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Russian Minister Gets Spammed, Spams Back
elhim writes "According to an article in the Moscow Times: 'Spammers last week got on the wrong side of the wrong man, and quickly found themselves with a taste of their own medicine. The man? Deputy Communications Minister Andrei Korotkov. Tired of the endless spate of unsolicited messages that clog e-mail systems everywhere, [Korotkov and others devised] ...an audio message to be volleyed nonstop to the telephone numbers listed in the... [email] spam messages.' Sometimes Russia reminds me of the Wild West."
Oh well I did the same multiple times.. Spamming back is a viable alternative to getting angry I think.. Plus it hits the spammers where it hurts them most...
I've always thought everything was bogus.
I'll order the penis enlargement pills right away.
--dpr
--larsw
First of all. A spam message with real, working means of contacting the sender? Why din't I ever get that? Only in Russia, I say.
And second, that guy is hereby my god.
...um...like...a sig...
They could have sent out two 250-pound gorillas called Igor and Radek instead of an audio message.
BOO! TERRO
BTW, Russia had its wild east. While we had our mountain man era, the Russian had theirs, except they were going in the other direction. The parellels continue untill the turn of the century!
Now the big difference here is that this spam message contained the actual working return address.
Spam messages i get have a bogus return address, so that's not fair to compare. By the way if could find the emails of my spammers they would not be happy either, and telephone lines would have nothing to do with it.
Just like that other "wild west" once was - before it was planted with the neon of corporations.
Coincidentally, I just finished a commentary on that very topic.
(Notice I didn't say "ironic?")
You really, really don't want to get on the wrong side of Big Brother in Russia, China, and many other not-so-free countries.
I'd tell you about the story of what happened to the phone spammer in China that kept pestering a government office, but then I'd have to kill you... or someone'd do me.
So long story short... get the spammers to spam top government officials in Russia, China, N. Korea, and so forth... heck... maybe they'll drop a nuke on the spammers, and solve the problem for good!
Ha, ha.
**FREE** Track and view your phone's via CellID and/or WIFI and/or GPS
We are a bit wild. But more west, than ever was.
Now if we can get our enlightened western leaders to do the same or better
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
Otherwise it would be totally useless right?
Sure the from address is generally bogus, to skip past the basic anti spam methods out there, but something in the email must contain a valid phone number, web site, or address, otherwise how would the spammers make any money (and I suppose they must as they don't do it just to piss everyone off)
OK, I will
Phone rings: "Let this be a warning to you: in Soviet Russia, spam *recipient* drives you crazy"
Hang up
Phone rings...
Oh, and in Soviet Russia, the punchline inserts you. Sorry, but it had to be said.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
"With the brainstorming help of the Group Against Harmful Programs...".
The Group Against Harmful Programs. Wonderful. Sort of like the Fantastic Four, or the X-Men. Sounds like the sort of thing Tron would belong to. "That's Tron, he fights for the users under the banner of the Group Against Harmful Programs"...
Cheers,
Ian
wow he sorta took it a bit far with that many calls in a morning, i say he should have at least been considerate and spread it out through the day, That way he could get much more satisfaction from it.
Although i can pretend to be saddened by the fact that people strike back at spammers in such ways... I'm really not.
Please let me be the first one to have said that ...
It really is too bad that there continues to be no legal recourse to fight spam though. An arms race of annoyance between spammers and spam-ees probably wouldn't be the best solution though, but something does have to be done eventually. It would be nice to go back to having one e-mail address instead of various "spam" addresses and then my personal e-mail... which of course still gets spam.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
Doesn't the Deputy Communications Minister of Russia have a secretary?
Wasn't there an article some months ago about something simimlar happenning in china? 'Entrepreneurs' would illegally put up advertisements (i.e. posters) all over the place where you have to phone a number to get the product. (Typically these would be mobile phone numbers that were prepaid so there was no name on the account.)
The law enformenet officials would leave an endless loop of messages on tht moble's answering machine that they must turn themselves in and such. I doubt that they actually expected anyone to turn themselves in, but it made all those posters with the number on them useless and thus discouraged putting them up in the first place.
I wonder if this russian fellow was inspired by that action.
From here in Japan, heading west, we run into the USA, most of which appears pretty wild.
Of course, Bush is only adding to that impression...
From the article:
Spammers have ways to get around anti-spam filters, he said, but it's possible to collect patterns from their e-mails and block certain logarithms.
What's the point? They will use polynoms! Oh.. I guess they meant algorithms.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
At one time I had a small software company. We outsourced all the phone and fax messages since we didn't have people to work 24/7/365.
One of the things I learned is an incoming toll-free fax cost me a lot more than a voice call because a single page fax was completed very quickly and the charge was per call/per page.
So...if you're getting hit with crap like junk faxes, fax it back to them on their toll-free fax number about 30 times.
It took about a month of this but I don't get lots of junk fax anymore, except for the a**holes that block caller ID and don't list a number to get off their list.
Another fun trick was to use a standard fax machine with a continuous loop of paper. Let that baby run for about 10-15 minutes and you'll create a lot of clutter on the receiver's end.
Now I know who to forward my spam-mails to.
CAPS LOCK IS LIKE CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!
Am I the only one to think about the spammer getting payed for those very expensive phone services ???
If there ever was a group of people that should be sent to the Gulag, it's spammers.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
- me
money fast!!! Just call 0900-555-555 (calls cost $9.99 per minute, children/ministers please ask your parents/president first)"Shit, I'm never good at being funny."
Yeah, you got that right.
Very unlikely that the email-addresses are correct, so some innocent bystanders probably have to suffer now.
6. Ukrainian farm girls and animals. free web membership
5. Enlarge your putin today!
4. If you order today, you get a free Russian space shuttle
3. Free Vacation in Chechnya, Enlist today!
2. Out of work Russian comedian, will work for food. E-mail yakov@smirnov.com
1. Meet beautiful American wives!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
For those of you new to Slashdot and fellow veteran Slashdotters, this is a PSA. As we all know there are many running jokes around here, i.e. the CowboyNeal option, 1. stupid action 2. ??? 3. Profit, beowulf clusters of everything, insensitive clod, and of course the most recently added SCO jokes, as well as many others I'm forgetting. By far, one of the most annoying of the running gags is IN SOVIET RUSSIA! Being that this story is about Russia, be warned that a veritable slew of IN SOVIET RUSSIA jokes follow this post. Any and everyone has come out of the woodworks with bat in hand for the communal beating of a dead horse. So for those with bats, swing away, today is your day. For the rest of us, strap in and enjoy the bumpy ride of redundancy.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
I didn't worry about the cost of the calls, because the people in Uzbekistan soon figured out that the calls were almost all faxes. I reckoned that even if they picked the phone up 10 times a day (to check to see if I'd stopped), it was worth the cost. Calls are only charged when they pick up the phone, right? So I let this go on for over a month.
Then I got my telephone bill. It was in the thousands. It turns out that there are three countries in the world where, if you phone there, you get charged even if no one answers the phone. And Uzbekistan is one of those countries!
I didn't know about that, and I complained to the phone company about the bill. But my case seemed weak because I was, it's fair to say, abusing the phone system. The phone company ended up splitting the bill in half, and I paid the rest.
I don't know if my attempts had any long-term effect on those nice folks in Uzbekistan. But at least I tried.
Two days ago I got a spam from a local (London, UK) company trying to get me to go to their event. It had a 378Kb attachment to it. Thanks.
The kicker was that the disclaimer said it was impossible to unsubscribe, as it was a carefully crafted one-time mailing list. I imagine i'll be on all future carefully crafted one-time mailing lists for them in the future too.
The email was sent with a from line of "[something]@noreply.com" or similar (which breaches their ISPs AUP), and if I was to contact them via their email address listed on their website, by their logic i'd have contacted them, thus allowing them to continue to spam me (since we'd then have an existing relationship).
So - best course of action? The Advertising Standards Authority, whose standards they ahve breached, seems to be a toothless tiger set up by the industry to pay lip-service to the general public (any ruling against an advertiser seems to result in a ruling of "we advised them to contact us in future before undertaking a similar campaign"). I'm not aware of any specific legislation to stop this (although i'd like to know where they got my email address from. Should I unleash the Data Protection Act?).
So, what's the best way to hit back? Complain to the ISP? File an ultimatetly useless complaint to the ASA? What?
for they find annoying people & problems crunchy and rather tasty.
In Soviet Russia, spam spams you back!
The first law of SPAM is that if you don't want to receive even more of it, don't open or respond to it.
a minister who reads his email. If more politicians read their own email (and not a hapless assistant) the problem of spam would be evident to them and antispam legislation would be nearer.
And yes, I know legislation is not the sole solution, but legislation plus technical solutions is the best bet in my opinion.
10. edible university diplomas
9. free anti-anti-spam software
8. Get a green (as in siberia) card now
7. Herbal alternative to Beef
Trolling using another account since 2005.
So can we point this guy to the SCO legal department? Get them boys in Lindon Utah hoppin'. Ideally get some home and cell numbers...
:)
"Hello?"
"Theese ees caal frrom Russia. tsk tsk tsk... [click]"
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Actually, this was ordinary russia.
So, in -s-o-v-i-e-t- russia... victims spam YOU!
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
....In soviet Russia, all your phone lines are belong to us.........;o)))
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
You just know this Minister guy would have driven down to the business in question, walked into their server room without explaining anything to anyone, and then SHOT the damn servers. And the tech in charge of them who should have known better. And then he would have turned to the guys assistant and said "Now get those computers working again and get back to spamming the US pig-dogs!"
... to protect them from themselves?
Cig? No, thank you.
As i get tons of bounced messages from russian spammer since my e-mail address gets forged into the headers, i really gave up on going after those russian guys. Either the site spamvertized is hosted by some isp listed on the blacklists as bullet-proof (i.e. spammer friendly), or it contains only some (russian, i suppose) phone number. If someone finally did care in .ru that would be a big relief for me.
Normally i dont dig those russian style hard measures, but in the case of spammers i really think theyd only stop when someone breaks their bones;)
To quote the moscow times:
/ 23/10588 53124564.html
:)
"There is no law against spam, it [such a law] doesn't exist anywhere," he said.
Good to see the Australians are posing this:
Laws to ban spam this year: Alston
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/07
Of course, this will only effect spam coming out of Australia, but its a good start
Now that is ironic...
How about enroll 200 000 persons to there event?
:) So they probebly have to send out the mail agen or phone everybody...
If you can get the numbers correct they don't know who is comming and not.
Case closed.
.....:::[Svante]:::.....
In Soviet Russia, the dead horse beats you.
Just shut the fuck up, already. It wasn't funny six months ago, it's not funny now.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
we already ate the horse - and we don't HAVE bats, you insensitive clod!
So which one wears the suit and which one wears the gloves?
Wonder what will happen if they spam the heads of their armed forces :-)
Does anyone have his email address? I need to send him a few mails with the phonenumber of my ex.
Interesting story, but it ends with the minister admitting the retaliation was ineffective on this occasion. If the advertisers are to be pursuaded not to spam, we need more people willing to bring it to their attention.
If their phones were blocked *every day*, they might have to stop spamming.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
"..an audio message to be volleyed nonstop to the telephone numbers listed in the... [email] spam messages.' "
Lets hope they weren't premium rate numbers. If so, I doubt they'd be bothered about their lines being perpetually busy.
"hey, lets get some new lines in and spam those russian nerds again"
And I think that ways how big ISP are charged for phone usage are much different from ordinary customers anyway.
...remember that there are some (lots of) spams out there that make money on the price-per-minute of the phone line you're trying to flood!
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
If you design a retaliation plan that just cansels out the benefits of spam. Then joe-job'ing someone whould also have no effect(since the "fake" spam benefits them the same amount as it hurts them). Now both "fake" and "sincere" spam is both useless.
The difficult part is designing the perfectly balanced retaliation sceme.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Look at the end of the article:
Spammers have ways to get around anti-spam filters, he said, but it's possible to collect patterns from their e-mails and block certain logarithms.
Logarithms instead of algorithms... Makes you wonder if the author knows what he is talking about!
Ander
@=
You would think that a national anti-spam list could be enacted, with all the penalties and guards that are on mass-market calling. Why is it that telephone communications are more well-guarded than e-mail communications? If you ask a company to put you on their do-not-call list, and they call you, they can be sued by you for substantial amounts of money. Why is this not the same for spam?
Chumley the Happy Walrus, anonymously lazy coward
Sorry just had to post this as a Bond film addict...
"From Russia with Love"...
Ring Ring!
Oh A customer!
(picks up phone)
Ni!
I recently got on the mailing list of a surf company in Sydney, I've no idea how since I'm in Perth and can't surf (Ex-pom).
I started receiving almost weekly newsletters and updates and, despite numerous phone calls and e-mails with the usual promises to comply, I just couldn't get off the list... then they sent the 2.5 Mb Word document, you know the type!
I e-mailed back and told them that they'd filled up my e-mail account and caused me to miss some important e-mails, plus cost me time and money due to the download costs. I advised them that, as they were now affecting my business, I'd be invoicing them $25+GST administration fee for each and every e-mail I received from then on and that if they didn't pay, I'd hand the account to a debt collection agency - one that takes a cut of the recovery value.
I cautioned them that it would not concern me if I received nothing from the agency but that such action could affect their credit rating. What a surprise(!), I've received nothing since.
If you can justify charging a fee to the spammer for administration or storage or anything like that, sufficient to stand up reasonably in a small claims court, then you should threaten to invoice the spammer and use a debt collection agency - it just might work for you too.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
In Soviet Russia: Spam has plan for You! (I had to...)
What was the voice message anyway? "Stop with the spam! All your phone numbers are belong to us!"
The power of Christ compiles you!
Tired of the endless spate of unsolicited messages that clog e-mail systems everywhere, [Korotkov and others devised] ...an audio message to be volleyed nonstop to the telephone numbers listed in the... [email] spam messages.' Sometimes Russia reminds me of the Wild West."
Yippie ki Yay, Mo Fo.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
This is the first rule of Russian government: We will retaliate! I bet his "send" button is Big and red and sounds sirens when he presses it. BUT: God help us all if he decides offence is the best defence. Be alert people: What's Russian for "Viagra?"
In Soviet Russia ... joke get sick of you!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
This is the avenue we should be pursuing when trying to stop spam. Instead of trying to stop the spammers themselves, go after the source (advertiser) instead. If enough advertisers are convinced/shamed/etc that spamming is a bad thing, they will go elsewhere to get their message out, and the spammers will magically disappear.
http://bike.stu.ph/rides - free GPS routes available for Garmin, Magellan, GPX and Google Earth
...cut to spammers setting up premium rate numbers to put in their SPAM messages in the hope that people will spam them back by calling them all the time.
Was there a lot of spam in the wild west?
Whoah! Remember what happened when they served ground-up sheep to cows? We got Mad Cow disease. (And when you feed the cows to humans, you get same thing, different name. Creutzfeldt-Smirnov?) I'm not saying that spammers have some spam prion protein infecting them (or brains to infect), but why take chances?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
How about an open source software project that creates a piece of software that attacks spammers using a SETI-style approach. Using spare bandwidth and CPU time, the software would repeatedly send requests to the links found in spam.
Repeatedly loading the homepage of some spam-spawning viagra sales site would hurt the viagra sales company. Companies that advertize with spam would find their bandwidth charges skyrocketing and their conversion rates plummetting. The key is to create disincentives for the e-commerce sites that try to flog their products and services using spam. While spammers can be anonymous, the e-commerce sites that use spam to get eyeballs need more permanence. Eventually, these companies would even penalize the 3rd-party spam sending companies for using email lists that generate too many spurious requests or that have low conversion rates (the spammer's pay drops if they send emails that lead to long streams of spurious requests).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
...spam victims YOU!
Jonathanjk.com
It's crazy how many spam websites are running on IIS with .asp scripts (or even better: .aspx!) as a
frontend, and Microsoft Sequel Server as a backend .
Just type a spare single quote into the "remove me from your list" box, and watch as parts of the SQL query are displayed. Experiment a bit, and transform this into a query that clears the entire subscribers list, or that changes their spam messages to something funny, or that keeps the subscriber list but replaces all e-mail addresses by their own whois contact (or better: their upstream provider's whois..), etc.
For starters, the following string often removes the entire list when entered into the remove me box:
(that's two single quotes between the or and the = sign).
If the site has an "affiliate program" (look around a bit...), the same string entered as a user name into the affiliate programme's login box might let you in, with a little bit of luck. If not, try the following instead (again, there are only single quotes in the string, no double quotes):
If it still doesn't help, try to repeat the same string in the password box.
If still not ok, you may need to use a union statement:
Start with one null, and keep adding more until the "parameter number mismatch" error disappears. Patience may be needed, certain login scripts require more than 40 nulls! Then start replacing the nulls with your desired password string, and attempt to find a combination which doesn't give you a type mismatch error.Example:
Then enter zozo into the password box. With a little bit of luck, this method may let you in.
Once you're in, you've access to the affiliate's (i.e., the spammer's) account:
- home address: always nice for a baseball bat expedition, or to pull an Alan Ralsky on the spammer.
- phone number: on your way to work, give your friend a call! One from each phone booth that you encounter! Write the number on bathroom stalls! Post it to slashdot!
- bank account number: well, just change it to your own!
- website URL: change it to you know what
- social security number: post it to as much places as you can
- ...
The benefit of such actions is twofold: not only does it teach the spammer not to spam, but it also tells him that Windows (and especially aspx + Sequel Sewer) is not a very secure technology.Have fun!
Wondering what would happen if you spammed this Russian politician and placed the number for the White House or some other important number in the body of the spam. I bet George W. would like it if the Russians were spamming his office. :)
Those who trade freedom for security will lose both, and deserve neither" -- Ben Franklin
For that, they don't need a contact method.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I was going to say victims spam spammers, but then you showed up.
Realistically, a subject of "In soviet russia..." with no body is plenty for this story.
Biatch!!! Is what I would have put in the audio
How does someone come across a picture like that? Very scary.
The turn of the century SUCKED.
It marked the death of the frontier. (I know, blah blah Indians were there first, but the population density was never that great and there were always massive sections of uninhabited land). The remaining frontiers are largely closed to the ordinary man, and are unlikely to ever be truly opened again to the point where you can just go somewhere, stake off a chunk of land, and just LIVE there, and have it be LEGAL.
I know, I know. Progress. We live 1.6 times as long, that's a good thing. Diseases can be treated better.
But, still . . . the death of the frontier marked the inability for a man to be physically independent. Now our lives are played out within the boundaries of 'The System', while our freedom must exist only in our minds.
cue matrix analogies.
What reminds me of the Wild West is George Bush. That guy is an authentic cowboy, with the manners that goes with it.
Yeah...we have all this hubub about all the overseas outsourcing, but I think we should hire him. Awww yeah. Let's get the Angry Russian on those spammers. I wonder how much he charges...
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Unfortunately spam has no borders and they still insist I'm tired of spoiled american women and need to meet beautiful russian wives even though I live in Moscow and already fed up of the latter ones.
But American Language Center is really one of the baddest spammers here. I can't wait to see them spamming FSB (current name of KGB) or other security service senior official one day.
It's the Russian mentality. Do you know why Russian planes don't get hijacked? They used to be, until the hijackers found out that the threatened pilot simply dropped the controls and started fighting back. No wimps in that country.
I kept getting spam from some dumbshit outfit trying to sell me... I don't really know or care. It's one of those so-called "opt-in hot deals" marketing scams that try to convince people they signed up for "today's daily deal" or some similar bullcrap. Anyway, they had their name somewhere in it, so I tracked down the actual marketing corporation that runs it. I found their 800 number and phoned. They have one of those "enter the name of the person you wish to reach" sorts of phone systems, so I think to myself, "there's gotta be a Smith there," so I type 7648... and get "Sarah Smith" or something like that. So, I get her voicemail (this is about 11p.m. my time). I left about a 5 minute tirade about how I'm going to waste fifty times as much of her time dealing with these phone calls as I do dealing with their spam.
Needless to say, I stopped getting spammed from them. Odd...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
The only part of the russian involvement in our Wild West period is the fact that they introduced the tumbleweed to the American west. I don't really care about the Russian settlers and homesteaders but every time I need to clean another pile of tumbleweeds out of my yard I still get pissed.
Damn Russians
..which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably designed for cooling the blood-T P
Back in the USSR... Back in the USSR... Back in the USSR...
Hansel USA - Chut up and read!
As long as people mod posts containing the words "In Soviet Russia" +1 Funny, I'm afraid they'll never go away...
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
Why doesn't someone post the contact info for some Viagra suppliers? Especially their CEOs? Make life painful for THEM I say.....
Adherence to the truth is a form of disloyalty.
The purpose of this spam seems to be the distributed harassment of FederalFundingProgram.com, whoever they are. Send this spam to 10^n people, and a reasonable number of nastygrams and crank emails will return to the target.
I wonder if they tried blocking log 0 :-)
A friend just showed me this site: http://www.mailinator.com/ if you are tired of spam, you can use that website to receive an email, and you don't have to create any account at all !
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
You have got to love it!!! Everyone gets bombarded with junk mail so it's great to see a man of importance do something about it!
Are you all STUPID? What the fuck??? A nonsense post with Goatse pictures all over him? YOU SHOULD HAVE YOUR MODERATOR RIGHTS BANNED!!!!!
In Soviet Russia, the joke shuts you up!
-h-
In Real Russia Spammers do not get call backs.. ..we take you out back in the woods and have you shot!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
1. Set up 1-900 number.
2. Spam Russian minister.
3. Profit.
Ha!
Mmmm.. Donuts
Yes, the scenario you describe is exactly what has kept me from writing some software to automatically redial spammer 1-800 numbers endlessly and rack up their long distance bills. The crap people leave on my car windows, the junk piling up in my snail mailbox at home, and the large volume of spam which flows into my email account like a wave of putrid filth... all of this stuff might be coming from the spammer OR it might be coming from a third party trying to get someone they don't like harassed by a mob of angry people. I don't think you can just look at a contact phone # and start war dialing it, assuming it's the real spammer.
You need to call the phone # first and find out if you're targeting the right organization. Once you've verified that you have got the right place, then you can commence with the retaliation, right? Or can you? I'm not sure that it's really legal to repeatedly dial a spammer's phone # 24 hours a day?
I for one welcome our new Russian Overlords!
-Spammer
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
"...on your front yard you only have one tire up on blocks".
How about this?
For a little history, search for 'dot annoy' on google. It was a little unix script that did this with 'cu' back in the day.
That sounds like some tactic the RIAA would use. Maybe they were really offering him free music and he decided to call and send them fake or virus infected music over the phone.
:)
Anyhow, maybe the RIAA are russian politicians... go figure
Me.
Can you ping me now?... Good!
I wonder if he sent them a Mobius Fax also? According to legend (and probably a true thing) some old thermal fax machines would catch on fire after a while if the mobius fax was not discovered and interrupted (and your construction paper didn't slip) - basically what you did was to feed a long strip of black paper into your machine and when it came out the back, loop it over and tape it together so that your machine faxed an endless stream of black. Funny stuff (until the arson charge anyway)
~GoRK
That's the main reason why I turn off the loading of remote images in email...
for Mozilla: preferences -> Privacy & security -> images -> []Do not load remote images in Mail and Newsgroup messages
In my experience, most legitimate users attach images to their emails. If I get an email which has remote images that I actually want to see, I can always right-click and explicitly view it, or turn the option on for that one message then turn it back off again. (I think I've done that once or twice in the last year)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
That doesn't show it at all, it's just yet more supposition based on a bizarre assumption that spam is actually targetted.
All that it shows is that 37% of removal requests are respected, which is a hell of a lot more than I'd have expected. We're talking about replying to spam that's already been received. I'd be interested to know what happens if you create virgin accounts and try and unsubscribe to spam lists that you're not already on, but that's a different question.
Thanks for the link though, it demonstrates that this assumption runs deep.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Is it still dangerous to do this if you go through anonymizer?
1) Change your phone number to a 976 number, where the caller is automatically charged $49.95 just for connecting.
2) Spam the Russian Deputy Communications Minister.
3) Allow the Russian Deputy Communications Minister to tie up your phones for several days.
4) Profit!!!
P.S. In Russia, spam profits YOU!
I don't get it.
This may sound cool and exotic, but it's actually pretty sad... Westerns are only fun to watch, they are not fun to live in. Especially when the robber gangs grow to the size of entire cities.
>|<*:=
and further more,
so the sections
Additionaly
while IANAL, it seems to me that Deputy Communications Minister Andrei Korotkov, A person under US law has recieved an unsolicited advertisement, to his computer which has the capacity to send and recieve faxes via a telephone line so it
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"Spammers have ways to get around anti-spam filters, he said, but it's possible to collect patterns from their e-mails and block certain logarithms."
Yes, how dare those spammers try to calculate the correct power of a number. I'm surprised that so many spammers use the same kind of mathematical equation in their e-mail....
Fooled filters ...
:-)
I just filter out ALL HTML e-mails and delete em from the server.
Since most SPAM is HTML it no longer bothers me. Sorted
Plain text rules KO.
siggy played guitar
Unfortunately many folks, myself included have the apostrophe in their surname and I can testify it does screw up SQL query engines big time thanks to poor foresight.
I've always filled in my address as root@127.0.0.1
Damn people using Microsoft
You can get into trouble for it. In Dallas about ten years ago somebody did that to Robert Tilton (a local scumbag televangelist) because Tilton had gotten a bunch of money from his mother. They started noticing a lot of hang-ups on their 1-800 number, and eventually had the cops trace the call and busted the guy. Can't remember the exact charge, but they can get you for something.
I don't believe it. No validation check was carried out on ' or '' = '
You would have thought it would have realised no @ was used for an email address!!
Well thank-you, it somehow accepted it.
SPAM is just a tin of processed meat of unknown origin.
siggy played guitar
god you are incredibly lame.
Remember when the U.S. was the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
DON'T CLICK THE LINKS!!!
In Soviet Russia, the fuck up shuts YOU!
The fun part is that while spam is technically legal in Russia, flooding somebody's phone number isn't, and is classified as a minor criminal offense.
.RU net and completely deserves such treatment. Their spam volleys are regular, annoying, and use all sorts of clever tricks to circumvent spam filters. By contrast, a lot of russian-originated spam (at least spam that I receive) is very business-oriented and largely contains honest-to-God offers to sell you tires, or electric cable or some other commodity, or seminar invitations; stuff you wouldn't show to your kids is extremely uncommon.
On the other hand, the American Language Center is THE evil spammer of the
In fact, more than once incoming spam had left me thinking that had I been involved in commerce, I'd probably even react to those offers.
I can always right-click and explicitly view it
GOOD POINT
I actually send remote images with e-mail from time to time. I like to do it when I'm sending a large higher quality photo or photos to someone, particularly when I send to more than one person, or to someone on dial-up. -It's nicer than taking 30 minutes to view any of their e-mails and they can watch it as it comes in,That's what my friend (a senior citizen) says anyway.
I haven't found anyone who hadn't figured out how to view a remote image even when they turned it off like you do, so it's not an issue.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Sometimes Russia reminds me of the Wild West.
That's why they call it the Wild Est. (OK, it's Kazakhstan, but the movie sounds interesting).
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Well, in Soviet Russia, YOU annoy Akbar!
I dont get any spam and I feel sort of left out. Can someone put up some of the info I need for me. I want to use this as an on hands oppertunity to write queries. You know training with a live system... :()
Also once ordered toner cartriges. Got a shipment worth $400 or so sent out to a university (and told them to bill us for it).
The trick to dealing with spammers is that everyone has to respond to the ads. If everyone responds, they'll never be able to filter the legitimate responses from those of us who are making up fake info because we're pissed.
OS X users -
Mail.app - double-click on the seperator bar between your mail and the preview window to toggle its visibility.
Entourage - Type Command-\ to toggle the preview window.
Somebody should set up spam-fighting group, as follows.
The companies which engage in spam marketing must list their website, email address, ICQ, AIM, phone number, etc. After all, a customer they're after has to get to them, somehow. So to send a flood of messages to any of these entities for a number of hours would make a sufficient dent in their logistics.
Problem for such an attack: this can be gotten around -- internet data can be blocked before it gets there, thus DDOS or sending 1000 or 1,000,000 emails will work once, but only for so long. And, it's a bit illegal. Phone calls from a certain number or a set of numbers can be blocked. Same is likely true for instant-messaging. That, or the company just changes their IM name, phone number, etc.
Solution to this problem: these work-arounds can be sidestepped. The group I'm thinking of would need the ability to change its numbers repeatedly, so that blocking certain phone numbers wouldn't prevent it from sending another volley of 1000 calls the next day. Such would need to also be true for other ways -- getting to the website, sending email, IM, etc.
Plus, if the company does change its number or address, the next time it sends spam will have the new contact-info. Since the group will initiate one attack each time a complaint comes in, if today's attack isn't successful, tomorrow's likely will be.
So, here's how it would work. This group of vigilantes would somehow maintain a set of communications tools that's always being updated and changed. Perhaps hijacking certain phone systems. But there's the legality problem, so the group might have to find other ways. Either way, it would constantly have hundreds or thousands of opportunities to make a call or send an email at any given moment. Thus this system could be used when needed to initiate a full-scale attack.
Every time someone gets an email message they perceive as SPAM -- or unsolicited real mail, for that matter (I'm very tired of credit-card offers) -- they forward it, in its entirety, to this vigilante group. When the group gets it, it sets off one single attack on the company that sent the stuff, but only after verification that the spam really is spam. This single attack may be 1000 - 1,000,000 phone-calls to the call centers, or a similar number of ICQ / AOL messages. This would be possible, though not easy, so the system to use to do this would be quite involved. Again, completely possible.
However the attack happens, it must make its intent clear - perhaps replace the website with a message demanding an apology for marketing practices. Or for the phone calls, have each call contain a recorded message demanding the company stop spamming, however it does it. A Russian minister recently did this.
The biggest problem with this, so far, has been when companies have done legitimate marketing (one-time messages, or opt-out lists) and have been attacked. Therefore, the vigilante group would first need to verify that the complaint is legitimate -- that the message is actual spam. Once this has been verified, then one single attack may commence.
One single attack like this, each time the group receives a forwarded piece of spam from a given company. Likely, this will mean multiple attacks to companies that engage in spam, since they don't send out just one solicitation. Therefore the group will need to maintain multiple centers from which to attack, in each of the ways it chooses to do so.
If you think this idea has merit, send it on.
I feel so used... I got the parent in my M2 stack, and blithely marked the "Informative" mod as "Fair". Then, curious, I checked out the article and thread.
How the hell did I miss those obvious "frontend" and "backend" links?
But I may have still meta-mod as "fair", since there isn't an option for "oops!"
By the way, for a full answer to the questions "what's a goatse?" and "where the HELL did you get that picture?!?!", as well as other Slashdot "gotchas", see the Wikipedia article on Slashdot Trolling.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
YOU FAIL IT!