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AOL, MS & Yahoo Unite On Anti-Spam Initiative
dilaudid writes "FT.com has an article about AOL, Yahoo and MS putting aside their differences to combat spam. An AOL VP is quoted as saying "Our customers are telling us it is the number one problem with the internet." Their intended response is "narrowly-defined federal legislation aimed at so-called "king-pin" spammers" who send the bulk of the mails. "
Finally! The Evil Empire has thought of something truly helpful to do with the 1 trillion dollars of cash. ;-)
;-)
I am concerned that when all of this is said and done, only users of a Microsoft OS will not receive spam.
You know your a scumbag when...
Slashdotters support AOL and MS when they attempt to stomp on you.
Microsoft drop Windows, and decide to give all money away to Linux kernel developers.
First a free internet and now this, do they realise that they're ment to be the bad guys?
Brocklesby Park Cricket Club
... federal legislation ...
I feel better already.
Dogs and cats, living together...
[b]mass hysteria![/b]
WTF. MS et al joining together to resist fundamental changes to the internet, and AOL moving to stop SPAM.
What's next? The fall of communism?
AOL is currently using censorship to try to solve their problem. Their customers want the ISP to stop spam, and AOL interprets this as a license to censor incoming mail for "spamness".
It never occurred to them that perhaps the customer should decide what is and is not acceptable.
This form of spam-filtering is very dangerous - when someone else decides for you who can and can not send you email.
Did you read the article (or even the /. blurb?)
The groups said they were particularly looking for narrowly-defined federal legislation aimed at so-called "king-pin" spammers whom they believe are responsible for the largest volume and most pernicious of unwanted e-mails.
They're looking to legislate the "spam kings" to death, not block mail from them for their collective subscribers. Funny, however, that they continute to ignore "black hole" lists that are actually quite good at deleting/preventing spam.
Expensive Internet Access! Corporate Invincibility! Internet Community!
With your powers combined, I am Captain Corporate!
(chorus)
Captain Corporate,
he's our hero,
gonna take spam down to zero!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Two stories in a row about MS doing the right thing! I think this is all part of a cunning plan. We'll soon see stories like "MS demands the DMCA is repealed", "MS releases secure OS", "MS replaces Windows EULA with GPL".
A short time later, after gaining the support of all the geeks in the world, we'll see "MS decides to take over and enslave the world", and there will no longer be any organised geek resistance to prevent this.
Its obvious, but something to note, that you need to have a yahoo/aol/msn email account to see all the benefits of this anti-spam initiative.
Nope. RTFA. It clearly says the plan includes suing the hell out of the spammers. If they can't turn a profit, everyone gets less spam.
Now I suppose I can expect the following in my inbox:
04/28/2003 sdogin@microsoft.com Join the fight against spam!
04/28/2003 asgasg@microsoft.com Join the fight against spam!
04/28/2003 dfjdfdsagsdg@aol.com Join the fight against spam!
etc, etc, etc.
RTFA. The main reason they're pushing for this is because their customers are telling them that the spam is decreasing the value of their offerings.
If the number one problem with the Internet is spam, then the number two problem is all the idiots who buy products from spammers and keep them in business.
Spam will never stop. Just like junk snail-mail will never stop. The tiny percentage of below-freezing IQ's out there who fall for unsolicited "offers" are ruining it for everyone else.
Perhaps if these three got together and ran some decent television commercials which cut to the core of spam it would greatly reduce, i.e.
Would you buy questionable medications from someone who solicits you from a forged email address?
Would you consider giving your personal financial information to someone incapable of proper grammar or even good spelling?
Would you visit a site alleged to contain pr0n/child pr0n knowing your visit may be tracked?
(some percentage, like 100%) of spam is unsolicited, commits an act of trespassing, is made by people who have nothing of actual value to offer and is intent on defrauding you. Visit www.cauce.org for more information.
Sadly, these companies will trumpet how spam costs billions of dollars, but a few million on public information awareness advertising is beyond them. Hell, I don't even see anti-spam public service annoucements on MSNBC or Yahoo. Smells like more ado about nothing.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Great! After they've sorted out the SPAM problem maybe they can find out who the hell keeps filling my mailbox full of unwanted Internet CDs.
. . Oh.
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Since it couldn't possibly be those lovely people at MSN, I can only assume that it was you.
I guess this is proof that there are people out there who would sell their own granny's email address... :)
My primary email account has disappeared under an avalanche of bounces and blocks from some asshole spammer forging my domain name in everything he sends out. I'm job hunting now, and refuse to install some new untested filters that are liable to throw out something important. So I need to wade through hundreds of returned ads for streaming gay porn.
If these companies can put a stop to the total scumbags, they can include a provision that their ads can be sent over the NSA's secret high-speed network. I'll still be grateful to them.
My grandmother got porno spam within 2-3 days of her MSN "internet appliance" getting set up, and it had a very unusual account name(with numbers in it, too)- no dictionary atttack hit this one.
Maybe, but my suspicion is that you underestimate the magnitude of dictionary attacks on common domains like that. Given millions of idiots, all MSN addresses are shallow.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
* Use existing laws: I am sure there is more than enough laws already on the books that cover "fraudulant and egregious methods to disguise and misrepresent". We don't need laws specific to spam we should use generic laws that cover communications fraud.
* Go after those that hire spammers too. If I contract someone to perform a service and I know their methods are not legal then I should be held liable too.
* Don't depend on laws to fix everything. Fix the system!
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
This works only assuming that all email/websites/etc... are within the US. I know we like to police the world, but even we couldnt pull THAT one off.
I do realize everyone's SPAM is at insane levels and SPAM has gone up in the last 3 quarters. That said, I have very intelligently and precisely made my 15 free filters and none of them work on Yahoo mail. Middle of last year, I decided to chunk down the money for the premium email account. I used up the free 35 extra filters pretty quick.
It is my opinion that Yahoo allows junk mail, in fact, dumps it heavily on it's customers so that they will buy a premium service.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
The spammers will claim they all fit in the personal communications requested by the recipient, and are not required to fill in all that rigamarole.
And you're right back where you started from.
No, the solution is to inform people that
a) Your body parts aren't going to get bigger (bellies excluded)
b) You really don't want to trust your finances -- even credit bailouts -- to people who'd SPAM you
c) There are no dignitaries in Nigeria that have millions of dollars they need to launder into the US, and if they did, you'd be arrested
d) There's no need to pay for porn. Go out into the big blue room and you could find someone real. Besides, there's enough free internet porn, just look.
You get SPAM because it works. People buy this crap. If they didn't, the spammers would stop.
Design for Use, not Construction!
The obvious problem here is that you're a social recluse and have not been increasing the number and quality of your relationships to keep pace with the number of people who want to sell you stuff. If you had, the percentage of your email that is spam would have remained the same or perhaps even decreased.
Don't blame the spammers. Leave the house more.
paintball
This is kind of funny, the parallels between the spam wars and the so-called drug wars. I call say this because it is more appropriately labeled "war on some drugs." But that's another rant.
But isn't it interesting that they (meaning AOL et al) are going after the big offenders and not, say, THEMSELVES? After all, they are analagous to the street-level pushers of the spam. The big spammers ("kingpins") are the ones who create the spam and are the nexus for it's origin. The product is then filtered down until it reaches the local ISP of the client/user and finally handed to the target -- the customer.
You might object and say, "the difference between drugs and spam at this level is quite sharp because drug users want the drug. Spam receiptients do not." Well SOMEONE is buying. Spammers don't spam because they think their literature amounts to avant garde exercises in promotional haiku. They spam because someone pays them to. And someone pays them to because someone is buying. In other words, every nickel they spend on spam comes back to them dressed up as a dime. It's as simple as that. The only real difference between the two analogies when you consider it is that spam is less visible because of the inherant privacy and legality of spam. That's all. You still have a product, you still have a buyer and you still have a larger community that must deal with the fallout of that activity.
However, this is the point at which the analogy breaks.
The community normally goes after the street-level dealers and the users. Of course the dealers have little to lose because they're poor to begin with and there will always be someone to deal. Always. And users/buyers are always going to use/buy. So go after the source, right? This makes sense, right?
So why are over half (55%) of all federal prisoners drug offenders?
This would be like Microsoft and AOL suing themselves half to death and prosecuting the recipients of the email when they purchased wares sold by spam. Never mind the fact that buying after seeing a spam isn't illegal. That's not the point. The point is that even if it were, it is an obviously flawed and ineffective model. It just doesn't work.
My
Limekiller
One thing that the big ISPs could do is exert technical pressure to help deny spammers the ability to hide. I would love to see them reject all mail in which the HELO greeting is not fully qualified and resolvable (as required by the RFCs). Same thing everywhere else a domain appears in an SMTP conversation. This would force a mass cleanup of incorrectly configured mailservers and I would be able once again to include that as a requirement on my server.
Although perhaps exceeding the requirements of the RFCs, they might also consider refusing mail if the HELO/EHLO does not resolve back to the connecting IP.
In addition, they could publish via DNS info records or ?? the IPs of all their outbound mail servers (no MX won't work - that's only for inbound mail). It would be great to be able to bounce all mail "from" someone at yahoo/hotmail/aol/etc. unless the connection came from a mailserver associated with that email address (sure, for some people the mail may have been legitimately relayed before arriving at their site but that has never been the case for my servers).
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Finally! The Evil Empire has thought of something truly helpful to do with the 1 trillion dollars of cash.
Well, enough spammers seem to use IIS... Maybe they could "extend" the HTTP protocol to detect whether the referring website URL was received in a spam, and use it to disable the server... :)
Until then, my little script works well enough:
#!/bin/bashI _WILL_DO_THE_SAME_TO_YOUR_WEBLOGS
COUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt 2000 ]; do
lynx -dump $1?YOU_FILL_MY_MAILBOX_WITH_UNSOLICITED_CRAP_AND_
let COUNT=COUNT+1
echo $COUNT
done
Note that my website includes a warning about what happens to unsolicited e-mail. Apparently, the "Order Viagra, Diet Pills & more with NO PRESCRIPTION!" people wanted to stress-test their IIS server at Beijing Telecom.
284
Please try the following:The page cannot be displayed
There are too many people accessing the Web site at this time.
* Click the [1]Refresh button, or try again later.
* Open the home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected
Internet Information Services
Technical Information (for support personnel)
* Background:
This error can occur if the Web server is busy and cannot process your request due to heavy traffic.
* More information:
[2]Microsoft Support
References
1. javascript:location.reload()
2. http://www.microsoft.com/ContentRedirec
Poor spammer. But then again, I'm only fulfilling his wish...
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
IMHO
ulterior motives are at work...
if AOL was serious about stopping spam, they'd catch it on the way out. I had 4 this morning that ANY decent filter would have caught (it's at work, so I am stuck with a krap filter).
if aol/msn seek legislation, better read the fine print, cause the real meat isn't in the title/stated intent.