people to loose their heads under the guilotine, but some iron maidens could be used too.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
I guess this law will help halt spam from foreign servers as well, because people in other countries respect our laws.
Go after the people who pay them to send all the spam.
If there are no clients, spam will cease to exist.
Death has been proven to be 99% fatal in lab rats.
bounties won't help. spammers will happily pay
a percentage of their take (more than the govt
is going to shell out) for their providers Not
to give them up. of course, if you couple this
with legislation that makes it illegal to aid
a spammer, Then you might be on to something -
but just one half of the loaf won't work.
problems.
there's little doubt spam will be won of the leading 'products' left to the softwar gangster payper liesense hostage ransom stock markup FUDgePeddlers from upon the pacific crest annex of capitollist hill/wall street of deceit.
so, for a mere 50$ mo., fuddles et AL can 'teach' you to be @leased as sucksassfull at spammage as heis.
accounting we will goo. buy for now, butt lookout bullow.
...that people keep trying to find legal solutions to technology problems.
We created this technology, and now that it does exactly what it was designed it to do, people try to make impose laws to restrict how it's used. I have a better idea, change email's design.
It reminds me of Singapore. A poor subway design allowed for a mischievious kid to shutdown the whole system with a stick of chewing gum. Their solution was to outlaw chewing gum. Sure it was wrong for the kids to act that way, sure they should have been punished, but seriously quit trying to create legal solutions to technology based problems.
I'll be sure to send a list. After all the cutbacks at work last year, I could use the money. Not to mention the fact that my home dialup received 1038 e-mails last month - out of which perhaps 2 dozen were desirable. I also have my mail archived back through May of last year.
All I can say is, "Come 'n get it!"
C|N>K
Resign now and save us all the trouble of watching you be demeaned.
That'll be fun -- put the guy in jail. The slashdot can post his new address (down to the jailcell) and we'll be able to see how many catalogs his jail cell can hold.
He'll be real popular around mailcall.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
no wonder you're still # -1
the only MiSsing part of the equation, is determining whereas va lairIE'a SourceForgerIE(tm), & patentdead PostBlock(tm) device swirls into this cesspool of execrable.
we're praying for you moron(s).
I think it's time to blow this thing.
Get everybody and the stuff together.
Alright, Three Two One lets Spam...
Just one more step towards a nation of snitches...
Mike Wendland is the one who wrote the story. The Spammer is Alan Ralsky.
that would have been so much better if the text that was in my buffer (" Proof? What year do they think this is?! ") had successfully pasted...bleah.
;)
At least my karma can withstand two -1 posts.
There are "bail enforcement officers". Learn the difference.
A simpler solution would just be to put a bounty on the head of the spammer, and let us hunt them down and bring them in dead or alive, but preferably the former. First few bounties collected this way would do a lot to resolve the problem.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
From the article: "The bounty hunters would need to trace the offending e-mail to its source, identify the sender and provide proof to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC would investigate and fine the offender, if appropriate. The bounty hunter would get 20 percent of the fine." If the main problem is not having the manpower to trace and catch these spammers now (as posited earlier in the piece), how is this queuing system going to help? I would think that the in-basket would quickly fill up and it would still require huge manpower to investigate each claim. There would certainly be loads of helf-assed cases presented and for that matter, why wouldn't spammers simply flood the queue with bogus "proofs" to bog the proceedings?
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
But just think! Now it'll be almost impossible for me to find free access hardcore porn, fix my credit, learn thousands of Ebay secrets, get that penis enlargement I've always dreamed of, and hear about unique business proposals, such as the time a rich Nigerian banker needed my help to claim millions of dollars, all in one sitting!
c'mon people... they don't have great offers like this in your local supermarket, mind you!
"In a Democracy, people get the kind of government they deserve." -Winston Churchill
Commander: We don't need their scumm.
Officer: Yes sir.
The problem with this idea is that every time someone spams us, we'll spam the federal government. This will just propagate the spam problem, rather than solving it (what happens when the spam branch of the FCC fraud division shuts down due to email server overload?). On the plus side, this whole scenario would make some Libertarians I know very happy.
This spammer goes by many aliases including spammer@aol.com and fred@slashdot.org. He is considered armed and dangerous and is known to use forged headers.
They're expecting us to squeal on suspicious activity (re: terrorists) for free, even though that could put us in danger. Lessig expects those chepskate bastards to pony up for spammers? Never gonna happen.
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
My work computer (2k pro) has an uptime of over a year (it would be pushing 2 years, but there was a power outtage a year ago, and no ups).
Just get rid of email as we know it. This is getting much too complicated for me.
Just do away with email. I've already done it with my US Mail. Every day, I'd open my mail box and find trash. Honest to God TRASH. So I told them I didn't want mail any more, just like in Seinfeld, only they actually did it.
I still have email, but I'd be happy to use this protocol instead, if only there was an effective reference implementation.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Well, apparently if it works here, it might just cross over into other lines of justice, thus making the police in many urban towns completely useless and creating an angry, distrusting populace, ready to turn each other in for fabulous prizes. What's that? Operation TIPS?
I have no idea what you're talking about.
The government should have a program where they pay bounty out to the first person to publicly execute known spammers.
This is a global problem. How would you deal with spam that originates outside the jurisdiction of this law?
"I am a die-hard capitalist....but unethical, lying, bastard capitalism is really no better than socialism" - unknown
I GET TO BE BOBA FETT!!!
Seems to me that the majority of spam is not traceable, and the spam problem is exacerbated by .NET stupidity. If ISPs get their act together and set up filtering to route only verifiable addressed mail then the problem will go away. There are many ways to detect and differentiate between mail that is direct and mail that does the spam central routing crap. Some filters that I have set up already do exactly that. There is no reason to believe that legitimate ISPs cannot do the same. However is blocking spam in the interest of ISPs? Perhaps not if their main source of revenue is automailers! The sensible solution is to pressure your ISP to block and refuse bulk mail that is from phony addresses. One good filter blocks any mail with @yahoo if the address before @yahoo is longer than 9 characters. Likewise with @hotmail, @aol etc. Sure this might block some legit mail but so far this has not been the case. Setting up bounties to bust email spammers is like putting sheep in wolves clothing. Alot of bah bah bah and then loud howling, when the spam revenue stream dries up.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
if you read the article, it explains how techniques like using PGP to sign messages can make the From field unspoofable, but they are not relevant when privacy or anonymity is crucial (whistleblowing, etc.). Hence, it cannot be demanded that everyone follows this practice. It suggests recipients should check your email more carefully to see if its legit (the article also explains this; checking your headers for a "postmark" that looks abnormal).
The last quote was somewhat encouraging, that "the Internet is a rough and tumble place" (paraphrasing) but we'll cope because it is often the best way to reach people.
If an unspoofable From: is what you want, demand your mail server administrator only accept signed messages, or filter them yourself in your client.
Another option is to convince her (and/or the administrators of any other MXs you care about) to relay with SMTP AUTH only. Most mail clients support that feature nowadays. If enough people start using that new RFC, we shouldn't have to worry about hijacked ISPs mail servers being used to send spam, and their netblocks being RBL'd.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
This would prompt a lot of people who run mail servers to learn how to monitor their logs and finally close their danged open relays.
I had a sucky sig.
http://www.lurhq.com/sobig.html
1: just find someone advertising that they will email your message to millions of people,
2: pay a few hundred dollars, give them your "ad", then wait until they send the spam,
3: then turn them in!
4: profit!
The bounties arn't paid for capturing people, but for identifying them. And the government isn't going to take some iliterate moron's word if they don't even understand that "From:" != actual sender.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I see the morons are out in force today.
Obviously if your are too stupid to type "Prisoner Dilemna" into Google, to find out what the comment is referring to, you don't have a chance of understanding the logic behind it.
Hello [your name spelled wrong]
Want to make as much as $3000/week, without leaving home!?! Become a Spam Bounty hunter! Just buy Doctor Bob's 12-step program for hunting down spammers...
etc.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
Why can't the EFF (or someone similar) pay the bounties? I'm a member and I'd be happy to see my membership dues go toward that.
I could make a lot of cash with this system...
Step 1) set up a porn site with an 'affiliate' program.
Step 2) convince spammers to sign up for affiliate acounts.
Step 3) turn them over to the government when they send out spam. Step 4) profit!
I doubt it would really be that hard to frame someone for spamming, btw...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
His comment had nothing to do with knowing (or not knowing) about the Dilemna, dimwit. I agree, however, that the morons are out in force today. Welcome to my foes list.
As an ISP, I get quite a few spam mailings coming through my servers. I'm already blocking quite a few. Imagine how many spammers that can be reported. Specially since I'm blocking as many as 12k messages a day on a server that only has 150 users on it. Not to mention the other servers with thousands
But doing so on the people you can influence (the operators of legitimate mail servers serving local users) will prevent the situation where a RBL captures a whole domain due to the compromise of a local account. You don't need to figure out how to do a full authentication chain yet (that's the role PGP fills right now).
Once you get to a certain critical mass acceptance, then you can go full force (forcing the servers to authenticate to each other using shared secrets).
Presumably, at this point there would be trusted MXs that allow connections from mail servers not running SMTP AUTH because they can't use it for whatever reason, but they would be whitelists.
That situation doesn't seem to far in the future. My ISP (Cox) already uses cram-md5 SMTP AUTH. At least I don't have to worry about someone impersonating me through their server. That's one step closer.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Clearly the Prisoners Dilema has some relevance to the problem, since the person most likely to know who a spammer is is another spammer who has been trading/selling lists with them.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
1) Start my own spam company
2) Turn myself in
3) ???
4) Profit
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
"let us hunt them down and bring them in dead or alive, but preferably the former." So someone forges headers to look like YOU sent the SPAM. I shoot you dead! Was that what you wanted? Moron.
Dear Mr. Mystery Man,
I regret to inform you that you have mistakenly advertised your desire for females on Slashdot. This is a common mistake, as both Slashdot.org and Seventeen.com begin with the letter 'S'.
As you know, women do not read Slashdot. Especially not the type of women that a 23-year-old Mystery Man is interested in. I invite you to visit Seventeen Magazine's site where you will find more attractive young ladies than you could possibly handle.
I will pay $100 to the first person to provide me with the identity of the actual person or persons operating the following spamvertised sites:
The name and address obtained must be within the United States and must be usable for service of process.
"whois" addresses have been checked and are not useful.
These sites move from ISP to ISP frequently. Many no longer work, but others in the same family appear.
We've received over 16,000 spam bounces because of this spammer.
The US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, clause 11, gives the gov't the right to issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal. This is a formal declaration given to a private citizen by a gov't giving him/her the right to seize the assets of a citizen of a foreign nation. So, we can have international bounty hunters, too. Unfortunately the letter of M&R went out of fashion about a century ago, but hey, it's still in the Constitution. This came up during the debate about what to do in the "war on terror" ... for example, see http://www.progress.org/archive/fold232.htm
We should issue letters of M&R for recipients of spam and ISP operators. They're stealing our property and their governments aren't doing anything to compensate us (hell, neither is our gov't).
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
I wonder what the hue and cry would sound like if someone was proposing bounties for "proof" that one of their fellow citizens was a terrorist.
1. Send spam.
2. Turn self in.
3. ???
4. Collect bounty as PROFIT!
If it becomes profitable to identify spammers, then everyone will be a spammer. Yes, even you.
Boca Raton, FL.
According to Steve Linford in this report there are out of the 150 spammers who are doing 90% of spamming, about 40 live there.
Not surprising that the recent suet against Steve Linford and other anti-spammers by the "lawyer" claming to represent anonymous coward "E-Mail Marketers" operates in Boca Raton.
You are right that the comment had nothing to with knowing or not knowing about the dilemna -- it was so entirely non sequitor as to be irrellevant.
The only fix is a complete rewrite of SMTP protocol, and totally outlawing spam completely.
What's wrong with the following solution? I can't see anything wrong - and it ought to be simple to implement. (SMTP would need some minor changes) It seems too easy :-)
Every time mail is routed from one server to the next, the receiving server should 'stamp' the mail with the IP address of the sending server. That way, genuine mail has a valid sequence of IP addresses, and spam can be traced back to either the originator's IP, or the first mailserver to "lie" on the stamp.
Either way, we then have an authenticated list of IP addresses of "bad people" - who could be dropped into the Real-Time Black Hole (or similar).
Also, given the spammer's IP address and timestamp, they could be traced quickly.
This would need all SMTP servers to change (by adding extra mail headers), which might take 2 years to permeate most of the world's systems.
So it's not an instant fix, but would work in due course (like IP v.6). It's also backwards compatible.
$100 for a name and US addresss for ELEVEN sites that are all hosted OUTSIDE the US and move around frequently?
no wonder you've gotten no takers so far.
If the risk of being sued is too much then the spam stops.
Only 18 people send the half of the world email in
spam according to another slashdot article. It costs alot of money to pay for a t3 line to spam. My guess is spammers might look for wireless networks next or go to a starbucks because they have high speed access. But will be severly restrained and may quite spamming altogether since its risky legal ground now.
It can take months or years to bring a spammer to court. You need proof and the spammers hack and hide there tracks. Its difficult to prove if they use openrelays and hack routers to hide there tracks. However advertisers can not do this so easily. If they hide there tricks customers will not find them.
Its the easiest and most effective way to get rid of it.
http://saveie6.com/
Too bad we can't make a poll about who will be the best bounty hunter, because the CowboyNeal option is gone.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
I blogged my rebuttal to Larry last January.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that the success of his proposal depends upon the efficacy of filtering. His bounty, if it works as desired, ensures that we have subject tags to do that filtering. My claim is that even if Larry's proposal allows for perfect filtering, we're still in store for a mail system meltdown.
This claim has not been well received. :)
The problem is that too many people--a significant number of them hang out on this web site--believe filtering is a magic bullet. It isn't, and Larry's proposal provides an example of the situation where you can implement perfect filtering and still have a mail system meltdown.
I do think there may be a remedy that may save Larry's proposal. If the filtering tag is moved from the Subject header into the tranport session (say, an ESTMP parameter), that may reduce the cost of rejecting spam enough to avoid the system meltdown problem.
Big dollar potential from the government rewards.
Large resources at major ISPs.
Major ISPs are a major target for spammers.
Major ISPs look to generate income from alternate revenue sources.
Like we all will have a chance at being first. Dream on.
Still, even with this in mind, the plan is creative and might go a ways in putting a dent into the spam problem.
Hello fellow internet entrepeneures!
... well maybe NOT! I must ask that you treat this COMPLETELY CONFIDENTIALLITY.
/www.mysleazybug.com/?shoulda_turned_preview_off=1 4545">
My name is M.S. Seiko, a former student of L. Lessing, Juris Doctore and respected internet laywer of Sanford University U.S.A.! I wish to share with you a secret known only to a select few for now, but to many very soon! Today it is worth much, tomorrow
Make $10K helping LAW ENFORCEMENT STOP SPAM!!!
Are yuo tired of SPAM? Want to be your own boss and be patriotic at the same time? What if I told you that you can make TENS of THOUSENDS OF DOLLARS doing both at the SAME TIME?!?!
<IMG SRC="http: /
Click below so we will remove your email address from our list and
never trouble you again.
xx- click here -xx
NOTE...
This email is NOT SPAM. You have in the past subscribed to one of our
affiliate sites, looked at one of our affiliate sites, received spam
before, used a computer before, had a really easy email address to guess,
or now own an email address previously owned by someone meeting the above qualities.
When I was a kid I remember that they used to put out there in the Old West
a wanted poster. It said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive'
I like this proposal. If we make this law, will you slashdotters let go of the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Act? (You know, in politics, it's win some lose some.)
God bless America
PotUS
"The Prisoner"
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Well of course, it's sort of a let the bad guys eat each other then pick off the ones that are left.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Each morning as I clear the accumulated pile of spam from my mailbox I wonder how many spammers you'd have to actually kill in a very public and violent manner before the rest got the message that spamming was no longer to be tollerated?
I'm sure there are plenty of hit-men out there who'd gladly accept a contract to take out one or two of the largest known offenders for a reasonable fee.
Would the other spammers be stupid enough to continue plying their trade or would we finally have a fast, effective solution to the problem?
Oh what a life I would lead, as a Spammer Bounty Hunter. Traveling across the world with a laptop in one hand and a gun in the other, I would track down those vermin, and bring them in.
It would be a lonely life, but full of adventure.
[Cue Theme Music]
/dev/psychic: No medium found
got a Barrett light .50 I'm just itching to try out
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
And I had only joked about this idea before.
The Declaration of Paris abolished letters of marque, though the US did not sign that treaty. However, the Hague Convention (which the US IS a party to) reiterated this ban.
Congress still DOES have the power to issue such letters if it so chooses, but it would place the US in violation of that treaty.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
I'm confused. How does the Prisoner's Dilemna apply to this story?
What we really need is a low that pays citizens for bringing in the scalps of spammers. Put all those guns to good use.
No, it doesn't. Spammers earn far more money by spamming than they ever would by turning each other in. There's no incentive for them to do that.
Besides, even if one spammer turned in another, that one could just turn him in too. The feds probably wouldn't offer any sort of immunity for something as trivial as this. Why should they?
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
Indeed, we're not supposed to issue them, but I suppose we're not supposed to go to war without UN approval/backing. Just like any other country, we'll do what's in our best interests and breach any treaty that gets in the way (especially environmental ones). Not to sound cynical -- that's what we should do. An act of congress supersedes a treaty, as you pointed out. I say we go for it.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
You read that right. We need more spam. More spam to more e-mailboxes. We need the spammers to come out in full force and bombard everyone on the internet with an e-mail box.
Most of the people don't care and aren't as annoyed. They simply don't get very much spam, if any at all. It's the small group of us that get it all, repetitively.
Once enough of the internet population cares, you'll see change at a faster pace.
if you're too stupid too to type "you're" or "dilemma" then get your GED and learn how to spell
...who thinks that this would make a cool anime series? Imagine, a group of shady characters with dubious histories, coming together through necessity and circumstance to bust baddies. Think of the storytelling possibilities!
Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
http://smokedot.org/
(Yeah, I could do it with $oss_os_of_your_choice but knowing my luck I'd end up with a real open relay!).
It's sat inside the NAT box with port 25 directed to it. Any other ports I should crack open? The other problem is how to maximise it's effects. At whom should I direct my emails/phone calls/bricks through windows when the hits start rolling in?
I'm in the postion where I my work can't come home with me so I'm looking for a project to get my teeth into....
Will Bounties Cure The Spam Problem?
Sure, just keep feeding the spammers tons of chocolate till their stomachs explode.
We don't trust the government from abusing there powers to trace our identities. We don't trust the RIAA from trying to find out who we are. Yet we are proposing offering bounties so that Joe's kid who lives down the street can use whatever he can to find out who some spammer is? The spammer spoofs my email address and the government is going to encourage a posse of wanna be's to hassle me, by offering them a bounty if they happen to be right? I don't like this idea.
So obviously the people at linux.org have now become a tad annoyed about this, and the page they put up goes on at length. But it is worth noting that they've already talked about this proposal of Lessig's at the bottom of the page and don't seem all that impressed about it. I think they have a point (although they seem to have expressed it a bit badly...).
One of the other points they address is the one you talk about yourself: When people are spamming for others, the people hiring them can't easily be shown to be responsible. Joe Bloggs down the road could send a ton of spam saying "vote for anonymous_loser for president", it doesn't actually mean you asked him to, even if in most cases it is pretty likely. So no, generally they don't have any sort of useful contact information that is available to you.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
And the other half of the problem is that people believe that spam is a technological problem.
We created this technology, and now that it does exactly what it was designed it to do
That's just it. It does do exactly what it was designed to do.
A poor subway design allowed for a mischievious kid to shutdown the whole system with a stick of chewing gum.
Even if this story is true, it's completely beside the point.
There is no way to stop sociopaths from spamming, without making email useless in the process.
The only thing I've seen that might prevent them is to turn email into the electronic equivalent of snail-mail, ie. sender pays per message sent... this would make email practically useless for most people, and still wouldn't stop spam.
Spam is not a technological problem, in any way, shape, or form.
SPAM is a convenient way for "the mob" to launder money. Think twice about hitting back unless you are well-armed and have backup (or are one mean motherfucker yourself).
I'm surprised that no one else has picked up on this yet. The following represents organized harrassment from more than one source:
"At this point, I continued south on Minnow Pond to the cul de sac and turned around. I found that the driver of the Jag had moved his vehicle in an attempt to partially block my path and had rolled down his window. I decided that it would be most prudent not to have any contact with this person at all and to go about my own way. Next thing I know, the Jag driver had pulled behind me and was trying to overtake my vehicle, surpassing normal residential speeds, honking his horn all the while. I sped up, made my way back out to Maple Road and turned west. In my rearview mirror, I could see Mr. Jag had turned eastbound. I breathed a sigh of relief, decided that my idea to go on a photo shoot probably wasn't my best, then drove home after stopping to drop the camera off for processing. I requested prints and a CDROM so that I could post the photos here.
After my return home, I didn't think much of the events of the afternoon and went about my normal business. The next day, Monday the 9th, upon arriving home from work, I noticed there were a pair of messages waiting on my answering machine. The first message originated at a number in Georgia, 770-657-1021, at somewhere around 1:30 in the afternoon (the third call came from the same number and wiped out the caller ID entry on my phone). The second came from a number in Colorado, 720-587-9978, at 3:45 pm."
http://ares.penguinhosting.net/~leftreveggplant/
If you want an end to spam -- and the much larger structural problems of rampant business avarice represented by Enron and the California power scandals, to name but two recent examples -- then don't vote for right wingers. They are committed to deregulation irrespective of the social consequences. But if you vote for them, thinking your measly tax break adequate recompense, then let us hear no more complaints about unfettered commerce. You got your tax break. Now take your spam like a good little soldier.
Chewing gum was banned along with spitting and long hair for the same reason, that the people in charge are control freaks.
Wherever you got that subway idea, it's nonsense.
Infuriate left and right
But you can argue for punitive damages.
Fight Spammers!
Are you on glue?
Of course there's no way to stop sociopaths from spamming. There's also no way to stop sociopaths from murdering, either, but that doesn't mean we can't make it an unattractive choice. The main reason spammers are so hard to catch and hard to block consistently is because e-mail, as currently implemented, allows you to hide where the e-mail has come from. If this was not possible, it would be a simple matter to figure out where most of the spam is coming from and block it. Most e-mail servers would quickly do this, most of the spam wouldn't get through anymore, they'd get an even lower response rate as a result, and bam! Unprofitable. The problem largely disappears.
What's so hard about that?
I think that legal measures, in this case, are justified and a good idea. But technological measures are not too hard to do either, if we were really determined. This problem is by no means unsolvable.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
Not that 9mm rounds cost all that much, but I'll be going through a bucket of those a week until I find and eliminate the last living spammer.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I (for one) am not a spammer, but that does not mean I want some technically savvy idiot coming along and digging for my personal information, even if he is just going to give it to the government.
Now all we will have to do is to switch from dollars to wulongs, and Cowboy Bebop can go hunting for them :) A nice 15 000 wulongs for "Mad Joe The Enlarger", or 20 000 for "Mortgage Broking Mike" :)
Hyperom.com
...just give me a license to kill the offenders - that'd be 'reward' enough. Oh wait, that and expense account.
But seriously what will the judicial system do then? Maybe if they do to spammers what they did to Mitnick...
Or who's password's been stolen. ^_^
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
I will become SpamFett, the great internet spam bounty hunter!
Natural-Selection Be
I'd like to collect a list of the people convicted of being spammers and sell that...
Lawrence Lessig is such a moron. Typical ivory tower pompous head-up-ass professor.
Well, they may be control freaks, but there are supposedly "good reasons" behind the ridiculously high penalties. (For example, spitting on the street spreads disease.)
And regarding chewing gum, they had problems cleaning it up. But the ban came in 1992, after chewing gum, stuck on the photo cell of a subway car door, stopped the entire subway system, making thousands late for work. And in the Singapore "ant hill", doing something which distrupts work seems to be the worst crime. (At least chewing gum use "just" has a maximum sentence of 1 year. The possesion of illegal drugs gives you the death penalty.)
More about chewing gum.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Are you a starving or poorly-paid geek? Then this could be the job opportunity of your lifetime! Become a spam-bounty hunter and show people how mean geeks are, lol!
Oh look, it's another one.
I'll write it slowly this time, so you can follow....
Type "Prisoner Dilemna" into Google and educate yourself.
it'll just make it even more intruiging to spammers. higher bounty on there heads for doing something wrong or illegal must mean it's got higher value to doing it, right? wrong, this is sooo the wrong thing to do. They know how to stop spam, just no-one will do it. no-one has the balls to simply make illegal the use of any open stmp relay capable servers. because they make too much money off of anti-spam tools and filters that don't work. spam is a very easy problem to fix, yet typically greed and lack of honesty makes it a world wide epedemic almost as bad as the SARS virus.
Hasn't it already been established that the act of accusing them is proof enough? Send them to Guantanamo Bay, they'll confess in due course.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think those held at Guantanamo Bay have been officially accused of anything illegal.
Officially they're not prisoners of war and they're not accused of any crime.
That makes them hostages, no ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
It'd be relatively straightforward to produce unsolicited pop-up ads on people's computers.
You either lure the punter on to a Web page that has a Java applet on it or send HTML mail that loads the applet when opened. Or, if you don't know Java, you use the applet as the payload of a virus, or embed it as a secret component in a piece of freeware.
The applet runs invisibly for most of the time, but calls home to the spammer's server every so often. When instructed, it produces a pop-up window containing an advert. The pop-up can be as antisocial -- sorry, attention-grabbing -- as you want. It can refuse to close for a set period of time. It can force itself on top of other windows. It can disable the keyboard and mouse until the user acknowledges your important message. It must certainly arrange for itself to be reloaded at system startup, or the user will miss your investment opportunities if he restarts his computer.
The usual precautions apply. All together now: don't enable Java and ActiveX in your browser. Use a mailer that doesn't display HTML mail. Don't catch a virus. Even better, use an OS that isn't vulnerable to most viruses.
Been there, done that. QuantumBill seems to be defunct. The site is gone, and so is "qlshop.com". (They're still in archive.org.) Calling their answering machine hasn't yielded much. Quantum Communications is a valid New York corporation, but their address for process of service is a P.O. box. (That's not a dead end, but it takes some time to trace.) I haven't been able to find a "Richard Demley" in Islandia, NY. "80 Halsey St." shows as a vacant lot in Earthviewer. So the obvious searches didn't yield a definitive result.
Fuck the resume addition. I'd become a spammer bounty hunter just so I could walk around in that cool Boba/Jango Fett armor all the time. Can you imagine the look on one of those "grow your penis" spammers when you bust down his door wearin' that shit?
Man, slashdot would have to create an entirely new icon for all the geeks that would submit their bounty-hunter-armor-custom-mods.
GMD
watch this
Usually it's hard to trace the sending of the spam. But most spam is selling something, or advertising web sites, and it's much easier to trace that part - you follow the money, because spamming is almost always about trying to get money. That doesn't mean that there aren't "Joe Jobs" framing people with forgeries (usually sent by real spammers annoyed at anti-spammers), and some kinds of spam (like "Buy stock XYZW") don't lend themselves well to it. But usually, you can track down where the money goes.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I agree than filtering at the ESMTP level would be much more scalable than filtering in the message body, and that'd help. There are other things that can also change scalability radically, such as moving from long-term-use email addresses under real domains to limited-use addresses under subdomains, combined with teergrubing mail to bad addresses. A number of mail systems support addresses like username+tag@domain.com, which lets you identify where some of your messages came from, but only at the MUA level; tag@username.domain.com is visible to the MTA at the envelope level, so it can be set to block email addressed to known spambait addresses distributed on a per-user level rather than a per-ISP level. It does mean that some anti-spam tools get built at the DNS server level rather than the sendmail server level, which can be fast and lightweight if you're not using bind, but has other issues. It also has the effect of making dictionary attacks impractical, if implemented carefully, because the spammer now has to search for usernames and subdomains, though under simpler implementations, this just means that a spammer who does get your subdomain sends you a million emails (oops...).
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That's ROKSO, the Spamhaus Project's Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) Database. More people watch TV than Spamhaus, but at least the ROKSO people do some research and try harder to be "Fair and Balanced" ...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's an email you can't refuse...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
... when I was there in the Navy. At least that's what they told us, along with spitting and all the signs showing "normal" hair and the message that if your hair was longer than that, go to the back of the line.
Now maybe the Navy lied to us, or Singapore lied to the Navy. But I think not.
Infuriate left and right
Was importing banned in the 1970s as well, or just chewing in public?
Perhaps it was the penalties that were upped in 1992 to 1 year in prison. I thought they were kidding.
In trade discussions between the U.S. and Singapore, chewing gum is one of the issues. They are relaxing it a bit now. Sugar-free gum is allowed with a prescription from a dentist or a doctor.
Another one of those countries I wouldn't want to go to if I didn't have to.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
I read your last journal entry. What happened with your job? I was sorry to hear that.. and besides, how old are you, may I ask? ;)
You can answer by email if you want. Just reply here too with the first and last letters of your email address so I'll know it's you.
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss