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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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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
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,
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!"
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!
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.
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!
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.
Might as well just link to where all of the information is.
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 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?!?!"
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.
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!
Junk Mail != Spam.
If those CDs were shipped to you postage due, then you can call it spam.
Not early enough.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
(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.)
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.
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!
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.
Junk Mail != Spam
Both consume limited storage space. Junk mail can fill up your postal mailbox and you'll then get a note, "You can pick up the rest of your mail at the post office." How fun. Spam fills up your email inbox until the sender of the next message gets "MORTAR_COMBAT!@slashdot.org's email is full".
Both abuse a common carrier system, paid for at least partially by the recipients of the message. Junk mail is usually paid for using bulk pricing systems, subsidized by the rest of the postal audience. Oh yeah, and the USPS is a government program. Spam is paid for by the ISPs, who in turn charge their customers.
If you think that receiving a 100-page glossy magazine from Abercrombie and Fitch doesn't cost you anything you are flatly wrong. It doesn't have to come postage due. When your kids spend your money at Abercrombie and Fitch, you've just funded the next round of that glossy magazine's arrival.
MORTAR COMBAT!
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Junk mail is usually paid for using bulk pricing systems, subsidized by the rest of the postal audience.
I'm afraid you have it backwards. Bulk mail, even at its reduced rate, is what allows you to send a letter at 39 cents. Bulk mail is presorted so as to make processing time for the post office almost nothing. Your letter with sloppily written address actually takes time to be read and sorted.
ALso, the USPS is a government sponsored monopoly but it doesn't receive any tax payer dollars. It is self funding.
Finally, large glossy catalogs are very expensive for companies and they are not typically sent to people who haven't shopped in the store before or requested the catalog specifically. They therefore are not in the same category as snail spam.
I'm in.
Suggestion: rephrase it and put it on Ask Slashdot
-Ab
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
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
- 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.
I refer you to rule 14a-8 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. There are (at least) 2 reasons why your proposal would be excluded (see question 9).
Reason 1 - "(5) Relevance: If the proposal relates to operations which account for less than 5 percent of the company's total assets at the end of its most recent fiscal year, and for less than 5 percent of its net earnings and gross sales for its most recent fiscal year, and is not otherwise significantly related to the company's business;"
Remember that AOL is a very small part of AOL TW and the cost of the CD's would be way less than 5%.
Reason 2 - "(7) Management functions: If the proposal deals with a matter relating to the company's ordinary business operations;"
I think deciding on advertising methods falls under the "ordinary business operations."
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 ?
Ummm, USPS is NOT a private entity, it is still owned by the government (although it runs pretty independently). There's been talk of spinning it off as a private corporation, but it hasn't happened.
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.
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.
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?
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
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!
..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
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.
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.
every year they send me an obscine bill.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
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.