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Another Worm Targets Anti-Spam Sites
kevinvee writes "Yahoo! is reporting about the next battle of Spam Houses versus Spamhauses. This time, its W32/Mimail-L receiving the attention. "It's the third Mimail variation to come after us, except this one is trying to do more," said Steve Linford, founder of The Spamhaus Project. Apparently this reincarnation comes as an attachment offering naked photographs. Once infected, a follow-up e-mail is sent to the user stating that a CD containing child pornography will be delivered to their postal address. "These guys write trojan (viruses), they carry out DDOS attacks and they get their money through selling stolen credit cards and spamming," Linford said."
What we need to do is find out the physical addresses of these nice individuals and try to reason with them using advanced negotiation tools, such as baseball bats and tire irons.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
There's a term for a coalition engaged in the act of making money through the use of intimidation and illegal acts: organized crime.
The spammers are exactly the same as the mafia.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
The problem of spam is not caused by the freedom of email, any more than murder is caused by the availability of knives and other weapons. It is too easy for technically-minded people to see spam as a technical problem, which is to be solved by replacing the existing mail system with something more restrictive. However, the spam problem is not spontaneously generated by the mail system, just as knives do not go around murdering people. Spamming, like murder, is a human action that certain humans choose to engage in.
It is, of course, useful to use technology to make harmful actions more difficult. Locking up valuables makes theft more difficult; hiring bodyguards makes assassinations more difficult. However, we do not pretend that technology should make theft or murder impossible, or that the world should be transformed into a padded cell so that everyone is technologically prevented from doing anything wrong. Instead we deter and punish crime through education and law enforcement. Technology can reduce the likelihood and impact of harmful human actions, but we cannot use it as a replacement for social responses.
Regardless of whether particular legislatures have passed laws which specifically address spam, we recognize spamming as a lawless and criminal endeavor. Spammers co-opt the property of others against the will of the property owners. (Note that this is worse than simply using that property without permission.) Just as gangs protect their core unlawful enterprises with further crimes such as murdering rivals and bribing police, spammers have come to use cracking, viruses, and DDoS to protect their core activity. Structurally, spam is just like other sorts of lawless action which we see as the proper jurisdiction of law enforcement rather than technological kludgery.
There is no shortage of evidence, gathered from public sources and fully admissible in court, that particular spammers are engaged in criminal actions such as the above. Contrary to common belief, these spammers are not in "third-world nations"; they are in Western nations such as the USA, Canada, and the UK -- nations which have broadly functional legal systems, and nations whose Internet users are the chief recipients of spam as well. Volunteers have already carefully collected this information in the Registry of Known Spam Operations. What is needed is twofold: (1) Funding for law enforcement to go after the known criminal enterprises; (2) Further litigation by major victims of spam, such as large ISPs, against those who are victimizing them.