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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.
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%
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.
I was so naive.
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.
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 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
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.
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'.
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!
Ok I'll bite... first off, the apartment that I live in, previous two and the dorm(s) I used to live in, had a "no solicitors" rule. Second, if someone was doing that to me, I would wait for them and I'm sure that a 2 min face-to-face chat would suffice for a 'cease-and-desist' order! If all else fails, the menu has a valid address and phone that can be used for legal recourse. Are any of these options available for spam?
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
1) Menu's dont cost me bandwidth or server CPU time.
2) Menu's do not contain sexually explicit or illegal scam material.
3) Reading the menu doesn't cause me to be the permanent target of 100 other restaurants.
4) Menu's may even be usefull.
In concept, they are certainly similar, though junk mail is far less annoying. Here in Australia, you can even put a "No Junk Mail" sign on your letterbox - something you cant do for spam.
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.
No, I don't protest when the menu guys flood my doorstep... but I might if I got 50 - 150 menus/day.
Or I might protest if the junk mail wasn't just menus and credit card solicitations, but porno, confidence scams and penis enlargers.
Or I might protest if sending junk mail was actually illegal, as spam is.
Or I might protest if I had a sign on the mailbox marked "ABSOLUTELY NO JUNK MAIL" and the mailman or flyer guy went ahead and ignored it.
And I'd be especially ticked off if I couldn't protest: if I couldn't trace problematic junk mail back to an actual business or legal entity that could be held somehow accountable.
The list just goes on and on. The differences between spam and junk mail are obvious and have already been discussed extensively in this forum.
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."
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
I live in NZ and read the original article. + the followups.
The original article was in the national paper The Herald, around two weeks ago. The original article was only a moderatly sized peice at the back of the paper (IT section). The author had simply had enough of the spam and was also worried for his daughters exposure to things such as viagra. So he went about tracking the spammer down. He eventually found him, rang him and organised an interview. Thus the spammers name appeared within the paper and thus harassemnt began.
So then the spammer become worried for his family .
some peoples moderation does not include weed
Comparing spam with menus left on your doorstep??
There are two *huge* differences when it comes to spam:
1) Your local pizza place actually has to spend money on each and every one of those menus they dump on your doorstep, which means that it is in their best interest not to dump 10 copies every day there, unlike some spammers do.
2) And something that is often overlooked in these kind of analogies: There are at best a few hundred businesses within driving distance to your house to which it could make sense to send you promotional snailmail. On the internet, *everyone* is local. That means potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of 'companies' who could send you their 'special promotions', for virtually no charge to them.
Spam levels are horrible these days -- I am the administrator of several mailservers at an ISP, and they receive hundred thousand spam messages a DAY, combined. Currently about 70% of all incoming mail gets flagged as spam by our spam filters, up from ~50% little over a year ago.
The total number of spam sent still increases every month, according to the numbers by the major anti-spam companies like Postini and Brightmail. Just for a moment, imagine how bad it would be if there had been noone trying to put an end to it...
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
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
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..
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.
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.
Wrong assertion, businesses aren't alike whatever pro-capitalist people are going to pretend. Selling flowers to the public, for example, doesn't, usually , nurture hate, anger and whatever the spam fashion is brewing these days.
be realistic for a minute here
I'm as realistic as anyone else and personally can't see any facts in your post. Perhaps i should read between the lines or something... ( hmmm wonder what's your day job. )
Does anyone protest when the menu guys flood your doorstep? No...
Wrong again. See that sign on my door. It says NO FSCKIN FLYERS! Better not ask for any reading lessons, i have strong tendency to act violently towards illiterate dumb fscks.
What about when Target or some other megaconglomerate sends bs in the mail that you didn't ask for?
They don't do that anymore. Not in my country. In what country do you live in ? Texas ?
Spam is no different.
Sheesh, this is getting pathetic. Did you ever get 1000+ flyers on your doorstep or in your mail box? I doubt it. It couldn't simply fit or it would be a great risk of fire. Imagine a couple kids passing in front of your house.
Now, if i would be running a business everyone hates and i would be told not to run it anymore by a huge majority of society... I would quit. DUH! So what's your point ? Well, i ain't high tonight and i can say i didn't understand what's the point you are trying to make. Anyways.. It was sure fun to reply.
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
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!
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.
Perhaps too much of a bit of wishful thinking there?
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
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
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!
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
virii is Latin.
No, actually it's not. There is no such word in either Latin or English. In Latin, "virus" is a collective noun, like 'butter.'
if we want it to be virii then its virii
Why don't you substitute a word in Klingon? You'll still sound just as goofy, but at least you won't be flat-out incorrect.
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 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.
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?
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
Perhaps marklar should just call them marklar.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
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).
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 ----
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?
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.
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.
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
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.