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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
8th grade dropout? How early can you drop?
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.
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!
Someone here could do it with the same logic the RIAA uses for their financial analysis, and show that had AOL not sold out, they would own the entire world. Since customer loss is clearly purely due to spam, AOL would then sue the spammers for $97 Billion. Then AOL would be allowed to attack any spammer's computer and delete or alter anything that has the same name as an e-mail client....
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.
Actually, this is a Bad idea, this is why we have laws against people posting addresses for doctors at abortion clinics.
While I hate spam, I think Ronald Scelson is on the right track. He wants to send spam with correct headers, make all spam use [ADV] and let the user filter spam. Seems a win/win solution. No need for black lists, just create a little client side filter [ADV*] -> Trash. Then the people who want discounts on software, or whatever can be part of the 1-2% that actually buy from spam.
Of course, why Ronald Scelson isn't using [ADV] type tags already is a slap in the face. Spamers should team up and start everything they can to do things legit, before we start legislating them into the history books.
Also on opt-out, You don't even need opt-out if you have [ADV] tags. Thou nice to have opt-out, the power to filter correctly is more important (imho)...
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. - Friedrich Nietzsche
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!
To go wildly offtopic...
Postage stamps were first introduced in Britain, in 1840. As you say, before then it was the recipient who paid for the mail, not the sender.
Now in those days that was sensible, since there was no mail system as such anyway. Cash on delivery was the only way you could be fairly sure that the messenger would actually deliver your letter -- since if he didn't, he wouldn't get paid.
Problem was, people cheated the system. Early hackers, shall we call them, figured out that they didn't need to have their letters actually delivered & paid for to communicate. For instance, if someone wanted the answer to a simple yes-no question (remember, all long-distance communication was by letter then, so this happened a lot), they could set up a code for the response to be communicated by the colour of the envelope. So: messenger arrives with a letter -- but the recipient, having seen the colour of the envelope, says he doesn't want it and refuses to pay.
Solution: set up a national postal system that people trust, so they're willing to prepay for delivery.
Of course, 150 years later and US phone companies make the same mistake with cellphones. Charge people to receive calls + caller id -> don't answer, just call back on a land line.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
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...
The article claims he sends 120 to 180 million emails every 12 hours, so that's up to 360 million emails per day. At that rate, it takes approximately 18 days to email every man, woman, and child on the planet....
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
Spam is a direct consequence of the fact that the email system was designed without taking this possibility into account.
The only way to stop spam is going to be junking some major portion of the email infrastructure. Every antispam measure yet proposed does this.
Either the spam problem continues, or you espouse getting rid of some part of the traditions by which email and the Internet have operated since the early days.
"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.
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.
- 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.
ALso, the USPS is a government sponsored monopoly but it doesn't receive any tax payer dollars. It is self funding.
Not only that, but it's even older than the government. The post office was concieved under the Articles of Confederation, before the current government under the Constitution. And not only did it pay for itself, but it was once the primary source of revenue to fund the government.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
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
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 ?
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?
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
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?
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!
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.