Slashdot Mirror
Telstra Denies Selling BigPond Customers' Data
Red Wolf writes "The Age reports that allegations that Telstra sells email addresses of BigPond customers have been denied by the telco. Melbourne-based IT worker Mark Edwards had doubts in this direction when he began receiving unusually large amounts of spam at his bigpond email address. Edwards grew suspicious because some of the spam being issued to him was also addressed only to a number of users within the bigpond.com domain, indicating that the unsolicited mass emailings were being sent to lists of BigPond users."
Hello, I get these all the time on accounts with my first name.
I sure as heck bought a few. I've got some Jones, some Smith, you name it. It's like having a friggin phone book, but it costs a lot more.
I'm with testra, and have had nothing but problems. Their Privacy policy allows selling your email address to advertisers. They've also got this insane capping system, that's stopped the rollout of broadband in AU.
Read more in Whirlpool. They've got the facts.
I'm not Seth.
to create an email DB by trawling for NDRs and then only sending to some at a time
I remember reading recently that Bigpond was gonna be blacklisted for allowing spammers on their service.
I regularly get spam addressed to my address along with other users at the same domain. But I doubt my university sells addresses. It's probably just what some spam software does, since spam assassin can be set up to assign a higher score to messages where your address isn't in the To or Cc fields.
Sheesh, what's with jumping to conclusions? Like assuming if your new hotmail a/c gets spam, then MS must have immediately sold it to spammers who immediately spammed it....
Telstra have a history of standover tactics (see Here, for instance).
I really hope they get busted under our new privacy laws. I have a telstra email address that I've never used that gets spammed constantly. If telstra didn't sell my details, then something very fishy is going on.
I'm not Seth.
At times I get spam that the To: header contains a list of users all on my ISP in alphabetical order. All it means is that the spammer has a sorted list and spits out the spam to groups of addresses at once. The ISP doesn't have any thing to do with it in this case.
ln -s
They got hacked and don't want to admit it. Instead they play dumb when their users are getting spammed.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
Just because the company doesn't sell the list doesn't mean that no-one within the company does (or someone that used to work there). I know of a few people that have taken lists of thousands of email addresses from their work on their last day, just in case they wanted to sell it.
On top of that, I know I've been offered cash more than once to get a list of the addresses in our database. If you were working in a call centre, in a country that you're just visiting, knowing that you'll only be there for a month or two, and knowing you'll never go back, wouldn't it just be too tempting to nap that list for future reference?
I'd like to know some specifics about the alleged selling of the e-mail addresses. Telstra says this:
"The most common practice is to submit a test mail list to an ISP containing thousands of randomly generated user names. Most mail servers would qualify the names and attempt to deliver a blank message to those that have been generated/guessed correctly."
I'm wondering how random some of the addresses were. Were they being sent to asmith@telstra bsmith@telstra, etc.? If so, then Telstra's reasoning makes sense. But if addresses like chalk54923@telstra are on the spam list, then I'd say that Telstra is full of it.
Lets just say I'm not surprised. Telstra are involved in every other unethical practice in the book, so why not flogging off lists of subscriber email addresses too?
Just say "no" to Telstra.
Must have been the piggy spam graphic. Could be the beer as well.
It must have happened like that! I mean no spammer could be smart enough to take a generic name like john and the domain name of Australia's largest ISP and make an email address out of it.
john@bigpond.com
That's way too difficult, Telstra MUST have sold that email address.
I have read the telcos privacy (a few months back) statement and it makes ti clear they can give out any information they want about you to anyone they want. I think they called it partners and business associates.
I think thatâ(TM)s plain enough... don't you!
Steel
There are none as blind as those who will not see.. (unknown)
Edwards grew suspicious because some of the spam being issued to him was also addressed only to a number of users within the bigpond.com domain, indicating that the unsolicited mass emailings were being sent to lists of BigPond users.
Why give them the benefit of the doubt and consider that this was simply the work of some relatively intelligent spamming software, designed to maximize its connection to bigpond's SMTP server (by sending the body of the message once with a large list of bigpond address) when you can accuse the cruel corporate ISP of selling customer data?
Now why these spams included target addresses in the headers of the e-mail (something SMTP absolutely doesn't require) is up for debate, but I think we're jumping to conclusions here...
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
There are no email lists being sold! There is no spam in the mailboxes of bigpond accounts! Do not believe the infidels! The glorious Telstra corporation will triumph!
"We didn't sell it, we bartered it!"
OLPC Australia
This happens all of the time -- it's called a spam dictionary attack, as the article attempts to explain. Spammers simply use every possible username in the world and append @yourdomain.com hoping to nail every user with their offers of bigger appendages.
The part in this article about spammers testing for the validity of a dictionary-generated email addresses is a load of crap. They could care less if the address is valid or not. They simply let the bounce message go out into never never land.
I doubt Telstra sold any email addresses. Dealing with spam attacks isn't worth the meager revenue that would be derived from selling addresses.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
1. Charge extra with low monthly caps and high per megabyte charges
2. Sell off user list, resulting in increased bandwidth consumed by all customers
3. Profit!
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Everyone in Australia has been Telstrated in some way shape or form. No one should find this sort of thing surprising.
The only way to find out for sure if an ISP sells subscriber addresses is to make a long, hard to guess address (such as jon4859493@bigpond.com) and give it to no one, just let it sit there. If you receive spam, it's a pretty good indication that your ISP is being rather loose with your contact info.
At our school, we don't earn a degree when we graduate—we earn pi/180 radians
This form of spamming is nothing new. Any sysadmin worth his salt should know it. It's Dictionary spamming. For example MOST of my spam comes to my ISP's OLD address, which forwards to the new one.
So blah@oldname.net goes to blah@newname.net. The spams I get routinely have CC's to a TON of other likely usernames on the service. To test this theory, I now have that account forwarding to Yahoo, and created a new, similar one, simply subtituting zeroes for the letter "O", and whereas I used to get 40 or so spam a day, I now get 1 or 2 a week, if that.
My theory is that there's a harvest trawling the net for usernames to try at various ISP's, and then spammer wakes up and goes "Okay, today I fire spam at Telstra.com" or whatever and VOILA! A whole ton of spam aimed ONLY at that ISP, and only at a particular subgroup of names. (The ones I get, because my login begins with D, are ALL names with a D at the start.)
Not saying it's NOT the ISP, but honestly, it makes no sense to sell the email address and then have to deal with the customer complaints. Bad business. (Of course, the Internet business model is built on such boneheaded techniques:))
Maybe Mr Edwards pissed off a support guy there, who kindly submitted his email address to several "opt-out" and assorted email collection^H^H^H^H^H^H porn sites.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
it sure seems likely, since he jumps to conclusions so readily:
Edwards grew suspicious because some of the spam being issued to him was also addressed only to a number of users within the bigpond.com domain, indicating that the unsolicited mass emailings were being sent to lists of BigPond users.
i have email accounts several places where i know the admin does not sell email lists. i also have my own mail systems, and i do not sell my lists of email users either. i constantly get a ton of email addressed to lists of users, only from those domains.
i'd be more likely to believe that spammers are using smarter and smarter tools.
Maybe you can offer to sell them a filter.
Oh, i see you have already done that. twice.
make that three , no four times
Umm, what's this one about penises say.
Why would I want to shrink my penis?
at both of my (different) ISPs email addresses. The spam turns up with only those ISPs customers addresses in the CC, usually several dozen at the same time.
I know the ISPs dont sell my addresses, as I have friends at both who have confirmed that they do not sell them, and I trust these people. As far as Im concerned, its just spammers with a list which has been sorted into ISPs and they are targetting each ISP at a time, maybe with different offers or something.
I dont like Telstra as much as the next guy ... but it could have been anyone with a simple bot to harvest Telstra Bigpond email addresses and then spamming. Maybe they have a grievance against the company (most people do) which is why its users were targeted .. or maybe it was because Bigpond users are traditionally the stupidest (no knowledge on broadband, computers, security etc) that they were targeted ... and perhaps spam mailers targeted Bigpond users because they obviously will buy anything no matter how reprehensible the product/pricing and treatment of customers.
Telstra is the national carrier and does most connectivity esp overseas and so has most of the Australian ip numbers allocated to it. You gota figure if Australia is the source of a problem it will be a telstra problem.
I recently got a spam email with a huge list of emails in the To: field. Then shortly after I got an email from one of the other spammees, to EVERYONE on the list, telling us the previous email was spam and how irresponsible it was of them to have all the emails on full display.
I thought to myself, what a knobjockey.
Hmmm.
Spammers are now sorting their addresses alphabetically and by domain.
AS some one who works at an ISP, I can vouch for telstra in this case.. but not usually. I despise them like many others.
But as many peple have already commented, spam comes grouped like this nowadays, and its not because the ISP is selling the address, its because they are leaving it on the net somewhere.
To prove this, we setup a dummy account on our system.. and left it there for months. In all that time it has not recieved 1 email.. spam or otherwise. This proves our system was not compromised, and that if you dont get your address out there, it wont get spam.
While users email addresses sometimes do not show up in a google search.. many people dont realise that even joke forwarding is being raped for addresses.
Deography Photoblog
Edwards grew suspicious because some of the spam being issued to him was also addressed only to a number of users within the bigpond.com domain
That means nothing. I usually get some spams which are addressed to several people on my mail domain. This is a small private mail domain I know nobody sold these addresses as a group to the spammers, it just so happens that spammers group by mail domain and send the email at once to all the addresses they have on that domain.
Telstra itself had a problem a while back, with someone claiming they had cracked the authentication service (Telstras Heartbeat). What had happened was, this information was collected from many back orficed accounts.
The long and the short of it was, that this person had gone through and bruteforced the accounts, the scheme which they hand them out is VERY predictable.
Doing my math, there is only.. 365 (Hint) combinations of passwords that they will hand out DSL customers as a default password.
Not had to break into.
I only read the YRO articles so that I can laugh at the paranoid slashbots.
ALERT! ALERT! PUT ON TIN FOIL HAT! POSSIBLE CONSPIRACY DETECTED!
Notice that the privacy geeks are usually the worst offenders in violating our privacy, too. They post our social security numbers on the web, just to show that it's possible. Corporations don't do that shit, because they know there'd be a huge public outcry. But we can't do anything to the privacy geeks.
I say we send the lot of them to Alaska. They'll be harmless there.
After a while I started getting lots of spam. The spam seemed to be addressed to 50 or so accounts that all started with "da" and ended with "@usa.net". Fairly obvious they were selling their lists to the highest bidder, and the second highest, and...
A few years later the whole domain closes it's free email service. Guess my life was up.
This has nothing to do with selling email addresses. I'm a Bigpond user. When I surf porn sites I get DELUGED with spam, without having to provide any identifying information.
The Bigpond referrer details identify your user name. You have a default eMail account which is username@bigpond.com. Therefore, any site which analyses its visitor logs can identify a pool of valid Bigpond eMail addresses.
Mate, if you don't want the junk mail, stop wanking so much!
a few weeks after moving into my new flat I received some snail mail spam. How was this possible, I pondered? until I noticed the mis-spelling of my name - the same mis-spelling as my telstra bill!!!
Telstra uses âoecookiesâ.
...thats OK, now this...
/me didnt click OK to join telstra.com. - cookies are traffic too .: can be collected by a traffic analysis agent.
Telstra uses Sensis MediaSmart Sales to supply ad-serving services for our web sites.
Telstra uses DoubleClick to supply ad-serving services for our websites.
*No personally identifiable information is collected by Sensis MediaSmart Sales from our web sites.
Telstra also uses Red Sheriff Measurement and Facilitate Systems to analyse usage statistics on our websites. This analysis is performed using anonymous data collected from the Telstra.com website. No personally identifiable information is collected by Red Sheriff or Facilitate Systems and we cannot link this anonymous statistical data to any personal information you may have volunteered to Telstra for registration purposes or for any other requests for products and services.
Why not, the cookies are still valid and full of information? *suspicous look*
Pixels keep you awake!
This makes the news on slash dot. Wow, didn't know Slash Dot had lowered it's news worthiness that much...
If you want to hear people complain all the time about telstra, got and have a look at whirlpool.net.au - the Telstra whiners playground...
The mail server at our work is regularly the target of a dictionary attack.
Bounced email goes to one of our sysadmins as a matter of policy to make sure nothing important is incorrectly addressed and mail is flowing smoothly. One Monday morning earlier this month he had over 16,000 almost-identical emails waiting for him to filter through, the result of a dictionary attack. And this is a fairly regular occurance.
The net effect of this is that people with the more guessable addresses (ie: the shorter ones) will get spam regardless.
Excelent Idea!
The Australian government recently (a day ago) announced that they will be privatising the rest (remaining 51%) of telstra. I wonder if this being on slashdot has anything to do with that?
Anyway, a day before the government's annoucement the senate was going to vote for an enquiry into broadband access in Australia.
Then later on the same day (or the next day) 4 independent senators voted against it (damn bastards, technophobics afraid of technology).
Look at these are two days in Australian politics and think, are Australians governed by morons?
Broadband enquiry likely
Broadband inquiry killed
New attempt at broadband enquiry
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
If you want a large ISP in WA, I recommend WestNet. They're a bit too big to still be really caring, but their reliability is a notch above iiNet's.
If you want an excellent quality smaller ISP in WA, choose ArachNet. They also have excellent colocation terms, and this bloke can sell you a dandy little rack box to colocate with (review coming soon). I use ArachNet myself. There are others.
If you want reliable DSL in Oz and damn the cost, try Request or Optus (nice picture). Everyone else has to go through Telstra to get their DSL (and these two will also if they have no DSLAM in the exchange), which costs you a big reliability hit.
Telstra account for your data as the sum of both directions. Most Oz ISPs will bill you for the max of in and out, or just bill you for in, but no, not Telstra. As a 'phone company, they're not too bad (their service actually works). As a "competitive" ISP, they suck.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Seriously, less than a few hours ago I met a guy (in person) who helps another guy spam overseas. He reckons a simple perl script (much like a link verification tool), a modified version of procmail (to become a mega mass-mailer), and an open relay, and they're in business. Sometimes they stick their own open relay (configured to remove original IP of sender) on a particular broadband ISP and spam using it as a relay. When asked by ISP, they then say "whoops I didn't know it was an open relay". A few of these warnings, and then a boot, and then they move to another ISP.
Anyways, their personal spider can obtain 300,000 email addresses in a day. It will also do a lookup of the domain to verify if valid, and other clever things.
I wanted to choke the guy!
Solution:
As soon as ISP's email servers BLOCK emails that have the original IP address removed (easy to do), then this type of spam will stop (if all ISP's will do this). They should also instantly boot users with open relays that have been spammed from, no questions asked. Networks that harbor spammers and their relays, should be blacklisted at the ISP. Emails should be bounced. If a GENUINE email is blocked, the bounce message could show how to contact ISP for remedy.
"I would have expected that, where "collated" email address lists are used, and where multiple destination users exist within the email headers, that the destination domains are more likely to be dissimilar"
Why wouldn't the spammer collate on domain name? Sorry whole argument is flawed on this basis.
Quite a lot of ISPs now re-sell Comindico's ADSL now.
Their entry into the market caused a small price war with wholesale prices, leading to the number of cheaper ADSL ISP options lately.
For those not familiar.
Telstra has a habit of raising their wholesale price to be close to or in some cases higher than their retail prices to end users, after a short delay the ACCC steps in and slaps down Telstra, who then behave for a while, then repeat.
This has the effect of discouraging competition.
So far the ACCC has not given out much more then slaps on the wrist, but this is mainly because the government is trying to sell off their share of Telstra, so they want the share price to be high.
You'll note that ACCC has been showing more teeth, and Telstra has been quiet lately, because the government has sidelined their plans to sell their shares (mainly because Telstra's share price is quite low atm).
If your mail server follows the early SMTP RFCs it might well do this :
%telnet bastardface.com 25
RCPT TO: <aardvark@bastardface.com>
550 Address unknown locally
RCPT TO: <andrew@bastardface.com>
250 Recipient ok. [andrew@bastardface.com]
RCPT TO: <apple@bastardface.com>
550 Address unknown locally
[... do your whole dictionary]
QUIT
all usually without ever hitting the logs
you get a nice big list of valid addresses all at the same domain and no-one is any the wiser until it stats filling up their inboxes
I know this because it happened to us when someone followed the wrong RFC
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I signed up, and their database entry took my middle name as my last. From a month or two later, I've gotten spam addressed specifically to a man with the last name of my middle name, and to my house address. It never stops.
This is regular dead tree spam I'm talking about.
Everyone sounds surprised to some degree, but really... who can you trust any more? Certainly not the government, certainly not big corperations, certainly not your neighbor, and maybe not even yourself. Nothing is sacred any more. I'm surprised some government big wig didn't buy in on a system to track e-mail addresses and harvest accounts via headers, then sell them.... or maybe they did. I'm wondering if protecting privacy is even important any more since privacy may not exist in these times. (that statement was partially sarcasim, but partly genuine)
%echo matt@bigpond.com.au | /www/bin/get_mx
extmail.bigpond.com
%telnet extmail.bigpond.com 25
Trying 144.135.24.8...
Connected to extmail.bigpond.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 bigpond.com service ready (identifier 29/4290323)
helo numpty
250 bigpond.com
MAIL FROM:
250 ok
RCPT TO:
550 recipient unknown
so you run your dictionary attack against the server
MAIL FROM:
250 ok
RCPT TO:
550 recipient unknown
RCPT TO:
550 recipient unknown
until you some 250s
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Yep, Comindico have their own network, but they DO NOT have their own DSLAMS and as such still rely on Telstra's Layer2 crap to deliver their service. See post above ;0)
In all fairness, I've got to question the claim that Mark has made. I am a self un-employable person who works from home. I have been using the Internet for about 5 years, and for the last three years have been using Telstra Bigpond cable. As part of my profession, I send and receive Email every day. I participate in a couple of "closed" mail lists. I don't run my own mail server, and simply use my Bigpond mailbox. My spam filtering software consists of absolutely nothing. On average, I receive 1 spam message a month. The simple fact is that if you do not participate in newsgroups, or other "open" forums, don't frequent porn sites, or buy stuff on the net, you won't get spam. In short, I treat my Email address as I do my mobile phone number, which means that it isn't handed out to just anyone. If the topic was the slow response times you get on Bigpond Broadband, and how a 10Mb cable-modem link still can't handle 160x120 movies in real time. Or, that surfing the net is still painful on Telstra cable, then the complaint might be valid.
I understand that a couple of years ago that a complete list of bigpond email addresses was 'stolen' from a database. And it would be easy of an employee to sell data without being caught.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
%host -t mx bigpond.com
/ index/
bigpond.com mail is handled (pri=10) by extmail.bigpond.com
so you run your dictionary attack against the server
%telnet extmail.bigpond.com 25
Trying 144.135.24.8...
Connected to extmail.bigpond.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 bigpond.com service ready (identifier 29/4290323)
helo numpty
250 bigpond.com
MAIL FROM: <>
250 ok
RCPT TO: <aardvark@bigpond.com>
550 recipient <aardvark@bigpond.com> unknown
RCPT TO: <apple@bigpond.com>
550 recipient <apple@bigpond.com> unknown
RCPT TO: <mr_brianpowell@bigpond.com>
250 ok
and every 250 is a valid paid up customer
and there's not a long entry in the world that's going to find you
in fact you can visit http://www.bigpond.com/home/memservices/community
to harvest email addresses like I just did while waiting to post with EXTRANS
still it's more newsworthy if you CHARGE someone for this information !
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
chalk54923 gets first ever spam...
my password really is 'stinkypants'
A large e-mail account provider selling e-mail addresses?
NEVER! (sarcasm noted with italics)
Hotmail anyone?
Error 407 - No creative sig found
As im reading this i'm checking my bigpond account. 329 spam. It should also be noted the bigpond have no spamfiltering stuff and include emails in the 3gb cap.
cat
I know of Request (who actually use RUCC for all of their ISP-ish stuff) and Optus using their own DSLAMs etc, even their own copper.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Well, everyone did it.. Credit Card companies, Insurance, Finance, and why not ISPs?
A Colleague of mind, who is very paranoid when giving out his cell phone number got really pissed off when he received a call from some banks offering him credit card services. Recently he signed up for one and had no intention of signing for more. It seems that these people shared information within the industry..
I'm not trolling.. Just lamenting on the alarming trend of the marketplace.
Will sys-admin for food
Did any one else read that as Telstra denies selling data to it's customers? As a user of ADSL in australia, most of which runs off the Telstra backbone, I can say there are certainly time where you are paying for nothing. Outages are all too common. Like it goes out when it rains common. I could see how they might deny selling anything at all given the level of service they provide.
EGG, the Electronic Gamers Guild
I have a Telstra Bigpond address (from having a cable modem).
I never get any mail at it at all, except for official notices from Telstra.
I've had it for about 4 years. I've mailed from it or given it out.
maybee an employee sold them to a spammer.
I have always wondered about inside jobs of this sort.
im sure it wouldnt be hard these days with the compact USB hard disks you can put on your keys.
simply plug it in, transfer all the email addresses, zip it up and send it to your favorite spammer, then collect.
sound easy? yeah... its scary.
So Telsta invents AC power and now is working as an ISP?
"I've been called worse things by better people." -Pierre Elliott Trudeau after being called an asshole by Richard Nixon
I administer a mail server for an ISP of about 20,000 customers. We see mail come in all the time with JUST customers addresses in them. (ie.. no outside e-mail).. but I know that we don't sell customer information. I do believe this guy is over reacting. I've actually had to explain to several customers of ours that we don't sell information, because they came to the same conclusion. I think spammers must be wising up or something and sending all the e-mails to one domain in a CC or something rather then seperate e-mails... takes less effort/bandwidth.
Why are Americans so paranoid about their social security numbers? I've never understood the great furore over people posting them on the net, or that banks might want them.
I have a friend, who a couple of years ago hooked up his telephone line but Te$tra. The catch is they misspelt his name in the billing details. Some months later he started to receive occasional junk snail mail addressed to him with you guessed it the misspelt name.
Go figure!
Mmmm... an Oz-centric article for once.
Just to point out that there are alternatives. Personally I'm very satisfied with TPG's dialup connection for A$50/quarter and I'm thinking of switching to their A$70/month 128/64 ADSL once my current account expires.
As far as I know, they're established pretty much all over the continent, they provide no-bullshit services. Not only that, but unlike that annoying blue bird with the annoying pie-eating chubby guy that's pestering the telly, this is not the 'tastiest' but the cheapest deal out there. At least if my survey of about 50 different ISPs in the area is anything to go by.
Oh and they better hire me as a sales representative now!
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
They're just a bunch of whingers that can't even organise a bbq.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
I think we have this backwards. Telstra is not selling bigpond email addresses. They are doing deals with mass marketers.
Eg Give us the stuff you want to go to all our customers, and we will send it for you.
That way Telstra can fairly truthfully claim they (as opposed to disgruntled employees) did not sell any email addresses.
I know Australia Post does it regularily. I have a PO Box and a home mail box and I get crap directly from Australia post and at the PO box I get unaddressed mail! Like only Australia Post can put stuff in there and they put junk mail.
I think it's the same with Telstra. It's all in how you phrase your request.
"Can you give us your customer database"
Answer: NO
"Can you send our marketing stuff to your customer database?"
Answer: YES!
Australian IT is definitely governed by idiots.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Why would an ISP that's so stingy with bandwith sell its user list and open itself up even more of the massive bandwith used for spamming? But then again... maybe they hope you download enough spam that it pushes you over into the next pricing tier. hehehe
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
It's most likely new spamming software that does on the fly web spidering.
I was getting spam addressed to myself and others in IT until I asked our webmaster to take off my mailto link on the IT staff directory page. Since them I've had a big decline in spams at work.
"BigPond public affairs manager Stuart Gray deined that Telstra sold email lists."
Whoopy do. There are many ways of circulating a list to 3rd parties without "selling" it. Magazines, for example, rent their lists by becoming mailing houses so the rentee can't see and therefore reuse the names. Charities swap lists.
Many site privacy policies use similar language which sounds like they will never pass on their list, but in fact they are just defining a narrow range of circumstances under which they won't. Could be clumsy English... but then I expect lawyers write these things, so maybe not.
FWIW, after 2 years of Yahoo account, used a lot, I get NO spam. Admittedly my email address will fail to succumb to a dictionary attack, but it does mean that Yahoo is not passing it on AND the traders etc (inc. Ebay) aren't either.
Having formerly worked for an ISP myself, I know that one test we did for finding out when a similar attack was being run on our e-mail servers was set up several e-mail addresses as "spam catchers," not advertising those addresses ANYWHERE, and just occasionally checking those boxes to see what was there, and adding any sender addresses found to our anti-spam system's block list. So does it happen? Definitely...
Tulsa sucks, but we get a 1.5 business cable modem with two IPs run to our apartment for $105 a month. It's had some outages, but the tech support was great. They even call back and tell you when it's back up, although we just left the TV on until the signal came back.
The fiber plant is pretty new. Most of the town was just wired for cable broadband in the last 2-3 years, so it's still pretty swift. Even with other people on the line it blows the hell out of bell.
The sweetest thing is you can call Monday and have the service deployed by Tuesday, or maybe even Monday afternoon if you call in the morning. So far, no complaints.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
When I got my phone connected here, Telstra mis-spelled my name. My name is incredibly uncommon.
... mis-spelled just as Telstra had ( at my company dot com dot au ).
:
About a month later, I was looking through the logs on the mail server at work ( as you do ) and saw an error about an unknown user, which just happened to be made up of my first initial, and then my last name
I immeditately called Telstra and confronted them, and they denied everything. The girl was quite rude about it and implied that I might also have stories about little green men carrying experiments out on my while I was asleep.
I absolutely INSIST that Telstra sold my details, consisting of ( but not limited to )
- my first and last name
- my employer
The above I can deduce from the logs on the mail server at work.
"ORDER BY username GROUP BY domain"
My SQL could be bad but thats pretty close in any case
simple stuff really
whats next? decending order names as proof time is running backwards?
cheers
I'll badmouth Telstra at any opportunity I get where there is some basis for it, so I guess in the interest of karma I should speak up here :)
:)
I've received approximately 5 items of spam in the 13 months i've had my Bigpond dialup account for. Compared to the amount of real email I get, this number is insignificant to at least 3 decimal places.
If you were to ask why i'm on dialup and not broadband, _then_ you'd hear some badmouthing of telstra
(-:
And your website probably explains why Flow is a SF download mirror. Now all we need is free connectivity between state IXes.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...had a hand in restarting PLUG before he left (that website served from an XboX). D'you know if he's a member of SLUG or anything over there?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
We had a spam problem a few weeks back. Some inkjet printer spammer was sending spam to/from one of our addresses.
At first they sent a couple of hundred _to_ our address, then they sent hundreds apparently _from_ our address (so we got all the bounces of invalid users, as well as a few "remove me from your list" types).
The weird part is, instead of using the actual valid email (eg. someone@validdomain.org), they were sticking random letters on the end (ie. someonegtwk@validdomain.org), thus making it _invalid_.
Eventually I wrote some exim and procmail rewrite rules to dump them into a file in my mail directory... they seem to have stopped at ~900. All bounce types, so who knows how many they sent...
(Before you ask, no, we're not an open relay, and they weren't coming through us. They were being sent, apparently from their system (or other people's), just with the From and Reply-To addresses set to our (invalid) address.)
Strange...
Can't find examples of evolution? No matter, neither could Dawkins
I'm a Bigpond customer - I actually have two accounts with them - and I've been seeing a lot of this stuff recently. Not your usual spam, but spam addressed to half a dozen or ten subscribers in alphabetical order. It's not spammers just picking likely addresses, neither - some of these addresses are quite specific and you'd be unlikely to guess them or find them with a brute forcer. Mind you, it's easy enough to control. I just pick the address next to mine in the list and any mail I get addressed to that chap goes in the bin. Cheers, Peter
This, too, is not true - the Gov't does plan to sell it's 50.1% stake ASAP, but Telstra must first provide "the bush" greater access/service levels/support than it currently does to those living in metro areas.
Oz is a very, very big country - far larger than the whole of Europe combined - and it will be a difficult ask for Gov't.
The Govt will now spend about $AU180M (about $US100M) to do so.
See one article about this here - http://smh.com.au/text/articles/2003/06/23/1056220 544959.htm
Even my enemies want happiness