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.

Comments

Re:Why do people do this?

[CausticWindow]

It's the american dream, baby. Get rich fast, don't give a shit about anybody or anything else.

That censorship thing.

[Zeinfeld]

Well, it is. I hereby formally reserve the right to censor my own email. Anybody who violates that right had better not get too close to me, or I'll nail his hide to a fence.

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.