Slashdot Mirror
I, Spammer
PCOL writes "The Washington Post is reporting on testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation by Ronald Scelson, an eighth-grade dropout and self-taught computer programmer from Louisiana, who claims that he sends between 120 million and 180 million e-mails every 12 hours, that he can break sophisticated software filters 24 hours after they are deployed, and that he has no choice but to resort to forging the sender information in his bulk e-mail so he can be anonymous and maintain his connection to the Internet. He added that he obtained all his addresses legally and that AOL gladly sold him the company's entire customer directory which Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL, did not deny." It's a tough life. Here's another story about the Senate committee meeting.
Hello Pot, this is the kettle, you're black!!
AOL is a bigger part of the problem vs being a bigger part of the solution.
With great power, comes great responsibility.
"This must be a Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
Dear God, I hope the committee saw through this pathetic little charade. Last time I checked, I had no oblighation to pay to receive advertising; I had no right to force others to pay the cost of carrying that advertising; I had no right to force others to put up with the deluge of complaints about that advertising.
And if he's right about AOL selling him their membership list and spamming their members (and AOL VP Leonsis' weasel words about "letting members opting out" does nothing to make me think otherwise), all that means is there are two assholes there instead of one. It doesn't give him any moral high ground.
But at least there's the proposal for a "federal antispam SWAT team". I'd pay good money to see a live video stream of that take-down.
Carousel is a lie!
while ($AOL)
{ $AOL=shoot_self_in_foot(with_gun);}
By Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 22, 2003; Page A01
As a Senate committee sought answers yesterday on how to curb the overwhelming surge of junk e-mail, one of the nation's most notorious spammers told members just how hard their job would be.
Ronald Scelson, an eighth-grade dropout and self-taught computer programmer from Louisiana, riveted the Commerce Committee hearing room as he explained that he sends between 120 million and 180 million e-mails every 12 hours.
He boasted that in 24 hours he could crack sophisticated software filters designed to block spam.
And he accused Internet providers of hypocrisy in claiming to want to protect their customers from unsolicited messages.
Large Internet companies spam their own members, he said, while other network access providers have signed contracts allowing known spammers to send out mass e-mail.
"I'm probably the most hated person in this room," said an unapologetic Scelson, responding to a parade of technology, government and marketing officials who decried the purveyors of junk e-mail.
Scelson and eight other witnesses testified as Congress grapples with what Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) called a tide of "digital dreck" that threatens e-mail communication, one of the most powerful tools of the Internet age.
With spam now costing U.S. businesses upwards of $10 billion a year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who is co-sponsoring an anti-spam bill with Burns, said it was time for Congress to stop dawdling and pass federal legislation.
All of the witnesses agreed that spam is a complex problem that defies an easy fix. But as executives from leading software companies and online providers fidgeted uncomfortably, the man known to anti-spam tracking groups as the "Cajun Spammer" described how he easily acquires millions of e-mail addresses from publicly available member directories at America Online and other providers.
Moreover, he said, "the same people complaining about spam send e-mail" with solicitations for their own products and services. "AOL spams its members," he said.
This prompted the committee chairman, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), to turn to Ted Leonsis, vice president of AOL.
"Mr. Leonsis, are you a spammer?" McCain asked.
Leonsis, who had testified minutes earlier about how AOL was blocking 2.4 billion pieces of spam per day, did not answer directly.
"We let members opt out" of commercial messages sent by the company and affiliates, he said. And he accused Scelson of violating the company's "terms of use" agreement by using AOL's membership directory as a source for e-mail addresses. Scelson readily agreed.
Scelson also testified about how some Internet access providers signed little-known agreements, called "pink contracts," with known spammers to allow them to send mail in bulk, at prices higher than other commercial clients were charged.
Although the contracts mandated that bulk e-mailers abide by all state laws, Scelson said it did not matter if the e-mailers followed the rules. Most of the providers rip up the contracts and kick spammers off their systems after being threatened by anti-spam organizations that track mass e-mailers and put them on blacklists.
As a result, Scelson said, he has had no choice but to resort to forging the sender information in his bulk e-mail so he can be anonymous and maintain his connection to the Internet.
"This is censorship," he said, arguing that both anti-spam vigilantes and Internet providers that filter out spam are depriving people of their right to see their mail.
"People still buy this stuff," he said, claiming that his clients get a response rate to his e-mail of 1 to 2 percent.
Scelson, who said he does not distribute mail containing pornography, said one of his biggest clients sells a package of anti-virus computer software called Norton SystemWorks at cut-rate prices.
Officials at Symantec Inc., which makes the Norton software
This sort of confirms that most spam is sent by a small group. Take this sucker out, and a massive amount of spam drops off the planet. Do it with enough prejudice, just to make sure nobody takes over the vacancy.
Why do people bother with doing crap like this? Just because they can? This guy has the mentality of a script kiddy. Someone find his info and organize a snailmail spam-a-thon.
Ok, another spammer, joy, so when are we going to start getting lists of those who HIRE these urchins? I frankly would love to start re-routing all the spam that comes to me BACK to the idiots who hire spammers. Oh, and how about some postal addresses on these spam-buying scumbags too, eh?
Ok, maybe this is a troll, but its what /.ers have done before.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I wonder if anyone inside of AOL has run the numbers to figure out
and compared that to the amount of revenue that they get from selling out their customers.
My false negative rate using Mozilla Bayesian filtering is way less than 1%, and the false positive rate since training is non-existant. Of course I do go back about once a month and re-train it with both positive and negative datasets but if you don't do good training how can you expect good results, it's almost like training a pet.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Scelson tries to make the argument that what he does is no different than other advertisers who send their adverisements through the US mail.
Unfortunately he, like all other spammers, completely misses the point that the two are not related. When LL Bean sends its catalog to you it costs the company X cents to do so per each catalog.
When Scelson sends out his 180 emails a day it costs him X cents in total. However, it costs all the ISPs whose bandwidth he and others chew up X dollars per email. Thus, he is offloading the cost of doing business to the people who are receiving the email.
This reminds me of the old postal system in the UK. In days gone by it was the receiver who had to pay to accept the piece of mail. If they didn't pay the mail was returned. It is only in recent history that the mail system is such that sender pays.
I wonder if Mr Scelson would be happy if all the advertisers who send him their mailings would tell him he has to pay to get those things whether he wants them or not.
I, Spammer, you Tarzan. We be in same intelligence level.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Why do I have this knot in my stomach as Congress prepares legislation to stop spam? Remember when they 'deregulated' the cable industry and all our rates went up? I know it is possible to go from bad to worse, but what is after that?
Some people have a way with words, others not have way.
I think the real behind-the-scenes motive of all the efforts we keep hearing about recently to throttle Spam is the intention to remove our ability to send e-mail anonymously on the Internet. Removing this capability frightens me, particularly for those living under repressive regimes. There must be some third way by which Spam can be defeated while still preserving anonymous e-mailing.
Scelson, who said he does not distribute mail containing pornography, said one of his biggest clients sells a package of anti-virus computer software called Norton SystemWorks at cut-rate prices. Officials at Symantec Inc., which makes the Norton software, said in an interview that although they have not seen the package Scelson's client is selling, other similar offers that they have tracked down have proved to be counterfeit.
I get 1-2 Norton SystemWorks spams a day. If they're from this fucker, let's hope the Symantec people are able to find out where he lives, and sue him into oblivion.
sulli
RTFJ.
1-2 percent on penis enlargement - and knock off Viagra offers?
Mr. Scelson is a fucking liar.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
How about his home address?
There is NO way he bought the AOL address information from AOL.
One thing to keep in mind when talking with spammers is that they always lie. They lie to themselves ("everything I do is legal", "I am forced to hijack open proxies") and they lie to everyone else ("Here's the information you requested").
The career spammers are, indeed, bold enough to even lie to the US Government, face-to-face. Too bad the US Government is usually totally cluefree when it comes to the spam problem, so these conmen get away with lieing to senators.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
He should be slapped lightly on the wrist with a rolled up newspaper once for every time he pissed someone off.
True story: I broke the trigger on my water pistol by fantasising I had a gun pointed at a spammer's genitals.
"...and that AOL gladly sold him the company's entire customer directory which Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL, did not deny."
Ted Turner must be rolling in his grave.
I personally dropped AOL when they started with Pop-ups 7 years ago. I was annoyed that they would force a big ad as soon as I logged on and that I had to dismiss it before I could do anything else.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
And not one spammer has broken that filter.
I'd sure like to see this brain surgeon try and find out who's on my whitelist and forge their address.
I can reasonably say hell will freeze over before that happens.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I think I have it. If we get the spammer's postal address, and the postal address of those who hired him, maybe we should just print out all the spam we get and sent it to the one who hired him postage due. :)
As an added bonus use the spammer's postal address as the return address.
Some of my email accounts receive 20 emails per day which are spam.
This has been happening for more than a year, and every time I spend 1-2 minutes per day deleting spam I get angry!!! Very Angry!
Its about time to use our skills and fight back!
Hackers Vs Spammers
"Now the individual has lost his right to get any e-mail he wants," Scelson said. So now I want to receive free viagra from jryaixz@yahoo.com? Quite the contrary; with proposed antispam laws, users are finally gaining the right to get only the email they want.
he has no choice but to resort to forging the sender information in his bulk e-mail so he can be anonymous and maintain his connection to the Internet
so why don't they just make a law to make it illegal to forge header information for commercial e-mail.. with the party to be charged being the one whose products are being advertised (since, well, if there's a way to get their money, there's a way to contact THEM)
that would cut off spammers air supply in the u.s. pretty quickly and it would be wicked simple to enforce
there's no way you can argue against this. even if you have a right to anonymity then there is NO way you have a right to anonymity in *COMMERCIAL SPEECH*. that just doesn't even make sense.
8th grade dropout? How early can you drop?
In the few days I have been using TMDA, I have been exceedingly satisfied. It is a much better solution than SpamAssasin. You should try to whitelist most of the people you expect to receive email from ahead of time, but I haven't had any complaints from people having to respond to a message bounced back to them for authentication.
That, in combination with qmail's revokable dash-addresses (howard-amazon@cow.com, howard-slashdot@cow.com, etc.) make it an excellent solution not just for avoiding spam, but for tracking its sources as well.
If he's sending 240 million emails a day and getting 1-2 percent return, even if he only make a few dollars off each sale that's a profit in the order of billions a year. Do you get the feeling he's lying to the senate?
Let's say 10 million emails per hour (lowest), 1% response rate (lowest), that's 100,000 responses per hour! That means that over the course of a year, we are talking about 876 million responses. Divide that by the 165.75 million internet users in the US, and we learn that each and every one of you respond to him 5 times per year!
Well, maybe he spams the entire world. I have no idea how many internet users there are in the world, but let's say it is something like one billion. That means everyone responds to him almost yearly! Amazing! Now I only have one question: those responses, are they sales or deaththreats?
People need to guard their email addresses in the same way they practice safe sex. Don't go sticking your email address just any old place ...
Ok, that was bad. The exceptions are cases where your ISP screws you and sells your name (like those sorry AOL customers had happen to them) or people who use brute force address guessing algorithms.
Although I think the legislation being considered is a good first step --
Nothing really beats good filtering. I put together a server side filtering process using a Mail::Audit. I support several end users who can administrate their mail rules (e.g. block if subject has "viagra" or if sender is spamboy@jizzmop.com, etc.) using a web based interface and MySQL back-end. People can share rules as well. It's working pretty well for everyone. Additionally, Mail::Audit allows you to tap into the RBL which essentially will give you an "unlisted number" - only those you have expilicity granted permission to recieve from can reach you. Sounds extreme, but I get ZERO spam.
... is here. He must not be doing all that well if he can't scrape together the dough to get his fat ass out of Slidell, Louisiana, a town I had the misfortune of driving through a year ago and whose only redeeming feature is the Lake Ponchartrain bridge/causeway leading out of it and to New Orleans.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
I would rather trust a spammer than a lazy computer programmer to get a job done, that's for sure. It's not about being nice, it's about being a hard worker. Stupid isn't forever, but lazy is.
How, exactly, is writing a few scripts to send out a huge batch of e-mail every 12 hours or so, with minimal input from the user, hard work?
Sounds to me like the spammer is the lazy one, but, maybe I'm missing something. Please enlighten me.
my pet machine
Once spam is legitimized, you can expect to see attempts to block or filter it made illegal as well. And then, once again, the world will be safe from consumers who commit theft by not viewing/reading advertisements.
Spam is a business because there are actually people out there that fall for this crap!
I maintain that if the general public would just wise-up, spam would go away rather quickly. The article points out that he gets 3% response. If it was 0%, we would be out of business. It's that simple.
So the solution is this: Educate those less computer-wise around you to NEVER respond to a spam e-mail. And definitely don't give them money!
"..and that he has no choice but to resort to forging the sender information in his bulk e-mail so he can be anonymous and maintain his connection to the Internet."
In other words: "I have to lie, cheat and steal to use resources on mail servers illicitly."
Asshole.
Trolling is a art,
Although I hate to admit it, I use AOL - much to the amusement of my friends. I have to say that I have not been bombarded with any spam since the creation of my new email account. I have used this account solely for communicating with friends, and nobody except my friends have the address.
Reading the comments above would make me think that all AOL accounts attract spam, just because they are at AOL. Some advice for AOLers. if you dont want spam, dont have a profile, and most certainly dont give your email address to all those porn sites you frequent...
I always say "Work smart, not hard".
If you can accomplish something with no user intervention, you must be doing something right.
Lol.
This article is 20 minutes old, I am suprised his home address, phone number, ssn, shoe size and EQ account info aren't already posted.
"Sig free in '03!"
how much money AOL has spent on anti-spam measures, or
how many customers AOL has lost due to the overwhelming amount of spam in their inboxes,
and compared that to the amount of revenue that they get from selling out their customers.
well lets assume AOL loses a net 100,000 customers per year who would have stayed despite other gripes, had spam not been out of control. Well then at $19 per month that's 228 dollars per year x 100,000 = 22.8 million dollars per year per year.
that is this is the rate of change of loss. if one assumes the average AOL member who would be bother by spam last say 3 years with the service then the amortized loss is
68 Million dollars per year (constant over time)
of course this assumes that the 100,000 number is correct. Presumably AOL also has people joining from other places, say MSN, that quit their providers too because of spam. And of course 100,000 was just a number ot get the conversation statered. Personally I would guess the real number is 10x less maybe 100x less.
Also as long as AOL is growing at a rate that is approriate to their cash flow they will actually be glad these people quit! that is, too fast a growth is bad for a company: you dont want to have to borrow money. often its better and more stable to raise it via stock sales and cash flow. thus as long as you are growing at your maximum rate you dont care if some people leave.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Somebody should kick that guy in the nads! I hate spam.
I think that here, "right" is a very subjective word.
He's doing wrong very efficiently, perhaps it might be better to say.
my pet machine
It's right here. This is about the umptieth story on spam in about three weeks. The word "obsessed" comes to mind.
Get a new address or install a filter, and then start listing interesting articles for a change because the spam topic is getting up-fucking old in a hurry.
Here's a proposal, as it seems like the world is moving closer to 'whitelist' (reject by default) method of spam combatantcy. Perhaps there should be a global whitelist set up, where a user signs up, and must verify their mail address, then the mail address is MD5 hashed and stored in a database. Recipients recieve an email from this sender they simply hash the from address and check to see if the hash exists in the database. If it's present the mail is accepted, if not, rejected. Solves the problem of invalid from addresses always used in spam, as well as solving the problem of preventing data-mining of such a 'whitelist' database by spammers (as it contains only checksums).. And it solves the problem of being able to recieve messages from people you haven't personally explicitly whitelisted; ie. old friends from highschool, aquantances with new email addresses, etc..
Whaddya think?
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
If AOL did indeed sell this guy their entire user list, then I have absolutely no sympathy for them. It also takes away the legitimacy of AOL, MSN, and Yahoo joining forces to eliminate spam when at least one of them (AOL) is actively contributing to the problem.
Maybe counting on ISPs to help eliminate the problem isn't such a great idea after all...
Five Dolla Moddy-Moddy?
Isn't it a felony to lie in congressional testimony?
In my wonderfull country (!= US). We have a systenm where you can put an official sticker (free at townhall). on your mailbox that you don't want Junk Mail, and you don't get any (mistakes excepted, but hey once a year or so). The same stickers also allow you to differentiate between "Junk mail" and "local advertisements papers" (Which can be handy if you want to know what's going on in your local community). If a similair system could be implemented for email (I doubt that, at least any time soon). then I would not mind electronic junkmail (allthough I would opt-out). Now I object since I have no means of opting out and be done with it.
Education is good! We can block and filter all we want, but until the people who give money to spammers stop doing that, spammers will keep trying to reach them.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Why isn't this the same crime as handing someone an ID card which says you are someone you are not?
He claims that he "has no choice but to resort to forging the sender information in his bulk e-mail so he can be anonymous".
Isn't that a bit like saying that when I was 19, I had no choice but to resort to forging my driver's license so I could buy beer?
MORTAR COMBAT!
James Munson
...
809 87th Ave NE
Everett, WA 98205
Gary Mizell
5518 E Friess Drive
Scottsdale, AZ 85254
Wendy K. Harris
2008 South Mebane Street
Apartment 2027-C
Burlington, NC 27215
Paul Wade
2 Oakmead
Meopham
Kent DA13 0PL
Elliot H. Johnson
3404 Burliegh Cove
Austin, TX 78745
Fr. G. G.
1415 Doric Drive
Reno, NV 89503
he has no choice but to resort to forging the sender information in his bulk e-mail so he can be anonymous and maintain his connection to the Internet.
Is that like bank robbers being forced to don a mask so they can remain anonymous and maintain their 'business operations'?
I've had one of my email addresses used as a reply to: for quite a few spams. A real PITA. Not only did that address get the standard spam, it get bounces from nonexistent recipients. Sometimes in the hundreds per day, as the result of dictionary attacks on various ISP's. On top of that, you get the indignant replies from pissed off people.
Blatant forgeries in commercial email headers should be made illegal.
But at least there's the proposal for a "federal antispam SWAT team". I'd pay good money to see a live video stream of that take-down. Ronald Scelson, an eighth-grade dropout and self-taught computer programmer from Louisiana I think they'd have to get Mr and Mrs. Scelsons permission first, they might want to send him into the corner or take away his keyboard or something harsh like that ya know
~Just keep eating, porky. Fat people are harder to kidnap.
if someone told you that you could become a millionaire just by spending a couple hours each day sending emails, you'd probably be the first to sign up.
There are thousands of people reading this right now who have the technical knowhow and time to do this. Yet none of them have, because unlike the slimy little git sat in front of Congress who is claiming that someone a spam filter infringes his 1st Amendment rights, we recognise that doing so would be morally wrong. I suspect that Ronald Scelson does not understand this because he dropped out in 8th Grade and probably missed a few classes on the subject.
If someone told you that you could make thousands a month just selling some herbs from the comfort of your own home, you'd probably sign up on the spot, right?
Does he copy all the messages that he sends to sent folder?
Must have a quite large hd..
Oh man, didn't they cancel Buffy? Maybe he can clean up his code with that new-found free time.
If you want to know what some of the problems with early mail delivery when the sender paid, read Mark Twain's Roughing It. Actually, they dumped most of it one day out except for what was necessary to provide a nice cushioned ride (stage coach suspensions were brutal). But read the book anyway. It's hysterically funny and the insights on what early America was really like are amazing. Try to see a trout 100 feet down on Lake Tahoe today.
He has two addresses, (assuming these are both him).
/. community like to show this guy what we consider spam?
These were the only Ronald Scelson's in Louisiana and considering they are both in the same city I would say it's fairly certain.
Ronald Scelson
211 Martin Lane
Slidell, LA 70458
Ronald R Scelson
1711 W Hall Ave
Slidell, LA 70460
Would the
And you haven't received at least 50 of their CDs in the mail over the years?
MORTAR COMBAT!
and the postal address of those who hired him
An important point here is that the spammer is just doing what someone hires him to do. The real person that needs some kind of sanction is his client -whether they're selling viagra, or Norton SystemWorks or whatever. Unfortunately, companies that pay to spam are more slippery than the spammers themselves.
The problems, for me, are that in my company, Executive A wants all messages (even spam that was intended for former employees) to go to his inbox. Since this is a M$ Outlook inbox, and is nearing the 2Gig threshold, he is constantly losing legitimate mail. The idea of setting him up with Mozilla would be a dream come true. I love using SpamCop.org to trash my personal spam, but to get others to get onboard is nearly impossible. Most people like to complain about spam, but have little idea the problems it causes. Those who don't complain, or worse, support spam are just idiots.
I went to battle MC Escher but drew a blank
and several dimensions away, Satan scraped the icicles from his beard and once more begged God to turn the heat back up. "Okay, so a spammer told the truth, but it only happened once, and it was an accident, it's not my fault, can I please have some frickin' heat down here already?!?!"
this guy was complaining because his legal business was being interupted. Well I say make it illegal. He got no more right to spam because it's his living than a professional hitman has a right to kill people. unsolicited, untargeted advertising should be illegal period in my book. Perhaps the answer is to build up a list of companies who employ spammers and boycott them. no advertisers, no spammers.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
According to Spamhaus:
d en cefile=1070:
http://www.freedomforum.org/speech/1999/10/20laspa m.aspa ge8.htm ln ths/Feb98 /feb23pr1.htm
(http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/search.lasso?evi
ABUSERS: Ronald R. Scelson
[Birthdate: 12-11-71 or 72, New Orleans, LA, married]
avsrscelson@aol.com / cajunspam@aol.com / avsrscelson2000@yahoo.com / dff@yahoo.com
Amy Hoolahan [wife/sister?]
43 CYPRESS MEADOWS LOOP
SLIDELL, LA 70460 US
Home: (504) 646-2225
Work: 504-649-6248
PHONE NUMBERS: 888-365-0000 ext. 1648 / 800-242-0363 EXT. 2427
888-724-3108 x5413752
504 781 8117 / 504-957-1037 / 504-847-1232 / 504-649-7751
504-781-6615 / 504-649-6248 / 504-781-6655 / 504-831-1595
504-646-2225 / 504-641-0876
FAX: 504 641 0810 / 504-456-0995 / 504-781-6615
MORE INFO: Connelly sues to keep spamming:
http://www.frc.org/legal/lf99j05.html
http://www.mediainst.org/digest/fall1999/p
Wife Florence Fox sued for Nu-Skin Pyramid Scheme:
http://www.attorneygeneral.gov/press2/mo
Me, I'm thinking some letters of marque and reprisal are the answer...
What a strange bird is the pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can.
The story about unsolicited email facing government opposition is currently the most popular story on Yahoo. It has been emailed 326 times-- all of them unsolicited. Got irony?
It seems to me that the folks most motivated and most skilled at tracking down spammers are independent techies with no relationship to the service providers. These techs work untold hours tracking down spammers without any hope of monetary compensation or reward. It would be helpful if we could get legislation that allowed these spam gumshoes to share in a portion of assets seized from spammers convicted as a result of their detective work, as well as a share of any penalties levied against the spammer. Of course, one must still overcome difficulty of successfully prosecuting these cases, but without the background work there's no case at all...
What would the result of this be? Email would be totally unusable that day and perhaps for many days afterwards. Not only would it get government officials to take notice, it would cause even the spammers to see the evil of spam. Those that are capable of seeing it anyhow, most of them are probably blind to it.
Also, everyone that became a spammer for a day would Profit!
Lasers Controlled Games!
an eighth-grade dropout...from Louisiana
As opposed to the rest of Louisiana?
Destroy this man
Ronald Scelson, an eighth-grade dropout and self-taught computer programmer from Louisiana, who claims that he sends between 120 million and 180 million e-mails every 12 hours
Wow, I want to know how many words per minute this guy can type. He could probably make a much better living doing manual transcriptions of books.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
I really wish the share holders would ratify a proposition against this. Any shareholder can submit a proposition to be voted on, someonee should do it. Think of the money saved not making the discs and bundling them with everything. I read somewhere that the largest cost of some magazines production is polybagging the mag _just_ so an AOL cd can be included, and AOL picks up the cost of course.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
What's the differance with banner adds, there usually bigger than emails so they chew up more bandwidth.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
"Now the individual has lost his right to get any e-mail he wants," Has anyone ever said "I really wish I could get those mortgage spams every single day?" You never hear anyone other than spammers complain about the "right" to get all email sent to you. Maybe we should be complaining about this, should every isp and backgone be able to filter any mail that passes through them?
I don't know that he is doing wrong. He is being annoying, that's true. But censorship is wrong, and I would rather deal with spam than have a system of controls in place based on content. But I suppose there is something morally "wrong" about exploiting any resource to the detriment of that resource.
Ok, He's doing wrong. But so is just about everyone else, in a different medium.
Slidell, New Orleans
Anyone else find more details?
Not early enough.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Oh, you want that? Here:
ABUSERS: Ronald R. Scelson
[Birthdate: 12-11-71 or 72, New Orleans, LA, married]
avsrscelson@aol.com / cajunspam@aol.com / avsrscelson2000@yahoo.com / dff@yahoo.com
Amy Hoolahan [wife/sister?]
43 CYPRESS MEADOWS LOOP
SLIDELL, LA 70460 US
Home: (504) 646-2225
Work: 504-649-6248
"Scelson said he currently has 22 clients and sends out as many as 18 million e-mails a day, but never more than one e-mail per person, per day "
... So not only do I get spam I get it 30 fscking times more than anyone else
I hate Mindspring [Earthlink] for this -
Some bright spammer found out that you can prepend the region in the hostname and come up with 30+ iterations of my email address and bulk up the lists
myemail@atl.mindspring.com, myemail@bmtc.mindspring.com etc
Yeah I want to hit 301 people with my dick. My wife's the only one not forging her headers tho..
B
(emphasis mine) I think it's a brilliant suggestion. If the Burns-Wyden bill is passed, then I can easily filter my mail to stop spam I don't want to see. I don't think that my ISPs should be blocking email that may be spam but follows these rules. The filters in Eudora and Outlook Express are powerful enough to stop all spam I am not interested in receiving if I know for a fact that the forged header problem vanishes. I think it's a great compromise.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Aren't we getting a bit cocky to think we can /. the Washington Post?
If you want to get your slogan and company name out there fast, it makes sense to use the Internet and email systems.
If you want to attract and retain a loyal customer base, it absolutely doesn't make sense to use spam or other annoying methods of advertising on the Internet.
As an example: I work for a company that owns one of the major online travel sites. A few weeks ago, we had an all-company conference call, and one of the members in my group pointed out that another online travel site had recently stepped up its advertising via popup ads on web sites. He asked why we weren't annoying the consumer with popup ads. The leader of the call replied, "I think you just answered your own question." He explained that while popup ads may be effective, they don't make any friends among consumers and they don't build loyalty.
If popup ads have such a negative impression, don't you think unsolicited commercial E-mail has a much more negative impression on the Internet population? Here's a hint: The spammers who sell Viagra (r), Viagra substitutes, penis extension pills, mortgages, and other spamvertised products almost never reveal their real business name. They hide behind throwaway e-mail addresses and make themselves untraceable to their audience.
Would a business concerned with consumer loyalty really have to hide themselves? My local grocery store doesn't have to hide from me. Neither does Target, Borders, Best Buy, or any number of bricks-and-mortar retailers. Amazon.com doesn't have to hide from me, nor do any of the online travel sites. Yet the spammers pushing penis pills don't dare reveal who they are, where they work, how I can contact them, or anything traceable.
I would rather trust a spammer than a lazy computer programmer to get a job done, that's for sure. It's not about being nice, it's about being a hard worker. Stupid isn't forever, but lazy is.
I think you're trolling here, but in case you aren't: That "hard work" relies on hijacking other people's resources. It relies on deception and lies to push a product to people.
(Disclaimer: This is not the opinion of my employer, of course.)
Fling enough shit at people and eventually you'll hit a scatophile. Who'll probably quite like it.
Pity you have to cover all the other people in excrement - but hey - someone wanted it.
Personally, I'd rather not don shit-repllant attire and adopt all your counter-measures but just stop the very small minority of anti-social idiots from flinging shit in the first place and ruining it for the vast majority.
An officer of a company should not make a statement without ensuring it is correct. Or taking reasonable means to ensure it is correct.
When a specific claim is made, like this there are a few options.
1. No statement at this time, or no comment.
2. Suggest that this didn't happen. This is against our standard policies.
3. Investigate the statement, and then comment on it's accuracy.
4. Say we did no such thing, without checking. This is reckless, and a responsible person should not do so.
I know it sounds weaselish, but you MUST not make a statement when you do not have the information to justify it. You can get in a lot of trouble for lying.
The committee also heard from Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who advocates a nationwide do-not-spam registry similar to a newly created do-not-call telemarketing list, plus an international treaty on spam.
.int top level domain is for organizations established by international treaties.
According to RFC 1541 the
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Because most of the actual monetary cost of sending the spam has already been incurred by the time you filter at the client. The message has already been transmitted from client to server to server to server to client over the internet, consuming bandwidth. It has already occupied disk space. Even the end-of-the-server-chain, pre-client filters like SpamAssassin only alleviate the last link in that bandwidth-bonanza (to-client).
.procmailrc to deal with all kinds of situations, but Joe Schmoe email user shouldn't have to learn complex regular expressions.
That spam email should never be sent, period. It should not ever proceed across the internet whose bandwidth is being paid for by millions of users, providing benefit to the sender. It should never touch the hard disk of a server.
In addition, it simply takes too much sophistication for the VAST majority of email users to properly set up filters. A simple [ADV*] -> Trash filter would delete some email that quite honestly some users want -- special coupons from Amazon.com for repeat customers, for example. Those emails would by (proposed) law have to have the [ADV] tag on them. So then you add another filter above the Trash filter to allow ADV from Amazon through... and so on, and so forth.
Pretty soon the hassle of organising your filters has exceeded the hassle of having to just click 'delete' to spam (for the average email user). I can easily enter a new expression in my
MORTAR COMBAT!
Why doesn't someone create a website where you can register your e-mail address to avoid getting spam? Then spammers could check their list against this list, and remove the addresses of spam haters. That would give the spammer a much higher positive response rate, since he won't ever sell to any of these people anyway, and he will also get less negative response. Everybody wins!
The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out.
Don't forget to exceuse that this page is the protection against spammers and once you've got the message then the person email address will be included to the whitelist and the rest of communication will go through a regular email way. BTW, it's your choice - will you add the email address to the whitelist automatically as a part of the form submission (seems like the stranger is not a bot at least) or manually after you read the actual message (to make sure that you really want to talk to the stranger).
I can create (and debug) such page in about an hour. If you don;t know how to program - ask you programming friend. But don't leave the spammer any chance - keep your email behind the whitelist!
Less is more !
Lock this man in an iron box that is only 5% larger than his body mass...give him just enough room to bang his head against the walls until he dies from head trauma.
how about we introduce mr self-tought big-brain to a few pillowcases filled with doorknobs in the middle of the night?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
But then when you start filtering data on content, you are not an impartial conduit.
You might then be taking responsiblity for the content you do let through.
I think ISPs are more scared of that than spam.
ISP's should let you opt out of their default mail filtering policy, then these spammers lose a big part of the arguement.
Either opt in spam filtering and opt in bulk email.
or
Opt out spam filtering and opt out bulk emial.
Why not just mandate what exists in many states for telemarketers? Establish a global blacklist that people can sign up for, and spammers must check that list before sending an email? The fines could be made substantial enough to be a deterrent - say 5 years in the pokie with a 300lb hairy "woman" named "Bubba" and siezure of all assets without forbearance of liabilities. That way, after 5 years of hell, they can get out of prison to a mountain of debt with no hope of ever climbing out.
This might be a technical challenge, but so was landing on the moon...
I hear you on that - I was just faced with wading through a sea of spam each morning or giving up my email address if I didn't get my shit protection suit on ...
I read something somewhere (thought it was Wired but can't find it now) to the effect that most spammers are not in fact selling porn or anti-virus software or penis enlargement at all - they are selling address lists, to each other. In which case the responses probably consist mostly of unsubscribe requests. Set up a temporary account and try to buy some of this snake oil and it seems you'll find that most replies lead nowhere and your dick is just going to have to remain the same size.
Not sure I understand the economics of this, but why should I...?
Rule 1. Spammer lies.
Rule 2. See Rule 1.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
He knows he is inconviencing people...
And he is being inconvienced!
So how is it that he feels we should feel sorry for him?
Note: He removed the ability to opt out... hence it's completely unsolicited, the email addresses are bought from a *third party*... and spammed so that they can't be removed from the list.
He's a clear cut spammer.
I have no problem with companies like Apple, Gateway, Palm, etc. having a mailing list advertising their products with tips and such... you can opt out... no attempt to disquise.
But he bought the list (obviously because he couldn't aquire a legitimate database)... and hid the ability to remove ones self.
...shoe size is 10, in case anyone was wondering ;-)
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
He boasted that in 24 hours he could crack sophisticated software filters designed to block spam.
That is plain funny. nothing get's through my Spammunition filters I have on every desktop here.
Yes the email is still transferred (Corperate IT is too stupid to install a spam filter on the server let alone run a decent email server) but it drops the signal to noise ratio here massively.
20 good email a day 236 spam today.. (yes it has a spam counter.)
the spam filters are getting damn good. to hell with laws, we'll kill them with the technology easily.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why don't ISPs set up several "pristine" accounts whose address is not given to anyone (document it) but is easy to guess through random generators and sue all spammers that send mail to them into oblivion?
As the child of a criminal, you get to see first hand the selfishness and excuses which drive these personalities. A friend's mother runs a prison system, and insists that there is really no cure for this--the sociopath. He will likely be on to the next nearly illegal exploit after spam is made completely illegal--if ever. at least he's not stealing from or killing people!
I had a roommate that owns a .com domain name. The only spam he gets are these "buy our list" spams. Plus, the list boasted several billion addresses claiming they were all verified. Seems the spammers lie even to each other... No honor amongst thieves I guess.
1-Set up a paid account with an anonymous remailer with limits, not in your country.
2-Set up a trusted remailer network. Ususally those groups that are repressed, have support groups outside the country i.e escaped dissidents that can help.
Not quite. Spam is simply unsolicited bulk email. I don't think junk snail-mail falls under the usual definition. And I'm sure I'm not alone in never having paid to receive snail-mail.
I guess that explains statements like the following, that display his keen insight into our system of government:
"But carriers should be held accountable when they submit to anti-spam groups. Terminating services to companies' such as my own without any legal reason to do so is not the democracy that we should all be living."
Jackass, if you're reading:
1) This is not a democracy. We're a democratic republic. There's a big difference.
2) Forcing someone else to provide you a service is neither freedom, nor related to a democracy. In fact, that would be contrary to freedom.
3) Claiming you're FORCED to forge email addresses because of "bullying tactics" is akin to claiming you were forced to break into my house and dump junk mail on my desk because I refused delivery.
Apparently you think America is all about you, and that you somehow have a level of freedom that compels others to act according to your wishes.
Rot in hell, dickhead.
How would the spammers / postal service / world react if we started writing "RETURN TO SENDER" on every single unwanted piece of mail? (Well, you know, snail mail...)
This guy deserves to die! Kind of makes me wonder how much of my spam came from him, huh? Give that sonofabitch the chair!
I have bad karma for speaking my Republican opinion. USA Rules!
Why not make it illegal to forge message headers, I mean this is a form of fraud, isn't it? According to this quote, it seems to be the thread that the spammers are hanging onto.
"Why do more people buy than complain about it?" Scelson asked. "If [the mail is 100 percent legal, and [ISPs] get a single complaint, they will turn around and kill your circuit, so we go out of business or we're forced to forge the headers. The biggest complain is you can't find us. If you could, you're going to shut us down, so why should we let you find us?"
Of course, enforcement is another issue. However, I think we need to establish that certain spam tactics as illegal and not give the spammers any illusion of legitimacy. Perhaps the threat of lawsuits or statuatory damages could help put some of these guys out of business.
I've grown used to logging on in the morning, deleting 20-50 spams that made it through my ISP's filter, then reading the 1-10 valid messages.
Until a few days ago...
Then I started getting bounced messages showing up in the inbox. First a dozen or so, and now 300+ per day. Some unscrupulous bastard put my e-mail address as the return address on those damned "Penis enlargement" spams and sent out a coupla hundred thousand. All have a different name ("Buffy", "Steve", "Frank", etc.), but all with my e-mail address.
I've had that address for nearly 10 years, which is the reason I put up with spam on it, but now I'm going to have to kill it all because some moron (the messages originated in China according the to headers) picked my name at random to hide behind.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
Ah, finally, a reason for everyone to have a Tandy model 100: cheap autodialer!
So I am reading this thread and what does the quote at the bottom of the screen say
you can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. -- Norman Douglas
How fitting, what does advertising in this case Spam say about our nation or the Internet as a whole?
I can't say that I feel at all sorry for him. Boohoo I have to forge my email headers so I don't get blocked, that should be flat out illegal punishable by prison terms. There is a virus going around that says it's from Microsoft. I think that virus and Spam that purports to be from someone else are exactly fundamentally the same. I think he should be escorted from the floor to a nice cozy jail cell.
I also don't think email falls totally under free speech, if some yahoo is out on the street corner saying how the God will punish women who wear short shorts (We had this guy at Florida State) that's one thing, you don't have to pay money to listen to him, unless your bored and want a good laugh.
But when you get ads for stuff in your mailbox you are paying for it. You are paying for storage space, you are paying for access time you are paying for the bandwidth to get these emails. If your using a paid for email address and not one supported through adds like hot mail, you should definitely be able to opt out. $0.02
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
what I'm wondering is, was the server down because the spammer was working for an amateur, or was it down because of the enormous amount of mail flowing thru its outbound pipes, or was it down because it was /.'ed with people trying to buy the product?
...
mozilla's getting pretty good -- I'm especially glad not to see those weekly notices that stri3286@bellsouth.net sent me yet another copy of klez and it was quarantined by the univ. mail servers.
maybe stri3286@bellsouth.net needs to be informed that he's been sending out klez all day long for the past couple of months? I confess I haven't bothered writing him.
...that any of these spammers are going to abide by this or any other law? They already violate laws in several states that make spam illegal. Do you think the residents of Washington don't get spam? Further, many spammers are outside the U.S., and these laws won't apply to them. Blocking all spam is the only way to stop it.
The obvious question is why being identified leads to loss of service. And of course we all know its because spam is against almost every service provider's Acceptable Use Policy. Its been like this for years - certainly since the Internet started becoming mainstream. There is no shock here.
The simple truth to the matter is that these guys are underground because their business is not legitimate. They are forced to hide their identities because they threaten the health of the networks they abuse and violate the contracts they agree to for service. They are not running a business. They're running a scam. This martyr complex is simply another scam they're trying to float.
I have been looking at the source of my spam lately, and, although the email addresses are always forged, the body of the messages nearly always point to some website.
What we should do is have a way to automatize the slashdotting of these sites. The resource cost for every recepient is very small, but is very high for the target web site. If the site is run directly by the spammer, then that's great (he get's to pay the bandwidth bill). If it is run by the spammer's client, then that's even better. If it is hosted on a free non-commercial facility, it will wake them up and will make them find a way to make their users accountable.
So how to do this in a very user-friendly and convenient way ? /dev/null. The app should have a funny user interface, that let's you know when a target host becomes unavailable (victory ! another one bites the dust !), etc. The downloadable list of target hosts should be maintained by a trusted source (it could be GPG signed for example), maybe mailed to you though a MixMaster remailer to avoid spammer suing the originator.
Make a distributed-computing application, very light-weight, that runs on every platform. You should be able to set the maximum bandwidth you want to use (the default could be very low, like 5kbps), when it should start and stop, etc.The app will go and fetch a list of URLs of images or HTML pages on the target servers, and start downloading them to
This could make all the Spam issue a lot more fun !
"He boasted that in 24 hours he could crack sophisticated software filters designed to block spam."
So isn't that in violation of the DMCA? Or am I stretching it? If he said he could get around them then its different but he specifically said he could crack them.
There must be some way we can use the patriot act to shut this pig down. He does not have a constitutional right to defecate all over our house. He is essentially launching a DOS attack on the internet infrastructure.
C372 4AB5 1E89 36DD FF72 E0C3 2BE6 22E9 ED0F A822
But the Tandy 100 used acoustic couplers, how will you autodial with that?
And that is not only limited to Electronic Mail... Their spam includes Snail Mail
The Registry of Known Spammers has his contact information, including emails, snail address, toll free phone numbers, etc. Lameness filter prevents posting the whole thing, but here's a peak at it.
http://www.freedomforum.org/speech/1999/10/20laspa m.aspa ge8.htm ln ths/Feb98 /feb23pr1.htm
ABUSERS: Ronald R. Scelson
[Birthdate: 12-11-71 or 72, New Orleans, LA, married]
avsrscelson@aol.com / cajunspam@aol.com / avsrscelson2000@yahoo.com / dff@yahoo.com
Amy Hoolahan [wife/sister?]
43 CYPRESS MEADOWS LOOP
SLIDELL, LA 70460 US
Home: (504) 646-2225
Work: 504-649-6248
PHONE NUMBERS: 888-365-0000 ext. 1648 / 800-242-0363 EXT. 2427
888-724-3108 x5413752
504 781 8117 / 504-957-1037 / 504-847-1232 / 504-649-7751
504-781-6615 / 504-649-6248 / 504-781-6655 / 504-831-1595
504-646-2225 / 504-641-0876
FAX: 504 641 0810 / 504-456-0995 / 504-781-6615
MORE INFO: Connelly sues to keep spamming:
http://www.frc.org/legal/lf99j05.html
http://www.mediainst.org/digest/fall1999/p
Wife Florence Fox sued for Nu-Skin Pyramid Scheme:
http://www.attorneygeneral.gov/press2/mo
AKA: RONALD SCELSON (NETBLK-FON-106771046442576)
43 CYPRESS MEADOWS LOOP
SLIDELL, LA 70460 US
SCELSON, RONALD (RS928-ARIN) RSCELSON@AOL.COM
5049571037
It shows
And all this time I thought the bad english in the spam I get originated from Asia.
He he. This fortune at the bottom is topical.
"You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. -- Norman Douglas"
After dozens of attempts to get AOL to implement the most rudimentary outgoing filters on their Email system, and getting ZERO response, I have regretfully informed our user base that we will no longer accept any Email emanating from any machine with an AOL.COM IP address.
.orgfor details) and their mail relays have sent hundreds of viruses into my domain.
They are breaking the rules of the Internet (see: SMTP RFCs) by improperly implementing postmaster@aol.com (see rfc-ignorant
I have asked all AOL users at my site who wish to continue emailing their home addresses from work to get a new service provider and given them two months to do so. I have recommended several small local ISPs to them that I know provide good service and never allow easily detected virii like Yaha, Klez and SoBig to transit their mail hubs.
We, fellow slashdotters, can use our enormous power as administrators of email hubs to get AOL's attention - since it seems more civilized methods are useless. The social contract of the Internet is simple; play by the rules (i.e. implement the required RFCs) or you are not part of the community.
He should really cut back on the penis enlargement on his forhead.
Well the user controlled filters could be moved to the mail server.
Go see ROKSO entry for Mr. Scelson if you want to get in touch with him. Excerpt below.
http://www.freedomforum.org/speech/1999/10/20laspa m.aspa ge8.htm ln ths/Feb98 /feb23pr1.htm
ABUSERS: Ronald R. Scelson
[Birthdate: 12-11-71 or 72, New Orleans, LA, married]
avsrscelson@aol.com / cajunspam@aol.com / avsrscelson2000@yahoo.com / dff@yahoo.com
Amy Hoolahan [wife/sister?]
43 CYPRESS MEADOWS LOOP
SLIDELL, LA 70460 US
Home: (504) 646-2225
Work: 504-649-6248
PHONE NUMBERS: 888-365-0000 ext. 1648 / 800-242-0363 EXT. 2427
888-724-3108 x5413752
504 781 8117 / 504-957-1037 / 504-847-1232 / 504-649-7751
504-781-6615 / 504-649-6248 / 504-781-6655 / 504-831-1595
504-646-2225 / 504-641-0876
FAX: 504 641 0810 / 504-456-0995 / 504-781-6615
MORE INFO: Connelly sues to keep spamming:
http://www.frc.org/legal/lf99j05.html
http://www.mediainst.org/digest/fall1999/p
Wife Florence Fox sued for Nu-Skin Pyramid Scheme:
http://www.attorneygeneral.gov/press2/mo
As long as people can make money sending spam it will continue. The financial incentive will make spammers overcome ANY technological or legal blocks we put up.
The only real solution is to follow the money to the source. Every spam is advertising something. Financially hurt the advertiser. Boycott the business. Start a boycott list of companies that use spam as a marketing method. Even if this is only mildly successful it will reduce the spam.
I'm sure all the great minds on slashdot can think of good ways to hurt these advertisers financially (hopefully in a legal manner).
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I expect to see a US Postal office 18 wheeler backing up to his house any day now.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
120 million per 12 hours...
i dont' get it man, that means, even if every human being on earth had an email address, which the clearly do not, he could email the entire planet in just a few days...
Just how much money are these guys making? According to the story linked here, the spammer who was sued by Earthlink recently sent "...more than 10 million spams over a three-month period generated a mere 36 sales - $360 in commissions for efforts."
I'm not sure how much most of you guys make, but where I'm from, $360.00 over three months doesn't sound like a get rich quick scheme. I guess some of these spammers are making big bucks though. *shrug*
--It's Pimptastic!--
The idea is simple to understand, you mean. But actually doing it? It would be easier to get the space elevator built. I'm serious. The public will not "wise-up". I'm sorry that's what you think has to happen before the problem will go away, but it's just not going to happen. I'd bet my life on it.
pbs.org has switched off their Blast Mapper page. I wanted to see how many kilotonnes it would take. (It laid various effects circles on top of a map given an address.) This just isn't as fun!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I'm in.
Suggestion: rephrase it and put it on Ask Slashdot
-Ab
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
I think that the way to handle spam is to sue the spammers. If a few thousand people took a spammer to small claims court he or she would be out of business. The maximum judgement in small claims court is $5000. The spammers simply don't have the resources to fight thousands of such lawsuits and even a few such judgements against them would open the floodgates to more such lawsuits which would be their undoing. Legistlation against spam is not the answer, direct public retribution is.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I think anytime a person or group has to fraudulantly represent themselves to do business it should not be allowed. This person is one of the many who are clogging the arteries of the internet and he should be delt with in a harsh manner.
those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. -isaac asimov
Um, in the US the law is not applicable to rich people.
Consider: George the first mining commerical shipping lanes. The sainted Ronnie selling arms to terrorists. The slap on the wrist DeLorean got for massive drug dealing. The Chappaquidick incident. Need I go on?
Once spammers get rich, they become immune to the law just like all other rich people in the USA. Only richer people can bring any harm to them.
That's their motivation, dude.
WTF kind of logic is that? Is he going to come by in a white van and sell me some speakers tomarrow?
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
It's Slidell, Louisiana, and we're talking about a spammer's family. Why not both?
Well, if he hasn't opted out of our "special offer" to exact retribution upon him, then he must want us to do this.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
That is a classic line. I'm going to promote it's usage to convey ass-backwardness in posts with your permission. ::giggles::
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
...there are still people out there who haven't blocked everything coming from @aol.com?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
- In the case of bulk snail mail, 100% of the costs (if you don't include me physically picking up the mail, looking at it, and tearing the latest "Want a 0% interest credit card that jumps to 30% later?" envelope as cost) is payed by the sender.
This is a common misconception. If you use the postal service to send letters with actual first class stamps on them, you are paying for bulk mail to be sent. Why? Because the postal service charges bulk mailers less than cost to send their junk to your mailbox. They make up for it with higher rates for first class customers.See for instance this statement from the former chief financial officer of the postal service.
That's got to be step number one, no matter what.
Without a method to send the mail in a sneaky manner, tracing it back to the source becomes a lot easier. Outlawing forged headers is almost tied with this. Set up a joint FTC/FCC task force that tracks down businesses running open/misconfigured mail servers that allow the relaying. Let's say a starting fine of $200 for servers that have relayed more than 1000 messages. $500 for 10,000+ and so on.
Administrator ignorance is the #1 reason we're getting so much of this crap in our boxes. Motivate them to educate themselves with a hit to the pocketbook, and we may start making some progress.
Anyone reading this knows there are a plethora of things to do... We just need to spread the word to our counterparts who don't.
I had a sucky sig.
Umm, how did you know it was stri3286@bellsouth.net? Most stuff like that forges the From field, and you have to trace back the Received lines.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
These are all extremely good points that really make the grandparent poster's points more or less invalid.
Yep, censorship is not a bad thing when it is carried out with the full consent and knowledge of the person receiving the information. I have Postini censor all my mail, damned useful too, means my RIM pager is actually worth something rather than giving me three screens full of spam. Postini is currently blocking about 300 spams a day for me. It does make mistakes but I go through and fish them out. I now lose less mail overall than I did before when good mail was often overlooked as junk
The censorship thing is real though. There are plenty of anti-spam crusaders who are worse than the spam senders. They abuse the trust that users have in them. One blacklist was closed down because the maintainer blacklisted his ISPs after they threatened to cut him off for not paying bills. It is not an isolated case, DCC is regularly abused in similar ways. Vernon Schryer reports posts from people he does not like on the IRTF anti-spam list as spam.
So no the spammer guy's complaint is not valid. But the problem of censorship is real. There are groups who organize campaigns to get opposing mailing lists blocked. The EFF reported that MoveOn.org's list was hit in that way. I'll bet that Rush Limbaugh has the same problem.
The basic problem is that people have got so worked up on 'stop spam at any cost' they are willing to allow their mail to be censored by people they have no knowledge of at all and no reason to trust. It can't be long before we find a blacklist being run by a spam sender, that would be a cool move, people would help you find open relays, you could blacklist your competition and whitelist yourself.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I know this doesn't really address the problem of bandwidth, but we already have advertising legal models for printed material, why not apply some of this to email?
For instance, in the case of newspaper or magazines, an advertisement must clearly be identifiable as an ad, otherwise the ad must contain a very visable "This is a Paid Advertisement".
So, I figure spam is trying very hard to be indistinguishable from regualar email or email sent from a legitamate company with which you do business. Let's just make a law that says that any email that is an advertisement must contain ADVERTISEMENT in the subject and body.
Sure, they can break this rule pretty easily, but this will allow the user and or government to identify which emails are not following the rule and find them.
This also gives the user and software developer and easy route to dispose of spam. If you don't want it, just filter for the word ADVERTISEMENT and push it to an ads folder or the trash.
Sure, there are still issues with this, but its a start.
Like puzzle games? Warehouse51 for iOS
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a simple upgrade of TCP/IP fix the problem of faked headers and open relays? Then most of this discussion and regulation would become useless and unnecessary...?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've already signed him up for every catalog in the first 6 pages of google search results for "free catalog" .. anyone wanna pick it up from here ?
"You dont under stand im a spamer and get paid 1000 per month to host reg sights
and 5000 per month to host porn so how much do you pay them? get the pic money
talks just like you go to a restrunt and spen $20.00 or I go in and spend
500.00 who will get the best service? Also uunet s aup does not say any thing
about bulk hosting just not to send spam."
(from one of his postings at http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&ic=1&selm=
He's just another lieing spammer...
Bugs Bunny was right.
First: I loathe spam. I've had a whole series of email addies rendered unusable by spam, and a couple more on the way. But something has always puzzled me....
When the RIAA goes after Napster, KaZaa, and other p2p providers, we all say "Hey, p2p is just a technology, you should really be targeting the users of the service that are breaking the rules".
However, when spam is concerned, we all say "Die! Spammer! Die!".
Why? The mass-e-marketers are just providing a service for paying customers. Some company pays Scelson and his ilk to send out all that mail. Scelson doesn't do it just for shits and giggles.
Why are we so eager to shut down the service providers (the spammers) in this case, when in the p2p case we defend them?
but seriously, YHBT. YHL.
I'm sorry you had to write all that in response to someone who could care less (or is laughing in spite of his lame self), I really am.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Was the water gun filled with baby oil?
Sadly, fraudulently representing yourself is protected speech under the First Amendment to the Constituion. The Nike case in California is the biggest test to this in a really long time.
I don't think things would be so different if corporations didn't have that right -- the actors, script writers, spammers, etc. working for corporations would still have the right to tell you lies, as individuals.
(OT TIME) What pisses me off is when the *cops* are allowed to misrepresent the truth. Like alleged sniper guy John Malvo not getting a lawyer because he asked "Do I get to see a lawyer?" and the cops said "No." Then he started singing like a bird. The judge ruled the testimony should be allowed, since Malvo didn't explicitly ASK for a lawyer -- he didn't say "Can I see a lawyer?" But it's clear from his question that his intent was to see a lawyer, and it's also quite clear that the cops knew they could play word games with him, because everyone wants this kid to fry so jurisprudence goes out the window. Hmmm I guess it does piss me off that the cops lie, but it pisses me off even more that it now has a big fat stamp of approval, at least in Virginia. What a crock -- what if someone who doesn't speak English well (Malvo perhaps) is detained and can't formulate the specific grammatically correct sentence to request a lawyer? Oh, wait, that person is probably a terrorist or illegal immigrant, nevermind.
So, I guess the overall arc of this post would be: don't come bitching about how horrible all these spammers are, they lie, hide behind secrecy etc. when that sort of behavior is exactly the same thing our legal system is doing with Malvo, and don't get me started on Ashcroft's tactics.
And, what's the fucking problem with spam in the first place. C'mon people, I have had the same HOTMAIL account for like five years, and for a LONG time my email was listed with each post on SlashDot. I still don't get that much spam, maybe five a day, and I'm not so freaking busy that I don't have the FIVE SECONDS it takes to delete them. What's that, you say? You run a mail server and the spam has got you down? Well, that's why your job is to run that mail server. If it were easy, they wouldn't have to go out and hire a specialist.
it was a troll. Can't you tell it's purposefully inflammatory? Have you even ever met a professed spammer? What was your opinion of him or her? Oh that's right, you haven't because they're slimeballs who hide or lie about what they do because they don't want to get throttled by half the people on the street.
I'm really sorry hon... you got taken.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
So hit men are not as guilty as the people who hire them? That's crazy talk.
..welcome to the internet.
Install the material on that CD and you will soon be seeing matter that is erotically arousing or sexually provocative. It'll even come straight to your email box.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
A well researched principal in social psychology is that the way someone who has been throughly discredited can gain credibility is for them to appear to be speaking against their own interest. For instance, a known world class con-artist who would never be trusted, no matter what he said, would suddenly become trusted when testifying in support of strengthening fraud laws. How do you know this spammer guy isn't getting let off from prosecution by testifying for tougher spam laws, or even getting a cash renumeration from AOL or whomever? Perhaps the spam law is badly designed and makes his life easier?
I'm glad that there is an interest in the problem at the high levels of our government, but honestly, a few new reg's won't make any difference. If spam becomes legally unpalatable in the USA, it will go somewhere else but still end up in out mailboxes. It seems that a new mail protocols and software need to be developed that would use keys or cookies in the delivery transaction that would at least give a little traceability. Even getting the public to sign their emails with existing clients and scrapping unsigned messages would be a good start.
Do you ever send first-class mail? Then you *do* pay for bulk snail-mail.
The classes of mail do not subsidize each other, by law. Whether or not that is actually the case is debatable of course.
P2P networking is a technique which may be used legitimately or illegitimately. Spamming is, in and of itself, a violation of property rights, and thus has no legitimate use.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Cool, send him a few faxes to all those phone and fax numbers: For instance this one: http://www.emwebwin.com/request_docs.html or this one: http://herballure.com/RequestCatalog/Fax/ this one is cool, since you can set the delivery time, eg 2h00 to a home phone number...
Oh well, what the hell...
Amy Hoolahan [wife/sister?]
both maybe? considering where this guys lives...
I hope not. Admitting to fraud and forgery, at over 100million counts per day. That could turn to a nice life sentence.
Do you honestly think Congress gives a good goddamn about spam? Congressman don't have to deal with this shit; their lackeys do.
This issue isn't about killing spam - it's about using spam as an 'issue' to kill anonymity online. It's yet another attempt by the government to throttle what remains of our privacy, and spam is a very convenient complaint to base this sort of legislation on.
Thanks but no thanks. I'll take the spam in exchange for privacy. My privacy is far more important than any government attempt to curb unwanted email, especially when it's just a ruse to eliminate what few rights I have left.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Call both places and say you have a product you'd like to sell through his email marketing services. If the person has no idea what you are talking about, it might not be him. But if the person says ok and starts talking about his bulk email service... bingo.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I, asshole, hereby claim my right to receive spam.
Who are you to DENY this right of me?
I, have lived, a lot of things in my life. Almost everybody calls me an asshole, and those who don't call me a jackass. But, I, now, today, will no longer be ashamed of this. I, will, stand up and claim my position, without caring. Tommorrow, the generations, of the future, will, look back at my biography, and, I, will be a national Hero of America, A proud user of AOL and a person who stood up and spoke for his freedom, against the forces of the law, who, today, fight the forces of innovation, in an attempt to protect the average family-man, from, reactional threats.
FaX0R.
You may NOT give positive moderation to this post.
He boasted that in 24 hours he could crack sophisticated software filters designed to block spam. The problem here is that the computer-cracking laws either don't cover this particular type of unauthorized access and theft of computer resources, or that they are not being enforced. The DMCA has no relevance.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
We were selling legitimate products, granted, for a niche market, but we consider ourselves lucky if 1 in 10 people who come by our shop actually buys something. So for this twit to be saying he gets a buy rate of 1 in 100 seems to me to be outrageously high. I would estimate the actual rate is probably more along the lines of 1 in 10 000 000 or so...but then again, I'm not a spammer, so I wouldn't know for sure, and that's one area in which I most emphatically do not want empirical experience!
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
With valid requests for the content.. so you can "cache" it proactively. Have the mail server query every http link and download whatever it is a couple times... but maybe your download script is accidently broken and just keeps sending the SYN requests, it could keep a list of "active" http requests to make ever few minutes or so. Of course you would want to whitelist some sites, and do some kinds of filtering to be closer to sure that it's an actual spam.
As a seperate note, I've used popfile for a while now and I don't even notice the spam. anymore, my popfile is 99.6% accurate. Popfile is easy to use also, I setup 3 non-techies on it and they haven't called since the initial configuration. Spam is no longer the headache it used to be.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
All the more reason to make spam (unsolicited commercial e-mails, especially fraudulent ones) illegal. Then you don't have to futz around with filters trying to avoid the false positives.
As far as free speech is concerned, yes you have a right to say what you like, but I have the right to not have to listen. If I am sitting in my house, minding my own business, you don't get to come in and start shouting in my face about enlarging my penis, all the hot hrony houswives you of whom you have pictures, or the great deals you can offer to me on herbal viagra. Similarly, I shouldn't have to deal with that crap in my mailbox. If you don't want to make spam illegal, thats fine. Just make it illegal to circumvent filters. Then, if someone spams you, it's either because A)you opened the door and invited them in, or B)you had the door locked and the broke in.
my pet machine
As I read this, the post was modded only 4, which is crimminal. It is best thing I have read in long time. Bump please. I guess this means less seti at home and more spamkill at home? -Iowa
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
AOL themselves spammed me offering to sell their subscriber list to me. I was dumnfounded to say the least. This happened years ago, before spam was a 'major' problem.
NR
I've got a great DDoS technique for the spammers:
It's called me, a baseball bat, and his fingers.
I'm sure after a good introduction that the spammer in question would be unable to provide service for awhile.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Sometimes it's more like you writing someone a letter and saying it's from me. I don't know how many spams I get with my name in the Sender address. That is and should be illegal.
Hehe, distributed denial of fingers?
Its inspectors carry guns, can put you in jail, and confiscate your property. Untiring Package Smashers can't do any of that.
It's a govt agency, just like the FBI.
Could that be prosecuted under the laws regarding identity theft? Because essentially, that's what it is.
(I've had it happen to me too, and worse, when some spammer had a virus, so I got these huge fucking bounces.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I don't really have anything to say about this story, but I could use some slashdot effect right now. So uh.. sorry for the spam.
Click on the link - you know you want to.
http://op.ath.cx/~tma/rtprof-usage/
You've gone too far - the link is above.
If you fill out the questionnaire I'm very grateful, thanks.
Orson Swindle, one of two Federal Trade Commission members to testify...
Kazaa, Napster, Gnutella, etc. aren't stealing *my* music.
Spam is stealing my bandwidth, disc space, and time.
0 1 - just my two bits
I "love" this quote from this article:
Crashing a data center by flooding it with traffic is certainly a form of trespassing and tampering with private property, [lawyer David Kramer] says.
What about spammers? Wouldn't that definition also apply to their flooding email boxes and servers with their crap?
Besides that, I can list several other things they are doing that is equal to that. For example they trespass and tamper with private property when they rape proxies, the same when they hack PCs and servers to relay their crap, their intent to trespass onto our property by trying to get around spam filters, etc.
If this is true, the spammers better realize that this applies to them as well.
If more people did that it would raise their cost of spamming significantly due to the time wasted.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
>Just look at the nonsense that President Bush has to put up with
You mean himself and his stupid descisions?
BTW: Mr. American, how many WMDs did Bush find in Iraq this year? How many were used against Mr. Bush's country?
Oh, yeah, that's right -- just as many as Bush had reasons to beat up on Iraq.
>I know that this so-called "junk mail" upsets many people, but let's be honest -- if someone told you that you could become a millionaire just by spending a couple hours each day sending emails, you'd probably be the first to sign up.
I know this so called "murdering" upsets many people, but let's be honest -- if someone told you that you could become a millionaire just by joining the mob, you'd probably be the first to sign up.
>I would rather trust a spammer than a lazy computer programmer to get a job done, that's for sure. It's not about being nice, it's about being a hard worker. Stupid isn't forever, but lazy is.
MMMhmmm. Well, that's your choice. You might want to know that the vast majority of spammers have rotted in jail more than once. Then again, at least it was an AMERICAN jail, right?
One acronym:
DTMF
Holy *%&@.
I just realized something. (Yes, I'm probably a bit behind, and just mod me redundant if this has been discussed before.)
The Super-DMCA that's been going around basically makes it a crime to attempt to hide the destination or originating point of any communication with the intent to defraud a communications provider.
This Super-DMCA has been passed a lot of places. Doesn't it pretty much already make forging headers for sending spam illegal?
What a grand idea! Hold the sellers responsible. In fact, make the penalties really large, but drop them completely in return for identifying the spammer *and* accepting a restraining order preventing them from using or contracting to use bulk email in the future.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
sounds like... terrorism!
Do I understand you correctly that only confirmed spammers' websites would be targetted, in order to avoid bringing down innocent victim sites added to the spam as decoys (like "savethetrees", various government or anti-spam sites)?
If so, I doubt a single trusted source would be able to keep track of all the legit targets needed for this to be efficient. Listing a few hundred websites is not a problem, but verifying them as belonging to spammers may be, especially if you intend to testify before an audience of 100,000 users. Perhaps a hierarchy of delegated trust would do the trick.
You don't want the target list to become the most requested item on the Internet, so perhaps it would be a good idea to distribute that thing as well.
And, I don't think you should go to the trouble of identifying individual URLs on each server. Just resolve the server name to an IP address, verify it as a legit target, and connect to port 80 regardless of what the initial URL says; it will most likely refer to the same physical host. Download their index (or error) page, perhaps with a suitable hint about the spammer's whereabouts in the (misspelled) Referer: field.
By all means, do bug them, but bug them gently, please.
Personally, I'd declare their web servers off-limits for my local proxy cache, in order not to violate their copyright by viewing the same copy twice over a period of several seconds...
More people fell for religion, so 3% is pretty bad for spammed products.
The amount of pump&dump stock spam I get is on the rise. How do you track that back to the source?
To make things somewhat more interesting, take the target IP address, convert it to an unsigned 32-bit integer modulo 3,600, turn the result into minutes and seconds past the hour into the future, and set your client to do the retrieval at that particular moment rather than when you received the spam.
In that way, similar requests for pages from different servers should be fairly evenly distributed over time at the client side, and your ISP should be happy.
oh baby that "you've got Mail" voice is just so sexy I can't help myself!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Why are we discussing stupid, inane crap like micropayments that would have a negative impact on ALL OF US, when all we really need is a simple X-This-Is-Spam header being required by law for all UNSOLICITED BULK/COMMERCIAL EMAIL (speaking of wool, how the hell are they confusing the definition of spam so severely? What's wrong with UNSOLICITED BULK/COMMERCIAL EMAIL?!?!).
DUH.
If the law were written such that Americans involved in perpetrating violations of that law were subject to arrest, we wouldn't have to worry about companies setting up off-shore spamhouses so much either, remember that even though a large amount of spam originates overseas, the ones paying for it and the ones causing it to be sent (the king spammers themselves, not the hacked or rented relay boxes) are still in the US and well within the reach of the FBI.
Either Congress has the wool pulled firmly over its eyes, or Congress is still in bed with the spammers.
To read about this guy's testimony, you would think there are millions of folks out there who want spam. He tries to paint "legitimate" spammers as good, decent folks who have to resort to underhanded tactics to circumvent the evil ISPs who block their spam messages.
Now, personally there are a few things that I'd want to receive that could be considered spam. There are some companies I go to where I want to hear about the latest deals (the weekend specials from the airline, for example). Sometimes these emails have an advertisement attached to it, which is fine. But the difference between what these companies do and what this scumbag testifying before congress does is I actually want to receive their bulk email. I had to go out of my way to be put on their mailing list, and in that process it was made quite clear that I would receive the bulk mailings.
Of course, the emails I want to get aren't really unsolicited. The impression I get is spammers like this guy don't seem to see any difference. A line hidden in an AUP that says when you sign up for a service you will receive "valuable offers from partners" is not the same as going to a specific webpage and asking to be placed on a mailing list.
So the question remains: Is there anyone who wants to receive coupons for $.40 off Lysol, offers to refinance their mortgage, discounted prescription drugs etc. on a regular basis? Does anyone think this is a valuable service? Would anyone be angry at their email provider for blocking those types of messages before they reach their inbox?
To read about this guy, there are millions who do. Personal experience points to something altogether different.
The Internet is generally stupid
Quoth the spammer: "But carriers should be held accountable when they submit to anti-spam groups. Terminating services to companies' such as my own without any legal reason to do so is not the democracy that we should all be living."
My biggest problem with this statement is there is a legal reason to terminate service. Spamming is almost always forbidden in the terms of service that are agreed upon when a new account is opened. The inviolability of a contract is a major foundation of our system of government.
and the poster says: 1) This is not a democracy. We're a democratic republic. There's a big difference.
Yeah, we've all heard that a zillion times, but you should know that the modern meaning of "Democracy" usually means "Democratic republic". Yes, to the federalists "Democracy" meant "Direct democracy" which they equated with "mob rule" and lawlessness, just like the word "people" in "We the people" meant rich, white, lawyers. Well, times have changed. Lecturing folks about the difference between democracies and republics usually just makes you look like a wing nut.
ABUSERS: Ronald R. Scelson
[Birthdate: 12-11-71 or 72, New Orleans, LA, married]
avsrscelson@aol.com / cajunspam@aol.com / avsrscelson2000@yahoo.com / dff@yahoo.com
Amy Hoolahan [wife/sister?]
43 CYPRESS MEADOWS LOOP
dude! Gross! He married his sister!
Have we seen a SINGLE article about a spammer here on Slashdot, EVER, where the spammer did not claim that they don't send pornography spam? Where the hell do I get it all from then? Santa?
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Not a monopoly, can you imagine if people were ALLOWED to put stuff in your mailbox? you'd have seventy gradeschool kids a week walking down your street putting ads from every local business person in the city in your box, not to mention the weird stuff.
Besides, why use mail at all anymore? I don't think I've bought a stamp, or mailed a letter in two or three years. Email, phone, Bill pay, phone pay, ups, The only thing I use my mailbox for is recieving magazines, and the few bills that won't send me an email or allow me to autopay them.
Shawn
..I send out spam for your company maliciously? I send out forged-header spam advertising the product of a company I hate, causing that poor company millions in fines.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
> an eighth-grade dropout and self-taught
> computer programmer from Louisiana, who claims
> that he sends between 120 million and 180
> million e-mails every 12 hours, that he can
> break sophisticated software filters 24 hours
> after they are deployed, and that he has no
> choice but to resort to forging the sender
> information in his bulk e-mail so he can be
> anonymous and maintain his connection to the
> Internet.
And here you guys all thought Neo was one of the good guys.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Dear Sapmmer,
I onw and control my own companys' emnail servers..you will always be banned and will be sued for computer intrusion if Have my way..deal with M*th*r F**K*r
Don't Tread on OpenSource
We use exim for our 14,000 users so if you forge your return address info, my system automatically rejects your mail since your mail MX dont match. Also I silently blackhole my spam as apposed to rejecting it so you never know what my filters are rejecting, so spam on Ronnie.
This guy lives only 30 minutes away from me! I work 10 minutes away from his house! I have to meet him
Well, let's all keep an eye on the local rag down in slidell and see when the mail starts to pile up. Their site is at...
http://www.slidellsentry.com/
In the case of spamming I've started to wonder about open relay blocking. Most sites that offer information about open relays to facilitate blocking (such as ordb.org) do not make the contents of their open relay lists public. And that made perfect sense to me until yesterday when (while looking into several spam filtering methods) I got curious and started looking for a list of open relays. I found at least one such - but it was clearly aimed at the spammers as it had incomplete information and a way to purchase a subscription.
So, by making open relay lists private and secret, we're actually supporting the spam industry (not necessarily the spammers directly, but the folks who sell them stuff).
Maybe its time to think about releasing the lists. This could have several interesting effects (positive :) , neutral :| and negative :( ) :
Maybe it wouldn't work, but the stuff written about the spam proposal before congress is seriously scary - it would essentially legitimize whole classes of spam and make it much harder to turn off such "legitimate" spam.
Yeah, but to go after the hitmen and not go after the people who hire them is even crazier. In many palces, the penalty for hiring someone for a murder is the same as committing a murder for hire. The same should be true for spammers' clients - punish (fine, sue, imprison) people who hire spammers as well as the spammers themselves. Otherwise, you'll always have spammers.
Significant differences separate spam from bulk mail, making them opposites, not just non-equals. In short, bulk mail is a negotiated part of a public good, spam is an unnegotiated public bad that interferes with (or can ruin) a public good. Differences include:
With bulk mail every step of the process involves trade and negotiations. This includes the last step- you receiving mail- because bulk mail subsidizes first class mail. Granted, this last step was negotiated as a group (all people in the US using the US postal service).
Spammers don't negotiate and don't trade with the people affected by their actions- one doesn't hear of them sitting down to say "I'm going to use this stolen credit card to buy an account for $30 and then send out 5,000,000 spams that'll cost you 3 days of sysadmin time and a crashed hard drive. Deal?" or "I'm going to use your return address so that your email box fills every 2 hours with bounces, and you lose important emails from a prospective employer, in return for me not getting antispam complaints. Deal?"
Bulk mail is used by the USPS to have smoothed out, predictable costs and income- again, subsidizing first class mail. From the USPS's point of view, everything is known and predictable *within the system* with standardized costs i.e. "this week in this area we'll be paid $.15 per mail for an average of 200,000 deliveries of ads. If someone wants to send 2x the ads they'll pay 2x the old total. We'll also be paid $.37 for about 20,000 first class mailings. Each postal worker will carry about 20 lbs of mail, except at holidays where it is 30 lbs..." Same from the user's p.o.v. "6 days a week a postal worker'll come by the mailbox. It'll take about 4 days for a letter to arrive, 7 during holidays, and about 1/100,000 will go astray (or whatever the error rate is).
Because spam isn't negotiated and because of the fake return addresses, etc, you have unpredictable and unknown costs, i.e. "every day I'll send an average of 5 mails, receive 10 mails from non-strangers (including annoying ones, but I voluntarily gave my cousin or Microsoft my address), and at random times get horrible pictures, be flooded by bounces or have my ISP crash or be blacklisted." Those costs are externalities- costs (or benefits) that accrue to entities outside of the negotiation process.
I've seen arguments that say that because of peering agreements, ISPs or users should think of a flood of spam bouces the way an 'All-You-Can-Eat' restaurant thinks of Sumo wrestlers: an expensive but expected cost. No, because the wrestler still fits on the bell curve the restaurant uses to predict eating habits, and what the wrestler does is legal. No human can fill their stomach with more than about a gallon of food, and the contract with the restaurant is that it is "All YOU can eat HERE", you don't get to feed two people on one ticket or bring food home using rubber pockets. Spammers cheat- its like one person paying and letting 10 people sneak in the back door. And they break the contract- those peering agreements / contracts usually say no spamming.
spammers cause damage far in excess of the money they put into the system. Its like the flu, a computer virus, forest fire or a traffic accident- the money paid into recovering from it is nowhere near the total damage it caused- you get a net loss to society because it happened. Spam also causes opportunity costs- all that time and money spent recovering from spam could have been spent in more productive ways. Money spent merely to restore you to where you were before is money wasted compared to being able to invest in the future.
Not that there's anything erotically arousing or sexually provocative on the internet...
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
One could easily make the case that, given the content of much of the net, an offer for net access is provocative to you.
The USPS will take your word for it, if you claim that the ad bothers you.
took the first one out of my bulk-mail bos at yahoo and the site was up www2.pulsetv.com/st/prodinfo.asp?number=1399,l se Direct Inc., 19001 S. Old LaGrange, Mokena, IL 60448, US
Pu
Domain Name: PULSETV.COM
Administrative Contact
Domain register: register@pennmedia.com
PennMedia, 19001 S. Old LaGrange, Mokena, IL 60448 US
Phone 708-478-4500
Fax
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
every year they send me an obscine bill.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
The executive summary:
LOL...funniest comment I've read all week!
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
This is bullshit. What happens with any email, including spam, is that the sender's mail server communicates with the receiver's mail server. The sender says, I have some email for you. Would you like it? The receiver says, yes, please give it to me.
There's no way you can construe this as theft of service. You, or your email server, agreed to receive the email! How can you complain when you intentionally facilitated the transaction!
I might as easily argue that the sender's resources were stolen by you, if you're not going to read the email. It is a fully symmetric transaction and both sides agreed to complete it. If one side is going to suffer regrets afterwards, they should have thought of that before agreeing to go through with the deal.
Spam is a problem, but the rhetoric being floated here is totally inappropriate. You can't be promiscuous without expecting to pick up a few unwelcome partners, and the same goes for your mail server.
One way to address the spam issue is to open the .GOV TLD to every day people. Let us all get a .gov e-mail address and then we'll either not get spam, or the spammers will stop filtering .gov from their databases and clueless politicians and government people will begin to get an idea of how counterproductive not prosecuting these spammers can be.
Anything you might ever need to say about anything has already been said better by Penny Arcade.
First, you buy a significant parcel of shares in FsckedCorp, a small company on its last legs. Then you convince enough suckers that this stock is going to go up and so they should buy in. One way to reach suckers is of course spam. To further convince the suckers that this stock is on the way up, you trade FsckedCorp with your friends back and forth so that the quoted price indeed goes up. Then, you sell all the stock over the market to the suckers and you laugh all the way to the bank as the stock then drops like a rock.
Whilst it might be harder to track this spam back to the source, it can be done, and it's also clearly a crime under existing laws.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Free Brochure
Free Information Pack
Free Travel Guide
Free Video Tape
Please send to:
rscelson@aol.com
Ronald R Scelson
1711 W Hall Ave
Slidell, LA 70460
All joking aside, this has to be the best solution to span I have ever heard. I truly hope someone starts an open source project on this one. (I would do it myself, but I am not a good enough programmer)
Damn.... now I know who kept telling me to enlarge my penis!
Maybe... but that wouldn't stop you from going to jail for not paying your taxes.
If we had elections on april 16th , I think we would elect a better class of ruler.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Oh, he has to forge headers. If I wanted kill this guy by hitting them with my car, I would have to drive off or I might get arrested. So driving off after running over someone should be legal.
Hrm, now that I think about it, I would kind of like to run over this guy.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
If I'm living in the Caribbean, I have to put up with car insurance offers and other geo-specific SpamSlop because the U.S. may say "Spamming within certain conditions is cool"?
Seems like every country needs SPAM laws for the U.S. to realize that it's an INTERNATIONAL problem. And it originates from one main country.
I have an idea. Have Oregon and other states make SPAM 'improper use of a computer' so it becomes a terrorism issue. Spamming is probably more of a terrorist act than some of the things on the list.
62.231.65.193 www.rx-online-store.com GroupRX img.mediaplex.com rmads.msn.com global.msads.net ads.msn.com bannerfarm.ace.advertising.com servedby.advertising.com
210.15.51.101 www.wuyi-shop.com m2.doubleclick.net ads.peel.com ad.doubleclick.net us.a1.yimg.com www.popupad.net cserver.mii.instacontent.net webpdp.gator.com media.fastclick.net spd.atdmt.com
just for those of you out there, i'd like to say that spam can be very useful.
i recently had my penis enlarged, and let me tell you, it's awesome. not long after, i helped out this guy from nigeria and he gave me 10 million dollars for it!! since then, i've been able to refinance my home, which i sit inside of downloading the most awesome porn, which can be printed on my quality inkjet printers, bought at an excellent discount. and to top it off, i can feel confortable that my family is secure because i bought some first rate life insurance.
oh and did i mention that it helped me lose 50 pounds ?
According to their anti-spam page, you can report spammers that offer Symantec products to spamwatch@symantec.com.
You mods are a bunch of heartless bastards!
Then perhaps that part of the cost is equal and not discounted but the part where they don't have to SORT the silly stuff is where the discount occurs?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I buy a cheap crappy penny stock - lots of it. I then sned out SPAM touting this stock as being the best thing since sliced bread and wait for all of the ignorant people who believe me to buy a ton of the stock and raise the price significantly. when I feel the price is as high as it can go, and before everyone figures out the company is trash, I sell my stock at a large profit. People figure out the mailing was crap when whatever spectacular event I told them would occur doesn't happen and the price drops or crashes. The SPAMmer makes money, the people duped likely lose money.
That's pump and dump - pump up a stock and dump it before anyone else figures out what's going on. Highly illegal and pursued by the regulatory folks when it's noticed but if you stay under their radar you're good to go....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
You argue that it's a tiny fraction - it's NOT. ISPs are having to upgrade servers and 'net connections due to the extreme volume of SPAM that travels their networks. SPAMmers are ATTACKING network connected mail servers attempting to force mail through and to steal mail addresses. This has occured to MY server countless times and it was NOT an Open Relay. Hell one twit crashed the box with his crap and his ISP smply refused to believe a dial-up connection could cause so much trouble - it can! It is so bad I no longer use MY SERVER for anything but RECEIVING mail, it has it's sending ability disabled. Anyone who pays for a 'net conection is PAYING for this problem. When a large percentage of overall traffic is nothing but UNWANTED SPAM then we ALL pay for it. When a mail server is so deluged with SPAM that it crashes and we cannot get our business corespondence then we PAY for that problem!
The company I work for has been forced to use a SPAM filter due to the EXTREME amount of SPAM that recently began flooding our servers. Pornographic SPAM in a work environment is NOT cool nor is having to upgrade infrastructure to store or filter the garbage. Is it okay that a large company is forced to upgrade it's 'net connection because the SPAM coming INTO it's servers is so great? Still think it's free?! We filter but that's only AFTER it has absorbed a significant percentage of our bandwidth and so we must upgrade in order to continue to function. Do you think our customers don't absorb that cost? YOU do and so does everyone else, all businesses are getting hit to a larger or lesser degree. It costs.
You truly don't understand the problem and have a very self centered view as to what's going on. It might have been okay when there was only a few SPAM messages being sent but when 9 out of 10 messages are SPAM then there's a SERIOUS problem. FILTERING is NOT a solution - silly butterfly be damned! Y
ou cite TV - how would you feel if there were 55minutes of advertising for every one hour show? THAT is where we're at right now - get a clue!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org