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In Pursuit Of A Spammer
Kyle writes "Over at DSL Reports, We are currently pursuing a spammer from the West Palm Beach, Florida area. This wouldn't normally be news, but we think Slashdot readers may be interested in just how successful we have been. What's more interesting is that the spammer appears to be posting in the thread."
While I hate spam in my inbox I don't see how (at this current point in time) they shouldn't be allowed to send it to you (regardless of the rules that some ISP sets).
It's their right to send it and it's your right to block it.
If I bring you back his ears?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It turns out, after I caught a spammer, I wasn't allowed to kill him. Apparently, that's not classified as justifiable homicide. You know how silly I feel now?
When you sign up for ISP account, yuo sign a contract called "Terms of Service". You aren't allowed anythingt prohibited in it.
:)
AINAL, so someone with mopre legal clue please correct/confirm
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
AINAL? What's that? A lawyer for the Arctic Institute of North America?
"We are currently pursuing a spammer from the West Palm Beach, Florida area."
Will be see this on Fox?
And I've said it before, you're free to do what you wish so long as it doesn't impact on me or my freedoms.
Spam costs me money. Every time I open an email I don't want, every time I have to update my anti-spam software (well, that's free but that's besides the point) it costs me time and money and I object. It's fine if I've signed up for a newsletter or advertising (yes, I've done that - Think Geek sends me notification of stuff even though I'm a dirty foreigner and can't buy any of it) but when I haven't it's costing me. Where can I send the invoice? To you?
I am a leaf on the wind
They're using my bandwidth and my resources with my approval. In most cases, they're also using someone's server without their approval and forging various information. If they were honest about who they were, and what they were selling, I'd have a lot less of a problem with it. Instead, they try to use subjects and senders to trick you into reading it and wasting your time.
Well in some countries, spamming is clearly forbidden.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Free speech, only applies to that SPEACH. There is no clause in the constituion that protects spammers in anyway. There is no freedom of the press issue either, this is HARASSMENT!
Pursuit of fleeing vehicles is much more common in LA, but the West Palm Beach folks are very fond of pursuing rental trucks full of votes to be recounted. So now they are just chasing a truck load of canned pork, doesn't really surprise me much.
We've found a spammer, may we burn him?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
t's their right to send it and it's your right to block it.
Sorry, that theory fails when fraud comes into the equation. Rule #1: Spammers LIE.
Lying, in this context (trying to steal your service), is fraud.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Who has the right to send a scam to people? I don't think scams are protected under the first amendment and I don't think advertsing should be either. Certainly the framers never considered advertising as political dissent in need of protection. So why do you?
he has an email newsletter. Let's all sign up!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
"When you sign up for ISP account, yuo sign a contract called "Terms of Service". You aren't allowed anythingt prohibited in it."
And yet people violate them on a regular basis. Kind of hypocritical to ask spammers to not violate ISP terms, and yet people run servers, consume bandwith like it's going out of style, etc, etc.
Well, somebody's doing an effective job of spamming, anyway. After him!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Spam costs me money.
Are you using metered bandwidth? How much per kilobyte do you pay?
Every time I open an email I don't want, every time I have to update my anti-spam software (well, that's free but that's besides the point) it costs me time and money and I object.
Every time a neophyte friend or relative forwards a virus warning hoax to you, it costs you time and money, should that be illegal too?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
... who's got a mental picture involving a Benny Hill style chase sequence?
Does junk mail sent to your work or residential address through the standard postal service fall under this as well?
I receive more then my fair share of junk through the USPS, and I certainly can't put a strainer over my mailbox to filter any out.
How is this different?
I now have the Benny Hill theme song stuck in my head and it won't go away.
This person spammed a forum which is wrong, but what do they really expect to happen this company? Do they want their domain revoked, a reprimand, a fine? Do they have proof that they spam on a massive scale or send massive bulk e-mails. It's one thing to send 1,000 e-mails a day and another to post an ad in a forum (on the same subject for that matter).
Fire + gasoline == big-ass fire
Seems like the spammer did the worst possible thing he could have done, heh.
Imagine if Bush had actually attacked Iraq in addition to bitching at them, for example.
. . .
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
What really bothers me about spam is that they have to be so cowardly about it and spoof source email addresses like kajfaiojiu@iouem.com. I wouldn't mind it if they were honest about where they're sending SPAM from, then I can easily excercise my right to block it.
$cat
We are currently pursuing a spammer from the West Palm Beach, Florida area.
The geriatrics chasing the cheap/generic/no Rx required/free shipping/insert your own common spam word here Viagra(tm)
your sins into me, oh my beautiful one.
Using your argument that "your time directly is worth money", all the crap snail mail junk I get should be illegal. It takes my time to pick that stuff out of the mailbox, sort it, and throw it out.
Unless you are paying by the hour for internet access, spam email does not really directly cost you anything. You can spend your time and effort filtering it, or just ignore it. I have a Tivo so that I can skip TV commercials. I don't read ad circulars in the paper. I rarely even notice billboards on the interstate. Let spam become internet noise and ignore it as much as possible...
Kids should not see the port spam, but that is easy enough if you turn off images and filter some mails directly to the trash.
I am not a spammer, and I don't support spam.
Yes, sadly every time I go online it costs me money. Telecom NZ sells its badwidth dearly - 20 cents/MB when I exceed my limit (each month I get a whopping 1000MB to play with to my heart's content. Weehee!). It's not much but as the number of spam I get increases so do my costs. Directly. I'm not billing for my time to open them all, my electricity to power the PC or any other stuff.
It's not just spam, it's any unsolicited use of my bandwidth - and yes, viruses should be included too.
I am a leaf on the wind
Besides annoying the spammer in question, is there REALLY anything they can legally do to him? I doubt it. I have fought with spammers before, trying to get taken off of their lists, and they threatened ME with telling my ISP (a college at that time) that I was harassing HIM. I believe he would have done it, too. So I resigned myself to deleting hundreds of spams per week, and getting used to it. I can't wait until they make RIAA-style computer-nuking legal...we can all just start a computerized World War III.
Not to nit pick,but...
/20 for a $4000 to $10,000, because they are going out of business.
Most big time spammers go right around the "TOS" by becoming an ISP themselves. All you have to do is buy a block of IP's from someone who has them up for sale. Believe me there are plenty of people who will sell you a
Next all you need to do is find a bandwidth provider and you're in business. Most bandwidth providers don't care what you do with your bandwidth as long as it's not illegal. And there isn't a lot of solid case law that spam is illegal. (I know we're all hoping for legislation to come through, but not yet...)
And there you go, no "Terms of Service" to break.
I hate spammers as much as the rest of you, but I really hate zeolots who have no idea how the business even works. The more you know about spammers the easier it will be to combat them.
Maybe I'm just jaded because most of my day is spent blocking this low-lifes.
... spam floats in water?
Here in New Zealand you'll often see mailboxes with "no junk mail" stickers on them. When I worked in retail years ago we made sure our junkmail delivery company avoided stuffing those boxes - it's just not worth the damage to your brand name to upset them.
I am a leaf on the wind
the USPS does not charge you for each letter it puts in your mailbox.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
As you may have seen, antispamcard.com recently spammed our forum.
They posted 2 messages to your forum. Is that what this whole story is about?
I tried, but it doesn't seem to be a hyperlink.
I live in West Palm Beach! I might try bribing his garbage man to dump a truckload of junk in his yard.
Common sense is not so common.
All they have done so far is make a lot of links from one site/organization to another. There has been no action against the spammer. They are not certain of his real name nor his address. I think its great that they're tracking him down, but I would not go so far as to say they have been successful.
Call up your local post office and tell them you want to refuse all fourth class mail.
That will get rid of the majority of your postal problem.
Can someone with a bigger attention span provide a summary?
Filter junk snail mail (3 to 4 pieces per day) Cost: 15 seconds.
Maintaining filtering software, filtering those that slip thru, and periodically check the "deleted" box for false positives cost me on average > 15 minutes per day.
The difference is that junk e-mail costs the sender very little and consequently the increasing rate of junk mail. When I give my e-mail to a customer or friend and I have to warn them that e-mail is no longer a reliable form of communication as the possibility of be filter out is getting greater and greater.
Notably, the most fervent researcher on the forum (Ameritec Tech) has discovered that the spammer was violating several people's copyrights. One of those people has replied and stated they are taking legal action against the spammer immediately for the violation.
For to end yet again.
God almighty. Quit talking about it and do something for Christ's sake.
This is similar to what has happened. Crescive appears to be a front. When contacting the host, I told them that Crescive was potentially involved with the spammers, but they forwarded my complaint to Crescive and told me to contact them. Thank you, http://www.traci.net, I appreciate it.
a 20 minute drive to give this guy a swift kick in the cable modem sounds like fun
So a particularly stupid spammer spams a forum frequented by technically clueful spam haters. After much effort, these guys might make life difficult for this particular spammer. At best this will result in a reduction of spam that's too small to measure. So why should anybody care?
I've noticed a few "diplomats" grubbing for money recently on the kernel mailing list. Nigerian vacations, anyone? Oddly, each sender/IP occurs only *once*, it seems. Even more oddly, no mention of "Free Speech" (or any other policy) is made. It seems that "Free STFU" goes hand-in hand with "Free Speech", for practical purposes.
As opposed to legal ones.
C|N>K
Don't get me wrong, I still applaud these guys efforts, but it's an steep uphill battle.
Are you using metered bandwidth? How much per kilobyte do you pay?
Even on unmetered bandwidth, due you think that the ISP will soak up additional costs by cutting their salaries/profits? Chances are they will pass the increased costs onto the customer. And certainly, it won't be the spammer who pays.
Actually, I always go for the penis enlargement offers. My schlong is now so enlarged, I can't even hardly keep from walking on it. The most effective treatment turned out to be a box that made this humming sound and had a hole in one end. After inserting the penis into the hole, one was to shake the box vigorously. Though it did hurt a bit, it was quite effective. After removing the penis from the box, a fairly agitated swarm of hornets flew out which my roommates found somewhat annoying.
Hey, some of these things really work!
Well, if UCE costs you money, you need to either work on making the practice illegal (which I don't care one way or the other about) or failing that, decide whether the financial cost you bring upon yourself by using the international e-mail system is worth the benefits you recieve from it.
It is NOT theft of service for you to recieve an e-mail you didn't request. It is a symptom of the system working exactly as originally designed. The e-mail system has the automatic and unquestioned acceptance of all messaging as it's fatal flaw. It is part of the deal. It's what allows you to send e-mail to your long lost friend that didn't know your e-mail address, or to e-mail some customer support service at Amazon or what not, or e-mail your family to let them know you're OK after surviving the Twin Towers disaster, or whatever. That's what it was designed to do. It has strengths and glaring weaknesses, and when you participate in the system, you are willingly putting yourself at the mercy those weaknesses. If someone sends you a truckload of stuff you don't want through your e-mail service, and you pay by the byte for downloading it, your service is no more being stolen than a zillion people hitting a website where they pay by the byte for traffic, because the service is functioning the way it was designed. If you couldn't afford all that, you shouldn't have signed up for a per-byte Internet service. If you want to avoid the pitfalls of e-mail you need to find or make yourself a service that doesn't have this particular fatal flaw. That, or keep working to make the practice illegal wherever you are, which patches a technical hole with a legal or political tub of spackle. However, unless they invade another person's equipment to send the UCE to you, they aren't committing any kind of crime by doing it, at least in the USA. And even if they do that, you aren't the one who's having the crime committed against them, unless it was your machine they used as the relay.
Here's a decent example...
I don't have cable television service because I have decided that I hate the flood of ads and other comercial idiocy far more than what I would use it for is worth. I could have rigged up a TIVO or ReplayTV or some other one of the myriad solutions out there for removing ads, if I wanted to, but I decided the hassle wasn't worth the cost. Just because I don't want the ads there, doesn't mean I have a leg to stand on demanding that they not be there. I can take measures to remove them or avoid them, and any cost I incur because of those measures is COMPLETELY MY FAULT. Same with UCE. If I don't like it, I either run a spam blocker of some ilk, take great pains to never give out my e-mail address to someone I don't trust completely with it, learn to deal with it, or chuck e-mail entirely. If I decide to do any of those things, I've only myself to blame for the inconvenience/cost associated with them, because it isn't theft for spammers to use the service the way it was designed.
So basically, you can send the invoice to whomever you damn well please, and it'll probably get deleted, ignored, or cause someone to bust a blood vessel at the gall of some idiot on the Internet who thinks he can send bills to whomever he thinks deserves to pay for his problems.
Most big time spammers go right around the "TOS" by becoming an ISP themselves.
/20 for a $4000 to $10,000, because they are going out of business.
Yes, but, unless they are becoming a tier 1 provider, they have to use an upstream provider, who probably have a TOS themselves, so no dice.
Believe me there are plenty of people who will sell you a
Well, as far as I know, you can't sell your ip blocks. You have to return it to the relevant provider/registry for re-assignement. Of course, just because they shouldn't doesn't mean they don't, but it's another point against them if it comes to litigation.
No sig
Ain't nothing justice, like mob justice.
has anyone confirmed that the deerfield beach address is this guys home ? :)
I wouldnt be surprised if some local readers did something really nasty to this guy... (a can of spam through his front window comes to mind)
Nah, on second thoughts, signing them up for every catalogue and ensuring that their telephone number isn't on the national do-not-call list is more fitting.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"It's unfortunate that your comments were modded down to -1. Given the opportunity, I would have modded your statements Interesting even though I disagree with you.
This really drills down to the core issue of spam: money. Based upon what I've read on the subject, I (via my subscription fee) am subsidizing the cost of a spammer's business. I welcome any evidence that contradicts this, but until that time I would analogize your statement as follows: "It is their right to barge into your home and shove an ad in your face and it's your right to stop them....and by the way, this process will cost you $$."
That kind of thinking doesn't work because I can't legally put a bullet into a spammer's head. One's right to free speech ends at my doorstep. Any alternative interpretation of the First Amendment opens up a number of conflicts with the Fourth Amendment.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
Even on unmetered bandwidth, due you think that the ISP will soak up additional costs by cutting their salaries/profits? Chances are they will pass the increased costs onto the customer. And certainly, it won't be the spammer who pays.
How much spam do you get? In a month, I use less bandwitdh getting and disposing of spam than I use in two hours of web surfing. Hardly enough to cause my ISP to incur additional overhead.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
So if the spammer weighs as much as a duck....
then he's made of wood?
and therefore?
A WITCH!
BURN HIM! BURN HIM!
*sigh*
Moderator missed joke entirely.
THe best revenge is a weblog post with his own info being higher in ranking than his own website :)
I should know I killed a spammer called Bruce Cullen(a movie extra-Outbreak one of the invefected victims that died in the movie) with this technique..
It was so bad that he stopped spamming altogether..:)
Don't Tread on OpenSource
it makes it all the easier to block.
You think any reputable website would hook up with an ISP started by a marketing company and thus get accidentally blacklisted? I assure you it is probably nothing of value.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
To either scare out of business or into more covert measures, spammers must have examples made out of them. And since there aren't legal measures for this...
all I'll say is that a little well placed vigilantism can go a long way.
All you have to do is buy a block of IP's from someone who has them up for sale. Believe me there are plenty of people who will sell you a /20 for a $4000 to $10,000, because they are going out of business.
Really? Who could I buy a block of IPs from?
Now you have the IPs, the URLs, the company names, etc.
So report these to every blackhole list available, report the hijacked material on the sites to the original publishers, check his providers for more spammers like him, and report the provider if necessary (so they start taking an active part in this as well) and get on to the next guy.
If ISPs began taking basic measures to block spam, refuse services to spammers, contact the providers of spammers, and blackhole domains, IP's, and networks that spam or encourage spammers, the spammers would eventually end up in a spammers ghetto of unscrupulous providers that could be easily blocked or filtered.
If it is left up to law enforcement and legislation, there will be loopholes as there are in the National Do-Not-Call Registry, and we will have opened up the door to congess regulating the use of email.
Read, L
What's more interesting is that the spammer appears to be posting in this thread!
Did anyone else notice the dates in the linked forum show that this was in 2001!!!!?!?!?!?
To the first person arrested for causing the death of a spammer.
I'm just in one of those moods.
too see /. able to offer a little assistance to the anti-spammer world. The /. effect removing weak servers from the WEB one at a time...
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
"Chad has seen and dealt with all types of mass media, entertainment, publishing, high-tech, and marketing companies like BBDO(Top 6 ad agency), to Turner Broadcasting Networks(CNN, TBS, Headline News, etc.) as well as Disney and Time Warner Media to name a few..."
Hmmm...Well, I too have "seen and dealt with" BBDO (yes, I have seen their ads), Turner (I frequently watch CNN), Disney (sure I've seen that mouse and have bought stuff for my nieces at one of their stores), and Time Warner Media (I seen to recall that they have some sort of relationship with the aforementioned Turner...but I could be wrong
The spammer's site is quite humerous. Has his picture plastered everywhere and talks about how he is one of the leading market strategest...click on each individual section for him in several different poses ;)
IAANPDWHNBTDTFSEOSTMLJTDEMS - I am a nit-picking dork who has nothing better to do than find spelling errors on slashdot then make lame jokes that don't even make sense.
Take a look at http://www.spamgourmet.com.
You can make up email addresses on the fly and limit the number of replies to any quantity you like. When the number is exceeded the email is eaten.
The fact that someone could DARE to moderate that "offtopic" just blows me away.
...having served in the military for a significant period of time, when I saw the 'patriotic business statement' by Heckman I did a 'quick and dirty' search of some databases -no listing of a Brad or Bradley Heckman deployed as member of the U.S. Army during Operation Desert Shield or Desert Storm. Someone tell the #1 spam hunter at DSL report webpage to try and get a unit ID from Heckman? For some reason I can't post to that forum and I couldn't find an email address for the #1 spam hunter guy. The best way to sink a fraudulent business that preys on patriotic people is to show them he's a fraud.
"Just an idea".
-Anonymous Cowardly Good Guy
> Every time a neophyte friend or relative forwards a virus warning
> hoax to you, it costs you time and money, should that be illegal
> too?
In a word? Yes. That would be an unsolicited chain forward, i.e.,
a message that had already been forwarded to the forwarder and was
now, without request of the recipient, being forwarded again. There
is no valid reason ever to do that.
However, the reversed-charges argument for making spam illegal is,
as far as I'm concerned, the icing on the cake. The really strong
reasons why it should be illegal have to do with fraud and
harrassment.
Vanishingly close to 100% of spam is fraudulent, at least in terms
of forging headers. (Fraudulent content in the body is quite
common as well, but it's the headers primarily that concern me.)
Even if only non-fraudulent spam were legal, that would be a
tremendous improvement. Since the spammers would have to register
a fresh domain name in order to force me to update my filters, it
would not be ecconomically feasible to do that for each and every
message. I could prewash the spam out with a blacklist, saving
lots of CPU cycles for my bayesian classification system.
Now, the harrassment argument, which IMO is the truly rock-solid
one: if I got anything like anywhere near approaching close to
as many unsolicited phone calls per day from the same outfit,
and if they behaved in the same fashion (refused to identify
themselves, refused to stop contacting me), law enforcement
would be all over the case, and if they could track down the
people responsible, they would go to jail. That the contact
is by email rather than phone shouldn't matter: these creeps
should go to jail. There's one particular spamhaus in Asia
that I would pay good money to know who they are and be able
to shut them down, because they just won't leave me alone. I'm
tired of getting seventy messages a day from these cretins.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
"Now I'm moving from being the CEO/Founder of a tech company selling (ASP) vapor-ware" Wow. That's all I can say about that. Chad Deckard Cheif Executive Officer Generations Marketing INC. Perhaps the vaporware was some sort of spell-checker?
tell Microsoft that he's a spammer and he's trying to compete with them. That ought to settle him.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
We can filter by IPs or keywords or addresses or whatever, but they one thing they can never disguise is their message: it has to be available or they're just sending static. Part of that message has to be some way to contact the company, or else there's no way for you to order their penis enlargement cream or online marketing guide.
What we really need is an anti-spam program that searches identified spam for URLs, then scrapes those pages for forms and email addresses so that it can fill out the forms with junk and send a few hundred copies of their spam to the email addresses. That would effectively lower the signal-to-noise ratio in their order system to the point that it would be nearly useless.
Granted, though, such a system really would be the spam equivalent of WWIII. Right now half of all email traffic is spam, and with widespread use of the "Doomsday Filter" we'd probably have one third of traffic being spam and another third being anti-spam mail.
Obviously that wouldn't be good, so this is just meant as a theoretical counter-offensive. The important idea is that passive measures have been proven insufficient, and the only way to stop spam is going to be to cut off the demand for it. One way to do that is to direct the counterstrike at the message sender itself, rather than just the messenger. If your breast enhancement company's spammer gets shut down, you'll just hire another one. If the spam you're having sent results in tangible and direct problems for your business, you'll find other ways to advertise.
What's a good way to spam a spammer? When you fill out a web form, can you put in some address that will spam the spammer themself? (like 'root@localhost') Does anybody have any neat tricks?
If someone finds one that works, us slashdoters should go around using it.
How much spam do you get? In a month, I use less bandwitdh getting and disposing of spam than I use in two hours of web surfing. Hardly enough to cause my ISP to incur additional overhead.
Frankly, I would say that the amount of spam received is irrelevant. Would you ignore the cost of dead-tree spam if you had to pay a penny (just to pluck a whole number out of thin air) for each item you received? Of course not; you didn't request it, so you would refuse to pay -- it's just a matter of sticking to your principles. If you did swallow the cost of such spam, however, then you could truly be considered a good little consumer, in which case you'd be unworthy of ever daring to criticise anyone doing business.
Simply put, Telescum are greedy bastards. I'm on the exact same plan as Audent; trust me, I know them well.
For instance, you know what excuse (paraphrased) their CEO, Theresa Gattung, uses for keeping the price of their ADSL service high? "There's not enough potential customers for our ADSL service because they're happy using 56k connections."
Besides being bitterly hilarious codswallop, this of course flies directly in the face of all their advertising for their ADSL service (named 'Jetstream') which proudly trumpets the superior speed at which you can access the 'net. Yet they never bother to depict or promote ANYTHING that would only work well over ADSL.
Theresa Gattung is a lying, greedy bitch.
I took the big step and blocked all of Asia at the IP level. I went from 50 spams a day to a couple a week.
I don't know anyone over there, so it's of no detriment to me. I should have done it long ago.
LOL! You asked for it!
Psst... hey buddy, wanna buy a block of IPs?
Cool! Can I come to your house and exercise my right to kick you in the nuts? Of course, you have the right to block it.
How do you feel about the hundreds of internet worms and script kiddies and failed spam relay attempts that are interfering with the bandwidth you pay for? Is that OK too? Mind if I run an extension cord to the outlet on your patio so I don't have to pay for my own electricity? Of course, you have to right to unplug it, but I'll just come back tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. And I'll tunnel under your house and tap into the wiring in your basement where you don't see. But you have the right to spend every waking hour trying to stop me from leeching off the stuff you pay for. I hope you don't waste too much time fighting me, though... I need you to go to work and earn money to pay for the stuff that I'm stealing from you, so that I don't have to go to work myself and earn an honest living. Wow, I love your attitude! Maybe I can hook myself up to your water and gas lines, too.
There's cyber-libertarianism, and then there's advocating total lawlessness. When everybody has a "right" to do whatever they want to anybody, that's the same as nobody having any rights at all.
I think we should just do a Slashdot story linking to Spammer websites every couple of days, the DoS attack should be brutal.
AmeriTech, the basset hound teasing out the trail, can be reached by slashdot readers at ameritechtech@dslr.net (as was his stated preference).
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Slightly off-topic, but good question: For the love of god... these damn "Net Send" Spams where you have to click "OK" to close are getting out of hand. I need my system messages, and I dont want to slow down my stuff with a firewall... How in the sam how do I fix this?!?!
>Maybe I can hook myself up to your water and gas lines, too.
and while we're at it... what do ur daughters look like hmm? hehe
I own a small IT business, and I occaisonally send out 20 mails or so to people whom I don't know but who I think may be interested in my services.. Is this spam? If so, how about 1, where does legitimate marketing end and spam begin? How come noone complains about the direct mail they recieve on slashdot? to my thinking it takes more effort to throw away a direct mail piece than to click delete to a spam....
Fourth class mail hmmm maybe we don't have that in Australia, I don't know what it is anyway :-)
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
In his comment he claims to be the victim of a DoS attack. Pleading,
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
If junk mail via snail mail got to the point of being a nuisance then it would. I'm at the point right now where I spend almost as much time getting rid of spam as I do reading personal email (not including mailing lists). I've also missed (or almost missed personal emails that I wanted to get because they accidently got marked as one of the 80 spams that I'd recieved that day.
Yes, I have the righ of free speech, but if I spent the entire day following you around ranting about penises, work-at-home scams, and how to find the best porn on the net, you'd have me charged with harrassment -- and rightly so.
Hmmm... It just hit me... I think it might be possible to charge these bastards with simple criminal mischief. They've actually gotten to the point of preventing my proper enjoyment of my own property -- which is the definition of mischief. They're also doing it wilfully, repeatedly and for profit.
There are also precedents... I knew one person who had been hacking the computers at the University of Alberta. First they tried charging him with something like theft of telecommunications, but he beat that rap on the basis of that a computer isn't a phone... Finally they charged him with Criminal Mischief, and he said that there was nothing that he could do to weasel his way out of that charge.
Criminal Mischief is a real catch-all crime.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Because most people don't get 100 direct mail pieces a day that tie up their servers, diskspace, ram, and bandwidth.
In several states, your spam is illegal!
Fight Spammers!
On behalf of my good friend Kaj Faiojiu, webmaster of iouem.com, I'd like to ask you not to post his email address in public.
Thanks.
worked like a charm last time.
So, that any action becomes a first ammendment analysis. Even if one has free speech, it does not permit one to use another's resource without permission to make people listen.
Fight Spammers!
Please tell me the "SPAMMER" did more then post 2 messages in an forum which actually shares the same topic as his posts?
Or is it just enough that someone labeled him a "Spammer" that we have to "dump garbage on his lawn"?
Was it just an AD? IF this really was only about 2 posts in a FORUM, not emails, not anything else, something that the forum moderator could delete if requested, then this actually makes me sick.
Bullshit.
The spammer is costing ME MONEY both directly and indirectly.
They cost me money directly when I'm on a $$ per byte/time connection -- they do still exist in this world, quite common actually. They cost me money indirectly with every wasted byte, over quota error, blown mail server, delayed delivery or other problem caused by the volume of spam. It does happen.
This is not like physical mail -- the US postal service has an entire bulk rate delivery infrastructure in place and the *sender pays the fucking bill*. I don't have to pay money to receive unwanted mail, nor do I have to worry that unwanted mail is going to fuck up the delivery of my regular mail.
Comparing the electronic mail infrastructure to the physical mail infrastructure is not valid. Claiming that the spammers have the RIGHT to send their crap unsolicited is WRONG -- it COSTS THE RECEIVER AND EVERYONE IN BETWEEN MONEY!!!
In other words: The spammers are effectively STEALING from every person who has not given explicit consent between their delivery agent and the other side of your keyboard.
This is not a constitutional issue either. There is nothing in the costitution that guarantees the right for someone to spew their bullshit in non-public forums in a fashion where the potential target has no choice but to PAY to consume their shit!
No one wants spam, including me. But is it really so much you want to track every company related to him and try to get him kicked off the internet? Come on. Is it really that hard to download a mail content filter, or hit delete?
People whine "but I didn't want to see that", blah blah blah blah blah. Get over it. You see things every day that you don't want to. Get used to it. Life is perfect, neither is the internet
The problem is that everyone on internet is a bully. But you're starting to go out of the internet now. Quit it before you go to far.
I mean, I dislike spammers just as much as the next guy. But why is this a newsworthy story? Allegedly, someone posts a message about their anti-spam product on an anti-spamming message board. The claim is made that the poster is a spammer. So the story becomes that a spammer posts an advert to an anti-spamming message board.
Aside from it being a bit uncooth, why is this suddenly The Hunt for Red October? Sure, it was kind of a stupid thing, but what's the big wreck that I should be rubbernecking over?
How 'bout a good ol' tar 'n featherin'?
If you're making this up -- good for you. You have a real future in Internet porn.
If you're not, know this: any woman who is worth her salt will know -- that is know -- that deep down you're an asshole.
Cuz you are.
Hm. Good idea, but how do I coax it out of him? I don't guess he'll just hand it over. Let me scour putamericatowork.com and see if he gives any specific information. Ameritech Tech
I've been trying to get an article on slashdot for forever!
What, me worry?
There were many messages and the moderators of the antispam foum at dslreports/broadband.com have deleted all but a few of them.
/.ers not knowing anything about dsl reports/broadband.com. It's like the consumer reports of xDSL and Cable broadband. There is even offical online realtime tech support provided in some of the ISP forums by the some broadband ISP's . ISPs are rated by the consumer there as well.
I am really having quite a laugh about so many
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
You can't tell the trolls from the spammers. (for all those jackasses out there that try to make spamming sound like an acceptible thing to do. Hobby.. shit.. You know people make hobbies of fiddling young children but I would kill a person i caught doing it.)
The married ones or the unmarried ones?
junkbusters.com
or dmaconsumers.org
Posting as AC because this is, well, spam. IAA reporter at a well-known computer magazine, and I've been seeing an upsurge in press releases from the ad industry about spam. Here's one:
Legislation may not be the answer to stopping spam. More than 30 states have anti-spam laws already, to no effect. And spam, like junk mail, is protected by the constitution. So although it may be a great inconvenience, the First Amendment will never fall to inconvenience. Also, anti-spam laws tend to hurt small businesses far more than established companies.
Mod this Down! Down down down the Shi^H^H^H^HWabbit Hole!
Look for dead dot coms in bankruptcy, or small town ISP's that are folding. I'm not sure if there is really a place they list them for sale, probably not ebay type material.
Well I'm the doctor and I say you're dead, so shut up and take it like a man!
My fave?
Send $5 to some rabid wing of Jebus freeeeks with a note that says:
"I AM POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL. PLEASE COME TO MY HOUSE AT (x) ADDRESS AND PRAY WITH ME TO SAVE MY SOUL!!! I DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH LONGER I WILL BE "NORMAL" AGAIN! IF I TELL YOU TO LEAVE - IGNORE ME - IT'S JUST THE DEVIL SPEAKING !!! HELP ME!!! PLEASE SWEET JEBUS!!!!"
Also: sign him up for one of those "10 CDs for a dime" offers and send him the worlds WORST music. Not even kitshy fun crap - just garbage, like some anonymous second rate "Modern Country" or some grade B hip hop or treacle like "smooth jazz".
Not only does he get a lot of crappy CDs, but a rekkid company intent on demanding he by more of their "product".
RS
RIGHT HERE IN THE CITY OF EMPHYSEMA!
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I hate to say this, but "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." One incident of tracking down spammers doesn't matter in the big scheme of things. Others have down near as much as this guy has done.
...from my experience, even if he does contact the right providers/abuse services, nothing will happen. Upstream/server/hosting providers "generally" (and I say this loosely) don't give a shit. As long as they pay their bills on time they let the spammer do as they please. While this sucks, it's the business of the 'net. Don't get me wrong though, some networks will respond and do take action to stop these scumbags, but alas, these nets are one in few =(.
While I too hate spammers, I think he's going overboard. This crap happens all the time on the Internet. He's just wasting precious seconds of his life trying to wipe this guy out...
Each class of mail service is supposed to be self supporting.
Fight Spammers!
Solution: Don't buy anything you get a spam for.
But you might not know how the spammer gets paid? Again I do know because I used to work for these people. There are three different contracts a client can make with a spammer. First is paying a set amount of money per each email sent, this is very small amount, 1/100 of a cent. So the money to be made for a spammer is in the number of unique email address he/she can send email to. The second contract type is page views. You know the spam with the pretty graphics. Under this contract type, each time you open one of these emails the spammer gets paid. And just how does the spammer know you opened one of his/her email? The images come from the spammer's web servers and logs you image request. It is a little more complicated than that but you get the picture. And last contract type is web traffic to the client's site that results in a sale, again not going into details. Cha-ching, they both get paid.
Before you start whining that you don't buy any thing that was spammed;
1) Someone out there does and you can't stop them.
2) I don't care.
The only other recourse is to try to get the spammer booted off of his up stream provider. The spammer's provider(s) could be some little Podunk ISP or leased lines from the big boys. And the only way to get them booted is to complain to the right people, and no the /. forum is not the place.
How is this done?
Forget about doing whois on any domain or machine names you find in the email headers, they are most likely forged or just plain crap string of characters. Grab the first IP address of the smtp server closest to the origin of the message. Take that IP address and go to www.arin.com and pug it into the (IP) whois search. (ARIN assigns the IP addresss in the US and knows whom they are assigned to.) If the IP address is assigned to a US company it will give who and how to contact them. If the IP address is assigned in another country then the registry will be listed and just follow the link and repeat the (IP) whois search there.
Usually an abuse@the_ip_owners email address is listed. Now you have to do is forward a copy of the spam to that address. If enough people forward email/complain spammers get the boot.
Will you take the blue pill or the red pill?
but diablo2 account doesn't count, you nerd
"..NP.." ? Nitpicking is one word.. :)
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Let's say I've got the best lock I can get (Spamassassin).. I'm still getting 100 advertisers per day at least testing the doorknob.. most of them bring lockpicks (l0ckpicks...) with them, and about 5 a day manage to pick my lock and sucessfully shove their advertising in my face, even though they can obviously see that I'm trying to avoid it.. and all of them are wearing ski-masks.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
the thread starts in April 2001 and goes to June 2002. Why is this news?
Member-Owned Cooperative. Here in rural Alaska, I have DSL for ~$50/month, and I d/l gigs of stuff, erm in my work of course. U/l tons of stuff too. Best part is I get a capital credits check every year. Hard to believe some of my neighbors go with higher-priced corporate-owned foreign ISP's like MSN, but many are on dialup still so for them it is not as important to get the best deal.
cp
In fact, the only game I really play is "The Collossal Cave", unless pen-testing is a game...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
According to some horror stories I've heard from vets of Vietnam, ears were taken as trophies there. Blizzard did not invent the concept.
Hire some very nasty people with guns to go do a drive by on them. It's Russia, you can prolly get away with it if anyone can anywhere.
i have seen several /20's for sale on ebay this year, also i believe there are a few ISP focused mailing lists that people buy/sell gear that also regularly have portable numbers for sale. I think you are looking at $4k or higher for that many ips. And you need to pay a yearly fee. Some allocationds are grandfathered and you don't need to pay yearly fees on those.
I don't like spammers much either, but this is getting out of hand.
How long is it going to be until people are getting burnt at the stake or stoned to death just because they were accused of being a spammer?
It's the spanish inquisition all over again.
Yeah I know someone is going to say 'I didn't expect the spanish inquisition..'
Why is Florida such haven for spammers? Are all the retired US citizens doing this to boost their pension?? :-)
So, how to handle it in a friendly and intelligent manner? Better filtering/sorting? Really cheap postage (0.1 cent?) would do it as it would raise the cost for spammers to a level where it is no longer profitable to send all that much, but would it be worth the trouble? It could be implemented in parallell with those who really don't want spam only accepting mail with a certain payment attached. A very cheap micropayment scheme is needed. Right now you can close the door to spam by not accepting any mail from unknown senders. That is what I would do at my house if people did as in your post. Actually I don't get spam shoved in my face, I get it in my mailbox.
It should be made law everywhere that [SPAM] or [ADVERTISMENT] or something like that should be included in the header/subject.
Then any spam that doesn't bare the mark should be sent to some organisation that fines the company advertised.
Chasing the spammers is hard, the people paying the spammers should be targetted instead.
Your post should be modded down for being funny!
The fact that you can't spell "uncooth", combined with what the word means is so fuckin' funny, I'm typing this post from the floor!
I read this as In Pursuit Of A Spanner, and thought it had something to do with Beneath a steel sky.. I'm such a nerd..:(
You probably already have tried this, but if they are spamming mostly russian addresses, block the entire russian/eastern european ip blocks, unless you need them. If so, you can be more selective on what to block.
While this may put to rest your mail server, I wouldn't want the bounces hitting your firewall either. So get your isp to block the addresses upstream.
This of course, may result in you getting blackholed from the russians receiving back bounces on their complaints (I believed bounced postmaster@yourmailserver.com emails may get you blacklisted), you should be able to straighten this out with the lists, and get taken off. If you are a fan of the lists, you should have to put up with their blacklisting tactics as well.
Good afternoon,
After receiving a e-mail solicitation for your "Miracle Member Enlargement" pills, I immediately sent in a money order for $49.95. I am pleased to announce that the product worked as advertised, and I am now a full four inches longer than I was originally. I have also gained a fair amount of girth. There is one problem though.
How do I take a dump without "it" touching the toilet water? This is a real concern of mine, not only because the water is freezing, but because I have been totally unable to use public restrooms out of fear of disease, germs, and other nastiness resulting from contact with the bottom of the bowl.
I am curious to know if there are other customers with similar complaints, and to hear how they have remedied the situation. A quick response would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your time,
"Big" Buck Hunter
Many of the world's Internet users pay *per minute* for access, to the telco, the ISP, or in some cases both. So yes, spam really does cost a lot of us money.
:-(
I've recently returned to the United States after nine years of living abroad, and everywhere I lived during those nine years (eight of them in a G-7 country) had per-minute charges.
I don't have to deal with those anymore, but I do have to deal with being unemployed and with waiting for the fscking telco to get those three load coils out of my phone line so the DSL I ordered three weeks ago and was told two weeks ago that it was up and running, will actually work
"Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Drain his blood!
kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!" they yelled and started their intense dance under the darkening sky.
The vast majority of spam (90+%) comes from less than a dozen individuals. So it's not THAT uphill.
I have an interesting technique. A lot of spam comes from Florida, which has no anti-spamming laws, correct? My solution is to forward spam not only to the FTC, but also to the Florida State Attorney General (ag@oag.state.fl.us), which is appropriate given the questionable legality of many spam offers.
If everyone does this, perhaps the powers that be will get the message.
Also remember that spammers haven't shown much concern about following the law. When you're virtually anonymous to all but your ISP (*cough* Better SMTP protocol *cough*), you tend to have this "they can't catch me" attitude.
ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) is at http://arin.net/, not the .com domain given above. Drop the IP address you want to find in the "search whois" search box at top-right of the page.
Note: I subscribe to the "death of the triple w". It isn't needed and it's horrible to pronounce and it adds up to an awful lot of wasted typing and space. So where do i sign up?
I am unable to get to slashdot from my IP. I get on an open proxy and I'm able to get to slashdot. Banned? In God's name, why?
Let's use your analogy of email to your home (it's not a good one but we can use it).
You are getting EMAIL to your Internet account (you consider this a spammer entering your home). I consider it an unlocked arena with no KEEP OUT signs.
It's his right to enter the arena just as it is the arena's owner/managment to block his entry.
Irrelevant. Trespassing is still illegal even if there is no specific KEEP OUT sign, so long as there is some clear indication that the place is somebody else's private property. In this case, an e-mail address (other than one's own) is somebody else's private property on its face.
For that matter, virtually all spam incorporates some attempt to bypass anti-spam filtering. This is ironclad proof that the spammer knew that he was trespassing, and should be punished under the existing computer-cracking laws.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Maybe it just wasn't funny?
an email address is not private property. Why do you think that it is?
I will continue to argue the point that it is open season until REAL/DECENT legislation is passed that makes it illegal.
But seriously, yes, I believe (physical) bulk mail to be a nuisance and would like to figure out a way to get it stopped. Every tuesday or wednesday I open up my mailbox and find it full of junk - huge coupon "magazines" printed on unstapled poorly produced paper with various cards and other bits of junk, unglued, somewhere in the pile. It's not enough that it's been made difficult for me to find the legit mail that day, they've also had to make it practically impossible to take it from the mailbox to the litter-bin (involving a minute's walk through a parking lot to my apartment) without dropping something. Thanks a f---ing bunch you marketing morons. I am thinking of proposing to the apartment complex that a wastebin be attached to all of our mailbox units.
I cancelled cable because it became impossible to watch a one hour TV program without sitting through 15-20 minutes of advertising. I just want some peace. I don't see why it's considered such a big deal to want that. Each level seems to get worse and worse. Several sources of information are unavailable in forms that do not require looking at advertising. Other advertisers make nuisances of themselves, deliberately pestering you for God-knows what reason, crippling valuable communication infrastructure in process. And the spammers take the latter principle to the fullest and expect you to be burdened with the costs of their activities, by not merely adding to the costs of running an ISP, but doing so in the most dramatic ways, forcing ISPs to get steadily more powerful mail servers to cope with being overloaded by bursts of activities.
If there is any reason capitalism should and will fail, it's advertising. Advertising run rampant is the best argument for communism ever. Maybe it's the only argument for communism. All I want is privacy, communications, to eat, drink, enjoy the arts, and be relatively healthy. I don't need the profit motive to get any of these.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Are you friggin' kidding me? He actually calls himself a "Business Savant"? What a laugh that is.
But the bulletin boards are not. http://spaminsurance.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=4&s id=0db7765c751499feaffb167643298fbf
Not that I'm advocating it, but I'm surprised there haven't been more episodes of vigilante justice in the spirit of HBO's Tony Soprano.
I'd wager that if enough of these guys got their hands smashed, their cars torched or their apartments trashed, they'd start thinking about a different career.
Or have I just been watching too much HBO?
The Obvious Man!
If you don't want spam, then don't let your email get harvested, by say posting it on a site like slashdot.
Since when is ignorance a point of view?
There are several areas of the world where it is not possible to get unmetered access.
And if you're going to call someone a mororn [sic], make sure you can spell it.
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
> Call up your local post office and tell them you want to refuse all fourth class mail.
Is there something similar in Canada?
Except they just changed providers, and it started using up too much of my time, and the amount of spam I was getting kept getting worse and worse until I had to abandon the account.
Now I'm very careful about putting my email where it might be harvested. My spam situation is tolerable, except it's really a pain that there's no email white pages for finding old friends.
Face it, the current email system is an old Arpanet thing that relies on a level of network courtesy that no longer exists. Spam will go away when we get a new email infrastructure based on verifiable identities, not before. All the "spammer hunting" is futile exercise is self-righteousness.
posted by Robm at the dslreports forum:
... "
"... We do not want to be heavy-handed in our approach and our research. To get back to the original reason for my post now, "Quick & Dirty" = Sloppy and inaccurate. According to Military.com buddy finder www.military.com/Locator/DodDetail/1,1..[?] there was a Brad Heckman that served. (MOS 91R - Veterinary Food Inspection Specialist). I can't verify that this is or is not really him though but it does agree with what he said
Because if you get an e-mail address by cracking into an ISP instead of paying for it, you will be charged with (among other things) theft. Duh.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Solution: Don't buy anything you get a spam for.
Ok, so we know that you and I are clueful enough to not buy spam products. We are so clueful that we install filters so we never even see spam. What about all the people who aren't that smart?
We can keep shooting at moving targets, taking out spammers where they show up, but there are alot more spammers than there are people willing to spend the time to track down and knock over the spammer again (and if he is good, he'll just move on to another ISP, and we'll have to knock him down again.
What is another solution, one that doesn't take as much effort?
I wrote a program for my windows box that parses the spam folder in my mozilla and Outlook Express mailboxes (I use Popfile to filter spam into other mailboxes, and mozilla mail does a pretty good job of identifying it itself). The program pulls out anything that looks like a URL, then downloads the page and any images and etc on the page. It does this twice a day, every day.
The object is not to single-handedly DOS the spammers website. It is to incur on the spammer a small cost for sending me email. Spam is only profitable because advertising to uninterested parties is nearly cost-free. Raise the cost of spamming, in this case by raising the bandwidth required, and fewer spammers will be interested.
The best part is that for most tech-savvy users its very simple to impliment. Since its not an attack, a few false positives are ok, and because its automatic, no effort is required. Rather than spending hours data-mining google and whois for personal details of a spammer, I can just be content that every message costs them money.
Ignoring spam will not make it go away. This is just another tool in the spam-fighters toolbox.
Wanna make the spammer pay? Do what I do and install a program to parse all the URLs out of your incoming spam and download their entire website every day.
Not enough to be a nusiance all by your lonesome (eliminating any problems with false positives or abuse charges), just enough to wiggle the bandwidth meter on the spammers website. Tell all your friends to do the same.
Spamming works because its nearly free, its up to us to fix that. Spammers can falsify headers, ignore bounce messages and provide no return address, but they almost always include a web address. Use it. Extensively.
Filtering spam out of your inbox helps to make it more profitable for spammers. Anyone who is smart enough to filter spam is smart enough to ignore the products anway. Instead, route it into a holding bin, regex it for URLs and once or twice a day, download everything from those URLs to the bit bucket.
Get all your friends to do the same thing. Bandwidth costs spammers money, so make them pay for sending spam by using that bandwidth. They sent you are URL, so they can hardly complain if you take advantage of it.
I (via my subscription fee) am subsidizing the cost of a spammer's business
And by blocking spam, you are making the spammers business more profitable by filtering yourself out of the group of people that use the bandwidth of the site through which he is selling products.
What you need to do is install a robot behind your door that will very politely take up as much of the spammers time as possible, without clueing him in that you are deliberately taking his time without buying anything.
This is a long term strategy. If spammers have to spend money on bandwidth sending their webpages to everybody who requests it, their profits will go down, hopefully negative.
Make the robot opensource and provide it to all your friends too. Thats what I'm doing (although its a couple days work away from a releasable state still)
it makes it all the easier to block.
No. they will not send you mail from this IP, but they will connect through one or more open proxies.
I.E.
This means they are not inventive users of the system as it is designed, but abusers that use false identities.
When you get your cable service you have nothing to say about the ads, but when some person cuts away the programme and starts transmitting his porn or other abusive material, under the station logo of a known station or listing your name on the screen, you have some base for complaining.
I bet it has been said before but it has been on my mind for a while. Don't go for the drug pushers go for the drug Manufacturers. We will most likely never be able to cost effectively outwit the spammers directly. But if we remove the legality or profitability of the companies to buy the spam time we will get results. They give all the contact information you need to give them money, it should be enough to track the company that is paying the spammer(s) in question. If they find that they are getting reviewed by the government or an official representative of an antispam investigation for illicit business advertisement, they will loose interest quick. The spammers will not spam if they are not making money. Bottom line. Sorry if this seems niave, but I think it is a direction that would work. Be Well All.
who's to say that 99% of the spam out there is from cracking into an ISP?
As far as I am concerned, if you give out your email address (that can be published somewhere), you are knowingly forgoing your right to privacy.
I (via my subscription fee) am subsidizing the cost of a spammer's business. Its a misnomer that you aren't subsidizing the cost of the junk mail you receive from the USPS. The 37 cents you pay today is an average of what it costs to send all letters together. The USPS couldn't send a single letter coast to coast for 37c. Every time you buy a stamp, you are subsidizing them. Lets face it: the 'cost of my time to hit delete' is less time than the 'cost of my time to sort through all my USPS mail and throw it in the trash can' unless your trash can happens to be right next to your mailbox. Moreover, it's been my experience that hitting the opt-out usually works. I was getting 40+ messages a day at my yahoo address. On all of the messages that provided an opt-out, I clicked. I now get about 2-3 messages, all from the guys who don't do opt-out.
Looking through his threads, this guy really wants him gone. Imagine if he spent that much effort trying to get laid instead...
But you might not know how the spammer gets paid? Again I do know because I used to work for these people. There are three different contracts a client can make with a spammer.
The second contract type is page views. You know the spam with the pretty graphics. Under this contract type, each time you open one of these emails the spammer gets paid. And just how does the spammer know you opened one of his/her email? The images come from the spammer's web servers and logs you image request. It is a little more complicated than that but you get the picture.
We'll, I don't know about the other two ways, but it seems one way to beat this is to raise the hit count up to the point that the cost to the client is far greater than the actual revnue from sales.
You could create honey pot email address for teh sole purpose of requesting th egraphic (multiple times if that ups the payment)
It may not stop spam, but at least the fools that use it would feel some pain.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I don't think I'm being heavy handed. I told Ameritech Tech to ask him pointblank for his unit ID, dates he was in the Gulf during Desert Storm, and where he was located. If he's for real he shouldn't have a problem with providing any of that and answering those questions would allow me to find out for sure and very quickly.
Also, for what it's worth I told Ameritech Tech that what I had found (lack of his name on a Desert Shield/Desert Storm database) in no way assured he was lying - but did warrant further checking on the matter.
There's no way I'd make a call one way or the other without more information.
-Anonymous Cowardly Good Guy
I'm willing to agree that my home-invasion analogy is probably not the best (after all, there's not much emotional trauma involved with spam...unless you're a parent whose child views porno-spam but in that case I would argue that you need to be a better parent). I'm also willing to agree that it's just common sense to avoid posting any email address anywhere on the Internet if you don't want spam sent to that email address.
I'll even buy the argument that I subsidize the cost of direct snail-mail spam by buying stamps...up to a certain extent. The difference is that I'm basically forced to buy stamps to pay bills. And increasingly, it is becoming more necessary to have an Internet connection for the very same reason. What an interesting recursive phenomenon. Here we have an industry (advertising) that in many ways has indirectly managed to force us to actually help pay the costs required for them to annoy us! Brilliant business move, I'll give them that.
I'm curious about what you think "REAL/DECENT legislation" illegalizing spam might be? Because in my opinion, there is no way to legislate the problem and even if there were, enforcement would be a nightmare. The only cure to the spam problem would have to be a public information campaign to educate people about the problem and advise them to boycott spam-friendly ISPs and stop doing any business with companies that choose to advertise that way. That's the only way I think we can effectively remove the profit-motive while at the same time keeping the legitimate channels open. The problem then of course becomes...how do you launch a worldwide public information campaign? I got it! What we need are anti-spammer...SPAMMERS!
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
the data is not correct.
MX records may *NOT* point to CNAMEs. the *ONLY* thing that they may point to is an A record.
CNAMEs don't work, IP addresses don't work, an MX record has to point at an A record.
(not that this has anything to do with whether someone is a spammer or not....just with whether they have sufficient clue to be trusted near a DNS server).
okay, my comments comes from the fact that when a Diablo character killed another character, it gets the victim's ear =)
whoever modded my previous post down is an idiot
I do hope you realise that you're creating a 'zombie DoS net' which future genertions of script kiddies will be very happy to exploit.
I don't think that's the 'solution' I was looking for.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Unsolicited mail cost me time. It has on occassion locked up my email system and cause me to miss mail. A copyrighted book contains the message, "illegal to copy whole or in part". If you copy list out of that book, it's plagarism. If a spammer copies email addresses from a copyrighted Website - shouldn't that also be considered plagarism? So sue the spammers. Make it costly for them, I'm sick of them creating messages with special characters, misspellings and other tricks to get past the filters that I'm programming into my computer. The fact that they try to get around the filters is proof that they are being deceptive, dishonest and no one in their right mind should do business with anyone like that.
I do hope you realise that you're creating a 'zombie DoS net' which future genertions of script kiddies will be very happy to exploit.
I suppose they could exploit it by becoming spammers, but it seems like a very inefficent way to do so.
And we will keep returning the _same_ answer, which you in your marketing frenzy are unable to comprehend.
I own a small IT business,
Good for you.
and I occaisonally send out 20 mails or so to people whom I don't know but who I think may be interested in my services
EAT SHIT AND DIE, SPAMMER!
Is this spam?
Did your victims solicit, request, or otherwise authorize these communications? I suspect NOT, since you state that you do not know them. This makes your communications spam regardless of your intentions, your business, your desire to communicate, your "First Ammendment Right To Free Speech(tm)" or any other delusions you may subscribe to. Spam is trespass on chattels. MY mailbox. MY property. The concept that this is wrong and punishable dates back hundreds of years.
If so, how about 1
If unsolicited, it's still spam.
where does legitimate marketing end and spam begin?
"Advertising" ends at my property, where it becomes tresspass and my right to use force to stop it begins. There is no such thing as "legitimate marketing", that's a fantasy the advertising industry is trying to get you to buy. GET IT ALL OUT OF MY SIGHT!
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
Heil hitler, and toss another email on the fire eh? I thought /. readers were a bit more forward thinking than they have demonstrated in this thread.
Is unsoclicted direct mail in your regular mailbox "tresspass to chattels" as well?
I understand and sympathize with those affected by the deluge of fraudlent offers, forged headers and those that send 1 mil+ mails/day. But I draw the line when honest businessmen, arent allowed to send even one unsolicted advertisement. If the offer is bonafide, the headers aren't forged, it's not bulk, the message is clearly marked ADV:, and requests not to recieve future mail are honored... the commercial mail should be allowed! Any attmept to prohobit such mail sets a dangerous anti-capitalistic precedent. The freaks who want to live in a society with 0 advertising are welcome too, try moving to the backwoods of Africa. and oh by-the-way you probably wont have to worry about recieving any of my mails there either.
You think so?
if you have several hundred/thousand machines which accept a (control message) and in return generate large amounts of traffic to a (target), that is a floodnet. I have no doubt myself that the script kiddies WILL find a way of mapping and using it.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Just so you know, there is no Palmo Way in Palm Beach. There may be one in North Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, South Palm Beach or Lake Worth, but not in Palm Beach itself, which is a 5-mile-long by one-mile-wide island with street names that have been unchanged for the last 50 years or more.
wags
because it's nearly free for the sender. Anyway, exactly who am I supposed to tell to stop buying "penis enhancement" products?
Ear, Tail or scalp (depending on the bounty) were needed as proof in the old west for having killed an unwanted animal or a native american.
My guess is he was compairing spammers to what the old west considered pests.
I don't actually exist.
It would seem that the First Amendment does not cover copyright infringment and fraud (lying about donations to charity).
Which points up the weakness of the Internet which spam exploits. The Internet consists of a bunch of privately-owned networks that allow each other access on the assumption that people on one network won't abuse the resources of another. This assumption has been weakened over the years, but is still a fundamental of Internet architecture. As long as we assume that all users will be good citizens, we're going to have spammers, script kiddies, various kinds of griefers, and all the rest.
That would make sense if all spam were identified as such. Then people could choose to receive it (????) or not.
In each one of those cases, you are not the victim of a crime. The person they are impersonating, or who's computers they are using without authorization are.
They send mail via one or more systems that are used as proxies, without their prior consent
If they have open proxies/relays, then they are arguably implicity allowing anyone to use them without prior authorization. If they hacked the relay, that's another matter. Either way, no crime is committed against the reciever of the spam, and it is soley the proxy/relay owner's responsibility to press charges.
They use sender addresses that do not belong to them, but to other people
IANAL, so I don't know if you can sue someone who wrote someone else's return address on mail they send you. Perhaps fraud. Either way, it's the fraud that's the crime, not sending spam. And even then, I'm not sure any laws applying to postal fraud even cover e-mail use.
They advertise websites that they do not host themselves, but have put on hacked machines or they use hacked machines as proxies
Again, this is a crime against the owners of the hacked machines, not you, the reciever of spam directed at those machines.
This means they are not inventive users of the system as it is designed, but abusers that use false identities.
I agree. However, making the owners of open proxies and mail relays aware of what they are allowing people do do with their machines and trying to get them to close them up, securing the machines they attempt to subvert illegally, and prosecuting them for computer intrusion and identity theft is what should be done. Not stopping unsolicited advertisements.
When you get your cable service you have nothing to say about the ads, but when some person cuts away the programme and starts transmitting his porn or other abusive material, under the station logo of a known station or listing your name on the screen, you have some base for complaining.
Sure you can complain, but YOU don't have the right to sue over it. The station that's being impersonated does. The only real control you have is to call your cable provider and cancel the service because the channels they provide or the cable provider themselves are doing a good enough job for you.
Unless you change the law to allow me to prosecute someone for a crime committed against someone else. Of course, that is when I excercise my right to complain by leaving for a more sane country, or go build myself a cabin in the wilderness if no country doesn't do something so stupid.
I'll overlook your invocation of Godwin's Law and your generalization of Slashdot readers. This is, after all, a passionate subject and people have staked careers on the belief that people are incapable of seeking out the products that they want.
Yes. The only difference is that I don't pay for that spam and, thanks to those anonymous bulkmail response envelopes, I am able to stick it to the assholes where it hurts: right in the pocketbook.
Respectfully, I don't think you really get it because you followed this statement with:
I disagree with you to a large extent. I believe that you're thinking that we still need a "push" mechanism to present options to customers...and we do to some extent. But the scope has been slashed by the Internet. The last time I bought I car, I walked into the dealership with a printout of what I wanted. All that was left to do in our transaction was to negotiate the price. I realize that there are people today that don't have an Internet connection so there is probably still a need for direct marketing. But I suspect that that need will continue to decrease as we turn out generations that take the Internet for granted.
How? How would the prohibition of direct marketing ruin any company that provides a product or a service to people? The prohibition of direct marketing would put a lot of people out of work which really sucks, but paradigms shift and these days I question the legitimacy of their livelihood.
Oh crap, I think I just got trolled by a spammer. News flash, bud: You're a pimple on capitalism. We're just finally getting around to popping you.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
Hey, wait your turn. There are a lot of guys in front of you and we all have multiple bushel baskets of the shite.
I thought
I can't speak for _everyone_ here, but I suspect that if you took a poll, you'd find that our average tolerance for spam has passed zero and is falling down into the negative numbers. We do think forward, but all we see there is exponential growth of spam unless something devastating is done about it and FAST.
Is unsoclicted direct mail in your regular mailbox "tresspass to chattels" as well?
I would like to say so, but IMU that wood mail box technically belongs to the USPS, or some other such loophole severely restricts my control over it. I'm going to scrounge up a free beer grabage can to put under the mailboxes at my apartment. I bet it'll get a LOT of business.
Too Bad. It's MY mailbox. I'd say that if you'll mark it "ADV:" or something equally easy to filter, that may mitigate your crime to the point where I might not advocate keelhauling as a penalty, but OTOH my ISP would then be faced with filtering the million "legitimate" ADV: spams that he'd receive every day for me, and I know he won't be able to do that for free.
Any attmept to prohobit [any and all advertising of any kind, not limited to spam] sets a dangerous anti-capitalistic precedent....
I'm sorry, but while I'm generally in favor of capitalism, I consider advertizing to be one of its more sinister excesses, especially when it's carried to such an extent that I can't open my eyes anymore without having to look at someone's commercial. I'd VERY much like to see an experiment in which ALL advertizing is banned, for, say, a year. Your claim is that, without advertizing, capitalism would fail, and I simply do not believe that that would happen. I think all consumers would be happier without the megaphone constantly blaring into their ear, and business would go on regardless. Except, I guess, the advertizing business, oh well. I'll remind everyone that the buggy-whip business pretty much took it in the shorts when automobiles were introduced, and no one (outside the buggy-whip industry) considered it to be any huge loss.
Being a businessman and an advertiser, you're suffering under the delusion that, because you have a message which is important to _you_ and which you want very much for me to see, that _I_ must therefore want to see it. I DO NOT. You're suffering under the delusion that you have some kind of "right" to get your message to me. YOU DO NOT. To the extent that advertizing interferes with my life (and this extent increases daily) you have NO right to my time. It's MY life. They're MY eyes, and I have the right to choose to NOT want to see it.
You (or any other advertizer) are NOT building "brand recognition", "positive consumer attitide", or any other kind of good public relations by intruding into our lives. All you're building is resentment and animosity. GO AWAY.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
So, how to handle it in a friendly and intelligent manner?
.40 S&W. These guys are past friendliness.
_Friendliness?_ You're kidding, right?
If someone wearing a ski mask picks my lock, comes in my door, and tries to shove an advertizement in my face, my reaction is going to be to put an extra hole or two in his ski mask, about the size of a
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
I sure don't want you for a neighbour then. Remember that people make mistakes, and when you are ready to shoot the evil spammer you might get your neighbour instead.