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Spammer Ducks For Cover
rabidgremlin writes "The New Zealand Herald has an article about a NZ based spammer who has shut up shop after being at the receiving end of an anti-spam campaign. Good riddance I say, but some of his comments ("never intended to break any regulations" and "I'll just stick to search engines and web sites - that's still plenty of fun and money.") had me wondering if he and other spammers are as really naive as the article makes out."
Well, cry me a river. I'm sure that there are 5-year olds out there whose parents were a bit concerned about their kids receiving penis-enlargement emails and links to porn websites. Oh, and "tons of email lists"... I thought everything these fucks did was "opt-in"? Does he mean to insinuate that that's not the case? Bwahaha.
Cry me a river indeed. Maybe this is a good way to kill them off.
1) Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
2) Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
and how does this guy plan on marketing his new websites?
"well, i figure i'll just use my vast email lists and invite everyone to check them out... that can't be illegal, can it?"
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Wow, the guys sends millions of e-mail messages, then he closes up shop after getting 20 unsolicited phone calls.
Guess that's what you call "can dish it out, can't take it"...
"Mr Atkinson said that on a good day he and his associates would send out 100 million messages."
:rolleyes:
"he had received more than 20 phone calls, five of them obscene"
oh for shame. 20 phone calls. some of them obscene! Good golly, why should the poor man have his time wasted in such a way?
This space available.
Since the server was slow even when It first appeared.
Spammer ducks for cover as details published on web
2003-08-19 - By JUHA SAARINEN
A New Zealander who sent billions of junk emails out every day has shut his business after his personal details were posted on the web.
Shane Atkinson - whose business is known as spamming - said the barrage of abuse made him worry about the safety of his children.
His identity as the man behind millions of spam messages promoting penis enlargement pills was revealed in a Herald article last week. Mr Atkinson said that on a good day he and his associates would send out 100 million messages.
He said that since the article was published, anti-spam activists had been "having a field day". He had received more than 20 phone calls, twenty of them obscene.
His personal information, street address and phone numbers were "plastered all over the web", he had been subscribed to a gay-dating site and his email address had been added to "tons of email lists".
"I have already banned my 5-year-old from answering the phone," he said.
The article also led to rackshack.com, the US web service that hosts Mr Atkinson's servers, being entered in the Spam Early Warning System list, which many networks use for blocking email traffic.
Rackshack gave notice that it would shut down two of Mr Atkinson's servers because of the listing, forcing him to move the servers to a different network.
Mr Atkinson has decided to get out of the spamming business, citing the "negative feedback" and saying that he "never intended to break any regulations". He has asked affiliates to stop doing the work for him.
"I sort of feel good now about stopping this," he said.
"I'll just stick to search engines and web sites - that's still plenty of fun and money."
Internet group InternetNZ has said it will file formal complaints against Mr Atkinson with the Commerce Commission, the Ministry of Health and the Privacy Commissioner.
New Zealand does not have specific anti-spam laws.
this guy peed his pants becasuse he received 20 phone calls, 5 obscene. unless he forgot a couple zeros there, this should encourage everyone to call the phone numbers of spammers they seeposted. to think that 20 lousy phone calls would actually make a difference. hell i get 20 phone calls a week from telemarketers, and this guy is complaining. but nevertheless, kudos to the antispammers out there clearly they are making a difference.
You realize, Mr. Atkinson, that by backing off now you're encouraging us to continue this kind of behavior on other spammers . . .
;)
In a truely please-don't-blink moment, the man who claimed to send out 100 million messages a day on such wonderful things as penis-enlarging pills complains about receiving 5 obscene phone calls . . . they were probably just disappointed customers.
-- "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" [Oscar Wilde]
.. he will devote his time to making linkfarms and other bogus websites with zero content? yeah that sounds like a plan to feed your family.
for the one's that don't know, it involves making sites that attract clicks(by looking like there could be for example emulation roms downloadable, or pron from there) from for example google and link to other sites of the same author to get the authors sites up in the search, thus polluting the search service with meaningless s**t making some fields of 'research' quite impossible to search with google without scripts for filtering that kind of stuff out of the results (doesn't need that much of a work with googleapi, and there's just few of these assholes making these sites and they tend to use the same referral id's on their ads on all of their sites making it a bit easier to filter them this filtering on client side needs a lot of bandwith though,and isn't that fast, obviously).
i'm wondering if somebody has made a decent easy to use program/scripts to use BIG blacklists with google (i hacked something together some time ago but it's not exactly easy to use for everyday stuff)?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
please
Do you spam ?
Have you even considered it as an option ?
If you said no its because you posess ethichs and a conscience. Congratulations and my sympathy you have things the typical spammer does not.
we all know pigs (spam) and ducks are cute, innocent animals.
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
There are some companies (and individuals) who send large amounts of e-mail, who are 'spammers' by one definition (as in they send large amounts of commercial mail containing advertisements) but who live by the letter of the law.
Freaks sending incest or rape spam to all the addresses they can find are crossing signficant moral boundaries, but people who've legitimately got access to mailing lists rented out by newsletter companies (to which you signed up, often accepting that you'd receive some ads) don't deserve to be hounded. What they're doing is not illegal, and not morally wrong, since you have accepted to receive this info.
Of course, there are a lot more bad spammers out there, than spammers who have morals, only mail proper lists, and respect remove requests, but that doesn't mean all spammers have to be tarred with the same brush.
The term 'spammer' is as accusatory, and often as false, as 'criminal'. You might think all criminals are bad, but what about the 'criminal' who said something bad about the government and got arrested for it? Likewise, not all 'spammers' are inherently evil scum sending porno ads to your TV-addicted drooling children.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I want to sell his kids som penis enlargemtn pills.
Spam, telemarketing, whats the difference? Why are you so offended? My 8 year old neice gets those e-mails.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I don't think, for the most part, that they are naive in the classical sense of the word; I think that they are closer to delusional. They have been given all the information they need, and they have chosen the interpretation which is going to let them do what they want to do.
However, I have seen a couple of occasions where a SPAM has been followed a couple of days later by an apology, where it truly does appear that someone has had a break-through experience and now understands that SPAM is a bad idea, where they truly did not understand that previously.
The CB App. What's your 20?
while there are no specific laws in NZ that say "thou shalt not spam" (and the government is looking at introducing something along those lines one of these days), there are plenty of laws already in place to hassle this guy with. The NZ Privacy Act is a powerful tool that says you cannot gather information for one purpose (eg domain name registration) and use it for another (eg spam), so he's probably in breach of that. He's also potentially breaching the health act by selling a product that makes a medical claim without either a: evidence to back it up or b: a licence to sell medicine. He's also probably breaching the Fair Trading Act by offering a product that doesn't do what it says it will.5 E241ED D85A39586CC256D8600210CBB)
InternetNZ (the NZ Internet Society) is laying a complaint with the various bodies about this guy:
(http://computerworld.co.nz/webhome.nsf/nl/
Can't give you a link to the InternetNZ release because they haven't put it on their website yet!
I am a leaf on the wind
-- Don't just delete spam, delete spammers. join SpammerHunters
It's not hypocrisy. They're doing it to make the guy realize that hey's being an annoying prick. If you're so simple minded that you can't get past "sending a spammer spam to make spam stop" you shouldn't be reading stuff in the first place. Just watch reality TV. This is like posting John Ashcroft's personal info on the internet to make him think twice about TIA/big brother stuff. It's not hypocrisy when you're doing X solely to the guys who do X to make them realize X is wrong. It's not hypocrisy, it's not ironic, and it's not coincidental. It's a valid way of making certain people realize they're acting like asses.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
...if only someone would post Shane Atkinson's Address and Phone Number. I don't think 20 phone calls is enough. I think Shane Atkinson needs to experience the power of "internet karma..."
I'll be watching for any details you might post.
-EtA
What I find most notable is that he can barely suppress the smirk [IMO] when he says he didn't do anything wrong, and also when he said he was going to stop.
RealVideo can be found here: http://www.tvone.co.nz/programmes/holmes/
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
Sadly enough, it does pay....I read an article that said over a 4-week period, 6000 people bought on average two bottles of $50 penis-enhancement 'medicine' that was probably gelatin.
Over a year, that can be pretty lucrative. He shouldn't be able to whine about it when the tables are turned, though.
(*ducks* for cover, get it, oh i murder myself...)
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
...this guy must have the biggest penis in the world.
Rule #1: Spammers always lie.
Rule #2: When a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see rule #1.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
This latest report shows a big change of heart from his comments of a few days ago:
See the full story here [stuff.co.nz].
64% of all statistics are totally useless.
z3ngine.
I therefore think I am.
Post his e-mail address and phone number!
No really, this is for legitemate business. I represent a major supplier of penis enlargment pills, and I just want to offer him my company's services.... ten thousand times per day.
The unofficial
AT&ROFLMAO
I'm not worried about Artificial Intelligence, when they invent Artificial Stupidiy, then I'll be scared.
I used to think that comparing the Internet to the Wild West was just as bad as that "superhighway" metaphor, but lately I've come to realize how appropriate it's come to be.
You've got a legal vacuum for the most part, considering that most law enforcement authorities won't take action until a certain monetary dollar amount of damage has been done (with some notable exceptions such as child pornography). Thus, the medium is dominated by penis-enlarging snake oil salesmen, grizzled dataminers trying to pass off fool's gold as the real thing, men in black hats, men in white hats, Indians with H1B visas (yeah, I know...), and e-mail programs infected with smallpox.
I only beat the Net Rush of '94 by a couple of years, but I've heard some of the oldtimers tell tales of yore, when the whole community would get together to raise a barn or wire a school with CAT-5, or how you could always rely on your neighbor to help mend a fence or patch sendmail.
"Round up a posse, boys. We'll head 'em off at the router..."
Yeah, it's a stretch. I know. But everytime I look in that Deadman's Gulch I call my inbox, my trigger finger starts to itch and I yearn for a nice
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"If you don't want to receive spam, don't connect to the Internet, or don't have an e-mail address."
Hmmm... I think you're right, he would've seen the light on his own.
How about we modify this quote a bit...
"If you don't want to recieve hourly death threats, don't use a phone"
Hypocrites indeed. They harrassed him with phone calls BECAUSE he was harrassing people with emails. You know, to force it through his thick skull that what he was doing was generally pissing people off?
Didn't you forget about the battle with the two year old over the domain Veronica.org?
Fight Spammers!
This is something I don't understand. I hope someone can explain or point me to an explanation of what I will try to describe. We all know there are very few laws against spam, and jurisdiction problems even if such laws exist.
Explain to me why it's not easy to demonstrate that someone that puts explicit spam in a child's mailbox isn't committing some sort of other crime. I don't mean "get a good mortgage rate," I mean some of the bad porn related stuff we all see, at least periodically.
So, hypothetically, let's say it's against the law in California to send some gang-bang smut ad to young Timmy. What is preventing the district attorneys, Timmy's mom, etc. from getting an injunction against John Doe? From a subpoena being issued?
Forget for now that tracing back the originator is tough. I'm asking, can't they be charged with a crime in, say, California? THEN, if they're discovered, OR if they ever travel to California & get caught (say, for a speeding ticket), they'll be in deep doo-doo.
This costs money, takes time, and doesn't find the spammers, I agree. But it will make a spammer who wants to go to a conference or travel think twice....and maybe open a whole new dot-com business opportunity: bounty hunters for the charged-but-not-yet-caught spammers.
Someone please explain why these people aren't guilty of crimes that are not spam specific, and why they can't be charged in jurisdictions where the spam is received.
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I wonder if he's ever got spam from his own company?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
I find it amazing that people like him seem quite happy to send 100 million emails out, but if the tables are turned they cry in their beer. Seems that everytime one of the spammers is exposed in the press, they are like roaches running for cover.
Maybe it's time to shine the light on the rest of them out there, lets see how many can take what they dish out.
" I worked briefly as a spammer, but then lost my income as a result of an anti-spam hacker with a chip on his shoulder." Good. You know the reason he had a chip on his shoulder? Probably had something to do with this spam that "people" like you send. Vigilantes in general... bad. Vigilantes taking down spammers... good.
Good job on publishing this guy's name. Now he tasted his own medicine and closed shop.
This is a great way to get rid of spammers. People should be personally responsible for their own actions.
From my whitepages:
Atkinson Shane
2 O'Neill Ave Harewood Belfast
0-3-323 6484
And that's in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Receiving 100 emails a day for penis enlargement, porn sites, great deals on vacations and a bunch of other crap is not a "pleasant experience" either.
It is not illegal to send unsolicited email, no, but unsolicited email is slowly crippling email itself. Just because it is not illegal does not make the spammers tactics any better than the anti-spammers.
It is legal for me to ride a train and drink a beer, but if I could magically clone myself 100 million times, then all the trains around here would have a bunch of drunk me's running around, and that would make the train system sort of pointless, except that I'd be pretty amused. Your argument would indicate that this would be ok...100 million beer drinking me's...that sounds cool.
man rtfm
They're a bit behind the times on things like
Road rage
Locking up the house and having a safe room
Gun Injuries and Murders
Driving on the same side of the road as everyone else going in the same direction
Postcodes - there are no postcodes in NZ
And the fact that there is too much spam!
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
This happens a lot, actually; criminals do it all the time...
It's not hypocrisy when you're doing X solely to the guys who do X to make them realize X is wrong.
What if X = sodomy?
Cheers,
Confused.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
by the same logic
;-)
if u dont want obscene phone calls disconnect your phone or dont have a phone line.
so start calling
You obviously have not seen the late night informercials advertising how you can have your very own internet marketing business, where you can make money fast in only a few hours per day.
Yes, you can be a spammer - if you sign up todayu!
Scary, No?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Man what dumb ass, watch the video clip and you will understand. http://www.tvone.co.nz/programmes/holmes/ I guess some people never learn.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
Isn't it amazing that people like this seem to equate legality with morality?
There are lots of things which one can do which are legal but immoral, or moral but illegal. "I thought it was legal" is never an acceptable excuse for doing something which you know to be immoral.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
Only 20 or so angry phone calls? I've had my personal phone numbers included in "Joe Job" spam (where a spammer deliberately impersonates you in order to cause you grief), and my phone rang off the hook all day with irate callers. Bit of an uneven playing field, wouldn't you say? I've never sent any spam at all, and I've had it far worse.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
I worked briefly as a spammer, but then lost my income as a result of an anti-spam hacker with a chip on his shoulder. Lets just say that it's not a pleasant experience. There's no use for vigilantes on the internet.
Good. You've wasted the time of millions of people. That's "not pleasant," either. Cry me a river.
Web Design & Software Development
wondering if he and other spammers are as really naive as the article makes out.
It is quite possible that they are that naive a lot of them may not be on every mailing list on the planet then they get a couple of Spam mails then it seems like a good idea. I doubt that many of them don't realize the scale of the problem. As well many Spammers are the same type of people that read and fall for Spam. So they actually think they can make good money at it and many do. But like with many other things people tend to fail to stop and analysis what they do on a grand scheme of things.
If I had no moral objection to it spamming seems like an interesting area of Work that is really interesting at an intellectual level. Working on methods to optimize bandwidth to maximize the amount of email out. Finding a method of hiding your true identity but allowing people to contact you to purchase. Understanding the limits of computer laws to allow yourself to use other computers without people knowing but still be legal. Finding ways around filters and other things. It would be interesting work in an intellectual level, but so would seeing a child grow up in a completely isolated of any nurture to see what are the true human instinct and what is what we learn. But there are a lot of people who have a hard time understanding more then themselfs and forget to see what they are doing is wrong.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
".. NZ based spammer who has shut up shop..."
thats just what he wants us think. He is probably just buying time to find out how his details were traced and how to restart operations again...only this time making sure his privacy remains protected.....
'The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist,' -the Usual Suspects
... if he got caught/found out, then he probably is just naive. Any who knew what they were doing wouldn't get caught.
Aggressive anti-spam activists should be locked up. They do more harm than good. I worked briefly as a spammer
Please post your name, adress, phone number, fax number, and picture here, on slashdot.
I promise you, we WILL do you more harm than good...
You can't take the sky from me...
And if one person called up their toll-free number and left them a phone number they didn't want to talk to, like their ISP's phone number, or Interpol's, or the FBI's anonymous tip line, or their local police office, or their country's government's people-selling-bad-medicine bureaucracy's complaint line, or other spammers' toll-free numbers, or other spammers' ISP contact numbers, they might also start to think they were getting slashdotted.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If he's sincere, I'll bet it was the implied threat against his family that got to him... probably sent his little conscience a-flutter.
I dearly hope no well-meaning geek actually threatened this guy's family; that's really way over the line, folks. The probability is that the avalanche of malice he received made him wonder what someone possessed of such hatred might do... what lengths they would go to...
Good riddance... I hope he's a better man because of it (though I won't hold my breath).
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Someone might have already said this, but Oh Boo Hoo Cry me a River. You lost your "income" stealing from everyone else. Boo Hoo. And correction: It is illegal in some states to send unsolicited emails if there isn't a proper return email address, if the return email addresses are forged, or if there is no real way to "remove" someone from the "list"...
I would not like to think that I could possibly be persecuting an innocent party.
Even in the case where it is in fact the spammer in question there tend to be stronger laws, in most countries, for phone/personal/snail-mail harassment.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
I'm not in the right place organizationally for spammers to sell me service (though I've had to help some of our sales people explain our anti-spam policy to people who wanted to buy our ISP services in simple one- or two-syllable words so they could get the concept...)
But I have had telemarketers leave me a voice-mail about getting lawn service - and they were clearly calling numbers in sequential order, at my office, in the middle of a concrete block of downtown, in a city where several thousand phone numbers in a row belong to offices that aren't anywhere near any grass. I probably should have asked them to drive by for an estimate, but this was before the spammer epidemic really took off and I wasn't as mean.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I tried to get postcodes for Wellington, and for Paekakariki (skuse spellin), and the people that lived there didn't know what they were.
But I confess that was 1998.
Having read the stuff.co.nz article about this particular guy, seems like he knew exactly what he was doing and how popular it was.
Somebody has posted an address for Shane, in Christchurch. I hope it's the same person. Otherwise it would be like being "Dave Nelson" in a USA airport.
Are the private school kids still wearing straw boaters and striped blazers in Christchurch?
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Well, if they like sodomy, chances are they won't mind being sodomized. This "do unto them what they do unto you" method only works for things that are antisocial and extremely irritating (spam, posting personal info in public, etc.) The theory is once they realize how annoying it is, they'll stop doing it. Now, if someone is anally raping others, I would be all for that person being anally raped. Once they get their asshole forcefully torn open against their will, they will stop doing the same thing to others. Kinda neat how that works out. I think it's all about inner karma.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
It's been 20 days since I've received a penile enlargement ad, though I've received nearly 700 spams on different subjects over that period.
Could it be that one guy was responsible for most of those ads?
Ack! I almost clicked submit having left the word "ad" out of the first paragraph. Glad I caught it.
because that's where [insert name of famous rugby union player here] comes from.
At least that's what the post office guy told me, when I asked him for the post code.
I did put "North Island", or "South Island" on to the envelopes just to be sure. But after travelling round, I discovered that NZ is not like the "West Island" (Oz), in that they don't have five suburbs or towns called "Beaconsfield" located an average of 1500km apart. And if they must name things after places in the "Old Country" (UK), they'd match particular UK regions to particular NZ regions so the names didn't repeat. There aren't even NZ States or Provinces. Cool. Although there are regional divisions for Rugby teams mostly. Go Otago!
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
I worked briefly as a spammer, but then lost my income as a result of an anti-spam hacker with a chip on his shoulder.
We pause now for any expressions of sympathy.
(Crickets chirp.)
<< I worked briefly as a spammer>>
At wich point you lost all rights to complain about anythign to do with your income, career, working conditions, public perception and feelings. You became a pariah, outcast by all who use the internet for more than 20 minutes a day, and some that don't.
<<but then lost my income as a result of an anti-spam hacker>>
Live by the sword, die by the sword. If only all spam-sending computers had a chip built in that could wipe their hard drives remotely. Or better still, crash the heads so they have to go to the inconvenience of buying a new unit every two days.
Your post is mis-modded. Saying you were a spammer should have got you a flamebait mod.
There is nothing more for you here.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
You cry when someone sends you 1 or 2 spams a day, but then you go ahead and cheer on the people who do stuff like this? That's fucking unbelievable. Have you no sense? It's hypocrisy like this that's going to keep spam a problem forever.
Any responce via phone to spam is a *solisited* responce. "Stop sending me spam" would be a very approperate responce to such a foofoo head.
Because the system is automated, the guy is going to get several million responces to the spam he sent. If you run a business based on this model, you are required in most countries to be taken off their mailing list if you ask.
So, I don't see it as being hyprocritical at all. The guy runs a business of contacting people. If people don't want to be contacted, they have every right to ask him to stop.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
[Copied from news.admin.net-abuse.email]
For immediate release - 15 August 2003
INTERNETNZ LODGES COMPLAINTS AGAINST SPAMMER
InternetNZ is lodging complaints against Christchurch
spammer Shane Atkinson with three different regulatory
bodies.
Atkinson has been identified in the media as being
responsible for the sending of up to 100 million spam
e-mails a day to promote his penis enlargement pills.
InternetNZ Vice-President, David Farrar, said that
complaints are being lodged with:
- The Commerce Commission for breach of Section 10 of the
Fair Trading Act 1986, relating to misleading conduct in
relation to goods.
- The Ministry of Health for breach of the Medicines Act
1981
- The Privacy Commissioner for breach of the Privacy Act
1993
"Mr Atkinson is an unrepentant spammer who believes that
those who don't want to receive spam should not connect to
the Internet. InternetNZ disagrees that connecting to the
Internet is a license for Mr Atkinson to promote his penis
enlargement pills to every man, woman and child's e-mail
address he can find" said Mr Farrar.
InternetNZ has been considering investigating the
possibility of advocating for NZ legislation to combat spam.
"If nothing is done to stem the tide of spam, we will start
to lose Internet users as they become overloaded with junk
mail. It is estimated that just over 50% of all email
travelling the Internet is now spam". said Keith Davidson,
InternetNZ President
=93If spammers believe there is nothing wrong with spamming,
then legislation will become a definitive requirement in New
Zealand. Many other countries have passed or intend to pass
anti-spam legislation. While New Zealand has been able to
rely on industry self regulation and a high degree of
co-operation between ISP's in the fight against spam, it is
becoming apparent that further steps towards legislation may
be desirable if attitudes like those of Mr Atkinson
exist.=94 according to Mr Davidson
InternetNZ urges the appropriate regulatory authorities to
prosecute Mr Atkinson to the maximum extent permissible
under current laws." concluded InternetNZ Vice-President
David Farrar
ENDS
For further information please contact:
David Farrar
Vice-President and Chair of Legal & Regulatory, InternetNZ
david@farrar.com
027 447 0216
Keith Davidson
President, InternetNZ
president@internetnz.net.nz
027 430 3317
Seriously, I have an idea. Maybe a social fix is the best solution for this problem. Please take this for the honest proposal that it is.
Anyone in a responsible position at, say, a bank, drugstore, or any business that would be attractive to an "email marketer" as a client, could help put LOTS of spammers out of business.
Just arrange a meeting to talk about the advertising services they could provide for you. Thank them, take their contact information, and post it to a relevant newsgroup.
This would not be immoral or even rude. You'd publish only the public information on their business cards -- nothing confidential.
Let the mobbed masses do to lots more of them what they did to the spammer that's the subject of the article.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
I am saddened and upset by most of the comments I have read here. I could not read it all...
I will try not to be nastey however as one closer to the action than most of you I find most of this drival offensive.
I have received his spam. I will say no more on this. I did start writting a whole lot but I don't
need to justify anything or say anything that could make life more difficult for me.
Mr Aitkinson is most likely out of business.
Not for spamming but because he has been accused
of breaking three New Zealand laws.
Mr Atkinson has been exposed because of actions taken against his operation. He has been at it a year. He only recently exposed his true identity in whois information. Mistake or not it happened on the 15th of July 2003.
Thanks to the NZ Herald reporter for finding the info. Me thinks a lucky hit... Hidden away in a
news group it was yes.
Mr Atkinson and his group have recently lost a large group of domain names. Something that has not happened to a spam operation before on this scale I think. Maybe I am wrong.
Its a tricky little jigsaw puzzle.
OK so we have got this far...
What you should be doing?
Be carefull my friend!
If you are going to get involved get advice before doing so. Read the horror stories first. Unwitting newbies often do not realize the consequences of submitting spam source etc. And even people in an antipodian paradise are not immune/safe.
Get involved on a different level.
If you are a US citizen oppose Opt-in legislation!
This will make it impossible for anyone outside America to stop spam. I can just see it now.
But we are allowed...
If you live in the normal world (Joke) get involved at your internet society level.
ICANN is meant to be the parent body on the Internet. They regulate and monitor registrars
who in turn are meant to regulate and monitor
ip address range holders who in turn pass this on to there clients.
THIS IS NOT HAPPENING!
The Intenet is not self regulating and is being and has been regulated against by governments.
Preasure the powers to be in your country to reach formal agreements with ICANN. Thats your registry that registers your domain name. Your provider whatever services you use. Make sure those agreements contain anti spam clauses.
Given current technology spammers are not annonymous. ICANN was provided information that could have led to the tracing of this offender in late 2002.
Finally a word for Mr Atkinson...
I do not envy his position at all however I also
would not like to see him physically harmed or harrased now that he has been uncovered.
The issue is his ability to hide in the first place.
He will now be dealt with by the authorities, investigated and prosecuted if warranted.
Civil procedings against him are unlikely in this country.
Keep your heads up... This is a win and a good win however the people associated with Mr Atkinson have come away from this relatively unscathed and the spam associated with the mother group still flows. They are still sending out large numbers each day as claimed. They are still sheltering within providers in countries like China and Brazil.
You can set up a phone number to reject any incoming collect calls. It would take about 10 calls and he'd probably just stick it on auto-reject
Christchurch is a small town and I will run into the jerk at some time in the future and he owes me for every mesage my spam filters had to nuke. He better name every one of his "associates" and do it soon.
Also I'll put up NZ$500 for the 1st person that can provide information to the proper authorites that leads to his arrest and jail time for this jerk. He broke NZ law by selling unlicensed drugs. If you want to claim it, get in touch with me. Any chance we can get this guy extradited someplace where he won't get a slap on the wrist? Maybe the US where peddling adult products to minors as well as selling illegal drugs will show the world that spaming is a bad idea.
Damn made a mistake.... Oppose Opt-in should be... Oppose Opt-out. Sorry folks... Checked it several times too... Proposed legislation in the United States makes it your responsibility to Opt-out of a mailing list as opposed to the legislation due to be inacted in the European Union in October. Oppose all government legislation involving the internet! It all goes against the self governance/regulation principle.
Uppage there are a few of the expected calls for government regulation of email that we see every time there is a story about spam, and there are the obligitory anecdotes about the hundreds of spam emails that some poor souls find every day in thier inbox.
.procmailrc in thier shell account (if they provide thier subscribers with a shell acc
So here is my usual post about how asking the government to regulate everything is a bad idea, and how I have little sympathy for the poor saps who are getting flooded with thousands of spam emails a day that makes it difficult for them to see the one or two legitimate emails that thier friends might send them each year.
First law. Bad idea because it won't work. As long as there are different countries with seperate governments that have differing attitudes towards the internet, commerce, and law it will be impossible to legislate spam out of existance. That is not to say that I am supporting the idea of one government rulling all peoples or that I am advocating any sort if international treaty on regulating email and the internet.
Far from it.
What I am saying is there are good methods of reducing the flow of spam to your in-box to a trickle, possibly blocking the spam flow completely.
Use a provider that is as concerned about stopping the spam as you are. That means no AOL, no MSN, no Hotmail, etc. These companies are notorious for not only allowing you to get spam flooded, but for allowing thier customers to send spam and not discontiuing accounts that are being used as fake "reply to" and "from" addresses. There are other companies that are just as irresponsible as the ones I mentioned, so you should not think that I am saying that these companies are the only ones that should be avoided.
If you like using the same email and access provider (I've been hijacking friends access accounts for years now), then you should know that smaller access providers often are more responsive to user's (knowlegable and legitimate) complaints than large companies. As an added bonus, thier access rates tend to be low, and they are as if not more reliable than thier corporate competitors.
If you like using a separate provider for email, ask around, do some searches, and choose one that has effective filtering/blocking of spam included in thier basic package.
You can filter the mail yourself with one of the many spam blocking services or filters that are readily available on the internet. Here are some links to some of the blacklists and filters that I know about:
ORDB
MAPS
junkfilter
Bogofilter
SpamCop
SpamBouncer
There are others, some services are free, some charge money. If you are going to use a filter on your own machine that is not part of a service, I highly reccomend that you stick with Free Software so you can learn something about how it works.
You should learn as much about the problem and potential solutions as possible by reading articles about spam that may be not quite as sensational as the currently popular "spammer hunting" genre, but are a little richer in detail and technique. Here is a good primer including some good links, and there's lots of good info on dealing with spam around the web.
You should attempt to encourage your provider to take an active role in helping users avoid spam troubles, either by providing information on how users can filter spam on thier own machines, by providing spam blocking/filtering service, or by allowing users to install thier own
Read, L
You can buy all the illegal drugs you want, and they can sell all the illegal drugs you want.
They just cannot *deliver* them, or have them delivered, and you cannot take posession.
It's kindof like the gold mines: you don't buy gold; you delay your taxes by buying stock in gold mines. They dig it out, they refine it; they never actually sell it. You take the tax writeoff (loss), and the ownership of the gold, both.
Cocaine has lots of legitimate uses (umm, do they use it in making Novacaine? If not, it still is legally used to weight down the DOJ buildings in Miami, and keep them from blowing away in Tornados) if I could only think of one.
Okay... I'm done with my daily Schozophrenic Thought For the Day.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
First, it's not illegal to send unsolicited emails.
Depends on the jurisdiction. It takes a while sometimes for legislation to catch up with petty thieves like you.
Second, it's not illegal to use passive defensive measures to block said spam.
Interesting. In this statement, you concede that spamming is an agressive act. That makes you the aggressor, and the guy who took you down the defender. Ergo, he's right, you're wrong, now fuck off and leave the net to honest people.
Aggressive anti-spam activists should be locked up.
Fuck you. You tried to make a living off of millions of counts of petty theft, and if you got away without getting the shit kicked out of you, then you got far less punishment than you deserve.
I worked briefly as a spammer, but then lost my income as a result of an anti-spam hacker with a chip on his shoulder.
Good for him!
Lets just say that it's not a pleasant experience.
It's not supposed to be pleasant, you greasy little shit-stain. I hope you're still having post-traumatic stress symptoms.
There's no use for vigilantes on the internet.
On the contrary! This guy got you to quit spamming, didn't he?
I'd say that's one *excellent* use for vigilantes on the internet.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
No doubt that letter from SCO scared him into closing up shop. If I recall correctly, SCO has specific IP rights to all annoying matter that exists electronically. Shame on you, Shane.
Or at least determining which Rugby team you should play in or support depending on where you live, right? I did mention Otago - for Rugby. The whole time I was there, I didn't hear the "provinces" referred to for any other reason. And I did ask. I think I even had a discussion with a regular inhabitant of the Beehive about it.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
[were != where - I thought that subject line looked funny] You're right: Christian Cullen. I vaguely remember a small speedy guy who travelled up the wing like a bullet. Trust NZ to have a harness racing horse named for him. Also travels fast. Why do so many Kiwis post as AC when you could post as a Kauri? or a Matai?
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
"He said that since the article was published, anti-spam activists had been "having a field day". He had received more than 20 phone calls, five of them obscene."
Obscene ones? Must be "thank-you" kisses from his penis enlargement customers.
His personal information, street address and phone numbers were "plastered all over the web". The article also led to rackshack.com, the US web service that hosts Mr Atkinson's servers, being entered in the Spam Early Warning System list, which many networks use for blocking email traffic.
I mentioned this before. Just remember folks.. SPEWS has your name, number, address, change-of-address, time when you eat, when you sleep, and when you realize your Preparation H is not working.
"Rackshack gave notice that it would shut down two of Mr Atkinson's servers because of the listing, forcing him to move the servers to a different network."
So Rackshack.. exactly how many thousands of abuse reports did you receive and ignore before SPEWS tossed you into the dungeon? I think you love your pink contracts a bit too much.
saying that he "never intended to break any regulations".
Rule #1. Rule #2.
"I sort of feel good now about stopping this," he said.
Rule #1. Rule #2.
"I'll just stick to search engines and web sites - that's still plenty of fun and money."
Rule #1. Rule #2. Rule #3. Russell's Corollary.
Please use your favorite search engine to review the "Rules of Spam" or go here.
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
But Daddy you told me you provided a very much needed service to the world, why would you be ashamed to let me here about exactly what it is?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I still wonder though ... Who eats SPAM?
I mean, receiving a message from a total unknown, with a scrambled email address, and selling some dream get-rich scheme or fulfilment to life - do people fall for it? Surely life has taught them more.
As for a solution, I read somewhere that SPAM could possibly account for one half of all internet traffic. If this figure is anywhere near accurate, then charging for data flow is one answer.
It has long been my opinion that anyone who is doing wrong is in some ways nieve. It is my opinion that the statement "ignorence is bliss" is the most evil 3 words ever spoken.
As a security guard by night and a flea marketter by day I've heard some of the most unbeleavable nonsense however most of the time the would be theaf actually believes it was ok.
This extends to spam. Spammers actually believe what they are doing is a valuable service. They think they are protecting themselfs from a rare few people who don't understand how business actually works.
Where would they get such an idea?
Maybe becouse such people do exist and actually harrass businesses with some really stupid ideas of how things "should" be.
Example: A business is closed and the boss is trying to leave. A costummer lays is wait for the gates to open. He blazes in nearly running me (the guard) over just so he can get inside.
Once there the boss tells him to leave and he breaks out screaming and yelling about how things should be. "People should be nicer".
Then in industrys there are "rules" everyone folows but nobody knows why or even where the rules came from.
Example: Closed source software drivers and no tech specs. The fear is that someone could use that to create a cheap knock off.
Sounds like the the kind of thing Microsoft says about open source.
"Keep your source code secret and nobody can figure out how your hardware/software works"
Decompilers, Chip specs, port scans, packet sniffing, lab testing, Random throw, bad luck, software being obveous and creative thinking. Need I say more?
In short we think they are just being greedy but it's more than that they actually don't know better and never actually bothered to learn net culture.
They learn the technology and figure thats all there is to the Internet.
I don't actually exist.
"It's not hypocrisy when you're doing X solely to the guys who do X to make them realize X is wrong." ---- It's not hypocrisy when you're [killing people] to the guys who [kill people] to make them realize [killing people] is wrong?
I worked briefly as a spammer,
...but then lost my income as a result of an anti-spam hacker with a chip on his shoulder.
Then you are a social parasite. People like you should be subjected to public harassment, the more painful the better.
I vote that the coliseum concept should be reinstated into the justice system - Tonight's main attraction... Spammers vs Lions!
First, it's not illegal to send unsolicited emails. Second, it's not illegal to use passive defensive measures to block said spam.
But why should we have to? Lots of things aren't illegal, but they piss people off.
I can hear the violins... It's such a sad story - the guy who pissed everybody off lost his irritating source of income... If I had my way you'd lose more than that. I'd ban all spammers from using the internet at all, and enforce it by removing all their fingers with a blunt axe. I hope you and all your amoral spamming kind rot in hell.
There's no use for vigilantes on the internet.
But there is assumedly a use for spammers?
You are a git.
my sig could kick your sig's arse...
For everybody to start phoning spammers up would be a distributed denial of service attack, and would therefore be illegal would it not?
I know I got threatened big time by my ISP when I started posting spammer's phone numbers out.
The penis-enlarging pills were SPAM? You mean they don't work. I guess I should stop taking .... I mean ...um ...I've uh never taken penis-enlarging pills.....
Green Monkey san
While some can read an email header and track down the spammer, most can't. If more education was given on how to track down spammers, more of us angry people would take this matter into our own hands. Teach the people and let the mobs regulate. It seems to work.
What i found most interesting was:
"Mr Atkinson has decided to get out of the spamming business, citing the "negative feedback"".
It's SPAM!!! When has there been positive feedback?! Has he ever stepped outside and asked someone what they thought about spam? Give me a break. The only thing missing was a "I didn't know people didn't like it" comment. Finaly a way to fight spam has been found!
...had me wondering if he and other spammers are as really naive as the article makes out.
No fscking way. I'll believe they weren't aware of anything as they forged headers and return addresses while looking for open relays, changing ISPs every 10 minutes, and paying ISPs 3x the going rate to look the other way for 24 hours as soon as someone believes that I didn't really mean to rob a bank, I just found a gun, happened to wave it around, didn't notice the teller giving me $600k in cash, and didn't realize that I was driving that fast and that all those lights and sirens were for me--I just figured they wanted someone else.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
So what are YOU doing about the hungry and AIDs cases? Just Boo-hooing, or just trying to shift the blame to people that complain about "executives and companies worth millions of dollars"? Or are you actually pulling money out of your OWN pocket to buy food and drugs for these people? If the Whinners of the world put THEIR money where their mouths are, instead of bitching about other people that are also bitching then a lot of these problems would be lessened if not solved. Of course that assumes that the hungry and sick are a real concern, and not just an excuse to attack people that attack those who have more money.
So what am I doing about the hungry and AIDS cases and etc? Well, admittedly no too damn much. But at least I'm honest about it, and I don't waste a bunch of time attacking people that are attacking other people. Oh wait I just did. Oh well. Nevermind.
Let he who is not guilty cast the first stone.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
"Killing people" isn't something "to the guys who..." Killing them may work. We do it here in texas all the time.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
You know, it's really, really disturbing that the experiences of a spamer are almost identical to that of a doctor that performs abortions.
I'm not really sure what that says about spamers, abortions, or society... I can just tell that there is something incredible WRONG about it all. This is definately going to linger in my mind for some time.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Courtesy is a two-way street. If you want people to act reasonably towards you, then you must do the same. Sending hundreds, thousands, or more unrequested messages for products that are likely to be useless at best is not a reasonable act. The USPS made chain letters illegal because the letters cost resources (paid for in part by other users) that could instead be used for more constructive purposes; spam has the same effect, but on individuals, rather than a single entity. It costs people money and time to deal with material that does no one but spammers any good.
Since spammers insist on depriving legitimate users of their rights, and governments can't do much, why are spammers indignant about vigilantes? Spammers use the impunity of the absence of law to protect themselves, but then claim the presence of law to protect them when they get tagged. Spammers can't have it both ways. If the law doesn't apply to spammers, and they can use other people's email and personal data without their permission, then they are fair game to receive the same treatment. If there are rules and protections for spammers, then they have to play within those rules. You can't have it both ways. I don't want anyone to be hurt, but I can understand a good deal of the anger of people here, particularly since Slashdot has many of the people who have to spend their time protecting against, cleaning up after, and being victimized by spammers. You really shouldn't expect people to feel any differently.
If I went around to bars knocking over people's beers and yelling propaganda at them, eventually I would be arrested. If no police existed to do so, eventually I would probably get my butt kicked, and I wouldn't be suprised if some the patrons ganged up on me and showed me the errors of my ways. Why do you expect spammers (who operate in similar ways) not to be subject to the same rules of cause and effect in human behavior?
What, you didn't get endless phone calls from telemarketers asking you if you need vinyl windows, home secirty, the newspaper, the voice of god, and a demonstration of a vacume?
Man you got it easy. I'd trade telemarketing for death threats anyway.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
and just to make it exciting some drive wherever the hell they feel like especially on the road between Wellington and Parapara'm'. And yes lots of people were getting killed but not necessarily the ones who deserved it. In just two weeks while I was there, 8 people died. I was very dedicated to the train after the first weekend, even though I knew that had fallen off the side of the mountain one time.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
I think the philosophy of many advertisers seems to be that they have some kind of "right" to bombard the public with ads, regardless of privacy laws and the like. Lawmakers seem to agree. Even worse, I once heard my brother seriously remark "but if there weren't ads all over the place, how would I find out about all the great products out there?!"
There seems to be a (creepy) growing consensus among the brainwashed portion of the general public that businesses have some kind of "right to stay in business", regardless of how crappy their product is, so we just have to put up with advertisers filling our mailboxes with crap, calling our homes, sending us email, etc.
Kind of like the MPAA and RIAA claiming that their declining sales are a result of just about anything but the declining quality of the "art" they sling.
I don't think much will ever be done to correct this problem until we bring it to the table that there's no such thing as a "right to sell complete shit and bother people about it", even in free-market America.
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-
eh, it's an AC post - emphasis on the 'C'
You expect it to be readable?
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Although I have always been disgusted by the spamming practice, I have always maintained that it wasn't right to stoop to their level. Same reason I don't set up attack-back features on firewalls. Public psting of his ID isn't the same as a campeign to flood his email or intigate DoS on his boxes, but it's a subtle temptation.
Oddly, this article might have me switching sides... Given all of the animosity directed towards spammers I find it amazing that the number of phone calls this guy mentioned was *20*. I would have though we'd be seeing 200+. I'm no one to pass judgement, but 20 calls sure seems a small price to pay for his contribution to Internet pollution. And it is implied that he is stopping now, which seems to increase the merit of this response / pay back.
The cynic in me still wonders if he made those claims to the media in order to decrease his harassment levels while he finds a new prvider. Seems like the shady types always have a plan "B" and this kind of thing is like playing whack-a-mole. Does anyne else really buy-in to him ending his games?
Me thinks that your sarcasm detector is broken.
Fight Spammers!
Taken from news.admin.net-abuse.email, subj: [MEDIA]: make penis fast spammer operating out of New Zealand, posted: 8/14/03
e ar ch&listing_type=ALL&ind=5&key=atkinson&loc =CH
| 2& svctype=1&zoomin=true&move=true
Quote:
The phone number is a NZ Vodafone mobile. Don't bother calling it to run his bill up, NZ mobiles don't work that way
There's a ChCh phone number, 03 323 6484 that he mentions on his
mobile phone voice mail message.
http://www.whitepages.co.nz/quick/search?page=s
Atkinson Shane
2 O'Neill Ave Harewood Belfast
0-3-323 6484
http://www.wises.co.nz/map/default.asp?id=67524
rxmedicalgroup.com, directNIC.com.
Registrant:
SA PUBLISHINGS
P.O. Box 36289 Merivale
Christchurch, NZ 8030
NZ
064211252557
Domain Name: RXMEDICALGROUP.COM
Administrative Contact:
Atkinson, Shane support@sapublishings.com
P.O. Box 36289 Merivale
Christchurch, NZ 8030
NZ
064211252557
Technical Contact:
Atkinson, Shane support@sapublishings.com
P.O. Box 36289 Merivale
Christchurch, NZ 8030
NZ
064211252557
End Quote
"Teachers leave us kids alone
At which point the bed would contain an entire horse.
No, just the head and ass, no middle. Not all that viable but who cares?
Tech Public Policy stuff
Cleangoogle.com - has to be a goer.
Usually, this is spam they're sending using their real e-mail addresses from their own domain names, often with real addresses in the spam itself, and they are selling real products and services of some sort.
I may have seen as many as a dozen or so since I got onto the Net in late 1991.
In those rare cases, you explain to them politely that they did a bad thing and why it's a bad thing, and they'll apologize and stop.
If they respond with one of the well-known spammer rationalizations, have fun and use your imagination to come up with an appropriate response.
Tech Public Policy stuff
We can hope at this point that some public spirited citizen will put together a legal defense fund for the person who . . . reasoned with the spammer.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Anyone know what his email address is? I get several spams a day to an address at my domain that they made up (mortgageshoppers@...). I currently autoforward them to uce@ftc.gov. Autosending a copy to a spammer would be additional satisfaction.
send spammers to jail. they are worse than crackers.
hmm, good point, perhaps I'm wrong... MS has tremendous talents in the area of writing dumb software... they might succeed in out-dumbing us.
Wikipedia lists ANI.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
How did the journalist go about finding out the spammers identity? I would like to know :-)
Wouldn't it be fun to have a web page listing spammers names and phone numbers? My personal spam inflow has gone from 30+ a day to 1-2 since the slashdot article, which is a factor of 15 at least. I suppose, it means that hitting just one more spammer with 20 phone calls would bring that down to 1 spam per week, right? That would almost be acceptable!!