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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
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)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
... to protect them from themselves?
Cig? No, thank you.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
Biatch!!! Is what I would have put in the audio
to quote other /.'ers...
you're new round here aren't you?
it's the goatse picture people....
Acid House saves Souls
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.
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.
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 :-)
I think it said: "Emergency, emergency, everyone to get from street!"
It used to be sport around here to try and trick people into following a link to http:// goatse . cx
(I have deliberately spaced that out. Don't follow it.)
Slashdot has implemented a number of features to try and avoid this. (i.e. listing the domain name beside links) I guess people are still sucessful sometimes, though.
-srw
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!
Slipping in goatse links is easy. Too easy even. There are a number of redirector services (shorl.com) which allow you to hide the URL, and even most mainstream sites do have some way to redirect.
No, simply slipping in goatse into a comment is so easy that it has become uninteresting. The real art now is to have a goatsy comment moderated up rather than down as the usual troll or flamebait. Seems so far it is working well (+4, and counting...)
Next challenge: slip one into a story submission!
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?
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!
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!
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....
Groovy! I must have missed this memorable event. Do you still have any pointers (which day it happened, or some unique keywords in the story to search for...)
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.
The real art now is to have a goatsy comment moderated up rather than down as the usual troll or flamebait. Seems so far it is working well (+4, and counting...)
I believe you're close to another one, too.
funny munging
I've always filled in my address as root@127.0.0.1
Damn people using Microsoft
The site was Torrentse.cx (a name that is program...), and the link pointed to Tubgirl (btw, the tubgirl domain name is hosted at some kind of redirector farm, and in light of my previous comments about SQL injection it is very astonishing that the other sites of that redirector farm don't show similarly disgusting pictures... but I digress...)
Predictably enough, the link was removed from the slashdot story as soon as it became apparent what had happened. The swift action of the editors forestalled most of the expected fun: There were only a handful of comments about the picture...
If the webmaster of torrentse.cx had been smarter, he'd have shown the normal contents to anybody coming from a Slashdot-owned IP, or he could have showed the tubgirl only for one visit in ten, or whatever...
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
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
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
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.
If you need samples, you can see enough of them in the Usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.sightings .
However, if you want to receive your own personal spam, the following strategies may help:
I've had huge success in attracting spam by simply registering a domain name. I use a dedicated email address for my domain registrations (if you're dying to spam me, do a whois on my domain name).
I forgot to clean out my "domains" mailbox for a couple of weeks, and I had over 240 messages waiting. It would have been higher, but the mailbox filled up to its 1 meg capacity. Every single message was spam.
Did you realize how many 1337 ways there are to spell p3n15 ?! If only that creativity could be turned away from the Dark Side..
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
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.