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Spamhaus Guru Steve Linford Profiled
BenLev writes "The New York Times has an article profiling Spamhaus Project director Steve Linford. The feature goes behind the scenes at Spamhaus, 'one of the leading groups that is trying to make the world safe from junk e-mail', showing that it operates from Linford's houseboat on the Thames near London, spammers don't like him, and his volunteer corps likens itself to the X-Men."
I like the idea of the do not spam registry that they mention in the article. But it seems like a real pipe dream considering how much trouble there has been getting the do-not-call registry up and running.
Also, most telemarketing is done from in-country because of LD charges. Not so with e-mail. It's pretty hard to enforce US laws on a Taiwan spamhaus.
Ah well, every little voice against spam warms me a little at least.
I could care less, but not without a lobotomy
What happened to that proposal to add records (as comments, so the DNS protocol wasn't broken) to the DNS saying that a domain was authoratative for the envelope 'From ' header ? That sounded like a good idea, so long as the MTA's took it up...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
My particular server (a dedicated box) was innocent, but my hosting facility had spammers on other dedicated boxes.
Isn't blocking a /20 like swatting flys with a hand grenade?
Non-NYT site
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
1) That's 3 clicks per email * the rate at which you gets spams. It adds up after a while
2) There's always the chance of a type 2 error - you could lose (either through accidental blocking or unintetional deleteing) an important email.
3) You pay for the bandwidth that they waste, in the long run. They are simply shifting the price of getting in touch with you from themselves to you. In effect, they are calling you on your dime.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I really believe that we currently have all (well mostly) the laws we need to stop spammers, if only they were enforced. Even if SPAM is still not illegal in most places. What most spammers do is illegal. Instead of fining a spammer for sending Nigerian scams, jail him for fraud. Instead of fining a viagra spammer, jail him for cracking in other people's computers in order to send the spam. Much more effective I think. Why go for "minor" civil offense when the spammer is actually guity of a criminal offense. I know not all spammers commit crimes, many do.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
You get email from someone pretending to be Spamhaus in order to discredit them.
I don't know about everyone else but lately I've been trying to find work and I have come across atleast 4 opportunities to make 1.5 times my normal rate if I do some development related to spam. Each time I've interviewed I've told the employer that spam was a bad way to go and that it'd be illegal soon etc... but it seems like they've all had past experiences where spam has been highly profitable.
-- D3X
My latest endeavour... truly free porn www.NeoX3.com 5 mins movies supported by only a 15 sec commercial. No-popups or membership or catches.
I'm surprised no-one has thought through the logical conclusions of where we're going with spam.
... since there is nothing serious happening against any of these directions, the conclusion seems unavoidable. What I'd like to say is that
Spam filters work only for those able to configure them. For the vast majority of Internet users, they are just a dream.
Spam blacklists are unsustainable in a world where most net connections come across DHCP, and most spam is/will be sent from owned home computers.
Spam merchants will continue to harness the 'dark side of the force', paying crackes and virus writers to create the networks of owned machines they need to operate from...
the Net will split into two halves, an "infected" and a "clean" part, and every single transaction from the infected part will be treated with scrutiny and suspicion.
But this is impossible too.
Conclusion: the purity of the net is a thing of the past. We will come to understand that traffic is bad until demonstrated good. Emails will be 99.999% junk, virus, and trojan, and the art will come not from filtering out this junk but from detecting the signal within the noise.
Clearly, whitelists are part of the solution but they are limited since you can't form a network of whitelists, it's a one-to-one solution that does not scale.
I see only one solution that is scalable. Data clearing houses. You register with me, I'll vouch for all your data, and pass it on to those who need it, along with my signature. A trust network, if you like.
Data clearing houses will rate each other, creating a system of moderation in which data is never guaranteed good, but at least you get a measurable index of confidence.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Try looking up Joe Job.
Why?
Our university had two install 2 new mailservers just to be able to run all incoming mail through spamassassin. Do you think the spammers paid for that "small annoyance"?
Donate free food here
SPF. Several proposals have been rolled up in this, under ASRG, including SPF, RMX, DMP, and related proprosals.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I doubt that any progress will be made in fighting spam until Microsoft/Apple include authentication options in their default mail applications.
Unfortunately, authentication is unlikely to do much to stop spam unless people use it with a personal whitelist of permitted senders. It is currently straightforward to track a spam email (SpamCop can do this if you paste the email in with full header information) but nowadays it typically comes from a cable/DSL user whose machine has been hijacked.
Break the Internet? Something tells me that you don't know very well what you're talking about. Spamhaus (or ORDB or any other black list service) cannot block anything if you (or your ISP) don't want anything blocked.
It's the email server's administrator choice to use such a blacklist or not. In other words: if you're running an email server, you can choose whether you want to block these IPs or not.
You could argue that you're a customer of an ISP that's using Spamhaus or ORDB to block spam and you cannot do anything about that. And I would agree with you on that: you should have the choice to use the blacklists on your email account(s) or not. But that, from the system administrator's point of view, is not a simple task, as of now.
My site
The problem isn't so much the spammers, it's the people buying from them.
If people didn't buy the spammers wouldn't have a market and would go away.
The issue is to educate the general internet populus that are are merely encouring the spam by purchasing from the advertisers.