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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."
What the fuck is a "Joe job"?
I mean, seriously, where is John Titor when you need him? Why didn't he warn us about how the very technology he spoke so highly about and by which he distorted our timeline and entire worldview would have already been the very tool by which the Enemy (spammers) spread their lies and confusion?
John, come on.. The 1980s can't be all that great, can they?
Pete
Can't stand to be called on the phone but will sit for hours on end in front of the television allowing brains to be stirred by the marketer's electronic spoon.
One thing they got right in the second Matrix movie is the illusion of choice as a method for controlling human beings. Telephone marketing is intolerable since control is in the hands of the caller. Television marketing is tolerable because a small amount of control is in the hands of the viewer. Just enough control to watch ads on another channel. Sad, pathetic, vulnerable, humanity. Got us all figured out and riding us for all we're worth.
But the real problem is, that Businesses see this as a legitimate practise. They convert real world business ideas and apply them online : example : Marketer comes up to you in the street and asks you if you would like a demonstration of Super Blobs magic washing up liquid. Now, ok, not everyone does say yes (one fingered salute from me :D) but many lonely housewives do! (sorry about the stereotype).
As the above rightly comments, the real problem here is people encouraging this business practise by sending them hard earned currency. And the fact that they do this doesn't just affect us in terms of email spam; the register recently published an article that suggested that people who were looking to come online were scared by the percieved threat of spam.
Someone, somewhere, somehow needs to come up with a solution to spam. It's got to be tough, universally implemented, and i fear quite restrictive.
i kind of feel slightly better now. knowing there's a name for it.
definition linked to in Wired article: http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid 19_gci917469,00.html
part of the problem (and i feel like i should be careful what i say eh ain't this silly) is that many ISPs tout an "unlimited addresses" feature allow anything@username.isp.com - and some spammers are realising this. or trying everything to get around filters... :/ a right pain in the behind!
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
earthlink.net seems to have a pretty good way of dealing with spam - when you send an email to an earthlink account for the first time it gets put in the user's "suspect" folder, then you immediately get an automated response with a url, you go to the page and enter the standard coded-number-in-a-distorted-image and can optionally add a short request message and your name, then the recipient can accept you and all further emails go straight through with no problem. You would only need to check the suspect folder if you were expecting something like a password reminder or welcome message. This is the sort of solution that will end up being adopted not some stupid "charge for emails" idea and we dont need laws that add to the complexity of everything and could potentially restrict freedom of speech (a law saying you cant send spam could provide ammo to the courts/legislators for starting other laws which go much further).
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Everyone knows that the *real* time traveler is named JOHN TITOR!
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Murder is the senseless waste of a human life.
Spam is the senseless waste of millions upon millions of tiny fractions of a human life.
There comes a point where the few seconds that each of us without spam filters spend deleting this crap adds up to the average lifespan of a human being.
If someone has sent that much spam, why should they not be treated in the same way as a murderer?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Instead of a tax (why do some people always look to government for everything), why not use a micropayment system in which the sender must pay the recipient for delivery. If the sender is a friend or the e-mail is truly worth it, then the recipient rebates the sender's money. The recipient would set the payment level and publish it to the public.
For example, I would probably set my payment level at about 0.50 or $1.00, but if I stil get too many spams, then I would boost the charge to $2. I would also create a whitelist of people (friends, clients, mailing lists, and a few select businesses) who are automatically exempted. When somebody tries to send me an email, the MicroPayment Mail Transfer Protocol (MPMTP) would automatically inform the sender of the charge when they hit the send button. People not on the system would get automated return e-mail requesting that they join the system to complete the sending of their e-mail.
The point is that each person can decide how valuable their time is. Spammers (including those in Hong Kong) would be forced to target e-mails to only those people who would appreciate them.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
And how do you implement such a system without backing it up with government-level machinery such as laws, law enforcement and judicial process?
I agree that government and law form the underpinnings of our economic system. But government did not create eBay or credit cards. Government is moderately good at creating a regulatory context in which rights and responsibilities are balanced for the average and common good. Government is generally bad at creating innovative systems that are customized to the needs of individuals. Finally, government is ill suited to standardizing/regulating international phenomena like spam and e-mail.
No, it's better to make it a government controlled operation from the start so that the standards are set the same for everyone.
The point is that not everyone wants the same standards. Some people may not value their time or not care about spam and thus chose a low hurdle (and a 0.01 tax is a very very low hurdle for spam, IMO). Others might place an extreme value on their time or loath spam so much that they place a high value of their time. So the recipient should set the payment.
Moreover, it is not the government that bears the cost of spam, it is the recipient. The recipient's "labor cost" far exceeds the cost to the internet infrastructure. Therefore the recipient should get the payment.
Since the recipient should set the payment and the recipient should get the payment and the issue is international, I would think an organization like VISA would be better at running the program than any of the Earth's 180-some-odd governments.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Did anybody open the HTML attachments with the time travel spam? They were advertisments for penis pills, viagra, and all the usual suspects. The weird-ass messages simply spoofed spamAssassin, et al., into passing this rubbish along...
Vincent "The Chin" Gigante wandered around Greenwich Village in a bathrobe, pretending to be crazy, to escape a murder conviction. Robby "Captain Time" Todino covers his slimy business with feigned nuttiness.
They both deserve the needle.
How long will this "we need a new e-mail system" go on? The discussion about a new protocol to replace SMTP has gone on for ages, but nothing has happened.
I predict that Microsoft will come up with a new, better secured way of transferring mail messages over the Internet. It will be a closed architecture that requires Windows on all client and server systems. It will take over from e-mail overnight. In about a year's time, you will get more and more comments like "Oh, you still have such and old-fashioned mail address, one with a @ in it?" from most of your mail partners, certainly in business uses of mail...
Why? Because the advocates of open standards only talk about the problems of migrating to a new standard, and don't actually start designing and migrating.
Unfortunately, a few years ago, that someone was probably my father.
I got a clue that he was responding (if not buying) things from SPAMed adds when he started to ask about some super-fancy-printer utility -- exactly the thing he would never stumble uppon all by himself.
When I said he didn't need it, he said that it's cheap, and that he might just get it anyway. Curious -- since the program was such an odd thing -- I asked where he was getting the offer from. "I got this email." Do you know the company? "No." That's spam. Never EVER reply or buy ANY of that stuff. "Why? They're just trying to make a living, and who knows maybe I can use the program." (GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR...)
Well, after a talk with him he *said* that he didn't reply to the message and would take my advice to delete the messages unread...but I know my dad. After about 6 months he finally got a clue, and joined the annoyed masses who dispise and know what SPAM is. In those first few months, though, I can't tell you how many messages he replied to and if he bought anything.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Its probably a double joe job - Robby doesn't wanna annoy random website users, he just wants to get out of this time frame!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
And, like all good Bond adversaries, this one has a nice secret hideout in Woburn. The 4 Oak St. address in his whois info is bogus. 4 Oak St. doesn't even exist. Oh, no, I found his secret hideout by scouring Google, showed up on his doorstep, and he denied being Robert Todino. Jim Todino, however, seemed to be quite perturbed by the fact that I was standing there.
It was amusing at the time but, now that you mention Bond, it's laugh out loud funny. I had the tall and extremely badass looking trenchcoat-clad sinister villain (Robert, I presume) standing in the doorway with the smaller sidekick (Jim) behind him covering his back. Like most adversaries, the sinister villain was cool and collected where the sidekick was stumbling for words.
Wacky.
Anyway, my account of being one of the forgery victims of Robert is on my blog.
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
For your viewing pleasure:
This one a month earlier:
(Yes, I deleted e-mail addresses to protect the guilty, but hey, it's principles.)
Another interesting note: The first time I tried to submit this: Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
So, at least we know he's lame.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.