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NZ Spammer Shutdown Makes Big Difference
lump writes "A notorious spammer, based in New Zealand, who had his name and other personal info released first in a national newspaper, and then on the web, has shut down his operation, citing harassment. What interests me about this case is that, in the 5 or 6 days since he has supposedly stopped operating, I personally have had one (1) spam email, to an address which had previously averaged around fifty per day. Colleagues report a similar reduction in spam. All I can say is 'excellent.' Hate to say it, but in this case, vigilante type action seems to have had the desired result. This needs to be publicised, as anything which slows down spam can only be a good thing."
Does that mean we can only look forward to baked-beans?
Yeah, true, but this doesn't stop the flux of spamhaus cohorts' virus-infected computers sending me their pestilence simply because I'm still on their "hit lists" or whatever. That's basically evidence that even if the root of the problem is taken care of, that the symptoms can still persist.
Unsolicited e-mail, spam or virus, all the same to me.
-
And the Angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots! The cries of the carrots!"
I really have noticed a dramatic decrease in the amount of spam I've received in the past 4-5 days. I figured it was just due to my dilligence with unsubscribing myself to mailing lists but everything just suddenly dropped off.
I used to get solid stuff in all of my accounts but I haven't gotten a single piece of anything in the last week. Hate to say it, but vigilanteeism is the only thing that works.
I have noticed a sharp drop in spam the past few day, too. I attributed that to the recent SoBig.F craze sweeping the nation (and beyond). Is there any definative evidence?
While I am skeptical, I am also hopeful. If he has indeed been the cause of so much of the spam I have seen recently, then this ought to serve as a wake up call to anyone looking to fill his shoes.
ads.slashdot.org
Sounds like we're about to enter the times of the Wild Wild Web, where vigilantism and marshal law run wild....sounds like fun to me!
... I haven't seen much spam in my inbox lately. But yet spam from my hotmail account is just the same, damn Microsoft for using their hotmail users as a spam whore for money. :P
This space is not for rent.
Catburglary is down. In other news, vicious sack beatings up 300%
I guess he was getting too many ridiculous e-mails :-p
Error 407 - No creative sig found
It has been tried before unsuccessfully so it doesn't always work, but I'm glad it did this time.
there's spam, egg, sausage and spam. That's not got much spam in it.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
"Anything which slows down spam can only be a good thing."
Hardly. Without violating godwin's law, I can think of lots of ways to stop spam that would be a bad thing. Be careful, this is a slippery slope.
It's "Viruses", not "virii". Grrr.
I was so naive.
I was actually looking for that spam to start training my spam filter and noticed almost all of it had stopped.
I thought it was related to the Sobig.F mess. I hope it really was that jerk and now has stopped.
I like it.
As I have this in /etc/postfix/body_checks /^Penis/ REJECT /^penis/ REJECT /^Pindick/ REJECT
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
many people are getting flooded with the crap and where they may just get a few spams and be able to read them, now they are inundated and are trigger happy with the delete key.
Many peoples inboxes are filled and can't accept any e-mail
It also may be that your particular address just happened to be 0wn3d by that particular spammer but not any/many others. There are plenty of other people that are on many other spammers lists.
I.O.U One Sig.
Shane Atkinson - whose business is known as spamming - said the barrage of abuse made him worry about the safety of his children.
Given that Mr. Atkinson is a man who sent out a hundred million spam messages a day, for penis enlargement and similarly raunchy BS, I too am worried about the safety of his children... with an amoral sleazebag like him for a father, who knows how his unfortunate progeny might turn out?
I doubt if Mr. Atkinson ever lost sleep over the millions of children whose email inboxes were polluted with his X-rated crap on a daily basis. And yet he tries to pull the "good father" routine. What a joke.
Correctly.
It should be viruses.
Thank you
maybe if we identify the large amount of trolls on /. they will call it harassment and give up?
Oops. we do that already I think...
Realistically though, is this something the US would want to adopt as a deterent? it seems to me way too open for abuse.
But let's suppose we could do that officially. Who is qualified to offically identify a spammer? How easy is it to detect a specific spammer (in terms of the skills required to get to right) and how easy is it to get the skills you'd need to do that? Not that Congress is going to authorize the establishment of an anti-spam unit...are they?
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
I think you are right. This jacka$$ was filling my inboxes too apparently. I used to recieve around 30-40 spams in my main hotmail spam repository....another 20 or more getting automatically blocked... Now I have less than a third of that. Praise God.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
"A notorious spammer, based in New Zealand, who had his name and other personal info released first in a national newspaper, and then on the web...
National New Zealand Newspaper?? That's commonly known as a flyer.
Just kidding. I actually know a lot of Kiwis and they're all pretty passionate about whatever they're doing. I'm not surprised at the result.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
I could help you with that--just tell me where to forward the junk i get.
Come to think of it, give me the real email address of a spammer.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
Hate to say it, but in this case, vigilante type action seems to have had the desired result.
Why do you hate to say this ? If governments fail to do anything about spammers, possibly because they don't know how, the only option is vigilantism.
If the only way to stop these guys is to put their names in the paper or mention them on television shows, so be it.
Personally I wouldn't mind seeing them being dragged down the street to be tarred and feathered.
Reality has a notoriously liberal bias -- Stephen Colbert
A much as a two-bit spammer in the South Pacific would love to think that he has such an impact upon the industry, let's be realistic. What about the South Canadian power outage? The various worms and virii that have been circulating? I'd say that maybe some of the filth spewing nodes of our beloved internet have been infected. Also likely is that the recent profusion has probably made some people take a closer look at their PCs and network, eliminating some spam-zombies, or spombies and other sploitz
Before anyone flames or trolls this down, be realistic for a minute here, and I in no way am trying to justify anyone's actions, just stating facts. Does anyone protest when the menu guys flood your doorstep? No... What about when Target or some other megaconglomerate sends bs in the mail that you didn't ask for? doubtable. Spam is no different. Want to give me cost ratios go ahead and I'll do a breakdown in sanitation costs if you think mail and menus cost nothing. Not to mention a possible fine you could get for having litter you didnt leave in front of your house.
So ask yourself, if you were in a business and were told how to run it which was against the way you were running it, wouldn't you leave, what if someone was threatening you because it does happen wouldn't you quit while you were ahead too?
MoFscker
Of course, just after he quit Blaster and SoBig hit the net, so it's more likely that the drop in spam is linked to them, e.g.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
DEAR SIR/MADAM,
MY NAME IS MOHAMMED YASSIN NGABE CURRENTLY PROVIDING INTERNET SERVICE TO SEVERAL WELL KNOWN SPAMMERS. I KNOW THIS LETTER MIGHT SURPRISE YOU BECAUSE WE HAVE HAD NO PREVIOUS COMMUNICATIONS OR BUSINESS DEALINGS BEFORE NOW.
DUE TO A RECENT UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT INVOLVING A GARDEN WEASEL AND MY LARGE BOWEL, I CAN NO LONGER PROVIDE ACCESS TO THESE UPSTANDING ENTREPENEURS. AS A RESULT I MUST REGRETFULLY DISPOSE MYSELF OF THE SPAMHOSTING BUSINESS AND GIVE THE ADDRESSES AND NAMES OF SEVENTY-TWO (72) SERIAL SPAMMERS TO A WORTHY REPLACEMENT HOST.
DUE TO THE SENSITIVE NATURE OF THESE ADDRESSES, AND THE SENSITIVE NATURE OF THE GROSSLY ENLARGED PENISES OF THE SPAMMERS THEMSELVES, I MUST EXCERCISE THE UTMOST DISCRETION IN GIVING AWAY THESE ADDRESSES.
TO ESTABLISH YOUR GOOD FAITH IN THIS TRANSACTION, YOU MUST FIRST SEND ME YOUR NAME, EMAIL ADDRESS(ES), SHAMPOO BRAND PREFERENCE, AND PENIS SIZE.
KINDLY TREAT THIS REQUEST AS VERY IMPORTANT AND STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL. I HONESTLY ASSURE YOU THAT THIS TRANSACTION IS 100% LEGAL AND RISK-FREE.
MOHAMMED YASSIN NGABE, ESQ.
LAGOS, NIGERIA
I have a prediction for the future.
Given the last week of automated spam from the most popular viruses out there, I'd say we can expect computers to outspam the best spammers. Spammers will write many viruses that send ads to enlarge our penises, and stop popup ads, and then they don't even have to take responsibility.
The smart thing for them to do, since they will be outlaws anyway, is to have OTHER PEOPLE send spam for them.
Enough people are sending "empty" virus messages right now. Just think of the marketing potential if those virus messages contained a payload to send the spammer's material!
Scary.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Someone who reads and posts to /. is married?
"Hello we're from the Moron church, and we'd like to talk to you about God"
"erm...I'm, ah, not here?"
"Okely dokely, we'll try again later"
"Bloody Morons"
Ummm.... so? It's like the word BOXEN. And Beowulf cluster jokes... and Soviet Russia jokes...
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
GRAMMER NAZI #1: What shall we do?
GRAMMER NAZI #2: We could use a spelling checker.
GRAMMER NAZI #1: Or we could arrest the spelling police.
GRAMMER NAZI #2 raises a sub-machine gun and points it at the SPELLING POLICE.
GRAMMER NAZI #2: You are vunder arrest!
My personal account has begun receiving 5-6 SPAM mails per day in the last 2 weeks. Before, I received nothing, ever. I've had the account 2 years. Our business account, i.e. our own domain, has had the e-mail service blocked by our ISP (knology.net) for 6 days!!!!!! They claim it is in response to the worms/viruses spreading throught their systems right now-they have blocked traffic intentionally and will not unblock until they think it is safe. They also hinted that they were mildly infected! Yeah, our SPAM is down to ZERO at work, but not for any good reasons!
During the last week, while SoBig was flying around, my spam level was exceptionally low. Now that SoBig is basically gone (for now) the spam level has increased almost back to its normal level. Remember the basic rule:
"correlation does not imply causation"
Just because spam levels went down when this guy said he was getting out of the game does not mean that his departure was the cause.
Michael Dinowitz House of Fusion http://www.houseoffusion.com
"An almost identical article appeared a couple weeks or so ago. "
Odd, someone's been driving my Delorean. That explains the copy of the New Zealand Herald sitting in backseat.
"Derp de derp."
Last week: 179 spams
Previous week: 210 spams
Previous week: 277 spams
My spam dropped by 35%. Though I can't discount the possibility that it's just the increased virus traffic slowing the rate at which spammers can send their emails.
anything which slows down spam can only be a good thing
s/spam/terrorism/
Still agree with this statement?
Stories posted in the YRO section should have an option to moderate comments as "Paranoid".
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
The bunch of worms have stopped and slowed lots of networks recently. Especially over the past 5-6 days. I would wait a bit before claiming a small victory.
I have said this before, we have a problem of ethics. Nobody wants to be responsible for what they do. A spammer is more concerned about making money than the inconvenience he causes to millions of people.
My solution is we will have to remove aninimity from the web. Everyone will have to become accountable for what they do.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Same sex marriages are legal in many states now. From what I have heard, the marriage rate has skyrocketed on Slashdot.
I would support a vigilante flash mob movement. Instead of spontaneously gathering and performing acts of stupidity, the mob could actually drag a spammer from his home in the middle of the night and exact punishment. Killing the birds of performance art and spamming with one stone, as it were.
If there were a spammer registry, by state, you could look up the spammer closes to your home to exact the punishemnt of your choosing. Think of it as evolution in action.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Can we use 'virulenzas'?
I monitor my father's email as well as my own, since he was a bit naive when he started out on the internet and got his email address in a bunch of spam lists.
Since the NZ guy got shut down, he's had about 1 spam a day (in Australia, close to NZ). I've been using Mailwasher to bounce all his spam, figuring eventually his email would show up in the spam lists as being dead, and hopefully being removed (other than those lists that don't care who they spam).
So it would be interesting to see if we can get a sense of the list this guy used, based on geographic proximity to NZ. I figured that maybe he was getting his names from closer to home, but I could be wrong.
The spam had so many different email addresses as the reply to field that I wouldn't have thought it all came from one guy!
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
moonwalk
spin
grab crotch
scream WHOOOOO!
Yeah I agree, in fact, I regard the constant complaints about Spam as a type of spam itself! Really people, get a decent email server that doesn't sell your address to the highest bidder, don't give your email address to anyone you can't track down to a telephone number and just stop using Outlook.
I wish someone would shutdown the spammer that helps in sending the artprice.com, artists-server.com,art-online, etc. spam.. A whole lot of the spam I get lately is from them, I'm not really sure why they think I'd be into buying art from them, but they sure are relentless.
Come on? You think this is a good thing? How in gods name can someone say that having less spam is worth making some guy worry about the safty of his own children? I wouldn't have any problem with the saps phone ringing non stop...or having his I-net connections DOS attacked...or of course having his e-mail address spammed...and maybe even test the security out on any websites he hosts so to speak...but spam is no excuse to threaton someone's child.
The original poster wrote that once the spammer who became known shut down his operation, saw a 98% reduction makes an interesing point: if we knew who was sending the spam and who was profiting, we the community could send him enough hate-mail and other forms of revenge for the richer ones to be more content with the money they've already made while the poorer ones might take up more noble pursuits.
It's a pity that there is, as yet, no elegant, widely-known mechanism for finding the people who are the source of spam. God, one of *them* unable to use email without having to learn to use complex filters to get his messages.
I would *pay* to see that.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
I read the original article and all the followups. The important part here is the spammer in question agreed to being interviewed...
some peoples moderation does not include weed
R I A A
Hate to say it, but in this case, vigilante type action seems to have had the desired result.
Hey, whatever works, short of killing their children.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Ok, I'm going to "express" myself by playing trumpet (no I don't know how the to play according to the official way, I make my own way which I still think sounds good). Oh, and did I mention I was going to express myself outside your bedroom window. Oh, and if you move, I'm moving too and am going to continue "expressing" my self. Still think anything is ok, regaurdless of the effect it has on other people's productivity and happyness, so long is it can be considered, however loosly, expressing one'self?
Little Brother, watching the watchers
...are an insensitive clod! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Please learn the difference between "expression" and communication.
I think it was simply due to the spate of viruses causing people to clean up their systems or shut down their servers - not due to this bloke.
Oh well, what the hell...
This needs to be publicised, as anything which slows down spam can only be a good thing.
So you're saying it'd be OK to murder the spammer too?
Sure he shut down his operation, but he was probably making a TON of money through spamming. My guess is that he will lie low for a while, change his name/address/whatever, then fire up the spam servers once again... and if not him, someone else will step into the vacuum.
One guarantee... If there's a profit to be made, people will do anything for a buck..
I'm in NZ, with a NZ isp email address, and I was getting a lot of annoying emails. I was wondering why in the last few days I've hardly got any at all. Makes sense.
Also I haven't received SoBig.F in over 2 days either... odd...
Or...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It's not illegal to sign someone up for a mailing list in most countries. It might be harrassment if I do it a bunch.
But if we each sign every spammer up for one paper thing and enter their website contact email for one mailing list, they'll be DOS'ed and each contributor would not be harrassing.
And since we have not communicated, we would not be conspiring, either.
So this is justice and it's it's legal.
Spam isn't expression. It costs the recipient money. I have no problem with this guy shouting about penis enlargement, showing large penis-enlargement signs, or doing anything.
Besides, your freedom of expression ends where my property starts. Come to my house and start trying to tell me about my penis, and i'll give you about 10 seconds to get the fudge off my property, and after that you'd better hope i'm a bad shot.
Sounds like somebody's a spammer.
Heh, heh...uh... heh... Fire! FIRE! FIIIIRRRRRREEE!
RTFF (Read The ...er... Fine Faq)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Hate to say it, but in this case, vigilante type action seems to have had the desired result.
This is hardly vigilantism - people called to complain (aside from a few kooks who made death threats) about his actions and how it affected them. The spammer realized the error of his ways.
Now, getting a dozen geeks with baseball bats together and beating a few spammers, while fun, would be vigilantism.
Ok, so its not a perfect anology, but both are still blaming the victum. Some of the advice in both is still good to avoid the negitive outcome (rape/spam) but both shouln't be neccicary. Oh, and so some AC can't complain: I'm not saying rape is in any way comparable to spam, I recognize that rape is much more serrious and it is not my intent to equate the two.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Of the record quote.
"I shut the damn servers down cause in a couple of days im getting like 35 million bucks from some guy in nigeria.Im gonna be a rich SOB."
What I wanna know is this:
What do we do with the spoofed junk we get where only the IP may be useful??...
Backdoor trojan execution through OS exploit? Report the IP to its domain admin? Or do we just do an IP-Lookup, find his house, and use something I like to call "Mr. Thingy" on him?
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
Now how do I get a bigger penis?
Stopping myself...Abort (core dumped)
Things which would slow down spam, but which most of us would not consider to be "good things.":
Come on, people. Aren't techies, of all people, smart enough to see that "the ends justify the means" is *not* a valid rationale?
Cheers
-b
We've outed and shut down one minor spammer.
The Register of Known Spam Operations lists nearly two hundred more hard-core spammers, along with everything the anti-spam people have been able to find out about them. Check the list, see if any are in your area, and take whatever action you feel is 'appropriate'.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
It would be nice to believe that one NZ spammer was responsible for 95% of all spam, but somehow... I don't think so.
Vigilantism, legislation, and spam filters are simply selection agents that will help to breed a tougher new spammer.
The drop in spam comes because spammers are trying something else and I reckon the writers of SoBig were paid by spammers, looking for a new way to send emails. If you thought the last week was relaxed, just wait. You ain't seen nothing yet.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Karma: Oldschool
"South Canadian" is a Canuck's semi-humourous way of referring to "North American." Those stupid Frenchies can't make good jokes, but even I picked up on it, unlike you, sir. YOU FAILED IT.
Do the unsubscribe buttons on spams actually take you off mailing lists? First time I saw one (back in the day) I immediately thought they would spam you more, and therefore have never clicked one...
Coincidentally, elephants like peanuts.
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
killing 500 of the spammer's relatives, including his family?
:)
It's what Londo Mollari would do.
n'th that.
Spam account went from, 4+ a day to 1-2
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
Remember the rubber must meet the road somewhere, and spammers must have a point of sale, where they can never be 100% anonymous or untraceable. What good is it to spam people, if they can't buy anything? Were they to write spamming worms, the feds would be on them like stink-on-sheiB because worms and viri are ecomonically destructive, at least more so than spam is.
I don't think the drop in spam is because of this guy in New Zealand, I think its due to AOL's new spam busting software! Go AOL!
Paint.NET, a Free Image Editor, with Source Code Available!
if we all get along and nuke the US out of existance I assure that the spam would drop by about 99.2%
>The correct word is actually viruses.
It may be, but it's just so much more fun to say virii.
It helps me filter who needs to be on my shitlist.
... FAIL IT.
he needs about a thousand million more mails and calls to make up for his spamming...
OK this is great news. One weapon that works wonders against spammers is by making them known. The closer you can get to making a spammer walk around his/her neighborhood with the word "SPAMMER" on their foreheads, the better the results.
Eventually, all of these individuals will stop after they meet the fed up people who will threaten bodily harm or worse because of spam.
The world becomes spam free. Being a spammer is just too dangerous. That is, too dangerous for anyone but the mob.
Then we'll be up shit creek.
I'm in New Zealand. Anyone know the guys address? Phone number?
Trolling for Karma whores?
Interesting idea, but I don't think a slashdot version of Bass Masters will work. Everyone has their two bits worth of karma. How could the tournement be scored? While an eleven hundred way tie might be fine by the hard core open source zealots, I think the rest of us would find it anti-climactic.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Perhaps too much of a bit of wishful thinking there?
because worms and viri are ecomonically destructive
Because worms and men are ecomonically destructive? WTF?
keeps it people hard
I imagine he might just set up shop in Aussie.
Hopefully he will be convicted by the health ministry for dealing in medicines.
I'd also like to see NZ Telecom just cut him off.
If any slashdotter would like me to drive up to Christchurch and kick his arse - let me know.
Heh, in the US he would be sued, in NZ we just use public embrassment.
Tomorrow is harvest day. To them, it is THE HALOCAUST.
-1 Offtopic
you've included your real email in a Slashdot submission about spam! Spammers will do everything they can to find out your identity or at least hijack or render your account usable. They're vendictive as heck, so don't reveal your identity when posting this kind of stuff.
You have just been chosen!
/. is now the place where everything tends asymptotically toward perfection for you. Yes. You. You have been selected. For no money down, you can have all of this!
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Are you balding? Have you already spent too much on name-brand Viagra? Have you missed your last opportunity for vacation time shares? Has it been too long since you have seen fisting teen nypho sluts on web cams? Need a home equity loan? Looking for yet more little icons with nifty seldomly used features to cram into your Task Tray to slow down rebooting and bring about yet more opportunities for security problems?
Well this is your lucky microsecond because
Not only that! If you order today, you can gamble online and lose all the money you haven't yet spent on previously mentioned commercial items.
My amount of spam is exactly the same as the previous couple of weeks... so much for this (weak) story. I think we need to "take out" more than one spammer for people to really notice a difference. -pug
Just in case the authoritys do not properly deal with this miserable excuse for a human being, i put foward this offer to you.
Send me money and i will personaly travel down to this persons house, beat him over the head with a sack full of 'delete' keys.
Then i will tape him down to a chair, and make him count from 1, to the number of spam emails he has sent out.
I hate people who give New Zealand a bad name. shame on them. We should deport them back to australia.
Si.
How long have you been a perl programmer?
Hacker: Programmer who gets the job done.
Developer: Programmer who gets the job, wastes the first 95% of the development time, and hires a hacker to get the job done.
You fight the fight you must with the weapons at hand. The victor writes the history. Don't like that system? Change it. I dare ya.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Image what a Beowulf cluster of BOXEN in Soviet Russia would do you.
Pfffft! :-p Silly! Imagine what it would do to NATALIE PORTMAN. Jeez. Get with the program. You nerd. ;-)
Nope, I had 200 emails to delete this a.m. So how do I find the guy sending me all this shit?
I've done lots of detective forays and unsubscriptions but the spam just keeps coming.
I'm thinking it would be useful if I could forward say a hundred spams to an address which would analyze them with other people's spam and figure out the top targets for detective work. Then when anybody gets enough energy/anger to do some calling around everybody benefits.. a kind of spammer scalping engine.
Wasn't there a story about some guy in Argentina recently? Go for it!
I haven't noticed a difference outside of what can be considered 'statistical noise' in my daily spam load. SpamAssassin (or rather the procmail filter that catches what's flagged) puts spam sent to me in a spam trap, from there it's easy to count the number coming in. SpamAssassin is still catching a veritable torrent of spam.
:-]
Funnily enough, SpamAssassin is also flagging the Win32/SoBig worm as spam. It's in the DCC (distributed checksum clearinghouse) and has a number of other 'spammy' features, such as obviously forged From: address and malformed datestamps. Not that it'd run on Linux anyway
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Whatever it is, coming back from a two-week holiday and shocked to see my real mailbox all stuffed up, I was very happy to see that my virtual mailbox contained less junk -- I expected something with two zeroes, but only had, like, twenty SPAM mails or so. I imagine I sometimes receive that much within a day.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Yes, despite all it's "virtues" I REALLY have a problem with spam. Duh.
nt
I run a very conservative mail server for about 340 accounts. I'm running 2-3 RBLs with no content filtering. We have a virtually non-existent rate of blocking legit mail.
Mail stats in the last 24 hours:
Rejected mail: 5,629
Accepted mail: 2,082
Because of our conservative blacklisting, the RBLs are probably only about 80% effective at best, we still hovered around our usual 28% legitimate mail traffic, verses 72% spam. (This also doesn't include worm messages which wouldn't have been relay-blacklisted so it's likely even worst.) Nothing seems to have changed, or it's not enough to be noticeable.
Everything they say about spam clogging the Internet is true. Based on my own stats, for a server that is generally below the radar running very legitimate web and e-commerce operations and a few select POP3 mailboxes, a vast majority of the bandwidth we use is undesireable crap. Imagine the improved performance of the net if we could actually make a dent in stopping the spamming sleazebags from clogging our pipes!
> This needs to be publicised, as anything which slows down spam can only be a good thing."
Really? Like killing the spammers or kidnapping their children? As long as it "slows down spam", is sure can only be a good thing?
I installed qurb http://www.qurb.com about two months ago, and it's caught 432 spam, not one of which has plopped in my inbox...
:)
:)
It's a challenge and response whitelist system for outlook, and I'm hooked. Shame it ain't freeware, but the trial version still hasn't quit on me... I may fork out yet
The spammers ain't going away, might as well treat 'em like lepers and not even listen to 'em
Thats right, drag the script kiddie outside and shoot him in the fuckin' head! It qualifies under 'anything', and I think it'd be a bad thing, don't you? All those poor, dead 16 year olds. Well, they shouldn't have inconvenienced you and wasted that bandwidth, huh? They sure deserved anything. On a more realistic note, what if there was a public list of the addresses and phone numbers of known spammers, which is more what this article describes. Imagine some kid hacks your computer, and exploits it to send out his spam. You get put on that list, and get harassed for weeks and weeks. Can't even use your phone... Yeah, it'd suck.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
...but it's true. (-: "FAQland, FAQland, uber alles?" :-)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
http://users.rcn.com/zap.dnai/
as anything which slows down spam can only be a good thing.
e.g. total annihilation of the world population would also slow down spam.
neutron bombs. you know you want one.
Not sure if it is related or not, but I'm seen my spam count drop by about 40 a day starting sometime last week.
I had attributed it to the power outage, the viruses, and the worms - but perhaps it was this... or some combination thereof.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
This is one of the best things that's ever happened to me. I don't know how or why, but 99% of my spam must have originated from this guy, as I haven't gotten a single one in over 12 hours!
Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses!!!!
Nothing to see here
harassment like in spam?
Its interesting that someone who litters others mailboxes with junk mail can't hack receiving it himself....
I for one am glad he's out of business. Like they say, what comes goes 'round, comes around.
This got me to thinking. The thing I hate most about spam is that there is no way to contact the seller to let them know you're not interested--ever. When you annoy people and give them no power to respond, they'll eventually come after you and your kids. I'm always amazed to find that spammers don't know that people are angry about their behavior, but I figure they've never heard from someone who they sent a message to.
Maybe they just think their "customers" are the people who give them money ... then what do you even call the people who receive the spam?
I guess I'm also amazed to think that nobody can come up with good legislation. Yes, we should be able to send messages anonymously--including business people--but the limit should be when that correspondence becomes harassment.
It's like if you put a sign in someone's yard--anonymously, without asking--and they tore it down, very few people would compain (at least not vehemently.) If you put ten signs in their yard every day for years, they'd probably kill you if they caught you. Is the answer to make a law banning putting a sign in someone's yard?
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
I hadn't noticed until somebody said something, but I did get considerably less SPAM over the course of the night than usual.
I use a hotmail account to sign up for all those things that shout, "This is gonna rack up the SPAM..." and it is usually good for ~80 messages straight to the 'Bulk Mail' folder in the course of the night.
Today there were only 23. Now I have no idea if, like some people are speculating, this one guy was responsible for it all, or if like others are guessing the recent virus/worm outbreaks are having an effect etc., but something is definately amiss.
No matter though, if this one guy left a gap in the SPAM kingdom there will be ten slimy SOB's to fill it.
What about setting up some spammer head hunting fund? If you track down a well known spamhaus (e.g. one listed on rokso) youd get some bounty out of the fund. Id be willing to pay some bucks to such a fund, and i bet some major isps and firms would be willing to do that too... And since there is no honor among thieves it would make life for our spamming friends a little harder (and more paranoid)
If you're talking about government measures, no. If you're talking about citizens' initiatives, on the other hand. . . well, still no, but only because I don't like agreeing with anything that has the words "anything," "everything," etc.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Who is buying the product or service? People that want their stuff advertised.
Who is getting paid for the product or service? The spammer.
What is the product or service? Ah, now here's where it gets interesting.
Many people cited that the difference is scale, that if you had several hundred menus dropped off on your doorstep daily, you'd be miffed. There's another problem with that analogy, though...
In the fast-food place example, they're the producer, you're the prospective customer, and they are telling you about their product. This is a relatively non-intrusive form of advertising (assuming the menus aren't dropped off by the truckload).
In the spammer's case, they're the producer, someone else is the customer, and you are the product. They are trying to sell your attention. But first they have to get your attention without paying for it first.
This is my objection to all advertising, but especially to spamming: that the waste of bandwidth, disk space, and time trying to deal with the inundating tide of mailbox crap is tantamount to theft, and you are the victim.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
I don't know how you would determine that "most spammers use Outlook or Outlook Express."
Certainly, most spamblower software forges Outlook MUA header tags, but it doesn't take much effort to figure out that the formatting of the spam is inconsistent with Outlook's abilities. I've got an archive of 2074 spams I've received (as of this morning) and the majority of it appears to have been generated with spamware optimized for that purpose, not with a commercial MUA like Outlook.
Think about it, Outlook is too slow, inefficient and buggy to be worth a spammer's time. Except perhaps as their own personal MUA, but I don't have any way to know that, since I don't receive personal mail from spammers, just spam from their spamblowers.
On the other claw, spammers are using viral techniques more and more frequently, and it's said that they frequently use virii to recruit the zombie nodes, so it's pretty likely that they are contributing to the problem in one way or another.
Who'd of guess, a spammer down the road. There goes the neahbourhood. It kinda makes it sad when you know this goes on so close to home. I'm thinking of doing a spam drop if anyone else wants to help, gather all the junk mail you have and lets go fill his letter box.
Note that the article mentions that Rackshack added them to the Spam Early Warning System *after* they saw the article.
I find it highly likely that they were told many times previously that the customer was spamming, and/or they surely could monitor classes of traffic and if they see a ton of port 25, see if the customer is spamming.
Shame on Rackshack!
...and never open my 'caughtspam' folder. I don't know (nor care) if the amount of spam I don't see is higher or lower :)
I only really care about spam that Spamassassin doesn't catch.
Because the authors of virii call them virii, and not some Klingon word. The word "viruses" refers to biological organisms, and the distinction is valid and desirable.
Do you insist on calling eight-bit quantities "bites" since there was no English word "byte" before computer programmers decided to make one?
"This needs to be publicised, as anything which slows down spam can only be a good thing."
What about the proposed email tax of 1999?
... ...
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
is that you become pissed because of the bounced e-mail, you go after your ISP and piss him off, and if it's not its fault it will go after his upstream and pass the piss on, and until the problem is fixed, rinse and repeat.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
... over the spammer whose doing the job he was hired to do. So, digging deeper in that vein we should be looking at the companies who are hiring these spam-a-jammas and start these types of tactics right at the source of the income (or right at the company themselves).
Is there a place already where we can add to a database of the companies who hire spammers?
"I'm not ashamed I can't function in society like I'm supposed to." - Paul Westerberg
See, writing viruses is not only illegal on the level of spam, it's illegal on the level of breaking and entering and all sorts of good stuff. When a new virus comes out, doesn't the FBI do their best to work out who did it and throw the book at them? Any site that's linked to by a virus is going to be pretty thoroughly gone over, and if they paid money to anyone for the privilege then the whole gang will be royally screwed.
... but spammers are in it for the money. Combine seriously illegal with a money trail, and it's my bet the FBI has your ass within a week.
I know that there's ways to disguise web site owners and such, and plausible deniability and so on
I for one welcome them to try it. It's about time we had some big guns going after spammers.
Sorry, I am still showing the same amount of spam as normal. And no, for the person who decided spam and virus'es are the same problem, you is wrong. Virus'es are not sent by people on purpose, and with fake addresses put into the from field by the virus it's hard to know for sure were it came from.
When police catch drug runners, they seize the drug runners possesions (house and car). Why couldn't it be the same for spammy??,
And the result is that illegal drugs are no longer available in the US. :P
I don't care how bad spam is, it won't kill your kids
And threats won't kill your kids either. How do you know whether the person(s) making the threats intended to make good on them? I seriously doubt that threats against his kid's lives would have been carried out.
The original poster was dead-nuts-on when he pointed out the hypocrisy of a spammer who e-mails sexual content to children and then trys to play the role of the good father.
But I've noticed a decrease over the last 2 weeks as well. Popfile takes care of them anyway, but it hasn't been as busy lately.
Just this morning i reached a new record level of spam mail. 46 email received, 36 spam...
You don't want filtered ISP service. It will eventually devolve into cable TV style service, where you get transparent proxied HTTP and Xbox/PS2 game nets and nothing else.
And, idiotically, the unfiltered service, which costs less to deliver, will end up costing much more, and the funds used to pay for the filtering costs, which will be high (equipment, people, updates, etc).
I understood that there is no attestation at all as to how 2nd declension Latin neuters might form their plural; that is, there is no instance of any of the three known ones (virus, pelagus, vulgus) appearing in the plural:
http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html
In short, noone knows what the Latin plural is.
"virii" is possible, but on the other hand, following the example of deabus, "virus" might have a special plural differentiating it from "viri", even if the plural of pelagus & vulgus was pelagi and vulgi (which is not known).
Please learn the difference between "expression" and harrasment.
On small hosting companies, twice. Neither time was due to spews but its not exactly rocket science to do it properly.
And besides, that is the entire point of spews, perhaps now people will start finding out in advance if their ISP supports spam and other antisocial sales tactics.
Collateral damage is the only way to go. Read the fucking spews manual and stop whining. You're just making excuses currently as to why you are still part of the problem. Stop it and start looking for solutions, even if it does involve some effort on your part.
Stop supporting spam and stop making excuses for it because thats exactly what you are doing now, intentionally or otherwise. If spamming ever becomes illegal then remember that ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law, neither is "saving a buck"....well not in most countries.
I was beginning to think something was wrong with my email..
... its ... wierd ...
Im so used to seeing them flood in, when i DONT get anything
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Dont use the razor of logic on this kind of person, he might get cut and blame you for his stupid assertion.
for what it's worth, the stats at spamgourmet.com confirm a drop off in spam the last couple of days. (if you look at the graphs, note that there was a server move near the beginning of July that accounts for the big drop and spike at that time).
Are we saying, beyond the featured shutdown, that SoBig, etc. have actually taken the *spammers* out of commission for awhile -- not only by clogging mail servers, but by infecting and disabling their boxes?
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
My hotmail account is only getting 5 or so pieces of mail and all of it is subscription based. Very little in the way of unrequested junkmail.
Collateral damage is the only way to go.
We use smart filters, and get virtually NO spam. We don't use blacklists that provide collateral damage. Neither does SpamAssassin.
And besides, that is the entire point of spews, perhaps now people will start finding out in advance if their ISP supports spam and other antisocial sales tactics.
If only the damage was limited to ISPs that "support" spammers.
Read the fucking spews manual and stop whining. You're just making excuses currently as to why you are still part of the problem. Stop it and start looking for solutions, even if it does involve some effort on your part.
Coming from someone who probably has to worry about one email address. Try managing a network, asshole. It's not possible to just pick up and move at the drop of a hat, not to mention, unreasonable to think we should. Our ISP *is* fighting spammers, just not fast enough for the nazis at SPEWS.
With standard mail, it's all the junk mail and catalogs that are subsidizing your 39 cent stamp. For accuracy and cost there really isn't any other postal system that can touch ours.
Alright! Come on!
now I don't have to put away my pitchforks and torches that I got out of storage for SCO.
Here are my spam stats, generated with Rob Park's excellent mboxstats:
Jul 01, 2003 102
Jul 02, 2003 84
Jul 03, 2003 83
Jul 04, 2003 87
Jul 05, 2003 64
Jul 06, 2003 62
Jul 07, 2003 81
Jul 08, 2003 95
Jul 09, 2003 73
Jul 10, 2003 90
Jul 11, 2003 88
Jul 12, 2003 84
Jul 13, 2003 77
Jul 14, 2003 110
Jul 15, 2003 122
Jul 16, 2003 112
Jul 17, 2003 84
Jul 18, 2003 112
Jul 19, 2003 103
Jul 20, 2003 83
Jul 21, 2003 92
Jul 22, 2003 89
Jul 23, 2003 103
Jul 24, 2003 86
Jul 25, 2003 91
Jul 26, 2003 90
Jul 27, 2003 66
Jul 28, 2003 98
Jul 29, 2003 92
Jul 30, 2003 95
Jul 31, 2003 98
Aug 01, 2003 97
Aug 02, 2003 93
Aug 03, 2003 66
Aug 04, 2003 83
Aug 05, 2003 80
Aug 06, 2003 76
Aug 07, 2003 107
Aug 08, 2003 85
Aug 09, 2003 59
Aug 10, 2003 63
Aug 11, 2003 75
Aug 12, 2003 63
Aug 13, 2003 68
Aug 14, 2003 71
Aug 15, 2003 58
Aug 16, 2003 75
Aug 17, 2003 63
Aug 18, 2003 51
Aug 19, 2003 34
Aug 20, 2003 62
Aug 21, 2003 60
Aug 22, 2003 66
Aug 23, 2003 67
Aug 24, 2003 64
Aug 25, 2003 65
There's no getting around it -- the quantity of spam that has decreased in the past couple of weeks.
Note that the corpus is my UCE folder for my primary e-mail address. I do not use any RBLs to block, but I do use SpamAssassin to filter, and then I hand-review my UCE folder daily, weeding out viruses and the occasional legitimate message.
-Waldo Jaquith
In order for Slashdot's garbage filter to let this post through, I need this really long line to bring up the average line length. In order for Slashdot's garbage filter to let this post through, I need this really long line to bring up the average line length. In order for Slashdot's garbage filter to let this post through, I need this really long line to bring up the average line length. In order for Slashdot's garbage filter to let this post through, I need this really long line to bring up the average line length. In order for Slashdot's garbage filter to let this post through, I need this really long line to bring up the average line length. In order for Slashdot's garbage filter to let this post through, I need this really long line to bring up the average line length. In order for Slashdot's garbage filter to let this post through, I need this really long line to bring up the average line length. Sorry about that.
DCC (Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse), which is as its name suggests a distributed spam detection and filtering network, shows no visible decrease in spam volume during the last couple of weeks.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
And furthermore, I guarantee you that the people who named this particular type of malicious code a "virus" didn't consult the OED or Wheelock's Latin either.
Language evolves. It would be better to have a new word for the singlar form, and not just for the plural, but evolution is rarely biddable.
Instead of squashing spammers as you find them, why not make the service spammer-unfriendly to start with?
Block outgoing port 25 connections by default. Limit the number of emails your mail server will send in a day, and the number of CCs on each. Again, by default. If someone needs more, let them ask for it. Run a spam-filter on outgoing mail, hold suspicious email for inspection before delivering it.
(Hell, you could even inspect it without "reading" it. ROT13 it, before looking at it. Spam should still be bloody obvious while actual content remains private.)
Just remember that the Taliban started out as a bunch of vigilantes who set out to rescue a pair of kidnapped girls, because no one else would do it. They succeeded and became heroes, but...
You know how that story turned out. Best remember to keep your focus.
[o]_O
Anything that reduces spam IS a good thing, you're right. Maybe we should consider mass extinction?
Second declension latin neuters are covered in every first year latin book. They are formed by adding an -a, in the nominative anyway. They also have a singular ending in -um, which virus does not. Pilum, for example, is neuter, with the plural being Pila.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
No mod points today, sorry.
.sig, I recommend you google for the Arrogant Worms single "Carrot Juice is Murder". You'll probably enjoy it; I have the Huff recording and it's pretty damn funny.
The fact that you've received no spam and/or virus on your private email indicates that the people you correspond with are savvy and conscientious beyond the norm. It only takes one idiot nephew a couple of mouse clicks to heave your address into the spamfields... say, by sending a chain letter to everyone he knows without BCC'ing. That does it every time!
Given your previous
Worms that advertise are not economically destructive, at least not for the spammers that write them.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
At I pointed out in an earlier message, SPEWS is probably going to be taken out (or devalued to 0.001) on the newest version of SpamAssassin anyway. More respectable lists like opm.blitzed.org, list.dsbl.org, and dnsbl.njabl.org get higher scores with SpamAssassin.
Zodiac Survey
And then, on the other hand, how can you be sure that people won't carry those threats out?
Remember back when we were talking about Alan Ralsky, and someone went out to his property to take pictures? It's not a very long leap to think that someone more unstable, or someone so entirely pissed off at spam to make a threatening phone call, could easily just take a shotgun and blast the man, or his family. Yeah, chances are, it's a threatening phone call, and not much more, but do you want to take that chance?
It's wrong, no matter who you are. You could be the most despised man in the world (and in this case, he pretty much is), but how much of that is the family's fault? The answer is none.
I'm seeing reduction to (from 20 a day to about 4 a day). But this might just be due to all the email servers being down combating the worms and virii. I can't beleive one spammer could make much of a difference. Perhaps the worm scares caused people to actually look at their server configurations, and they closed up a lot of open relays?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Er, that would be the same exact place you fit in the television stations, radio stations, billboard, magazine or newspapers business model, wouldn't it? The difference is you have more choice in receiving ads from these other media. And yes, the free newspapers that used to show up in my driveway twice a week used to piss me off too, until I made several complaints to the newspaper threatening to have their delivery person arrested for criminal tresspass and offensive littering... now they don't seem to show up anymore. Ah, the other difference: most other media don't lie about the source of the ad, so there actually is somebody to complain to!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
This needs to be publicised, as anything which slows down spam can only be a good thing.
You mean anything short of dragging these people out into the street and hanging them from a light post.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Very swiftly? Are you sure about that? I also see active SBL records that are 6 months old.
Do you really think these blacklist sites take the ISP off then?AFAICT, yes, SPEWS de-lists when all the spammers are gone.
And then, on the other hand, how can you be sure that people won't carry those threats out?
I can't. You can't. The only person who knows whether a threat is real is the person making it.
Remember back when we were talking about Alan Ralsky, and someone went out to his property to take pictures? It's not a very long leap to think that someone more unstable,
Why do you call the person who took the photo "unstable" (by saying that someone else could be "more unstable.")?
It's wrong, no matter who you are. You could be the most despised man in the world (and in this case, he pretty much is), but how much of that is the family's fault? The answer is none.
I never said that it was right to threaten someone's family or to do them harm. What I said was that a death threat was not the same as murder. The poster to whom I was replying said that 'spam doesn't kill people'. Well, neither does a threat.
So, for clarity, it's wrong to spam to anyone and especially wrong to send sexually explicit ads to minors. It's wrong to threaten the life of a spammer or the lives of his family members. And it's obviously wrong to murder someone over spam.
A canadian spammer can be contacted here:
Bill Rapanos
85 Thorncliffe Park Drive
Toronto, ON
M4H1L6
416-467-6585
...because I get about 600 Sobig mails every day!
;-)
All on my primary mail address - I have 7 different eMail addresses and didn't get one Sobig mail on the other 6.
I guess I just know too many dumb people who keep clicking on every "Wicked Screensaver" attachment
----------------
When police catch drug runners, they seize the drug runners possesions (house and car). Why couldn't it be the same for spammy??
Personally, I have no desire to see the tortured police-state logic currently used to "arrest" drug dealers' possesions expanded into any new fields. These policies are Draconian beyond need and should be abhorrent to any true American patriot as the worst sort of perversion of our legal system and an attack on our civil rights.
Such measures are probably not needed against spammers anyway. Pursue the spammers with any serious law-enforcement effort - even just a credible possibility of fines - and I bet the spammers will evaporate. They have total freedom to lie, cheat, and harrass not because of weak anti-spam laws, but because there is zero enforcement. Jaywalking is more likely to land you in court, for Pete's sake.
is to force the companies that allow spam to pay for and honor a 'do not spam' list.
Sure spammer can move, but the companies that have the bandwidth to allow people to send out that kind of data are few.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You are likely not receiving viruses so much from spammers as you are receiving them from viruses.
Outlook and OE being the key identifier here, you are likely getting emailed from normal users who have been infected and are this either infecting random users on the net, or users in their address book, or users from the address book of the previous person who infected them.
Spammers wouldn't bother with most viruses, unless they were adware viruses, because most viruses aren't profitable the way (long-term) advertising is. Spammers are evil, but so are virus-writers... you have to distribute the blame a bit between the two of them for your messed-up inbox.
Dude, the police state is here and its called the the patriot act Ashcroft is even coming to my state today to tell everyone how wonderful it is.
The problem with spam is that it is getting increasingly harder to deal with. I have one email account. Some spammy is sticking my email in his forged "return to" headers and DOSing my email account with delivery failure notifications. People with webmail accounts don't have the luxury of installing filters.
The real problem is not about creating a possible police state, but not recognizing the problem of spam as severe, which it is. Making spamming a felony and confiscating spammy's computers is not creating a police state.
What it's doing is saying that as a society at large we do not accept spamming and thus we create laws to deter it. Just like any other law that punishes stealing, forging, fraudulent activities -- all (that I might add) which is represented by the spam in my inbox.
I'd be willing to say that the majority of my fellow citizens would agree with me, with a few spammers and libertarian fanatics disagreeing with me (are you one of these?).
Or maybe you're saying that spammers should have the right of free speech no matter what. The problem of this is that a large amount of my spam consists of lies, scams and penis pills.
Should lies and scams be protected so that spammers can have "free speech"???
Concerning the penis pills, maybe the FDA should demand that they demonstrate the efficacy of giving me a 10" schlong overnight before they are sold. That represents a large chunk of spam right there. And as for the viagra varieties maybe the FDA needs to say that it is illegal to sell viagra without a real doctor's visit.
I don't see how any of these things I said creates a "police state". The police exist to provide a necessary service to citizens.
Or wuold you rather have a society ruled by outlaws???
As I said in my first sentence - the problem of escessive government damaging civil rights exists through the patriot act.
Not by throwing a few spamers in jail.
I really can't figure out your post unless you are a spammer too.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
It seems all sorts of people have been getting much less spam these days. I have been getting less too, but the difference isn't nearly as big. I've gone from getting an average of about 35 a day (45 on weekends) down to about 25 (35 on weekends). I must be on the wrong spam lists. :( Has anyone else out there also *not* noticed much of a difference?
Which leads to an important point: Spam vigilanteeism has the potential to become an worse form of "joe job".
When someone posts a name, address and phone number and says, "He's a spammer! Get him!" how many wannabe vigilantes actually go to whois or spamhaus to verify that the guy actually is a spammer and that the address and phone number actually belong to the spammer?
How long before spammers try to pull a "joe job" on an anti-spammer and post his address? And since when is whois information so reliable--what's to stop a spammer from registering a spam domain name under someone else's address? Think twice before harassing an alleged spammer--it may backfire.
PS. Yes, I know my sig is ironic in this context. Follow the link, it's funny :).
You do not understand SPEWS
- if spam is sent to trap, list spammer IPs only, notify ISP
- if spam continues, expand list to nearby IPs, notify ISP
- if spammer remains, expand list further, possibly upstream
Yes, every ISP is abused by spammers at some point. The key is that responsible ISPs terminate them immediately, and the block goes away. Whereas if the ISP harbors spammers (malice, neglect, or otherwise) then expansion is deserved.As always, remember that blocklists have absolutely no power on their own (except for MAPS/Above.net which is sadly corrupt, IMO). They do not control any email except their own. The actual blocking is done by independent sites and their email administrators, of their own volition. If I choose not to receive email from particular IPs, that is entirely up to me, and to anyone who pays me for service. Period.
I see everyone's marching orderly and in single file in their responses. 1300 e-mail over the weekend...500+ SPAM. Any questions?
Some criminals have knocked out the DNS servers for SPEWS through a DDoS attack. This is a brilliant spammer strategy, because if SPEWS is knocked offline, no ISP will know to update their filters should an ISP clean up its act, and thus they'll stay blocked indefinitely. Rule #3: Spammers are st00pid.
However, there is a SPEWS mirror here: http://spews.sorbs.net/ and you should be able to look up your listing there.
I don't know if it's updated now that SPEWS is down, though because the attack is on the DNS server, if the people who run the mirror know the proper IP address for SPEWS (which I have been unable to locate) then they might be able to keep the mirror current.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I'll not bother commenting on your analogy, but suffice it to say that it is heavily flawed and not at all applicable to SPEWS.
The DNS servers for spews.org have been knocked out thanks to a DDoS attack by some spamming criminal, which of course means that even if your ISP cleans its act up, SPEWS has no way to let its users know that the IP blocks are delisted. Spammers are incredibly stupid.
Anyway, you can probably look up your ISP's listing here : http://spews.sorbs.net/ (SPEWS mirror).
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
They use windows and like it. (In this case, along with all the slow down viruses.) Don't worry, Microsoft, Norton and perhaps McAfee will patch their woes and Spam will return. Unless the spammers are cheap and don't pay or know how to patch.
Seems to me the guy was clearly joking. Come on, unsubscribing from mailing lists? It's just unfortunate that the moderators are retarded and gave him the +4, informative instead of the +4, funny he deserved. And before you ask, no, it wasn't my post. ;)
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Blocking egress port 25 is simply the most effective way to ensure your business does not get blacklisted. Bonus: the SoBig.F virus (and its ilk) won't work, either.
If you connect workstations to the internet (ISPs as well as almost any other business) its time to start being responsible. Use NAT. Block outgoing ports that cause trouble (for others). Be part of solution, and you'll avoid the wrath of being part of the problem. It's that simple.
anyone know if this did affect things? any numbers?
I did notice a few weeks ago that the spammers suddenly went to using varied, real-sounding names as their From's so that became a little harder to scan-n-delete...
I don't know about the quantity decreasing... but I deffinately have to say that the quality has decreased... I'm getting more and more emails about buying things, and less and less about pr0n. I mean really... "sally want's you" and "you make me so hot" emails keep me going and knowing someone out there loves me! What would I do without all that positive reinforcement in my life?? ;-)
Me too!
Society would be justified if it made spamming a felony. Those who spam abuse the public for private gain, the very definition of a crime. It is right for society to loath and treat such people with distrust and contempt. They have abused society and society should not trust them. Reasonable punishment includes fines and temporary removal from society, aka incarceration, loss of vote and firearm rights and public record of your less than trustworthy nature. The size of the fine and length of jail time should be proportional to the volume and offensiveness of spam. People who willfully send vile and abusive pornographic material to minors around the world deserve to lose all of their ill gotten wealth and lots of time to contemplate thier crime.
Hanging is a little too much but it's something to consider..
Your rights end on conviction.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Do you really think he's gone?
He starts getting some harrassing calls, decides to publicly call it quits and thereby hopefully dissuade any further punishment for his actions.
He realizes he was bad (aka he got caught), he's sorry (that he got caught), and he won't do it again (in a way that will get him caught).
Nice press announcement. Let's forgive the poor misguided fellow and move on. *snort*
How could he possibly think for a moment he was serving the public good?
It reads like an ex-con turned born again christian and I'm skeptical. Keep his info and give him a year to prove himself.
Or better yet, if he's sorry, why doesn't he provide some public service to make up for it?
Hate to break it to you, but there *is* a demand for spam. Why? Quite frankly, it works. Teh demand fo rspam comes from the person/entity *selling* or hawking something, not from us.
.4% = 20,000 responses from people waiting to buy. Assuming a net profit of but a single penny per response that comes out to 200 bucks. At a nickel it is a thousand dollars. Can you send spam for less than that? Absolutely.
Let us assume that one in 500,000 people will buy something from a spammer, or visit the referenced website (which probably gets counted as a hit or click somehwere earning the spammer money).
Spam is cheap. Let us say (assumption alert!) that one could send out 5 million spams for 10 bucks. One would only need to make 10 bucks or more on 10 sales, or an average of a bucks/sale. That isn't hard to do.
Any Windows virus contains the capability to send spams using your system (assuming you run Windows, of course). Wait till the public sees a 65 year old grandmother getting her stuff ripped away from here because of a virus that spammed using her machine, or becuase a spammer used her address as a reply to w/forged headers. Yeah, that'll make people feel good about themselves, eh?
You write as if the Internet repealed the laws of supply and demand. In truth, the prevalence of spam is an excellent example of them in action. The cost of electronic spam is next to nothing, and there is a demand for it, thus the supply busts wide open.
Think of this:
If postal spam was as cheap as email spam, how much postal spam would you be getting? I'd wager a helluva lot more. Why? Cheaper advertising costs, and at even low rates of return, it becomes cost effective.
Consider that direct mail has a 3-5% action rate. Cut that by an order of magnitude for spam, just for sake of dicussion, and do the math. Five million spams *
As long as people, such as yourself, ignore the reality of supply and demand in the world of spam, you will fail to understand how to make progress in combating it. And you will result to threats of violence to get your way. There has always been spam, it is just a new medium. Failure to recognize that will lead to failure to successfully combat it.
And as far as someone supplying spam, the spammer *is* the supply. Even modestly uncreative types could probably grab a scripting book and in a matter of a couple hours make spam lists of millions upon millions of potential addresses.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
"...anything that slows down spam can only be a good thing."
Ahh, I see. So, blackouts, stopping the Internet, having some bureaucrat determine what is and is not spam, and banning email are all good things, then?
I think not.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
In the past day since I read this story, the only spam I have received to my hotmail account has been from Chritian Finance advisors and a Christian Dating service (count of 5 pieces). I think this is the first Christian spam I have ever received, and all in 1 day... how odd.
This morning I logged in and about 70 our of 120 messages were spam. This is pretty normal for me. It's no big deal though because I use Mailwasher Pro which tends to get most of it. It's still mildly annoying to click through about 5 to 10 spam messages, but regardless, I didn't see a spam reduction.
I'm sorry to hear that you're having so much trouble with your e-mail, and I can see how this sort of abuse could make anyone froth at the mouth a bit.
On the upside, spammers have to hop from one domain to another fairly often. The deluge of bounces can't keep up forever.
My point, basically, was that stiffer punishments won't do any good if there is no chance any of them will actually be used. There are some anti-spam laws now, but there is no budget or interest in enforcing them, so the spammers have carte blanche. Enforcement is, as always, far more important than the actual penalties.
Shane Atkinson
2 O'Neill Ave Harewood Belfast
03 323 6484
+6433236484
SA PUBLISHINGS
P.O. Box 36289 Merivale
Christchurch, NZ 8030
NZ
064211252557
Shane Atkinson
support@sapublishings.com
P.O. Box 36289 Merivale
Christchurch, NZ 8030
NZ
021 1252557
+64211252557
There is no latin word virus so suppostition is fruitless. If it WERE a word like vir/viri - ie man/men it WOULD make sense. There is a lot of pseudo-intellectual crap floating about that examines the possibilities of which declension it belongs to. Romans were nothing if not practical. Neuter referred to something sexless. If they were able to sex it, they would have made it either masc. or fem. and since they are such virile little buggers, they would have been viewed as masc. This, like the mentioned crapola above is just supposition and there is NO reason to carp about it. I took three or maybe four years of Latin in the early sixties. The language doesn't come back, but the supremely practical political and wonderful lyric memories stay with me.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
are these spammers spamming for the heck of it, or do they get good money (like we hear)?
if they do get paid, who's paying?
it's always said spams contain no links to actual originators of the content. which doesnt make sense, since if none of the advertised products were buyable, where do the advertisers get their revenue, and benefit do they derive from the advertisement?
and if u COULD actually buy stuff/services off them, why can't we track them down?
Save our brethren. Can I get an amen?
Now all we need to do is convince the spammers to use their bandwidth to check the news rather than using it to piss the rest of us off. As soon as they see that there's consequences for their irritating actions, I'm sure they'll turn around, and most people's e-mail boxes will remain empty.
:p
As if that will ever happen
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
OH...isn't that just too too bad...
If there is no point in having distinct separate words for distinct separate concepts and physical items, how is one to communicate?
Hey, I know - instead of having separate nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns, we can use the extremely cromulent word "MARKLAR" to replace them all. That will stop that nasty "linguistic fragmentation" cold!
In fact, marklar marklar and marklar? Marklar's marklar to marklar on marklar. Have marklar marklar the marklar that marklar should marklar marklar? The marklar of marklar is to marklar the marklar of marklars, and marklar marklar marklar of marklar through marklar marklar (which is marklar marklar marklar) marklars that marklar.
Tu mihi lambe nates
you silly twit. if you consider complaints about spam to be spam, you are quite the idiot to have voluntarily followed the link to this discussion and subject yourself to all of this "spam". dork.
I know it is nasty, but I too have had it with spammers. Lets harass them. Just because they say they stop, we should not. Keep subscribing them to their own stuff. Fill in bogus info on their forms and supply their internet mail addresses fetched from Sam Spade. Subscribe both them and their upstream providers to spam and smut lists.
It works. It's sort of like terrorist hijacking. They don't stand a chance if we stand up and fight.
Menu's dont cost me bandwidth or server CPU tim
They cost you human time in bending over (potentially injuring your back) to pick them up from the porch, or they cost you time to open the door and unhook them from the doorhandle. You pay for maintenance on that door/porch, be it in rent, mortgage, property taces, homeowners insurance (what happens if the people fall down on your rickety porch?)
2) Menu's do not contain sexually explicit or illegal scam material.
The first part, well That depends on where you are. The second part, ask yourself why not? Because they'd get nailed for their already illegal activity!
3) Reading the menu doesn't cause me to be the permanent target of 100 other restaurants.
Nor does reading email. If you got a spam, your addres is *already* permanently on that list, in most cases.
4) Menu's may even be usefull.
So can spam. I've received useful spam many times. I chose to not participate, but it was indeed, still useful.
Here in Australia, you can even put a "No Junk Mail" sign on your letterbox - something you cant do for spam.
Sure you can. You can use a whitelist or similar system for your inbox. I have a couple addresses I use like this. IN fact, I do this on my phone line as well. I have caller ID. If you don't call from a number I don't recongize, you have to leave a message. If you call from a blocked line (as most phone-spammers do) you are instructed as to how to unblock your line and call again. Most phone-spammers will not bother.
There is another service the local telco offers that forces unknown callers to leave who they are. If they give it it then rings through and you are presented with the opportunity to accept or not. Meanwhile, they have to sit there waiting. Phone spammers do not do this probably 90% of the time.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
(snicker)
This is absolutely zany. First of all, I was kidding about almost everything except generic good will. Secondly, I believe I have a dusty 1541 in a basement closet at my parents' house. ::::::shaking head::::: Thirdly, the place I extract my ideas: Yeah. Right. Smartass! :-)
Typical. Even in perfectly platonic things, it's feast and famine. I just returned to college. Shockingly, I'm fairly well adjusted among people who define "computer literacy" as the indoctrination into MS-Office. I'm going for liberal arts degrees. Now how about this: I'm
sans computer for about two weeks. I've been talking about art, politics, economics, sex (of course), history, military culture--you name it, and everyone is ok. When I was trying to make a point about conservatism in microcosm, I said, "Well, take the example of C versus Java. See, in my old school view, C and assembler is disciplined work to make the computer behave more efficiently. The 'easier' kinds of things like scripting languages have gotten even more bloated and more decadent with processor cycles..."
Then I pretty much interrupted myself. Oh shit. I forgot. I'm starting to get a life. These people have been having lives. Weird. I can't use C and Java as an example. I have to be explained why jokes that recite lines from "Everybody Loves Raymond" are funny, but I'm learning.
That's what education is for, no? Go figgur.
So every silver lining has its cloud. Now I'm neglecting some neat online people (esoteric "high tech" Luddites, etc. and people who treat string theory as headline stuff), but hey. We threw a killer dinner party with curried chicken et all last night. Cute girls (oops) college women and even, what, bottled water and chatter about the virtues of Western Civilization were there. Methinks I could get used to this. That's what's odd. It's like getting kicked out of Lamda Lamda Lamda by some default supervising de facto deity, but that doesn't mean anything disparaging about the folks.
Getting a life is almost what the label says it is. Strange, normalities, eh? Oh well, I'll still occasionally code some 16-bit assembly language in my sleep every once in a blue moon, but I hope never to feel truly comfortable when Microsoft hooks every interrupt and when "computer literacy" professors have no idea what that gripe means. In my punk/metal days, we had a sort of moral code to stay on slow burn, never losing the (out)rage and axe grinding process. It's like that all over again. It's like selling out or tempting myself to sell out. I'm supposed to be too old for this shit (like I would let such suppositions hold any sway in deciding what to do). I feel bad though. I know I won't get back on /. often. Take 'er easy. :-) Nice geekin' out with ya.
Currently our team is building a website for the city of Dunedin, located in the South Island. We are working hard to bring people the same services they would expect in the US WITHOUT spamming people.
Website: The City Octagon
The URL is:
www.thecityoctagon.co.nz
or
www.thecityoctagon.com
We are at least trying to make a difference! -Thanks