Slashdot Mirror
From Artist To Spam-Hunter
I am Kobayashi writes "Wired has a story about Andy Markley, a graphic artists, whose business domain name was spoofed by infamous spammer Eddy Marin and used to spam thousands of people. After the incident recurred at a new ISP, and at the risk of his business and sanity, Markley fought back. He tracked down Marin through several spoofed email addresses and several hi-jacked servers, and eventually was successful in getting Marin's current ISP to shut down his account. Too bad he was a graphic artist and not a professional bounty hunter...."
i expected a "and he torched the spammer's luxurious mansion in revenge" kind of ending... :(
Very simple. EVERY single ISP should be REQUIRED by law to implement a system where each user is limited to say 100 e-mails a day. This would stop much of the spam. I realize this would only be effective in north america, and yes I have thought about spammers signing up for multipal accounts; but this measure would make it much more difficult and expensive for them to do it from their homes. Just my 2c
K Man
That looser is at fault. He is the one who could not keep his own domain name safe from hijacking. He should be eaten to death by a horde of rabid weasles.
OMG OMG OMG WTF OMG WTF BBQ STFU RTFM, OMFG OMG OMG OMG ROFL LMAO OMG WTF STFU ROFLMAO
The governments of the world are clearly not going to do anything REAL to stem the tide of spam.
I vote for an internationally organized collection of vigilantes, who could organize by location into lynch mobs to PHYSICALLY BEAT THE EVER-LOVING CRAP out of spammers.
I'm being dead serious. When the "authorities" don't do a bloody thing, maybe it's time for us to take the authority for ourselves!
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
3. Aggressive rejection of email via blocklisting causes some legitimate email to be rejected. However, that collateral damage is limited to spam-friendly parts of the Internet. The sender knows full well it was not read and can re-send the message via another channel if it is important. This knowledge also allows them to take action to correct blocking errors; and heightens awareness of who is not doing their part to fight spam.
Anyone who reads somethingawful.com knows that this isn't necessarily the nobrainer that you think it is. They had a particular problem where people would be able to sign up for their forum accounts, but they could not be mailed back with the activation because of the SPEWS blacklist determining that the part of the internet SomethingAwful belonged to was Spammerville, USA. This meant that 10-20% of the people who tried to get a forums account couldn't be mailed back, and SomethingAwful could even mail them back to explain why!
Here's a nice link for the angry rantings of Zack "GeistEditor" Parsons on the subject. Yes, we should fight spammers at every turn we get, but the "collatoral damage" means that some people can't even find out why they never get a reply from their girlfriend/grandparents/long lost friend.