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."
I was impressed with the article until I got to the comment "I mean, what do I care about what Windows losers get scammed out of?". Now I like Linux much as the next geek but thats just going to aliante people.
M$ might be a monopoly but at least they have bought some form of consistency
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
... You know the rest of it. Just as comic book characters have such a code, it would appear that computer geeks need one too.
It's obvious that the folks at evidence eliminator know a good bit about tech, and not enough about morality. A lot of other fine folks who run legit/non-shady companies have the same knowledge but don't use it to trick consumers into using their products (probably because they actually make something useful). Just because you have the power to do something doesn't mean you should use it. Imagine if the loyal slashdot crowd were to use our collective resources to advertise any one issue or cause.....
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
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When good spammers go bad? Isn't that kind of pretentious thinking there are good spammers?
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That can work for either party, there's nothing new about people filing law suits in order to prevent someone from doing the right thing. It is important to remember however when dealing with such assholes that a letter from a lawyer is not as intimidating and many people think. Lawyers write letters which have little or not legal value all the time, I've received some myself when my old landlord and his wife got divorced and were fighting over who was the landowner. The letter itself wasn't worth the paper it was printed on, but it did have an official legal letterhead. Always make sure you know your legal rights and never trust the other guy's lawyer to tell them to you.
Except they may not be the spammers but users whose systems were abused by spammers or users who inherited the IP address of a spammer. There is absolutely no excuse for striking back against computers on the other side of the world. You can ignore them, no questions asked, but if you have to cause them harm, do it through their upstream provider. They know the situation and can deal with the problem in a civilized manner. Most ISPs will warn YOU and then terminate YOUR account if they become aware of your vigilante "justice".
You aren't actually crashing the "spammer's" box. You're crashing the box of some poor sucker who doesn't know enough to that he should have a firewall (software or hardware), between his computer and his cable/dsl modem. Meanwhile, the spammer just moves on to another of his pool of tens of thousands of broadband IP's which have computers attached to them EXACTLY THE SAME WAY.
So congratualtions, you have successfully made some poor guy's day miserable because his box keeps rebooting and he hasn't an fscking clue why, and you have done exactly nothing to hinder the spammers. Keep up the great work!
> Check to see what netblock the dsl line is in and let the provider
> know instead.
Report a SPAM incident to an asian ISP? Are you new here? They just don't give a shit.
Democrat delenda est
You do realize that this is illegal and you can be prosecuted?
First off: It is possibly illegal.
Are you familiar with the computer crime laws in most Asian countries? Do they exist? Do you know if they protect computers with no passwords? Many computer crime laws offer very little protection for computers on public networks, if the owner doesn't bother to protect them himself.
Second: Most spam is blatantly fraudulent. Let say I'm getting 419 scam emails from somewhere actually inside the US. The second they file a complaint against me, I can go after them for fraud. Put simply: Spammers don't want you to know who they are. They can't file a complaint, our you could go after them for fraud.
Third: How is someone in Singapore going to prosecute him? Is the US going to extradite him for crashing a computer that was sending fraudulent email to the US? Or are they going to say: "Hey why don't you come set foot on US soil and then we'll talk about it?"
Fourth: Let's say this computer does belong to an "innocent" (read negligent) bystander. Crashing his computer might actually get him to fix the problem/alert him that someone else is controlling it.
This isn't something I'd be likely to do myself, but I'm not going to start yelling "Hey, that's illegal!" without thinking about it. Morally, I don't see very much wrong with what he's doing. Legally, he's on shaky ground, but he could, possibly be in the clear.
Life is too short to proofread.