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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.
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."
!!!
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!
In the States, it's not uncommon to see a Congressman debating in front of a mostly empty congressional hall.
You are probrably confusing regular congressional sessions with Special Orders.
Special Orders allow congressmen to discuss any topic for any length of time. This occurs after the regular sessions are complete, in the evening hours. They are generally for the benefit of the C-SPAN audience and for the congressman to get what he wants into the Congressional Record.
Q.
If a spam king and a spam queen have sex what do you get??
A.
A spamwich!
Ok, so it's a lame joke, but I still think it's funny..
Intrigued by the House of Lords?
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Postfix has tried this, it almost works, but it takes a while for mail to be delivered, and if someone is using an open relay, it can very easily fail
What you will need to do is to do a check agianst the first mailserver in the mail headers...however, this dosnt always work, because some companies place their mailserver inside the network, and then use a ssh tunnel to send to a mailserver outside the network...to prevent their mailserver from taking a hit.
all in all...it COULD work, but some niftly little tricks are needed first.
by RFC, the server must allow MAIL FROM: , which ought to be used for a response to a delivery error.
I doubt she reads
(Number taken from here.)
Reg article
USENET thread.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
All that these "crazy" lords would be able to do is delay or return a piece of Legislation to the Commons. Woo - scary.
The British government works like this:
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.
> 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
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
No Brit has any business calling themselves a citizen, they're subjects!
"mail from:" addresses are almost always forged.
Your server could easily create a situation in which the forgery is not a random, non-existent address, but is mine, or yours.
I've gotten spam and virii in our office with the 'from' line the same as the 'to' line, or the same as another user in our domain.
Please take note that this post is NOT a troll. the supermarket chain Sainsburys, owned by Lord Sainsbury, did indeed engage in spamming. The Register has the details. Check your facts before moderating please.
A latent existence