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Time-travel Spammer Strikes Back
HopToit writes "Robby Todino is apparently upset about being outed a couple months ago as the source of all those wacked messages about 'Dimenstional Warp Generator Needed.' According to Wired, someone has pulled a major joe-job spam attack (forged 'From:' lines) on three popular sites in retaliation for making fun of Todino's goofy search for alien technology. Robby, if you're out there, you have ceased to be amusing."
It seems that everyone in his right mind despises telemarketing. Spam too. Ask anyone, and they'll tell you that there are few things they hate more in life. It seems as if there are no exceptions to this rule -- everyone, bar none, hates telemarketing and spam.
But it can't be true. Someone must be responding to this stuff by spending their money. Because for some reason, telemarketers and spammers stay in business. Somehow, it must be worth it for them.
If everyone hated the stuff as much as they say they do, if everyone hung up on the unwanted calls and deleted the unwanted mails in nothing flat, like they say they do, then the problem would fizzle out before long. No one could make money doing it, so there would be no reason to keep trying. And yet, the crap just goes on and on and on.
I've read rumors that a certain small percentage of the people called or mailed actually do respond and end up buying something; usually the figure is put about 10%, or something similarly low. Hard to believe that such a business would be worthwhile if the response rate is so low; but whatever it is, it must be high enough that the incentive for telemarketing and spamming is maintained. Otherwise, there'd be no such thing.
A national no-call list is a nice idea, but I can't see the problem going away altogether as long as the telemarketers and spammer still believe there's a chance to make money. Certainly the spammers are not going to let some trivial thing like a Federal law stop them. (They'll just go on spamming from Antarctica, or wherever.) If we really want the problem solved, once and for all, we have to ensure that there is no future for those businesses, and that would require educating the public, right down to the last man, woman and child, to always follow this rule without exception: If someone calls you or emails you to sell you a product, then whatever you do, don't buy that product!
DISCLAIMER: I am not trying to be flamebait here, this is my honest opinion:
I'm torn about the idea of an email tax. While in general I don't like the idea too much, it does occur to me that this might be the only way of dramatically reducing spam.
Look at it this way: Even a wicked-busy web maven likely sends less than 1000 emails a day outside of their own company LAN (with a few exceptions I realise. Individuals likely send less than 100 per day in general.
So, say you put a tax, to be administered by your ISP on each email, of say 0.1 cents per email. Big Business guy gets charged $1/day, home user $0.10 per day. By no means big money. Johny McSuperSpammer, however, who sends out 10 million emails every day, gets a handly little bill for $1000. Kind of changes the economics of his penis enlarger ads.
Like I say, I'm not a huge fan of paying more, but it does seem like making emails cost per message sent might be the best/easiet/only way to dramatically reduce spam.
Furthermore (ideally), to make up for the cost, you ISP could take $5 per month off your bill, to make up for the extra you're spending to send email. They still make money, because of the tax, the financial hit for you is minimal, but the spammers get hosed.
(off topic, but you'd think it obvious that any time machine breakthrough would be all over the news right! ; i guess basic rationality doesn't come into this though. scary.)
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
For fun putting aside the 'do they exist?' and 'can they get here easily?' questions I've often thought that if you really want to find visiting Aliens and the like then you have to find something on earth that would be worthwhile coming to see - an alien tourist honeypot if you will.
The only thing that I can think of that potentially fits this bill is a total solar eclipse. Although there's some compelling evidence that life like ours can only evolve in a similar 'double planet' system like the earth-moon, there's really no reason to expect intelligent life to be around at exactly the same time as the apparent moon and sun size matches sufficiently closely to see a total eclipse. Indeed total solar eclipses have only been visible on earth for a hundred million years or so and will continue only for a few hundred million more - quite a small window in the history of our planet and something sufficiently rare that it may be worthwhile diverting a few light years to see.
So if I did want to find an alien or the like I'd look in the middle of a path of totality
In the bizarro world of the internet, we likewise have broken locks. Email, specifically, is like a car with really, really shitty locks on it. However, instead of knowing about this problem for many years now and a few (some equally bad) proposals for fixing it, the main mode of dealing with the problem is:
In the article, the reporter states that Todino's father says his son has mental problems. OK, fair enough. Then his father needs to step up to the plate and get the guy some help.
Barring that, the people being joe'd really need to follow up on this. Either this guy is an unrepentant spammer, in which case he needs to be made to pay the price, or he's mentally unstable, in which case he needs professional help. The latter possibility is really more serious, since Todino could conceivably go off the deep end and do something more serious. Possibly, the best approach would be for them to contact Todino's father and tell him that if he doesn't get his son some help immediately, they're going to pursue the case with law enforcement. Assuming the father's statements are true and that he gives a damn, this should at least get the ball rolling.
What strikes me is that the major problem is not the spammers doing direct DoS attacks on the targets, but that they're using brain-dead behavior of mail servers to pull off DDoS attacks. If you control an MX, please configure it to issue a 550 error during the connection if you can't deliver the message instead of accepting it and then bouncing to what you almost certainly know is an innocent party. A party who is not the sender of the message, by the way, which means you anal types who say "RFC says I must bounce" have to note that it also says you must not lose a message, which is what a bad bounce does. Please be a friendly network neighbor and stop bouncing spam.
Well written, pretty consistent and sufficiently evasive not to get caught with outright lies. Smells like a university project by some political/social sciences students...
The owls are not what they seem
I'm using an ASCII terminal. Or a PDA with a small screen. Or VoiceXML over a telephone. Or I'm sight-impared. Or my ISP bounces your ISP's coded-number-in-a-distorted-image with request that they respond first with a coded-number-in-a-distorted-image, rinse, repeat. Or I have my filters set to autotrash any graphics in email because 99% of the time it's for penis pills. Or it was a Joe-job and your ISP sent me 20,000 coded-number-in-a-distorted-image challenge emails.
Now what?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It's not that simple. If you want to figure out that you can't deliver the message, you have to check. Checking takes computer resources. Now everyone has a really easy way of DoS'ing your server.
Furthermore, by returning 550 in the SMTP session, you've given criminals an easy way to search for valid email accounts.
Accepting and then bouncing the messages remains the more secure and better performing solution. (Even when it's a 'Joe job' unfortunately.)
I agree with the person who posted that we need a new protocol.