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Good Guys 2, Spammers 0
JoeJob writes "A couple of victories in the legal war against spammers. First, a Washington resident has been awarded a $250,000 decision against a spammer that sent him 58,000 copies of a spam. Second, looks like the spammers who are trying to sue Spamhaus, SPEWS, and other spam blacklists have decided to tuck their tails and run. Let's hope this trend continues." If you care to celebrate this, one food springs to mind.
Back in the day; when the debate about allowing comerical interest on the Internet fired up, many predicted that today' situation would be the outcome... *soft crap destroying the backbone and .com(ers) diluting the content to the lowest common denominator.
i won't be happy until there is no spam at all.... That, or capital punishment. Nothing like deterring spam with a good caneing. Anyone who recieves a copy of the spam gets to give the offender a whack. In extreme cases (porn sent to childrens email address, etc.) the spammer is sent to a federal -pound me in the ass- prison. Don't even ask about what happens for the penis enlargement senders ;)
Too bad it'd never be feasible to penalize all of the people who aren't patching their systems and thus flooding people's inboxes with virus spam. I'm still getting hundreds, sometimes thousands of fscking "Your Details" e-mails every day -- despite the fact that the problem was widely publicized and (supposedly) widely patched. In a way, this is worse than spam, because not only do I often get more virus mails than regular spams, I *know* I'm using a lot more bandwidth on all the SoBig.F crap...but until it's ever feasible to punish folks who won't/can't patch their systems, I guess we're stuck with this crap, too.
How To Get Humans To Mars
Well now, this is certainly a laudable decision, that the court made, but isn't the judge overdoing it a bit by making the spammer pay 250,000?
When a group of lawyers thinks you are too sleazy to join them, then that's really saying something!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
58,000 separate offers to make $10,000 each = a lot more $$$$ than the $250,000 he got He obviously picked the wrong option in suing
Spam and rice is what my Hawaiian college buddies called it. You could smell it all the way down the drom hall. And it tastes really good. Really. ;) Kind of reminds me of sushi, only saltier.
Unfortunately, I think that the RIAA's financial clout is likely to give it a greater chance of success than individual anti-spam activists.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
...good guys: 2, Spammers 1,943,238,345,753,261 (today alone)
How can we keep the internet a place of free exchange of ideas and NOT have spam? The problem with spam is, is the creators show an incredible lack of originality and creativity. I'd tolerate spam better if it had something truly interesting to say, or presented something that is intrinsically dull or boring in a new or interesting way. Why don't spammers use irony? Ironic spam would be a welcome addition to my daily email.
We want unlimited sharing of music files, we want free software like linux and freebsd, we want the internet to remain the wide open wondrous interface that it is...I don't see how we can have all these things and NOT have spam.
So far my Bayesian filter has been very effective in de-spamming me. Has anyone tried training one to filter out legitimate email and keep the SPAM? I suppose that's technically what it's doing anyway.
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Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
If you get the capital punishment you will be happy?
You must really hate that spam.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
you can sign up at their How Can I Help page, and apparently it costs nothing to join.
If you're not in the U.S., you can sign up to their international chapters:
EuroCAUCE - Serving the entire continent
CAUBE.AU - Serving Australia, New Zealand, and all of the Pacific Rim
CAUCE Canada
CAUCE India - Serving Asia and the Indian subcontinent
I'll be signing up today.
I don't think it's right to sue someone because they're trying to help block spam, but I think the way that some blacklists go about it is very much wrong and harmful to innocent bystanders, and they really should be held more accountable than they are.
You can imagine my dissapointment.
Isn't Grouch Marx supposed to have said "I don't want to join any club that would let me be a member" ... maybe this is the reverse case, maybe the supreme court panel is saying the guy isn't sleazy enough ...
Infuriate left and right
You'd have people signing up for AOL, just to get the spam.
Now 2.5mil woul be painful, but 250k doesn't seem like much. But at least another one bites the dust. And hopefully this will encourage others who have the means to continue to sue spammers. I have the will, but no means. As in I have a desire and a bunch of email records yet I have no money for a lawyer and googling for free info seems to bring up useless adds for stuff I don't need.
On another note I was eating dinner wiht a friend and she told me in VERY strong terms that spam would "never go away" and as a business practice it works great and she supports it. She said in her company's case they "send" out their marketing material to harvested emails that are sold to them froma third party. Yet inthe next sentence she complains about getting penis enlargemtn emails and breast enhancers.....
meh!
Ave Molech Setting
The best anti-spam tool I've found so far is SpamBayes, a great open source app that lets you decide what is spam and what isn't. Just train it for a few days (perhaps longer depending how much Spam you get in a day) and it'll filter all the junk mail to a separate folder. If there are any false positives (or negatives), just move it to a "good" folder and train it again. After a week of training, it hasn't failed once!
This is all well and good, but it will be news for real when the spam house pays up. The chances of ever collecting on this judgment are slim and none.
Actually finding and garneshing their accounts is possible but I can not imagine that will be easy or practical.
The other question I have is, how about a class action law suit. I know about 100 million people that would like to sue, the ULTIMATE class action.
Tech solutions will beat legal ones in this fight. Check out Mailinator
I, fo' on', welcom da' new musubi cookin' overlords
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Lets see a thousand posts about how you set up a bayesian filter!
Oh yeah, and keep your laws away from the internet, be they anti-spam, anti-porn, anti-terrorism, anti-hatespeech.
This is a problem easily solved with technology, thanks.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You run a site that promotes porn, if someone disagrees with porn should they DDos you? The answer is no, they just shouldn't look at your site.
SPEWS is pretty much the same thing, if you don't like them don't use them. If you don't like that your ISP uses them, switch ISP's or have them remove the spam filtering on your account, it's that simple.
It's very apparent you have never had to deal with spam and angry users at the ISP level, it's a whole different ball game, don't advocate DDos of the tools that we need to protect our users. You shouldn't advocate DDos for anything, not even spammers.
Litigation is a fate worse than a thousand deaths. Lawyers have powers to destroy that far exceed anything mere torturers have available. Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can be used to forever dissolve your sense of security, seal away prosperity, call down imprisonment, tortures, and exile, and to confuse you, and kill you in installments, wasting your time away with convoluted garbage. Being flayed alive to death doesn't quite match being nickel-and-dimed to death. One torment lasts hours, another lasts decades.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
The FTC says Childs and Lightfoot promoted a "get rich quick" chain mail scheme via spam and Web sites, promising participants they'd receive $10,000 in "gifts" within a "short period." Recipients of the e-mail and visitors to the Web sites were asked to pay a one-time $41 membership fee.
$250,000 is more then $10,000. Profit!
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
But I'd still like to see SPEWS sued into the stone age. If you want to block spam, that's fine... but you just can't convince me that blocking thousands of legit servers, just because they're close to spam servers, is in any way a good practice.
Username taken, please choose another one.
Ironic spam?
How about this:
Do you need a larger, thicker penis?
Of course you don't, you have no girlfriend you frigging loser!
Come join us at slashdot.org!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Bah to that.
I used the Osirusoft lists for a good while. They helped me reject more spam than you can shake a stick at. I don't care about the guy's personality that runs the show (Joe), I just like his product. Just as I like OpenBSD.
Trolling is a art,
Why, the damages are punitive my good sir. YANNL (Youse Ain't Not No Lawyer)
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
According to the article, there is an FTC commissioner named Orson Swindle.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Thats the funny thing: they *DIDN'T* find the lawyer.
Mark Felstein is not only the representing council for EMarketersAmerica, he's also their sole corporate officer, and as far as anyone can tell, their only member. The EMA was formed mere weeks before the lawsuit was filed.
One of the defendants assertions has always been that EMarketersAmerica was formed for the sole purpose of filing the lawsuit. In fact, somewhere on the NANAE threads was a remark that Felstein admitted that he would dissolve EMarketersAmerica at his earliest opportunity once the lawsuit was resolved.
Of course, the defendants might have a thing or two to say about that...
Don't even ask about what happens for the penis enlargement senders
They are sent to Federal PMINTA Prisons, and their cellmates are given viagara and enlargment pills that work?
I've been getting emails about email lists being sold with 100's of millions of email addresses. It would seem to me that it would be illegal to sell someone else's information (email address) without their consent. Is this not the case?????
The problem isn't my ISP using them, it's other people using them. If my network neighbor spams you, how the fuck is it my fault? How is my ISP being a dork about it my fault?
Under your "logic" (note the quotes), you would encourage a city to put up military roadblocks, and prevent anyone from going in, when they find one crack dealer in your neighborhood. And when you go to complain, noone exists. Not "you know their name, but don't have access to them", but "nobody knows their names, and we won't tell you".
Fuck spews. Fuck them until they bleed, then fuck them harder.
I'm sorry, but 58,000 emails is not worth 250,000$.
We bitch and we moan about how the RIAA wants to sue people who share music hundreds of thousands of dollars despite how trivial the issue really is.
Receiving a spam is annoying but I don't think a single spam email is worth ~4.31$. When you think about the bandwidth, storage, and time to delete, I think it is nowhere near that much. I think you could argue on the order of 0.50$ or so for each email. Cleaning them up should be relatively easy because if they came from the same source, they should have very similar characteristics.
I hate spammers, and I think what they do sucks. Nevertheless, this response is overkill. It's like putting someone in jail for 20 years because they were growing cannabis.
Join Tor today!
How can you prove the damages are $500 per email. That seems a little outrageous.
Those are punitive damages. The idea is to deter people from spamming. Besides, when you factor in all the millions of people who receive the spam, look at it for a second then hit delete it quickly adds up those cents.
Spam erodes the Internet and wastes everyone's time. Just because a single piece of spam is easily dealt with does not mean e-mail is not suffering a death of thousand cuts as we speak. All the Bayesian stuff, SpamAssassin, DNSbl's and Habeas are doing is buying some time until the inevitable.
It's called "punative damages". I surely don't cost $10,000 just to pick up the phone (although, there's a goal to strive for...) but the new federal "Do Not Call" list has just that as the penalty for bypassing it.
Fines are usually *not* based on the "cost" but instead of "deterent value". If the fine was a penny, the spammer might just pay it.
Sig under construction since 1998.
according to stats, a lot more people share music than do spam, and eliminating the major spammers would probably contribute a lot more to killing spam than sueing a bunch of 12-year-olds would to killing P2P.
RIAA has bigger resources, but also a much larger spread target
a Washington resident has been awarded a $250,000 decision against a spammer that sent him 58,000 copies of a spam
Somehow, I fell like I'd really like to receive a lot of SPAM now.
Don't forget, these spammers are actually making considerable profit doing what they do!
At first, you might feel it's excessive to make someone pay out $250,000 for dumping a bunch of spam mail on somebody (presumably by accident, since they couldn't think it made any kind of business sense to send mail tens of thousands of times to the same address?).
If the punishment isn't high enough to make the spammer think twice about his/her actions though, it won't function as a deterrence. (It's fine and good that settlements make amends for wrong done to the person suing, but in cases like this, it's sensible to ensure the money awarded is sufficient to deter the accused from doing the same thing to somebody else. Why cause more people to tie up the court system with similar cases brought against the same guy, if you can put a stop to it the first time?)
It's not about the money, it's not about the individual spammer, it's about a little thing called precedent
In the end it's about winning in court - and a $250,000 win in court would be would more than twice that in settlement. Spammers, time to duck and cover, because I see only more of this type of legal retaliation in the future.
While I have no love for spammers or their tactics, I am happy at least that Joe Jared and his Osirusoft list is done for.
/. (besides me) has commented on this. I was always under the impression that freedom of speech was important to people here...
So, what you're saying is that you support the use of DDoS attacks to silence people who are critical of unethical (and in some states illegal) activities? Because that's exactly what happened to Joe and Osirusoft.
Agree or disagree with SPEWS, it's pretty damn sad that nobody here on
Okay, It seems to me that there is a simple solution to all of these spam related problems.
Instead of relying on a technological solution that will be circumvented sooner or later, why not follow the money?
Going after the spammers themselves seems to be a losing proposition because they have become adept at being elusive. The people in this equation that cannot afford to be elusive are the ones that are actually collecting money from the targets of spam. The people that are paying the spammers for their services are the ones that need to be penalized. When the spammers are no longer useful they will die out.
Making money from spam should be made illegal. I think it would be a lot more effective at reducing spam than the methods that are being used now.
If my logic is in any way flawed, please let me know.
We have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose. We understand that hearing us say this is important to you...
no use for me then... I only get around 3 spams a month... :)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
it seems to me more like this puts the score at "good guys: 2, spammers: 93856299376591".
maybe I'm just pessimistic?
I'm still getting hundreds, sometimes thousands of fscking "Your Details" e-mails every day -- despite the fact that the problem was widely publicized and (supposedly) widely patched.
Heck. I'm running a completely non-microsoft shop and am still getting bogus bounces from mail transfer agents warning me that I might be infected, because the darned worm found my "Rod" address in somebody's address book and is masquerading as me.
(But at least the author of ONE of the darned MTA firewalls had the cluefullness to include mention that it might be somebody masquerading rather than an actual infection.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Much as I'd love to see the guy's house taken away and then dropped on him, Florida's one of those wonderful states with an unlimited homestead exemption (used by any number of South Florida real-estate swindlers to cover their posteriors when the suckers, er, investors found out they actually HAD bought swampland...)
A new multilevel marketing business...
Here's how:
1) Move to Washington state.
2) Set up an email account.
3) Populate the web with your email address.
4) Collect the spam.
5) Sue for thousands.
That could pay for the war in IRAQ. It also remands me of the scene on Airplane where everyone was lined up to slap the screaming woman.
Fight Spammers!
Under your "logic" (note the quotes), you would encourage a city to put up military roadblocks, and prevent anyone from going in, when they find one crack dealer in your neighborhood.
Please. SPEWS is intended for blocking email, not EVERYTHING.
I have the freedom to associate with whomever I want. So do you. Do not our servers have the right to associate with whichever servers we choose? Apparently not, in your opinion.
And when you go to complain, noone exists. Not "you know their name, but don't have access to them", but "nobody knows their names, and we won't tell you".
There's a reason for that, too. Simply running a blocklist, no matter how gentle, will get you harassment from spammers, death threats, frivolous lawsuits, etc. Those who formed SPEWS simply wanted to avoid all that. (I am not SPEWS, nor do I know who is.)
I still receive hundreds of spams per day, for viagra, enlargement, what have you. I can only note that the volume increases daily
You mean to say that shit works?!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The 2 major food groups!
How can you prove the damages are $500 per email.
Easy. Lets say I run a mail server. Let's say it's my employer's mail server. Let's say we pay for bandwidth based on utilization. Let's say we pay for and maintain all the hardware and software on the mail server.
Now, let's say we get flooded with spam. Let's say that, on average, each employee in the company gets between 60 and 100 spam messages a day. And let's say that said spam consumes 1/8 of your hardware and bandwidth resources.
So, the formula you're looking at is something like:
cost of spam = employee wasted time + sysadmin wasted time + (hardware maintenence costs * 1/8) + (bandwidth costs * 1/8)
You can see where $500 per email starts to get realistic. Mind you, I just neatly extracted this complex mathematic formula from the darkest recesses of my arse, so I don't know just how accurate it would be, but you can at least start to get the idea.
Now, magnify this exponentially. Instead of a corporate mail server, let's say it's an ISP mail server. Lets say the ISP has tens of thousands of subscribers. Let's say that, even though they offer filtering to their customers, they don't actively block any spam to avoid the possiblity of accidentally blocking non-spam.
Now you can begin to see that there are costs involved in spam that the average end user never sees.
...but the first image that came to mind when I read your post was Anubis from Stargate SG1. "He was banned from the system lords because his crimes were unspeakable, even for them."
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Filthstein is trying to voluntarily drop the case against the individuals listed on his frivolous suit in an attempt to avoid paying for the legal fees in behalf of the defendants.
If he gets his wish, he's won. The only purpose of that lawsuit was to cause as much cost as possible to the defendants in legal fees and otherwise. It was such a blatant attempt to stiffle free speech, that Filthstein should be disbarred for it.
The lawsuit also exposed him as the quack as he is. He should be disbarred for that reason as well. You guys should read the motion to dismiss from the defendants' lawyers. It's absolutely hilarious on how it points out the glaring errors in Filthstein's suit. It's not just factual errors regarding the issue at hand, but procedural errors any competent lawyer would've caught before he would've filed the suit.
For the "FUCK SPEWS" crowd out there, this suit had NOTHING to do with SPEWS. Filthstein and his buddy, convicted cocaine trafficker Eddy Marin, were suing the most vocal critics of Eddy's spam empire, that's all. They just wrapped it around the "we hate SPEWS" banner, because otherwise it would've been too obvious that the suit was nothing but a SLAPP suit.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
> If my network neighbor spams you, how the fuck is it my fault?
It isnt. And no one said it was. (Or if they did, they are wrong.)
> How is my ISP being a dork about it my fault?
Again, it isnt. Nor is anyone claiming it is.
You are not being blocked.
Your ISP is being blocked, and rightfully so.
9 times out of 10, the ISP (be it local or backbone) is willingly and knowingly faking records to show that the spam came from your ISPs space, or another of their customers IP blocks. That is why ISPs like UUnet do not allocate IP space correctly (SWIP it with arin.) Its because if they SWIPed some space but not others, then we could easily block UUnets spammers by rejecting mail from non SWIPed IPs.
But UUnet will purposly not SWIP your ISPs block, or your block, to you. This way they can hide spamemrs in their IP space and no one but UUnet can tell who is doing it.
When a backbone or ISP does this, they become listed by SPEWs.
Fuck you and any ISP that willingly hides spammers amongs innocent customers.
And as a final note, you dont need to contact SPEWs admins EVER.
Why would you? What do you plan to say?
YOU are not listed, thus YOU can not be removed.
Your ISP, or their ISP is listed. Only they can be removed.
Atleast as of now, it is still totally legal to boycott any company you choose to, and they are not suppost to be able to pass a law to FORCE you into buying a companys products you dont want.
SPEWs is a boycott of email.
You bitching about how your spam loving backbone is having an adverse effect on you is just like the RIAA bitching about people not buying their CDs so they pass laws to get their money anyway.
If your ISP hosted 95% kiddie porn, would you be as quick to bitch that the world blocks them (and thus you), and still insist that they are 'ok guys' and you shouldnt be blocked?
that his name is pronounced "swin-DELL"
But yes, I was thinking the same thing... delighfully named indeed!
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I used to be like that. Believe me, you will get more. Eventually the guys who spam you now will sell their list of addresses to otherspammers, who will sell it to other spammers, and so on ... and then you get to be in the hell that I am, where I get 200 spams a day...
Dude, it's a punitive value. The value is chosen as to be larger than any possible benefit from spam, else it would be useless.
Ie; if it was $1 an email, and a spammer makes $2 per email on average, then hell, it's just a business expense.
So you make it arbitrarily large, also to compensate for the "they'll never catch me!" factor.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Because of its isolation and the army bases spam is a very popular food.. There are many recipes for using spam that are popular on the islands.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Like this guy's style. Keep going after them. I hope he kicks their butts.
This sig no verb.
Make the RIAA copyright "pen1s enlargement", "v14gr4" and stuff.
Now, what will happen if they send (not share) thousands of copies of it
Im all too happy with that
how long until
I stand corrected. Apparently there are two other people listed with Mark Felstein. Adam E. Miller, an attorney, and Bari Nemeroff, who is an IT recruiter. This thread in NANAE has some info on these other guys.
How many times does this have to be repeated.
Spews won't list a whole ISP until they've repeatedly ignored complaints about spam. If you don't like it, complain to your ISP, they're the ones ignoring the problem and profiting from spam.
Or just move away from them and find an ISP that doesn't offer its services to spammers, if it hurts ISP's financially when they allow spam then eventually they won't do it anymore.
The internet is not a public place, it's made up of lots of private servers that you are invited onto provided you agree to play nicely, why should my ISP be forced to accept traffic and use up the bandwidth that it pays for when it's coming from an ISP that abuses the net like that?
Such as granting someone the freedom to kill anyone with impunity.
Shhh, it's only "censorship" when someone tells you to shut up.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
While your praise of a criminal act of vandalism is telling of your personality, it's interesting to note just how ineffective the DDoS against SPEWS really is. It's so far knocked the main SPEWS information website offline (though there are active mirrors) and it's taken out one DNSbl that happened to incorporate, among various other lists, the SPEWS level 1 list. The other DNSbls with SPEWS information are still up and running and up-to-date, allowing admins to filter out traffic from known crime-ridden netspaces as they please.
Not to mention that if SPEWS really did die, the consequences would be rather dire. For all the venom and bile spit at SPEWS, the alternative -- permanent blocklisting in thousands of individual filters -- is arguably much worse. That is the reason that the netspace that once belonged to AGIS is now effectively "no man's land" on the 'net.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
How can you prove the damages are $500 per email. That seems a little outrageous.
Statutory damages, not actual damages. The practice is detrimental in ways that cannot be accurately quantified, so the legislature specified minimum damages (as in court awards) for the offense.
This is similar to the USA-wide ban on junk faxes for which the recipient can sue for $500 (possibly tripled) per offense. Of course, hardly anyone utilizes these laws, which means junk faxers are still around, making profit on illegal activities.
Am I missing something?
The EFF's position on spam sounds good, but is unrealistic. They fail to take into account the costs related to spam. They also fail to take into account the private property rights of the individuals and organizations that own and operate mail servers.
I don't know about you, but I'm not sending in my donation until they seriously re-evaluate their stance on this issue...
And forget about the Government doing anything effective. Until the anti-spam movement has a lobby as powerful as the DMA, we'll never make any progress at that level.
Mmmmmmmmm, Spam Musubi... Just like mom used to make... Oh wait...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
I think at this point spammers have scored more than "0", perhaps they have scored a trillion or so by this point.
Don't worry. I just signed you up for a whole lot more
Yeah, what we really need is to REWARD people for joining AOL.
Holy crap, I think my sarcasm meter just caught fire....
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I accidentally sent myself about 200,000 emails one time when testing some code that emailed errors when something really bad happened. It's scary to think that I could possibly be sued for fat-fingering an email address.
I was not attempting to make a value judgment about the validity or moral imperative of either protagonist.
Sorry for the confusion.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I don't understand your logic. If the number is going to be a round one, why not make it high. UNLIKE file traders spammers are not giving people the choice of whether to recieve the spam or not (unless you count the opt-out / double opt-in bogus links that are included in the mails). No way! If I want to allow other Kazaa users to download from me I will set my software to do so. It is, after all my bandwidth. I am paying for it, it has a cost and I decide the value of it not you and definatly not the spammers who think that value is = 0...
~~I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank...~~
is to make my email as public as possible and hope to win a settlement...$250k should cover my $40k/year education plus a little grad school quite nicely....
goaheadandtryme@elinxubox.com
go ahead try...I'll see you in court
Brian
Except that you're wrong. The ISPs in my small city are listed because the main upstream available in the region also once hosted a spammer 1,500 miles away. I didn't spam. My ISP didn't spam. Noone in my state spammed, at least according to the blacklist details.
Let's try this: I'm going to blacklist your family because your third cousin twice removed puked in the yard of someone who posts in the same newsgroup I frequent. Don't like it? Change your name or quit complaining! There are plenty of last names available; noone's forcing you to stick with the current one.
Does that sound fair or reasonable? Of course not! But you have no problem punishing me because I live in a community that uses the same upstream as some lamer I've never met, will never meet, and have nothing otherwise in common with. Is that really any better?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
... can I try a slice with green eggs instead of my usual ham?
A good victory though... even though I still feel like Sysyphos pushing that boulder every time I open my Inbox...
Mnem
"Hold my beer and watch this!" - Anonymous Texan
That should have been modded up "Funny". You're trying to send someone e-mail and it was refused because they use SPEWS? Then they don't want your mail. Quit whining about it.
English is not my first language you insensitive clod!
What you don't realize is your ISP's upstream repeatedly ignored requests to terminate the spammers account. SPEWS doesn't immediately ban the whole service provider. They block the offending IP's and work their way out as nothing is done to remove the spammer from their network. Obviously your upstream profitted from the spammer, and they continued to profit even after they were alerted a number of times that they were hosting a spam outfit. Your upstream choose to ignore the complaints and continue to host the spammer and take their dirty money.
When the spam stops, and that means all spam, the blocks start to come off.
I for one will continue to use SPEWS because no one should profit from spam.
or really hate freedom.
Or really hate theft.
nobody likes spam, sure, but this whole scene is really about encouraging the government to regulate communication.
No, it's about the government preventing someone else's "communication" from costing us money. If you want to rent a blimp to advertise your penis-pills, go for it. If you want to pay to put an ad in the back of Rolling Stone, more power to you. If you want to buy time during the Superbowl, have at it. But don't waste my bandwidth and storage, costing me money, by sending your spam to me.
if you don't like spam, do something about it. filter, build a honeypot relay, whatever.
I do. I own the domain anti-spam.org. I use multiple filters and blacklists. I have a honeypot system that includes the time, date, and IP of the system that harvested the address off of my web page. I am a member of CAUCE. I do plenty about it already.
but don't go whining to the feds demanding they regulate a free and open communications channel.
I resent your use of the term "whining." It is rude and inaccurate. The whole problem with e-mail is that it is not "free" in the monetary sense. ISPs and corporations spend incalculable sums of money on bandwidth, servers, storage, backup, administration, filtering products, to deal with spam.
According to Brightmail, roughly 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States was spam as of March of this year. That means that four of every ten mail servers at major ISPs are needed just because of spam. It means that 40% of the bandwidth that the ISPs buy for e-mail is used by spam. It means that ISP's customers are paying for the spam.
If I come over to your house and spraypaint an ad for my autobody shop on your car's hood, don't complain. It's just me exercising my rights to free speech.
The FTC action against Miss Cleo was persued because the FTC
- saw "laws that they believe support their position"
- were "willing to use the legal system to seek financial remedy from the perceived violators"
- and "the threat of financial penalty is likely to alter behavior".
I don't really find anything significant about this observation. This is how the tort system works. (IANAL)I'm well aware of that supposed procedure ("supposed" because, after all, who can verify it?). It still comes down to the fact that I can't send email to anyone with a SPEWS-crippled mailserver - not because of my sins, or my ISP's sins, or even their upstream's regional office's sins, but because of the old actions of someone in another part of my continent.
I know that the idea is to increase collateral damage to the point that the pressure on the offending ISP. How would you recommend that I do that? I'm one of thousands of customers at my ISP. They are one of thousands of ISPs that use that upstream. What would you say is a more effective target of my efforts:
I'll leave you to guess which path I took.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
How appropriate, that an article about spam would be submitted by a user named JoeJob.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
..is a known spam host and open mail port. www.sentris.com. Been trying to move my domain for the last two weeks without success. They won't release the DNS or the domain.
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Joe Sixpack
58,000 new emails
Point of advise: read the post you're replying to *BEFORE* you start typing.
You've essentially made the same point as I have in an earlier post. My "freedom of speech" statement referred to Joe Jared's freedom to host a secondary SPEWS DNS server without getting the crap packeted out of him.
Comcast/AT&T are harboring huge amounts of spammers, and abuse seems to go largely unregulated. Based on my logs, the largest source of open proxies is on AT&T/Comcast and no amount of reports seems to do any good - they continue to harbor spammers and don't seem to care. I strongly urge people to avoid Comcast for being a haven to spammers and open proxies. We're blacklisting huge chunks of IP addresses in their space because they simply won't take action. Just today, a large bank got caught in our net and after a discussion, I convinced their IT director to switch to Bellsouth so as to not be associated with this unethical ISP. I'm sick and tired of AT&T/Comcast spammers.
Funny Read
...
"His hair pulled tight in a ponytail, his sunglasses small, dark ovals, and wearing a dark suit and red tie, he looks like a Miami Vice extra"
This is how I picture spamers
Wish I could have seen that, I'd know if I got in arms reach of a spammer, I'd be kicking some spammer ass too.
If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it. -- Calvin Coolidge
Ah, yes, I remember it well. A bunch of whiny children showed up on NANAE and waved their tiny penes around about how leet they were and how they would show SPEWS who's who.
I've seen the sadness that is their site. It suxors.
I like you how you just said that the analogy was bad without actually explaining where it goes wrong. Instead, you toss out a mindless ad-hominem regarding my pro-SPEWS stance.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I've heard really good things about SpamBayes but have yet to check that out. Although I recently stumbled across a service that uses SpamAssassin, and so far it has kept my inbox junk free with no false positives. Besides the filtering service (shadango.com) works well because it enables me to check both my students and hotmail at the same place. All I have to say is it's worth looking at.
Ya know, everyone admits that SpamAssassin kicks ass.. I personally have it catching about 95% of my spam, which is a level I'm very happy with. 1-2 spams a day isn't a lot to have to delete.
The problem (at least with me and a lot of my friends), was that I have 5 addresses (I'm a webmaster for 2 different sites). The one site I really had control over had SpamAssassin, but the other ones were admin'd by someone else (who was too lazy to install SpamAssassin).
I recently found a free service out there that not only uses spam assassin, but allows you to use it when viewing *ANY* of your email addresses. So now I've even got my @hotmail address being scanned with SpamAssassin.
I don't mean for this to sound like a retarded plug, but I'm VERY happy with this service (well, as long as it stays free!). It even allows you to store files online and generate temporary accounts.. you should seriously check it out: www.shadango.com
Nate Dogg
Look up the word in the dictionary. You're trying to make an argument, not appeal to the common man. Get you shit straight, Internet destroyer.
Let's see the SPEWS case ID. We can look it up and see for ourselves whether or not your listing is "justified".
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
but not at all. You're not talking to a bunch of Windows users, so spare the stretched analogy. Argue your point logically without analogies or don't argue at all. Spam is like spam.
Yes, everyone who likes porn and does not like SPEWs is obviously a troll. All right thinking people love spews and hate porn, I forgot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I have the freedom to associate with whomever I want. So do you. Do not our servers have the right to associate with whichever servers we choose? Apparently not, in your opinion.
It depends on who uses your servers. If you run an ISP and have a service contract to provide email to people, then you don't have the right to arbitrarily censor people's email, in my opinion. SPEWS blocks more then Spam, they pretty open about blocking all mail from organizations that aren't as zealous about preventing Spam in order to cause economic pressure. They can and do prevent people from receiving email that is not Spam. That shouldn't ever happen. Boycott whatever you like, but it's immoral to boycott on other people's behalf just because you can.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
They're also hosting the annoyences messagemedia.com and linkexchange/listbuilder.
Oh, and skylist.net and lamailer.com.
Those are just the ones that have annoyed me.
For a most detailed listing of the spammers that are currently hosted by these fucktards, check here.
THIRTY-NINE fucking spammers CURRENTLY listed.
You're lucky you can talk to anyone. Forget SPEWS, you're in the damn SBL, dude.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
And with regard to the junk fax laws, someone sued fax.com for 2.2 TRILLION dollars about a year ago, and has the faxes to prove the case.
Hilarious quote from him: "I'd be very happy if we just got $100 billion."
fax.com claim to send 3 million faxes a day, and have been in operation four years.
Fun with calculator time: That's 4,380,000,000 faxes. That's 6,570,000,000,000 dollars, which is coincidently almost exactly the national debt last I checked.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
OMG...someone else in the world makes spam rice?
Wow...Back in dorm-days, we'd have spam rice nites where we would send envoys to pick up ingredients and everyone would pitch in to cook and we'd all gather round a dvd or two.
Haven't made it since I left uni, but golly do I miss those days.
Catch my drift?
I don't want to stop spam when it's already in my machine. I could also buy a gun to stop burgulars in my home or I could employ someone to answer my phone to stop phone marketers, but that only takes care of the symptoms, not the cause.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Hmmm... which shows more "cluefullness": sending someone a message because you (inaccurately) believe they have a virus, or sending someone a message even though you realise they probably don't?
In my opinion, the first shows forgivable ignorance, the second unforgivable stupidity.
The problem is not with spam, nor with laws. The problem is with the SMTP protocol. There is currently no way to track the originator's IP, nor any way set 'content type' flags. If the originator's IP were known to be accurate and preserved, it would be easy(ier) for routers to implement "The first 200 emails in x seconds are fast, then kick down to one email per minute" or "When (threshold) emails from a source is reached, insert 'Bulk Mail' flag if it doen't exist". Mail readers could then be set to accept email from 'my favourite mailing list' but ignore all other 'Bulk Mail'. At this point, spamming becomes non profitable, as most people have it auto-deleted.
This still allows people to send well targetted, unsolicited email in low volumes (Most of my clients appreciated getting an unsolicited email offering my services, because I did the research to find out they were looking for someone like me, but were unaware of me). The typical "spam" will disapear, because the volumes will not be received to make it cost justifiable.
Any laws passed on the current technology will fail because not ALL countries will pass identical laws. A slight tweek to the protocol will allow filter/routers (yes higher layer than just IP routers) and readers to, over time, eliminate the problem.
Right after you assholes quit spamming.
I don't bounce mail based on SPEWS or any blacklist - but I do use several blacklists to help cull the chaff from the wheat. I still get a chance to glance through the headers before all the junk gets tossed. I do that because I'm not willing to throw away any legitimate mail if I can help it. I'm sure I do miss some, now and then, because it's hidden in the middle of all the spam and comes from a blacklisted site.
You, of course, blame SPEWS and the other blacklists. I blame the spammers who keep sending the same crap day after day. You probably blame child abuse and drunk driving on the police, not the people who actually do it.
And that's why I don't like SPEWS. I have no leverage at all to do anything about it. None. It's not like I'm tacitly supporting spammers by staying on with a spam-friendly ISP; I'm using the only broadband ISP in town, and they happen to use cw.net as an upstream.
As it turns out, I think my ISP may be migrating to another upstream. If I were to verify that, do you think the powers-that-be would be generous enough to reward their move with the ability to send mail to SPEWS-crippled mailservers again? After all, they did the right thing - right?
Out of curiosity, what blacklists are you showing me on? Now that Osirusoft went black, I think my problem may've resolved itself. I'm not in the Spamhaus Block List, and ORDB doesn't list me in their database. Even their 3rd-party blacklist search gives me a clean slate.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You just can't seem to grasp that anyone running what you call a SPEWS-crippled mailserver has decided that they don't want to talk to you. Like the spammers, you don't feel that they should have a right to say "No, go away".
SPEWS doesn't force themselves on anyone. They publish a list, kind of like Consumer Reports. An admin can configure his machine to use that list, or not to use that list. There are a number of other lists available, or you can use none at all, or you can create your own. That's up to the admin.
Different people have different standards. Some are willing to risk losing some legitimate email because they feel the benefits of getting rid of a *lot* of the crap outweighs the value of those emails. Others don't feel that way. The guy that owns the server makes the rules. You're mad because you don't get to make the rules for servers that you do not own. Funny how that works.
Of course you have the right to do whatever you want with your server. I have some of the legitimate blackhole lists (i.e. ORDB, SBL) on my own mailserver. It is the prerogative of postmaster to discard or bounce any mail he sees fit and I have no problem with that.
What I do have a problem with is naive sysadmins who enable systems that deliberately punish innocent bystanders and then run around saying "look at me! I'm a 1337 spam fighter!1!! W00t!". They don't stop to look at the implications of their actions before looking at their bounced mail logs and smiling at the number of "spammers" that they're rejecting.
I say this for the final time: I have not sent spam. My ISP has not hosted a spammer. Their upstream, however, has. There is nothing that I or my ISP can do about that - nothing. We're just small fish in the pond and don't have any influence to change things.
Put yourself in my shoes for a moment. Imagine how you'd feel if you saw your emails bouncing with "F-off and die, spammer!" 550's, and you know that you and the people you associate with have nothing to do with the source of the problem. Would that sway you to using SPEWS yourself and recommending it for your clients? Or would it make you decide that their policies, however well-intentioned, are causing a lot of harm to people with no recourse or ability to right the situation?
So, go ahead and SPEWS-cripple your server (yes, I said it again - if you use SPEWS, then your mailserver is crippled in that it can't process legitimate, well-formed incoming mail) if you must. But lose the smug attitude about it. Sure, you're hurting a few spammers. You're also doing a lot of damage to people who've never done a single thing to you other than having the audacity to get an account with their local ISP.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I've had a few of my domains blacklisted for NO REASON and contacting those sites did absolutely NOTHING.
"Why did I get blacklisted? I'm not a spammer."
Them: "Oh yeah? Prove it."
WTF? Me prove it?! How about they show me one SINGLE shred of evidence that I spammed in my life!
For the most part, all of my email goes through, but sometimes that ONE client won't get my email and it almost always happens to be on something very important. If you're gonna do it, do it right. Don't just point fingers and say, "You're blacklisted. You spam." without giving any basis for argument.
Who the hell died an made these guys in charge of a damn thing?
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Screaming about having no leverage...tough. Some of us don't even have a single broadband ISP. You don't have some mythological right to have broadband, and, thus, make pisspoor choices of said broadband provider. My (only) cable and phone company are the same people, and they're in no hurry to do anything...they have no competition. I can't get their DSL or their cable modem when I live.
But, anyway, you have three choices: Have your mail blocked, demand a better choice of upstream, or get someone to relay outgoing mail for you, which probably costs about five dollars a month. Demand your ISP pays it...you won't get far, but they will realize that their customers, and only their customers, are having to spend money elsewhere, which is a real good way to lose customers to places that don't have that extra cost.
And, yes, they could lose you...you could drop the business static-IP server connection, and just get a cheap virtual server elsewhere, and a cheap, consumer-level broadband connection from them.
As for what blacklist you're in...well, you're on CW, so, basically, you're randomly in quite a few private ones that you'll probably never get out of, some even with a move. (It's not vindictive, it's laziness.) As for public ones...SPEWS does, in fact, still exist, and people do block using it. The fact that it's hard to find is just that...it's just hard to find.
And blacklists are expanded seemingly at random, to continue to place more pressure on ISPs. And are reduced for only one reason: Dropping spammers, which CW will not do.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Hmmm... which shows more "cluefullness": sending someone a message because you (inaccurately) believe they have a virus, or sending someone a message even though you realise they probably don't?
In my opinion, the first shows forgivable ignorance, the second unforgivable stupidity.
Not really. SOME of the viruses fake the return addres, but many don't.
What he needs is a flag in the database to indicate whether each signature is for a return-address faker. But he's probably getting the database from an external source that doesn't include that information. If so, he's doing the best he can by warning the purported source while noting that his machine MAY be infected or MAY be being spoofed by somebody else.
Interestingly, in the presence of a bunch of OTHER bounces that just accuse you of being infected, the "maybe you're not really infected" reply is handy for newbies.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This topic is timely in my case. Today I got a message from AOL that my domain, tgrigsby.com, was banned from sending emails to anyone inside AOL. Apparently, www.comusnetorg.us was using my domain in the "Sender" of the spams they were sending. They would generate random user names and prepend them to the that domain. The domain in the emails was fiveaalive.biz, which was a junk domain registered by comusnetorg.us and which redirected to the comusnetorg.us website.
All to sell fools illegal, fake, or nonexistent prescription drugs.
I've contacted my ISP in the hopes that they can smooth the ruffled feathers at AOL. And now I'm pondering the wisdom of suing a company that, according to the whois record, is based in the UK.
I feel they owe me money for using my domain name. I've now been personally affected by their actions, and I'm PISSED. I'd like to sue for possession of every testicle in the company, delivered to me floating in a jar of pickle juice, but that seems a bit unrealistic, so I guess I'll have to go for money.
Are there any lawyers here that can comment on my chances?
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
It's time for Spammer Hammer to pull out his Rail Gun and fire up the QD to see how many dirt bag spammers he can frag...
spews.org is up again. It seems to go up and down throughout the day, but there does seem to be more uptime (that I've observed) than downtime.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
It depends on who uses your servers. If you run an ISP and have a service contract to provide email to people, then you don't have the right to arbitrarily censor people's email, in my opinion.
/dev/null if a postmaster redirects his incoming email there?
An ISP is not a common carrier, it is a business. If they're breaking a contract, the wronged party should hold them to the agreement, possibly escalating to a lawsuit. Blame the one breaking the contract, do not blame a blocklist the ISP uses. If they're not breaking a contract, and not breaking any laws or regulations, one can only vote with those methods available, like one's feet.
Boycott whatever you like, but it's immoral to boycott on other people's behalf just because you can.
Can you rephrase this? This doesn't make sense. SPEWS cannot block inbound email anywhere, except on their own servers. Only the administrators of a mail server can cause mail inbound to their server to be blocked using SPEWS' list. You're misplacing blame.
Would you blame a *nix OS vendor for providing
Fax.com is a nasty outfit. Read this dossier on them. Also read this story and this FCC report and this lawsuit by the California Attorney General's office which detail the kind of sleazy behavior fax.com and its constituents engage in.
You started off with fuck SPEWS, so I think we understand you just fine.
You say you use ORDB and SBL to block mail - but you seem to feel that every admin has to make the same choice that you make. They don't. They run their systems, just as you run yours, and they make their own choices - you don't get to make their choices.
If an admin wants to do so, he can set up a mailserver and send 550-FuckTheWorldIHateEveryone every time someone tries to connect. His system, his rules. You hate that.
I *have* received bounces from being blacklisted, just as you have. I'm on a dialup, dynamic IP, and sometimes it happens. The spammer is usually long gone by then, but there it is. I cope with it. You seem to feel that people who have decided to use SPEWS on their system shouldn't have the right to bounce *your* mail. But they obviously don't want to talk to you, or they would whitelist your IP. Since you claim to be an admin, you should know that they can do that.
Yes, some legitimate mail will bounce with SPEWS. Some will with ORDB and SBL, too. As I mentioned before, some people are willing to deal with that, and some are not. SPEWS doesn't make them, and they don't pretend that there are no IP's listed which don't send spam. They are very upfront about that.
I don't use SPEWS myself - it's not my choice. But I wouldn't take away someone elses choice just because I don't like it. You would, which is why you and your friends are running around screaming "Fuck SPEWS" and running DDOS attacks.
Nope. That would've been autopr0n. I just happened to agree with what he has to say.
Anyway, it's been nice chatting with everyone, but the subject is dead. Just like Osirusoft.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
An ISP is not a common carrier, it is a business. If they're breaking a contract, the wronged party should hold them to the agreement, possibly escalating to a lawsuit. Blame the one breaking the contract, do not blame a blocklist the ISP uses. If they're not breaking a contract, and not breaking any laws or regulations, one can only vote with those methods available, like one's feet.
That's fantastic. Perhaps one day you will learn the diffrence between 'illegal' and 'immoral'
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
That's fantastic. Perhaps one day you will learn the diffrence between 'illegal' and 'immoral'
You snipped the part where I actually addressed your comment, which was
Boycott whatever you like, but it's immoral to boycott on other people's behalf just because you can.
Please explain how one boycotts something "on other people's behalf".
Spammers, porn pushers, and you all hate SPEWS. That's nice company your keeping. Your mom will be proud.
Bah to that.
;)
/. (besides me) has commented on this. I was always under the impression that freedom of speech was important to people here...
I used the Osirusoft lists for a good while. They helped me reject more spam than you can shake a stick at. I don't care about the guy's personality that runs the show (Joe), I just like his product. Just as I like OpenBSD.
--------
So, what you're saying is that you support the use of DDoS attacks to silence people who are critical of unethical (and in some states illegal) activities? Because that's exactly what happened to Joe and Osirusoft.
Agree or disagree with SPEWS, it's pretty damn sad that nobody here on
----------
Bah Indeed,
While I didn't intend to troll, I don't care that I'm labeled as such. I don't mind the idea of blacklists when they are kept current and have a responsible maintainer. I feel that it is one of the best and only few effective ways to stop Spam at its source. When you are responsible for effectively censoring people you need to act in a responsible way. What I don't like is not so much a personality issue as the fact that he willingly would just let people hang on his list just to make them suffer. If you were added to his list (or any list) there are devices for getting yourself removed from the list. You have to show that you fixed your problem and are no longer open relaying (or whatever). When his devices were no longer available due to the DoS's, there was no way to get removed from the list. Even before he was DoS'd, his response was not very good but it was at least functional. If his systems were not allowing retry submissions, he should have found an alternate way to receive submissions or he should have pulled the list. Obviously those that used it were still getting updates to add IP's but he wasn't taking any removals. Those that tried to contact him directly from a different machine automatically got that IP added to his list as well. When he finally closed the list, rather than notify people, he just blocked the world. That was a DoS in and of itself. As far as supporting DoS attacks to silence people who are critical of unethical practices, I do not. I do not support DoS attacks to silence anyone, even anyone who uses a blacklist to silence anyone he sees fit. All I know is that it's got to be difficult to be critical of unethical practices when you are employing them yourself. Two wrongs do not make a right and karma's a bitch!
T
That does seem fair - one swat against the bare butt Singapore style for every 250Kb of bandwith taken by spam.
This post made with the Dvorak layout.
"Friends don't let friends use QWERTY"