Slashdot Mirror
When Good Spammers Go Bad
pfleming writes "According to this blog article on BadTux by Eric Green, the constant harrassment of spammers has a price. You get a Cease and Desist letter- or more correctly, your ISP gets a C/D letter. But, if you're a hard core geek you just might get your site more notice as it gets mirrored out onto sympathetic hosts.
Also mirrored in other locations."
How much is the hourly cap? I have mirrored it, although the formatting of the rant is pretty dire
http://blue.doosh.net/~yarn/elgreen.html.gz[4k]
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I've got a file with ip addresses of spammers who've pissed me off enough to blacklist them. It's available at http://enthalpy.homelinux.org/spammers.txt.
/etc/firewall/spammers.txt`
/23 in the iptables might be too 'clumsy' for some. You can use /24 which blocks a smaller group of computers around the ip address in the list. /23 works fine for us.
;)
I use the following script:
for I in `cat
do
echo Blacklisting Spammer: $I/23
iptables -A INPUT -s $I/23 -j REJECT
done
to blacklist them.
I personally guanantee that all the addresses in this list have spammed me. If you don't believe / trust me, fine - don't use it. I use it on a production server and have never had any complaints...
By the way, the
The list is 98% asian dsl accounts.
Also, for an alternative solution, try this:
smbclient -L $IP_ADDRESS
where $IP_ADDRESS is the address of the computer that spammed you.
If you're in luck, you'll find yourself connecting to a Windows computer. It'll ask you for a password. Hit enter. If you're still in luck, it will list the available shares, and a list of server names. Pick a server name. If there are more than one, try each one
Now, download and compile 'smbdie'. Search for it on google. Run:
smbdie -i $IP_ADDRESS -p 139 -t $SERVER_NAME
where $SERVER_NAME is the server name you just picked from smbclient's output ( above ). If you are still in luck, you will have rebooted the spammer's computer ( it blue-screens ), and maybe even caused some data loss.
Really don't like them? Add the smbdie command to a cron job. I've found most spammers have fixed ip addresses, and they become available to reboot again withing approximately 2-3 minutes.
Enjoy!
Here's most of the paragraph that you quoted from
- I offered to take down evidence-eliminator-sucks.com for free. All they had to do was take all mention of me off their site. I mean, what do I care about what Windows losers get scammed out of? But no, they had to go off and hire a solicitor to spew out a cart00ney, and now it's too late for that: the site is now hosted on several servers scattered around the Internet, and I couldn't make the site go away now even if I wanted to.
What he's refering to is this page on evidence eliminator's page that twists the truth a lot about Eric Green.Anyway, if he wanted to be more accurate, he probably would have said "I care a great deal about evidence-eliminator removing untruths on their website about me, more than I necessarily care about getting the truth out."
Mirrored from news.badtux.net
Eric Green doesn't use Windows very much. A long-time Linux user and advocate since 1995, Windows software interests him about as much as, say, the price of pork bellies on the Chicago futures market. So why is the publisher of a much-spammed Windows software product trying to shut him down? Welcome to the wild and whacky story of the strangest bunch of spammer scammers on the Internet: those whacky folks at Robin Hood Software whose overpriced "Evidence Eliminator" software is spammed on every Internet forum on a regular basis. This is a tale of spammers and spam, and an unlikely spam fighter who has learned that spammers suck even worse than most people think. And in the end, it's the story of how spam fighters around the globe support each other when the spammers decide to go after their critics and detractors. It all started back in June 2000. At the time, I was researching encryption algorithms for use in a new software product. There was this product called 'Evidence Eliminator', produced by a company named 'Robin Hood Software', being hyped on the sci.crypt and alt.privacy newsgroups. Curious, I went to the web site of the publisher of the software. After being subjected to flash animation, popups threatening me with jail if I didn't buy Evidence Eliminator, and no way to contact the makers of the product other than a web form, I decided: "These people aren't credible." And said so. From my work account. Big mistake. I didn't realize I was dealing with spammers. I thought they'd be interested in seeing what an industry veteran thought. But there was no response to my message on the sci.crypt newsgroup. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. I went on with his life. But Andy Churchill, one of the principals of Robin Hood Software, wasn't so eager to let go. Imagine my surprise when, in early 2001, I ran a Google search for my name and discovered that I was part of a vast conspiracy by some strange New World Order collection of villains to destroy the makers of "the best security product on the market"! Naturally I wasn't happy. And as someone who isn't shy about expressing his opinion, I expressed it, sending EMAIL to Robin Hood Software demanding that they remove any mention of me from their site. Andy Churchill of Robin Hood Software iadmits to have received that EMAIL, but says, "we deleted it". There was no response from Robin Hood Software. So I did what comes naturally to any Linux geek: I put up a web page. Which Robin Hood Software swiftly (and in violation of my copyright) duplicated on their own web site, with "False." (no explanation) beside each of my points as to why you shouldn't buy their software. And as time went by and, thanks to the readers of my site, I accumulated more and more evidence about Robin Hood Software's activities, including evidence that they were behind the "push ICQ" spamming of their product (an EMAIL to their affiliates urging them to do that kind of spamming), Robin Hood Software's web site became yet more lurid, even to the point of duplicating a copyrighted gag photo (cropping out Agent Binks) on their own web site. These people don't appear to be too stable -- definite candidates for the aluminum foil beanie award. In early 2002 I purchased the domain name 'evidence-eliminator-sucks.com', and did a major overhaul of the web site to try to organize the by-then large amount of information that I'd accumulated about Robin Hood Software and its activities. By that time it was clear that these weren't nice people. Deceptive claims in their advertising, huge amounts of spam originating from their affiliates, ia browser hijack virus that hijacks people's web browsers and redirects them to the Evidence Eliminator home page, and their continued attempts to disparage their critics and competitors on their aptly-named Dis-Information page pretty much are a Major Clue. I also launched the "Evidence Eliminator Sucks Conspiracy" -- both a statement on what I feels is Robin Hood Software's paranoia in their rantings about a "vast conspiracy" out
How funny! I just discovered and read a story on Kuro5hin about this, written by Mr. Green himself.
He posted the article to Kuro5hin too. You can find it here.
I know you're a troll but for the benefit of other people here...
/dev/hda
hdparm is your friend. Make sure you enable udma transfers. E.g.
hdparm -d1 -X udma6
You can do this for your other drives/cdrom/etc.
For example, without udma I can only burn cd's at around 12x and it uses all of the cpu time. With it on I can burn cd's at 30x and the cpu is virtually 99% free.
In short, configure your computer properly. Even in older windows you had to enable DMA for DVD roms and such.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
2 thoughts:
1) don't let your browser report your real email address (if you're on windows, this may require using a non-IE browser)
2) Spamassassin is your friend...
Yep, I have a fairly low user number here :-). The blog is still down, but I retrieved the story and posted it as a static page at the URL in question. No more Slashdot Effect. I didn't realize that my poor Celeron 800 with a whole 64mb of RAM couldn't keep up with a 512kbit DSL line when serving dynamically-generated pages, but it's having no problems handling the load with a simple static page.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Well, it wasn't as if I was planning for my *blog* to get slashdotted. But once I realized what was happening (i.e., why my web server's hard drive light was on solid!), it wasn't a big deal. After all, I already knew that GeekCode was slow as a slug, the only reason I used it was because it was the easiest of the PHP-based weblogs for me to modify, and my blog has never gotten more than a few thousand hits a day so the speed didn't matter. But if everybody's coming there for one article... (shrug) serve it to them statically. My web server (which is running FreeBSD, BTW, not Linux) is now quite happy.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
When I posted in their "discussion board" that this had occurred and pointed out the "Evidence-eliminator-sucks" web page, I was promptly tossed off the system - with no warning or explanation. Even better, I'm still getting the spam email from the web site.
As for their ethics, yes, their ethics suck. Their advertising says you'll go to jail if you don't use their product, they have popup scare ads that display your hard drive (if you're using Windows) and says that they're looking at your hard drive and you better buy their software or all those porn gifs will get you thrown in jail (it's a simple btw, with C:\ as the source -- i.e., it's just displaying your hard drive to yourself), and then of course there is the virus that their affiliates are sending around to hijack people's web browsers and point it back to the Evidence Eliminator site, and ... well. I think you're getting the picture now. These are not Nice Folks. And if we can trace that virus back to their offices, they will be wearing stripes soon.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Here's all you have to see to know what type of people these folks are, if they're still allowing links from slashdot. I could hit this page from my grandmother's PC and it would present me with the same sort of rhetoric. If they're rejecting links from slashdot, open a new browser window and go to http://www.evidence-eliminator.com/go.shtml to see the scare tactics these guys use to drum up business.
-- Jeff Clough, Humble Programmer
US law is much less restrictive. The First Amendment is held to encourage "robust debate", even if some the statements aren't entirely correct.