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Spam, Milord
Your daily dose of spam... rjwoodhead writes "Hansard, the official journal of the UK parliament, reports on a recent discussion of spam in the House of Lords which not only mentions Monty Python, but reads like one of their skits." A New York spammer has been arrested. One account isn't scientifically representative, but it's a grim picture when you're showing a spam-doubling every 42 days. And an article in New Scientist suggests solving a puzzle, which is essentially the same idea as hash cash.
"Baked beans are off, all we have is SPAM!"
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, can the Minister think of a name for the enormous amount of unsolicited ordinary mail we receive?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, when I have a moment I shall bend my mind to that question.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Why waste time with legislation? A more permanent solution would focus on the technical - e.g., changing the protocol to forbid spam, etc.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Instead of doing some random puzzle, why not kill two birds with one stone and have machines that want to send email or have access to other services do a small work unit for folding@home or something.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer heralded the case as the first criminal prosecution of a spammer under New York's six-month-old identity-theft statute. "Spammers who forge documents and steal the identity of others to create their e-mail traffic will be prosecuted," Spitzer said at a press conference.
/. -- and free to continue spamming. Sorry, but I don't see this as all that encouraging.
Seriously...the Buffalo spammer was almost trying to get caught, at this rate. The reason they got him is not because he's a scumbag spammer; it's because he brazenly engaged in identity theft. That just happened to be a tool that he then used to aid his spamming operation.
The article contains one or two references to the amount of bandwidth consumed by his activities, but so what? If it hadn't been for the identity theft, he'd be vilified on
Also, I know we're not supposed to bitch about this, but it's a slow day at work and I'm bored: "2003-05-14 16:11:21 Buffalo Spammer Arrested for Identity Theft (articles,spam) (rejected)"
"Understand you're having a little Jimmy Page trouble."
Forget Spam, wouldn't you prefer a rat sorbet?
The people pictured are from the Atlanta team, there's also a Pasadena team that is putting a picture together. From left to right they are: Tom Tatom, Kate Trower, Bobby Arnold, Beth, Milliken, Larry Fine, and Louis Rush. People in Atlanta not pictured include our team lead Erich Hablutzel, Brian Greer, and the departmental manager, Mary Youngblood. The Pasadena crew includes Laura Truchon, Kenn Wilson, Brad Patton, Brian Majeska, Jesse Kolbert, Kevin Phillips.
Today is a good day for all anti-spam activists!
He either comes off as a real interesting guy with encyclopedic knowledge,or a pathological liar with an ax to grind
Lord Renton: "bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an e-mail? Obviously Lord Renton isn't going to be having a problem with spam!
So this guy gets arrested. But not for sending spam, but for stealing credit cards to fund his spamming operations. Also for identity theft and fraud. Still legal to spam, it seems.
No sig
Actually, I heard this debate on the radio late at night and I was impressed with the Lords taking an interest in something which as far as I know the House of Commons hasn't yet bothered to devote any time to. It seems to me a wonderful illustration of the Lords coming kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. Long may it continue!
It's good to see that they can throw in Pythin references to a debate. It's what makes us British goddammit! If you can't say "Spam Spam Spam Spam" with a straight face, in a serious debate, you have no business calling yourself a citizen, and especially not a member of the house of Lords!
recent discussion of spam in the House of Lords which not only mentions Monty Python, but reads like one of their skits.
Well sheesh, where do you think Monty Python drew their inspiration from? Your nostril?
The HoL discussions are pretty odd from an American standpoint (Hey! It's rude to interrupt! So quit it with your booing and hissing and here-hereing!), but at least most of the house is present during the debates. In the States, it's not uncommon to see a Congressman debating in front of a mostly empty congressional hall.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
are the spammers increasing the amount of spam because:
a)They are seeing an increase in profit with the more spam they send.
b)They are spamming more because of black lists and the such.
c)More people are just getting in on it.
or are their other reasons. As a side note...does anyone actually know a person who purchased something from a spammer? Not I.
One account isn't scientifically representative, but it's a grim picture when you're showing a spam-doubling every 42 days
Dear Spammers,
Please slow down your spamming to doubling only every 18 months. This will give Moore's Law a chance to keep pace.
Thank you.
I am writing a SMTP server which has a plugin called "reverse" which goes and checks the "mail from:" address to see if it is valid.h oneymail it is not finished yet, but hopefully it will keep only people with real email addresses able to send email.
http://lucifer.intercosmos.net/index.php?display=
And yes, it does store known "good" emails in shared memory so that all child processes can have access and know which emails are already allowed to send email.
The project is called honeymail as you can set it to "honeymode" so that when a spammer finds it and thinks it is an open-relay they start sending and everything just gets forwarded to spamcop, Occams razor etc..
Would love any ideas anyone has on honeymail.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Lord Razzall: My Lords, given the Government's concern about voter turnout in elections and their commitment to increasing the use of Internet voting and campaigning, does the Minister consider that further restrictions on unsolicited e-mails would be contrary to that objective?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, no, not at all. I cannot see that it helps anyone in any activity, including voting, to have their computers flooded with this often quite distasteful material. It takes up a large capacity--some 40 per cent of e-mails around the
hey, looks like the british politicians actually think law applies to them as well, unlike the americans that want to be able to spam you with political messages
...so that explains their reluctance to practice proper oral hygiene...
All your base are belong to us!
That is just too amazing a coincidence that that figure is also the answer to Life, The Universe, And Everything.
;
If you look into anything closely enough, you can find a relationship to that number.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I am afraid that I have not been able to find out why the term "spam" is used, but that is the meaning it now has. It is a matter that should be taken very seriously because it not only clutters up computers but involves a great deal of very unpleasant advertising to do with easy credit, pornography and miracle diets. That is offensive to people, and we should try to reduce it.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I can help the Minister with the origin of the word. It comes from aficionados of Monty Python, and the famous song, "Spam, spam, spam, spam". It has been picked up by the Internet community and is used as a description of rubbish on the Internet.
So, at least some in the House of Lords:
wish to be protected from having an email
equate easy credit with pronography with miracle diets
have heard of Monty Python.
I'd say that they compare quite favorably with the US Senate, so far.
[big snip]
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want. I do not know whether they could be called "corned beef" or something, but I have had enough of them
Clueless humor, I suppose, but humor.
[big snip]
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, can the Minister think of a name for the enormous amount of unsolicited ordinary mail we receive?
I wonder whether this was sarcasm or more clueless humor?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, when I have a moment I shall bend my mind to that question.
Definitely sarcasm.
See what I've been reading.
I wonder how much time they would save if they did not say "My Lords" and talk in third person all the time.
Never knew country singers were that smart!!!
... to not read this and imagine a bunch of stodgy white guys sitting in a large room hmm-ing and haw-ing. All the while constantly adjusting their white wigs. An intresting read, and an intresting look into the British Parlimentary system that a lot of us dumb Americans don't bother to look into. I think it is pretty amusing that they feel free to drop Monty Python quotes. Not saying that it is a bad thing at all, as a matter of fact a good thing. But I don't see how a bunch of stodgy guys in wigs discussing Monty Python helps keep my Inbox Spam free... (Spam you say? Spam-Spam-Spam-Spam-Spam-Spam-Spaaam!)
"Never upset a goalie, getting hit with a blocker is an unpleasent experience - facemask or not." -Me
Aha! Now we finally know what THE question was that was lost when the earth was destroyed in the Hitchhiker's Guide!
ISR is less tiresome that SPAM!
/syle
!!!
I think we really need to start seeing more arrest with regard to spam...spam is getting to crazy and in some cases damaging levels. Just yesterday I had to hack up a few mailserv's tcp stacks in the kernels because they are reciving such a heavy load of mail (for approx 20000 users) that they were all starting to need rebooting every 2 weeks.
This isnt the sick part, the sick part is when i looked at the postfix logs, there was almost 5, 000, 000 pices of mail being delivered daily, and out of this, over 4,000, 000 were being bounced because they satisfied the requirements to qualify as spam.
Now I admit, this is more mail than most mailservers recive (this is a major mail system for a WAN, so it recives more mail than most --- and relays alot of mail for other networks ) but this is absloutly insane. 200 000 users are generating 5,000,000 pices of mail, and 4,000,000 of those are being bounced!
This means, the average user on this network is reciving 25 emails a day, and only 5 of these are being delivered. and 20 are being bounced because of spam.
Now if anyone says we dont need to throw a few spammers in jail for no other reason than just to make an example of them...well after seing this, you cant possibly belive that.
My favorite solution to date is to find the top spammer....kill him...video tape it and publish it on the web and say the #2 spammer is next!
So that's it! The question and answer to life, the universe and everything...
Q: "How many days does it take for spam output to double?"
A: "42!"
Douglas Adams would be so proud...
-JE
-JE
It somehow makes me happy that Lord Faulkner of Worcester knows the spam song...
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Instead of making the sender solve some weird problem, make him encrypt the message with your PGP public key. Then the sender only accepts messages that are encrypted, and junks everything else. Not only will spam be cut down to almost nothing (PGP encryption takes a bit of time), but you will now have some privacy too!
Oh right, and the war on drugs has been such a success?
Besides the parent has a good point. The answer is not through legislation. What is to stop people from hosting their spam sites off shores where they are protected from the laws. Kind of like the 809 Phone Call Scam.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
There is something reassuring about calm and respectful discussion of a serious issue; it also seems, from the text of the Lord's discussion, that the Lords hadn't entirley made up their minds about this issue - wheas in the US Senate, it is always a debate, never a discussion
Are pseudonyms equivalent to hiding our true identity, and criminal under New York law?
You know, I just figured this out:
If I charged $1 to listen to a 30-second ad, I'd be making $120 / hour!!!
Then I could finally afford to get those penis and brest enlargement operations I always wanted!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If you generously figured 1$ per gig (in reality prices are a fraction of that), they're saying each e-mail was 1.21megs. If you go by more realistic prices, (25c/gig), you come up with 4.8 megs per message.
If you want to work the numbers the other way, earthlink is saying it costs them 1.21 cents in *bandwidth alone* to send an e-mail.
I'm calling bullshit on earthlinks "cost" of spamming. In reality I'll bet he didnt "steal" enough bandwidth for grand theft. (At my web host, 500$ would buy me 1.3TB of transfer).
Wether or not spamming is legal -- THEIR network allowed him to do it. They didnt notice a million dollars worth of bandwidth being pissed away ? Earthlink Buffalo didn't notice they were a million dollars less profitable this month/year and go WTF? Of course they didn't, they're lying through their teeth.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
While visiting England many a year ago I had the distinct privilege to watch a debate from the "Strangers Gallery" (gotta love English names) about public noise laws. It was great the way they all insulted and belittled one another in pompous and correct language. Most of my anti-PC attitude came from listening to that session. What they said was perfectly polite and respectful. How they said it is where the fun took place!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
That'd get you halfway there! Then you just need the fur and tail!!!
Imagine if Slashdot read like this transcript.
Lord Johnny Mnemonic: My Lords, do you agree that the original post in this thread shall be labled a "First Post" and condemned as such?
Minister Cowboy Neal: Aye, and who will join me in moderating up all Natalie Portman posts?
The content would be the same, but it sure would be lot more polite...
--
$tar -xvf
That's following on from the previous page.
If you haven't seen it yet, a visit to http://www.spam.com is a must. This is the meat replacement product the Pythons were talking about. There's a nice screensaver, and wonderful slogans like "SPAM Lite. Try it.". And it's apparently all very serious.
The puzzle solution seems to be a convenient one for hardware manufacturers- all of the puzzles would have to be tough enough to slow down the spammers and their 2-GHz PIII's, but then it would take the poor bloke with a 66-MHz machine 30 times longer to send his email.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
As if chain-letters and e-mail bourne viruses weren't bad enough.. lets make the server calculate some math for each peice of junk that comes through!
The first bit, right before they talk about Intenet-delivered luncheon meat, said:
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I totally agree. These statistics on accidents are extremely fascinating; they prove that the British public can use practically anything in this world to hurt themselves with. It is understandable that there are an estimated 55 accidents a year from putty, while toothpaste accounts for 73. However, it is rather bizarre that 823 accidents are estimated to be the result of letters and envelopes. It is difficult to understand how they can be the cause of such serious plight. I agree with the noble Baroness that it would be helpful if people paid careful attention.
Wow, over 125 accidents a year in the UK, just from putty and toothpaste alone!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Hopefully someone in the US Congress will soon draw up a bill to formally induct the Nation State of Great Britain into full and complete Statehood as the 51st United State of America.
No offence.. but i'd rather remain a part of Europe than a part of the United States.
Distinguish between 'milord' and 'my lord'. The former is (I think) used only for continental nobles, France in particular. Same with 'milady'. Did nobody here watch that Three Muskethounds cartoon?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Intrigued by the House of Lords?
Check out this live feed (in session until 4pm EST).
is like a Monty Python skit. For those who haven't seen it on C-SPAN, I highly recommend finding the next showing and marking it on your calendar.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Quoth Lord Renton:
My Lords, will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food that lasted for ever and was supplied to those on active service can become an unsolicited e-mail, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an e-mail?
This is absolutely hilarious! Not only is he calling Spam (tm) the food product inedible, but he's completely confused about how it evolved into e-mail! Har!
'Tis true that Spam saved the troops in WWII, though.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
How I would praise it more were it be I had more thumbs!
Not sure if EL was claiming these as damages to just themselves but damages done throughout the 'net.
If the latter, probably every spam was charged for multiple times. At Earthlink, at the backbone, at the recipient's ISP, and then at the last mile to the recipient.
Don't forget CPU usage and storage space in addition to bandwidth.
It may be somewhat inflated, but it all adds up.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
is to make it unprofitable. It's really not a question of passing appropriate laws as much as combatting it with economics. If a practice doesn't yield dough, it'll die off. (probably to be replaced by something more annoying and worse, but still...) Ignoring it won't work, as the problem will still affect servers and hog bandwidth (hence the name). It really is parallel to the war on drugs. Maybe excessive taxation would work, but it's a global problem, not a local one.
Mod 0: Troll
Andyboy_H
Actually, the 51st state is Iraq. Great Britain is just King Bush II's other private summer home.
Unfortunately you have no say in the matter.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Quotes include Baroness Sharples: My Lords, can the noble Lord say whether ring-pull cans are safer than ordinary cans which are opened with a tin-opener? Which is safest?
"E pur si muove!" - attributed to Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642
I knew he was unhappy at being relegated to the English First Division, but didn't think he'd resort to having to work for Earthlink!
Kevin Phillips
> it's a grim picture when you're showing a spam-doubling every 42 days.
Oh, dear! When we reach the point where there isn't enough bandwidth to deliver all the spam and all the 208 KB viral e-messages posing as Microsoft security updates, will we get to choose which ones have priority for our mailboxes?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I recommend that the puzzle they have to solve is a factoring problem. Computer engineers trying to make their email clients faster would research ways to quickly solve the factoring problem, and then they would unintentially be contributing to number theory research. Hopefully eventually this will help break RSA.
It's all these dinks who paid $39.95 to Don LePri and are determined to get rich quick that are the real SPAM problem.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Related to the discussion of crypto puzzles as payment to fight spam, it's interesting to look at the web page of the PennyBlack project at Microsoft Research, especially their Crypto 2003 paper by Dwork, Goldberg and Naor. Instead of using CPU-bound puzzles, they use memory-bound puzzles. The idea is that CPU speeds vary greatly between the fastest and slowest machines available today, which makes it difficult to compromise widespread acceptance of the slow but good machines AND control of the fast but spamming machines. On the other hand, memory bandwidths have a much narrower variance, which makes paying by "wasting one's memory bandwidth" more equitable among the slow and the fast. That's the approach taken in this project. It's a fascinating read (although, it has a bit of crypto, which could be heavy).
I cannot see that it helps anyone in any activity, including voting, to have their computers flooded with this often quite distasteful material.
Is he referring to unsolicited email or a canned, pork product? Either way, it's a problem.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Yeah, it's funny, but it raises a serious question: just what exactly does "unsolicited" mean in this context?
- That you expressly asked for this particular piece of email?
- That you expressly asked for emails of this type from this party?
- That you didn't expressly ask NOT to get emails of this type?
- That you expressly asked for any and all emails from this party?
- That you didn't expressly ask NOT to get any email from them?
- Etc. Etc.
It seems to me that there are different levels of "solicited". And that this is where spammers will find loopholes to use to their advantage...Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I would not, could not, in a box.
I could not, would not, with a fox.
I will not read them with a mouse.
I will not read them in a house.
I will not read them here or there.
I will not read them anywhere.
I do not like green eggs and spam.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
Yes thats right, because we don't have a general election every four years any more, do we? Its been tough contacting your MP too, since the Post Office was shut down and all.
Lord Mitchell asked Her Majesty's Government:
What are their plans to reduce the growth in spam (unsolicited e-mails).
Translated: I am receiving seven hundred penis enlargement and shemale porn spams per day. This is becoming difficult to explain to Lady Mitchell.
Lord Sainsbury of Turville:
My Lords, I hope noble Lords will appreciate how I move seamlessly from corned beef to spam.
We aim to implement by the end of October this year the privacy and electronic communications directive. This includes requirements that unsolicited e-mails may be sent to individuals only for the purpose of direct marketing with their prior consent, except where there is existing customer relationship between the sender and the addressee. Consultation on the draft regulations started on 27th March and closes on 19th June.
Translated: look, I'm making a clever Spam joke! Aren't I a hoopy frood?
Just like the United States, we're planning on passing laws, but only rarely doing anything to enforce them.
Lord Mitchell:
My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for that Answer. Unsolicited e-mails, known as "spam", now account for half of all e-mails in this country. In the United States, they account for 70 per cent. Spam, whether it is nuisance advertising or hardcore pornography is literally choking the Internet. Will the Minister expand on his Answer? Do the Government intend to follow the example of the United States Senate in introducing legislation specifically prohibiting unsolicited e-mails?
Translated: No, seriously, the long-schlong pills and he-she emails are a pain. What are you going to do about it?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville:
My Lords, we believe this to be a serious issue. The fact that a European regime has now been agreed implements the door to bilateral agreements between the EU and other countries, which is clearly very helpful. The European Commission is keen to pursue that.
There is now a big movement to stop spam in the United States. Twenty-six states have legislated and, although I do not believe that any action has been taken at the federal level, there has been a recent forum from the Federal Trade Commission on the subject.
We take the matter seriously. If measures are to be effective, it is vitally important that the international dimension is taken account of.
Translated: Well, nothing, really. I mean, if the EU does something, maybe, but come on, I mean, France is in the EU, right? How seriously are we going to take anything France is involved in?
Lord Renton:
My Lords, will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food that lasted for ever and was supplied to those on active service can become an unsolicited e-mail, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an e-mail?
Translated: Me and Ned Ludd want to know what these "e-male" and "interweb" thingies are, and what they have to do with lunchmeat?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville:
My Lords, I am afraid that I have not been able to find out why the term "spam" is used, but that is the meaning it now has. It is a matter that should be taken very seriously because it not only clutters up computers but involves a great deal of very unpleasant advertising to do with easy credit, pornography and miracle diets. That is offensive to people, and we should try to reduce it.
Translated: Hell if I know. You really expect a bunch of pasty guys with thick glasses and technology fetishes to come up with a normal name? All I know is they say it's bad, so we should do something about it.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester:
My Lords, I can help the Minister with the origin of the word. It comes from aficionados of Monty Python, and the famous song, "Spam, spam, spam, spam". It has been picked up by the Internet community and is used as a descrip
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
-I want to be able to mount as a user because all my MP3s (that I can't listen too) are on the second drive.
/etc/fstab
/sbin and /usr/bin directories to your path.
So include that mount in
-/bin files should be able to be run from any location
They do, when it's in the path. Add the
-ALSA should be included with Redhat
Not when Redhat works without it.
-APM should work!
Sniff. You're right! I was wrong. No wait - YOU FAIL IT!
And the question: Why isn't Lunix ready for the desktop?
Just yours.
YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
No offence.. but i'd rather remain a part of Europe than a part of the United States.
The last 50 years of peace with continental Europe is a mere blip in a long and bloody history of fighting. The traditional enmity between us and the rest of the continent is there for a reason.
Lord Haskel: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that modern fax machines are equipped to refuse faxes that have no return telephone number. In that way, many unsolicited faxes are filtered out. Is there any way in which the Internet system could operate similarly? For example, can the Internet service providers filter out e-mails that do not have a return address on them?
(italics are mine for emphasis)
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
Ahh.. stop spamming, you /. editors!
Just because some comments seem slightly in awe of the house of Lords, Lord Sainsbury is the owner of a large national supermarket (my local one enjoys gouging the prices under the auspices of being an 'express' store, but that's another matter).
Lord Sainsbury is a major benefactor or the current governing party (the Labour party) and as a result is the UK science minister, which I'm sure doesn't cause a conflict of interest for GMO food, which his shops don't sell.
He's also part of the government who's education secretary wants to cut funding of purely academic study whilst increasing reaserch into "baltic studies". Lucky he's already done his tour of two of the best universities in the country.[sorry, rant, being paid less than minimum wage for research sucks.]
Not to be a conspiracy theorist but a general election and possible euro referendum will be coming soon,the Labour party is in debt in fact and have passed exemptions based on donations in the past (some have been refunded and exemptions rescinded (sp?)) so watch for the donations..
Lord Mackie is the Liberal Democrat spokeperson for Scotland (a bit like Canada, cold), other than beind old and a career politican he seems ok.
On the subject of junk faxes, this was discusse in June 98, probably as a result of an EU directive (yay EU) 97/66/ec , as a result the telephone preference service TPS was created, which IIRC is a not a law-enforced scheme but is an advertising industry creation.
Anyway, it ain't over till the fat wallet sings, and I can see this being tacked on to the national I.D card scheme or privacy/piracy laws to pacify us.
42 eh. so that's what the human race was created for by the mice, to find the critical doubling speed of spam :)
BB
You really don't want to add the 10 provinces of Canada as states, really. Just think of the problems you will be adding, Quebec separation, whingy westerners, panhandling maritimers, the provinces blame the federal governments no-one gets along and besides, we don't have fancy-dancy licence plates on out cars, well except for Northwest Territories and Nunavut with their polar bears. I don't think we have any professional sports teams other than in hockey and the Blue Jays and there may have been a professional football league at one time. We have this bad habit of pronouncing words correctly (well except for francophones, but they mispronounce words (english and french) deliberately). We would insist on using our dollars bcause the bills are different colours and look better (though when Charles becomes King, it may not be so). Finally, if you annexed Canada, there would be more of us down south. If I haven't made Canada unattractive enough for annexation I can go on.
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
I think that they may be referring to "unwanted" faxes and lettermail from constituants. I doubt that direct marketing lists apply to them (unless it's a fax from The British Direct Tele-Marketing Association).
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
"EarthLink VP of law and public policy Dave Baker applauded the decision by the N.Y. attorney general's office to arrest Carmack. "Howard Carmack's arrest demonstrates that spamming has both civil and criminal consequences. Simply put, spammers who brazenly disregard the law will wind up in jail," Baker said in a statement."
Ummmm.. Although he is a spammer, I think the fact that he stole people's credit cards and identities may be the real motivation for the prosecution.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
He wasn't expecting the Spammish Inquisition!
It fascinating to watch the 'Honourable Members' skirt the line between debate and personal insult. In the parliamentary system, if the Speaker/Chair thinks they've gone too far, they can call them on it and request they withdraw the offending statement. Dysfunctional as the B.C. Leg is, there were never any duels called on matters of honour. But this exchange between Moe Sihota and Fred Gingell back in 1993 was my all time favourite. Even in apologizing, insults can be made...
>> New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer heralded the case as the first criminal prosecution of a spammer under New York's six-month-old identity-theft statute. "Spammers who forge documents and steal the identity of others to create their e-mail traffic will be prosecuted," Spitzer said at a press conference.
Couldn't this be loosely manipulated to tag spammers that spoof a known good email address as the sender?
After reading this, I can't help but think what a great show The House of Lords might make. In any case, I might have to start reading transcripts of their discussions, this one was great - a mixture of humour and serious discussion, exactly the way things should be done.
825M messages per $1M is 825 messages per dollar, or $0.0012 per message (not 1.21 cents).
This number *still* seems inflated for bandwidth alone, even considering multiple cycles per email (as the mail servers retry failed deliveries, deal with bounces, etc., which obviously are a far greater problem with spam than with normal email).
I would say that even though this number is likely inflated for bandwidth costs alone, to consider the total costs incurred by Earthlink you also have to consider space wasted by mail queues, processor and drive wear, performance hits to their customers (which hurts business), and the massive amount of staff time it took to continually shut down Carmack's accounts, and eventually track him down.
I wouldn't be surprised by a $1M cost... which makes me wonder if there was a misquotation or miscommunication (possibly intentional... I don't want to pretend Earthlink is a paragon of goodness) somewhere along the way from the engineer who made the estimate, through Earthlink management, to the newspapers.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Idiots.
Any idea why all the text-based ads are for facelifting and other cosmetic procedures? I can't see any obvious keywords for those...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Seeing how this failed miserably, I now use two different methods of spam prevention. it's cut spam down to roughly 2 per day (which means each user might see 1 spam/month avg.) with 0 false positives over the first 30 days of testing.
Put simply, if every mail server in the world were to switch to using decent filters, it would make spam all but irrelevant and thus we wouldn't all be sitting here reading about it.
In the past few weeks, I've received an average of 117 messages per day, just under 2**7. 42 days x 7 = 294 days, just under ten months. Ten months ago, I was receiving a lot more than 1 spam per day. This count does not include messages blocked by my mailer because the sender's domain does not match and so on. However, my spam blocking arrangements have not changed during this period. So, at least the spam that I see has not been doubling every 42 days.
Congrats & Beth will you marry me??
Today I wrote this little web server (in Perl) with infinitely many pages... and a robots.txt file telling not to load any of them.
The idea is that this could make some spiders -- email-harvesters, for instance -- spend a lot of effort on nothing, while not harming regular search engine bots which obey the robots.txt file.
(an interesting thing would be to see who is disregarding the robots directives)
Does anyone have an idea how well a thing like that could work?
Any reasons why it wouldn't?
Is the best part of this article:
IBM Research announces Super Spamatoresistive (SSR) disk technology.
Don't get both a penis and breast enlagements at the same time guy, you will hav people looking down, then up, then down, then up.
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
This will take hold when people, so angry at their spam load, will completely shut down their SMTP communications, refusing all unauthenticated communications.
It is quite obvious that no one is currently pissed off enough to sit down and thrash out an entirely new authenticating XML based E-Mail protocol. I think spam filtering services are actually doing the net a disservice right now, since they're artificially keeping the level of aggrivation under critical mass. SMTP and the anonymity it provides has got to go; that's the only way the spam problem will ever be resolved.
I'd like to end this by sending mad propz out to Lord Newby, who is going to be the butt of a good many jokes when he finally gets on the net.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I've said this before. The idea of unencrypted connections needs to go away. If e-mail could be converted over to an all-encrypted traffic pattern, this would add a load to spammer systems. You could post an address with a public key, all based on open protocols to allow porting to lots of systems, and anyone wanting to send you a message has to encrypt using that key. This can be PGP-style 'encrypt the symmetric key' or make them use the heavier public key method on the message text. This would be minimal for most people, at a few seconds per message. Legitimate large mailers would just have to deal with the overhead. Spammers would be in a pickle. Instead of messages per second the throughput changes to seconds per message.
This would have some incidental benefits relating to nosy people in the transmission chain. The thing that would be the biggest problem is that, at some point, for this to work, systems would have to start rejecting unencrypted messages. This would create some problems initially, but then there is no technical solution that will not require changes within the users field of view.
This solution imposes a time cost on everyone, but for most end-users the time cost is minimal and can be hidden from them during reading by mailers that background-decrypt while the first message in the session is being displayed. Sending messages just adds a few seconds from the end-user viewpoint (unless sending to a personal mailing list) and most people send far less than they recieve. Spammers have no way to hide the time cost because they recieve almost nothing in comparison to the sending volume.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
I believe Austin natives did hear a rather Texas-twanged chorus of, "Run away! Run away!" coming from the Capitol a couple of days ago.
I hope it was only a flesh wound.
> I think that they may be referring to "unwanted" faxes and lettermail from constituants.
Um, "constituants"? This is the *House of Lords*. They don't *have* constituants, they aren't elected.
Chris Mattern
Constituants? Hah. this is the House of Lords. I'm not even sure if a lord has any topographical binding an area (They come with quite fancy titles, not necessary english duchies or baronies.), but I'm certain nobody voted for them.
He also told us about an incident that took place in the years shortly before the Civil War wen tensions amongst Northern and Southern Congressmen would run high. The way it goes, a Northern Representative made a disparaging remark about a Southern State. the Senator for that said State, along with 3 or 4 other Senators proceeded down to the House chamber whereat they grabbed the Northern Rep and proceeded to bull whip while he was held across his own desk. Now that is what I call legislation!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
You know, it's not legal to spam faxes either, but guess what... my office fax is loaded with crap every day!
And since the offense is being committed in the privacy of your office, who do you expect to do what about it?
The federal law against unsolicited faxes provides a few ways of dealing with them:
Have you done anything about those faxes? If not, you have zero right to complain about nothing being done. If someone burglarizes you and you don't report it, is it justafiable to complain about the lack of police action on it?
You are assuming the number of internet users is constant for the period. Hypothetically, if the number of users doubled in that time, then no increase in your personal spam volume would still result in a doubling of traffic.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
The incident before the civil war was famous because it showed the tension between the north and south. Senator Charles Sumner, Republican of Massachusetts, was caned by representative Preston Brooks, Democrat of South Carolina, in 1856 for insulting Senator Andrew Butler's stance on Kansas (and making light of his medical condition). Brooks was Butler's nephew and caned Sumner at his desk in a nearly empty Senate chamber. So, as legislation it didn't really work because they were from different chambers. As propaganda it worked pretty well, but for Sumner and the abolitionists.
I think the first 'caning' in congress was in 1798. You can read about it here.
Milo
If we consider the anti-fax-spam law to be a good one, it should simply be extended to the email age due to the close similarities. Spammers have been successfully sued based on the fax laws.
Can you provide a reference to this?
At the very least, the PA Superior Court just ruled that the ban on unsolicited faxes in the TCPA can't be applied to email. I'm not aware of anyone successfully arguing otherwise in court, but it might be nice to hear otherwise.
Regardless of the amount of legislation put in place to stop spam, spam will persist. This is because it works. Spammers simply look at statistics. If 1 out of 1,000,000 spams gets a sale, then it is in the spammer's best interest to spam more people and therefore generate more sales. Spam will only stop if the consumer stops allowing it to be a finacially viable form of advertising. More should be done to inform the consumer, i.e. reciever of spam.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/24/21 58258&mode=thread&tid=111
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Funny how fellers from TEXAS think it's ok to go AWOL and be negligent in their duties to their country.
Well, whatever you want to call them, I'd expect that members of the House of Lords get all sorts of requests from the public for them to address various issues in the house. The fact that they're not elected would allow them to make more light of the issue than if they were in the House of Commons.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Lord Newby: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. However, would he accept that...
"It's Dot Com!"
Spam spam spam...
And I quote:
...ah, the elderly!
"That is a blatant lie! There's not and haven't been 73 people in the entire history of the British Empire who've used toothpaste!"
btw, The idea was published in 1992:
C. Dwork and M. Naor. Pricing via processing or combatting junk mail. In Advances in Cryptology---CRYPTO '92, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1993
See also papers that site it.
1... who gets the money if you charge for email? Considering the amount of junk post I get I think spamming would continue even if a fee is involved. Hell I remember compu$erve back in 1982 when they charged roughly the same as normal postage for user to user e-mail. This seemed like a good deal cause it was faster. I got spam on that service dispite it costing roughly the same as postal rates.
And considering the topic was about a person who funded a spam operation via stolen credit cards and identy theft, a bogus paypal account isn't too hard to muster up.
2. I have to admit, this has some merit, the idea of using visual passwords and such. Ascii art though, so long as there was a program generating it, there can be a program to decode it. OCR is getting better by the day, beside, you can *assign* a staff at minium wage, who's purpose in life is to just decode visual passwords. Eventually you can get some system together that will decode faster based on a checksum.
Not that #2 isn't a spiffy idea, it just screams of being able to be circumvented.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
at their R&D "open day", you probably read it. Visit the following link. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1034867 ,00.asp
Good job your post got rejected, otherwise there'd be another Dupe post from the /. editors.
;-)
If its any consolation, all my posts get rejected. even the interesting ones
The first thing I did was made a sendmail milter that does exactly the validation of "FROM:".
I ran into trouble in various areas:
1. AO-Hell now has a non-RFC mail server
2. Yahoo "blindly" approves ANY "FROM:" test
3. MSN "blindly" approves ANY "FROM:" test
4. Majordomo may not validate their own "FROM:"
5. Nothing prevents SPAM'r from "assuming" a valid email address (heck, they have 1 billion to pick from... identity theft here, YES!)
6. Any attempt to tie DNS MX to the "FROM:" will break the following:
a. mobile IP
b. legitimate "forwarder"
c. NAT environment
d. valid SMTP-Relay link
e. Backup SMTP server
So, my work is also a work-in-progress, but I see the barriers. This is a stretch but I continue to use it nonetheless because the benefit far outweighs the risks of dropped legitimate mail.
The last trick up my sleeve is the "WHITELIST" with folding cash-hash challenge or "please type what you see" LARGE TIFF images.
--
Hang the Spammer from the highest yardarm!
I received a lot more than four or eight spams per day ten months ago, if you want to be really ridiculous and argue that the number of users has quadrupled or octupled in the last ten months.
OK, I was a little unclear. The number of users doesn't have to increase by that much, the number of mail addresses has to increase. Considering the number of people that get second and third addresses as "spam traps," this seems entirely plausible to me.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
People have been setting up second and third email addresses in large numbers for years. If you are claiming that the number of email addresses has increased by more than 8X in the past ten months, then I think that claim seems sufficiently implausible that the burden of proof should be on you to provide some statistical evidence to back up that claim.
You are generalizing from a sample size of one. If I used your method of determining statistical reality, then the economy is fine. No one I know has been laid off in the past two years, and everyone's gotten raises. Unemployment doubling? Wages flat? Unlikely at best! What does the Bureau of Labor Statistics know?
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Even if your spam has more than doubled in the past ten months, you would need to argue that the number of internet email addresses has increased by a factor of large enough to work out to an increase of 128X of total spam. For example, if you spam has gone up by a factor of exactly 2, you would need argue that the number of internet addresses has increased by 64X in the past ten months. If you can't honestly do that, then you haven't even shown any anecodotal evidence to support the article's claim.