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IronPort Arms Both Sides In Spam War
securitas writes "We all know about IronPort's recent acquisition of SpamCop. What may not be common knowledge is that IronPort's Senderbase has 'the reputation as the fastest way to send millions of junk e-mail messages' and is popular with spam factories. Founded by two former Microsoft executives - Hotmail's Scott Weiss and ListBot founder Scott Banister - IronPort claims its customers are not spammers but legitimate marketers. Critics say that this is a clear conflict of interest. Playing spam from both sides might be likened to a pharmaceutical company enabling the spread of a disease in order to sell the cure. SpamCop founder Julian Haight - who had to sell the company in order to remain solvent - is quoted as saying of IronPort's anti-spam measures: "I am not sure all its standards are tough enough." The story was originally reported by the New York Times' Saul Hansell. Abbreviated mirror at IHT."
in business ethics while employed at Microsoft, I am incapable of believing that the owners of Ironport would ever do anything to hurt the general public simply to make an obscene profit.
SpamCop founder Julian Haight - who had to sell the company in order to remain solvent - is quoted as saying of IronPort's anti-spam measures: "I am not sure all its standards are tough enough."
And IronPort's response? "Obviously his business sense was not strong enough, or he wouldn't have solvency issues."
This is like when McAfee bought out the major underground virus-makers back in 1997 and pumped money in them to keep them going at a fast clip.
Oops. you weren't supposed to know about this one.
Yes, I know a lot of what I write makes it sound like my tinfoil hat is loose but hear me out:
IronPort buys SpamCop
Worms hammer anti-spam sites
Because IronPort is now "spammer friendly", SpamCop doesn't suffer these DDoS attacks.
SpamCop's for-fee competition and free lists are ran off the net by IronPort supporters.
Not suprisingly, IronPort's products don't block mail from their customers.
IronPort and it's spammer customers profit.
Trolling is a art,
The analogy needs to be furthered a bit: this would be like a pharmaceutical company not only spreading that which they themselves sell the cure for, but above it all, that cure being phony, so that the market for the cure is maintained. Think, do you think IronPort's spam protection measures will stop their own supported spam? This reminds me of a bond-type plot where evil villains pay an evil company to let them continue ravaging the world. Even though this obviously would only last so long in the pharmaceutical industry, I'd call it a feasible, profitable, and despicable practice for the e-mail industry, with all the sources of spam floating around.
"What the big deal is about spam... just delete it and quit yer cryin'. Jeez."
What is the big deal when someone from down the hall always keeps sneaking into my office when I am away and taking a dump in my chair. I just wipe it up and go on. Jeez.
"And just one of these 'rocks' could solve this war in an instant....if we weren't selling it to both sides"
See, all teh funky Europeans (who claim that their medieval society is inferior to America) have to pay for bandwith by byte transferred! Imagine that!
So, expect a bunch of Europhiles to start talking about dumb, insensitive americans, while they are paying $23/gallon (or whatever funky money and "cor, blimey" measurement system they use) for gas and paying per byte transferred of spam.
Ha! I will take my procmail and filter off the spam, pay $2.00/gallon of gas and drive my SUV around drinking Budweiser! Who is foolish now??
Nothing like having your SPAM and eating it too!
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Since IronPort has access to SpamCop's filters now, they could hypothetically engineer a method around them or just kill the product entirely - or make it so that only they could bypass it, and any other spams sent from elsewhere would be blocked.
Arming the wolf with the shepherd's crook? More like giving him an M-249.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Budweiser sucks. Just for the records. But it's not a real beer anyway. So it is allowed to suck.
Playing spam from both sides might be likened to a pharmaceutical company enabling the spread of a disease in order to sell the cure.
Or it could be compared to Chaplin's film The Kid :
The Tramp rescues a baby abandoned by its despairing mother, brings it up to become his partner in a window-repair business - although it is the Kid's business to break the windows first
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Well, if that was all you could nitpick on, I consider that post a success.
So IronPort make both Spam mailers and anti-spam products.
Will they use their spam mailer expertise to make better anti-spam products, or use their anti-spam expertise to make better spam emailer products?
Why do I think I know the answer aleady.....
This practice (of selling "pro" and "anti" products) is accepted in other markets. Not saying it's right, just saying it happens:
1)The telephone companies sell Caller ID *and* CallerID-block.
2) Supermarkets sell SlimFast AND chocolate doughnuts. Mmmmmm. Doughnuts.
More examples, anyone?
Spamcop could improve what is already good filtering, by automatically blocking crap from IronPort's SenderBase clients.
"All your SenderBase are belong to us."
I said this before and I'll say it again...
There is a huge incentive for IronPort to stay on the legitimate side of things. Spamcop rocks (thanks Julian!) - but only because of the constant vigilance of the many users who report instances of spam. This is a human-based review system of millions of junk messages... without the users, there is no Spamcop, and Ironport bought nothing. They can't afford to risk being the bad guy here or they risk losing the reviewers !
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
It's kind of like the diet industry. You try the newest hottest spam killer that will guarantee getting rid of all the spam, like trying the newest hottest diet that will guarantee getting rid of all the kilos. You lose the spam like you lose the kilos, and then, after a few months, it all comes back twofold. So you try the next newest hottest spam killer, the next newest hottest diet, blah blah, it comes back threefold. Then you try the next...(ad nauseum)
When life hands you lemons, grab the salt and pass the tequilla...
parents wasn't worth more. i only mentioned the most important thing.
His comment was about Bonded Sender, not SpamCop.
--
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum
But that's okay! Because there'll be a really hot girl involved and Tom Cruise will show up with all sorts of slow-mo walk-bys, acrobatic insanities, and lots of doves being scared up into the air from off camera by John Woo...
Right...?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
mmmhh - could this become a trend? I wonder, if they'll just kill off SpamCop, just like Vivendi just killed off mp3.com; after all SpamCop was probably not making that much money, if financial troubles lead to the sale.
Hotmail helpdesk #1: Dude, spam is big business.
..
Hotmail helpdesk #2: Ya, I bet someone could make a killing off an anti-spam service.
Hotmail helpdesk #1: Sure, but spammers are legitimate marketers too.
Hotmail helpdesk #2: Dude I know, their just trying to get their message out.
.
.
2000 - IronPort founded
.
Quack, quack.
Take a look at Cobra - they make radars and radar detectors.
But if that happened, what would happen to /.?
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
I guess a few bugs still need to be worked out.
I should buy some cement.
Everyone in the Microsoft thrall volunteered. Weiss and Banister signed their names in blood to Microsoft contracts. At some point, Dark Lord Ballmer will come with the Blue Screen of Death and collect from them. That is the way of things, at least until Frodo Torvald is able to throw the closed-source ring of power back into Mount Redmond where is was forged ...wait, it's time for my medicine again, isn't it?
The CAN-SPAM bill, as many of you may know, is aptly named. It allows spamming, providing the spammers aren't breaking existing laws. Woohoo. What a victory.
If I were to guess at the intent of IronPort, I would say that they'd start a multi-pronged profit operation. Charge other 'legal' spam companies money to stay out of SpamCop permanently, sell spam, and sell spamcop.
Nice job, guys. But I think other spamming businesses are going to be looking at you in a pretty jaundiced light -- it's clear you're trying to monopolize the spam sending market, and use those resources to kill off other spam-blocking services, thus providing a neat monopoly. And of course as soon as SpamCop is the only 'commercial' spam blocking list, the rates to stay out get jacked up; and so on and so forth. Maybe they'll start selling exemptions on a per-complaint basis, and thus tax spammers based on how much mail they send out. This would be ideal for them.
I doubt it'll work. People are not idiots. Even people who send spam, though sometimes I wonder. Anyone on either side of the battle should be able to see the writing on the wall.
PINKY: Gee, Brain, what do you wanna do tonight?
BRAIN: The same thing we do every night,Pinky!
Try to take over the world!
{Pinky and the Brain theme}
BRAIN: Email messages, Pinky, is our new tool! We will take over computers with trojan horses, send spam from there, and then we will sell everyone Anti-Spam... for what it's worth !
PINKY: What if they don't buy your anti-Spam, Brain?
BRAIN: Even better ! We will scare the people off the internet, leaving their connected PCs behind! This in turn will give us more hosts from which to send Spam. We will then have taken over the world!
PINKY: Egad, Brain, Brilliant! Oh, oh, wait, no, no -- why would they be scared of us? We're so small, um, we're practically the size of mice, Brain!
BRAIN: We *are* mice, Pinky.
PINKY: Oh, right. Well, there you are then. Nya-ha-ha!
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Good to hear Julian Hate is having hard times!
The archetypal example of this kind of double-dealing are arms dealers who sell to both sides - a practice which is common among Western companies (particularly American and British). The Rothschild dynasty (and dozens of others) made its fortune this way and it does not surprise me in the least to find a Micro$oft connection here. "M$ put the security holes in, we make money exploiting them, then we make more money selling a so-called 'fix'."
you had me at #!
ListBot founder Scott Banister
Listbot == spammers
They've been in my server block lists for longer than anyone else. Fomr the day they started business, they spammed me, all the time saying they had my permission to do so.
Spamcop had its flaws, but at least until now they were well-intentioned flaws.
I use Squirrelmail, and one of the options is to use Spamcop (report as spam)
/dev/null'ing everything.
In he last few days, when you process your spamcop response, I have noticed that instead of sending the notices to the usual "abuse@comcast.net" it is simply
I was wondering about this.
Has anyone else noticed funny things going on in SpamCop?
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I see this as a single-minded business. SPAMcop wants to remove spammers by hunting down the true origins of mail it is told are illegitimate, or through filters. OTOH, it is owned by a company that teaches and sells mass-marketing schemes. This mass-marketer has competition, and thats exactly what SPAMcop will be going after. Bingo! You have a great model to improve your scores by showing actual tallies of improved responses from people using your lists or methods.
However, there will be an easy way to detect this: If the companies that are sending the spam are ignored by SPAMcop and also part of their enterprise, we have the feared result. At the moment, I haven't seen any evidence of this posted anywhere. But I'm only one person.
mug
I think big business is starting to learn what step 2 is, and it's kind of frightening.
- Create inconvinience/problems.
- Sell products which eleminate the problem.
- Profit!
What a shame the tech industry is becomming.CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
You mean kind of like Verizon selling my phone number to telemarketers, and then trying to sell me anti-telemarketing services for a premium price?
"IronPort claims its customers are not spammers but legitimate marketers."
To me, any marketing related mail is spam. Another user may want to be marketed things that he is interested in, but not me, and I suspect the same of most users of any type of anti-spam solution.
Don't Tread on Me
Don't Don't Don't follow that link.
Some of the companies that make radar detectors also make the radars cops use. There is no conflict of interest there.
Personally I don't see a huge problem. Oil companies are doing research on non-oil fuels. Companies all the time play both ends against the middle, and end up winning. Now, if they start playing too heavy on one side, then the balance goes and they start to lose money. I say give them time before we judge them.
Now, if that makes sense to anyone, could you please explain it to me? I think I've confused myself.
Actually, pharmaceutical companies do create'diseases' to sell more of their products.
Isn't corporate capitalism wonderful?
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
"Playing spam from both sides might be likened to a pharmaceutical company enabling the spread of a disease in order to sell the cure." - kinda like astrazeneca</a&g t; does with <a href="http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/199909/can<nobr>c<wbr></wbr></nobr> er.asp">breast cancer</a>.
Give me your address so I can come and urinate on your doorstep.
Just clean it up. Jeez.
Which is why I support the Green Party.
Isn't that the correct phrase for Trolls?
Allow me to smash the fallacy of this argument one last time. All you self-correcting market folk, the market is not sentient, it doesn't think, display cognitive abilities, or even self-awareness. It is completely at the mercy of the thinking, scheming, self-aware and cognitively gifted operators who routinely abuse those who naively assign these qualitites to the market. The market has not been unfettered since the last crop of deceitful, thinking operators made a complete hash of the market. That problem was solved by the government regulating aspects of the market.
The utopian ideal of a self-correcting market is unattainable, because to attain it, you need to depend on another utopian ideal, rational consumers. Well we haven;t got rational consumers, and it is unlikely that we ever will have a homogenous group of rational consumers. This always opens the market to abuse by unethical vendors, consumers, and middlemen. Of these the biggest criminals are those who continue to ascribe traits to the market which itr patently cannot have, particularly in the face of overwhelming evidence that their assertions have never historically worked out, and (for good reason) have not been tried again.
Like any other ideal, or postulate, Adam Smith's ideas don;t work verbatim in the real world. Adam Smith's version of capitalism is no more viable than Marx's vision of communism. Adam Smith's idea has, as it's sole feature, the fact that the real world implementation of his ideals end up working out better than the real world implementations of Marx, Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler. But this is not prima facie evidence that Adam Smith's unabridged ideas are some type of gospel fact. Particularly in view of the fact that we have had far closer implementations of Adam Smith's ideas, and they have led directly to Railroad Barons and their abuses, and the Great Depression.
Even the political right, which often is the source of this mantra, does not naively leave the market to self-correct. When Ronald Reagan's administration was faced with a floundering economy, they didn't utter incantations over Adam Smith's grave, or invite Ayn Rand to minister in the National Cathedral. Nope, they helped the market along, they artificially created a demand for the market to fulfill. As the market returned to health, the need for that artifice was reduced. That this was necessary is manifest. Consider inflation, costs of oil, GNP, at the beginning and end of the Reagan years. Can anyone say that the governments actions in pushing the market did not have a beneficial effect? You can argue that you would rather have seen the money go elsewhere than holes in N. Dakota, but the need was real, and the effect of the governments 'meddling' in the market was equally real.
This is a real world we live in, ideals have their place, but they cannot usurp reality. Idealists have allways tried to make reality fit their nice little theories. At the small end of the scale, the idealist gets a rude awakeing. At the largest end of the scale, millions of kulaks in the Ukraine starve, or millions of innocents are shepherded into box cars and slaughtered like buffalo.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
I hope spamcop.net doesn't go down the tubes. They are only one of 5 that my mail servers use, but have been one of the more reliable RBLs around.
But what if they become unreliable disreputable? What are some other reliable blacklists to talk to? Especially now that SORBS has instituted a fine to be removed.
It really seems to me that Ironport dealt with questionable companies in the past when their only product was the A-Series line. They were young and young companies need revenue to make it through. They now focus on enterprise email, yet they have to honor service contracts signed with known spammers like Digital Impact. I truly don't believe that they are still targeting spammers for new sources of revenue, as the enterprise email market is far more profitable than selling to spammers wearing italian suits, so it really makes no sense to me.
When it's something like file sharing, everybody's keen to jump on the "don't blame the technology" bandwagon. After all, file sharing can be used legitimately, right?
How is this any different? There are legitimate needs to send bulk mail aren't there? It's not only used by spammers is it?
The only difference I can see is that spam is something techies collectively hate, and copyright is something a lot of people are ambivelant about. Let's be fair and apply the same standards! Arguments don't stand or fall based upon whether we like the people involved.
It's not the same thing at all. I clean spam out of my inbox every day, takes a total of about 3 seconds, and there's no funny smell.
I'd like to beat some bush in 2004. I was planning on getting laid in 2003... there's a couple weeks left, so we'll see.
Selling the phone lists of the customers to telemarketers and then selling call blocking services to prevent those annoying calls. Sounds like a nice way to create demand on both sides.
-- To airer is humen
Specially at M$ where its not enough to M$ to win but YOU have to lose.
The only thing I'm happy about is that even Bill Gates will eventually die, just like the poorest Afghani. There is some comfort in that. Nobody lasts for ever.
But if there is an after-life, I hope he has to use his own products to run a support-site for his own products for the rest of eternity.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilb ert-20031129.html
And good God, he's an AOL user!
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Playing spam from both sides might be likened to a pharmaceutical company enabling the spread of a disease in order to sell the cure.
Ironbase makes a computer that can be used to send lots of spam. They certainly don't "enable the spread of" spam.
It would be more like if the creator of Kazaa sold software to catch copyright infringers, and claimed that Kazaa users are not copyright infringers but legitimate downloaders of legally distributable indie music.
i submitted that story weeks ago... the text of the story was so similar i seriously thought it was mine. but i guess securitas had more links than i did.
anyhow, ironport is not doing anything illegal according to any federal or state laws i'm aware of. as for ethics? it's a corporation, come on. remember when bertelsmann was suing napster which it had just purchased? or when fox news tried to sue the simpsons? or the krupp family selling weapons to every power in europe before and during ww1?
better yet look at our own federal government - "checks and balances" seems to have gotten a little out of hand.
the larger an entity the more likely you'll have conflicts of interest and in our world business and government entities are only getting larger, not smaller.
my book
I get over two megs a day of spam. wich automaticly goes in the trash. I get stuff from microsoft all the time an i never endorced a microsoft product. with this going on i bet well get more spam about how to get rid of spam.
Some software money can't buy. For everything else there's Micros~1
? legitimate marketers ?
I thought I got a computer and a cable connection so I could suft the web, play games, etc. But in retrospect I guess I just got it to provide legitimate marketers with a custom built Bill Board for their advertising pleasure. You Are Weclome.
Sounds like when that one phone company (I think it was AT&T) was selling technology to block telemarketers to consumers, and selling technology to get around technology to block telemarketers to telemarketers.
And, as they say, hilarity ensues...
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Playing spam from both sides might be likened to a pharmaceutical company enabling the spread of a disease in order to sell the cure
This reminds me of an oldish but interesting discussion I had about lawyers and representing yourself in court (pro se).
If some guy uses a lawyer on you, you may also need a lawyer, in a way having a lawyer take care of the problems another lawyer made. (Members of one "guild" making work for each other.) This only applies to borderline barratry and frivoulous suits against the financially less endowed. I guess most lawyers deal with real cases, where the cases make more sense than making the other party bo broke over legal fees.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
+1 Truthful
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
I used to use Spamcop alot, but now with the change over I am not sure I can trust them & am not sure I want to give them any more money. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Gee.. and they have my email address...
Would they? Could they?...give their collected mail addresses to their 'partners'/'customers'?
10 Send report of spam to spamcop
20 spam cop 'parters' spam you
30 goto 10
I just found out that somebody I used to work with is there now, and that's what I'm going to do.
(Yes, I do still have friends.)
There are some legit companies that use it. A place I used to work used it for sending user-configured news and stock alerts. Interestingly enough, the box is a rebranded dell running freebsd. I have my suspicions they are using qmail on it also just because of the way it behaves. Everything is hidden behind a nice little interface though, so you have to boot with a floppy to poke around, which I never got around to doing.
:) It is a good product though, you would have serious trouble getting that kind of performance out of a standard mailserver using the same hardware.
The boxes are $30k each last I checked. On a revenue of $10 million, that's likely under 300 machines if you include a support contract. Not selling many of them...
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Of course it is stupid to imagine markets are self correcting. There will always be a ratio of stupid people to bandits and if left unchecked a market will go into meltdown like a nuclear reactor.
Markets need an inhibitor in form of fair rules to stop this runaway effect. The best I have heard it put is:
Capitalism: A recursive algorithm to perpetuate movement of the saddlepoint in a zero sum game. Known bugs: Stack overflows about every 10 years.
Companies which play both sides of the equation are pretty smart , however they generate no useful net output and just add to this 'heating effect'.
So its in no ones interest to allow them.
btw LOL @ 0 - offtopic
Thanks for the exact quote. What is your source?
"ensuring that the voters of Florida weren't disenfranchised"
That is exactly what they did. They made sure that the actual vote totals went through.
"Respecting states rights by not overruling the decision of the Florida Supreme Court"
No state has a right to ignore the results of a Federal election since it did not go the way some officials wanted it to go.
That is interesting. That is much better than "PR" which is basically pushed by racists who want favor skin-color-based voting decisions.
(PR = Proportional Representation)
It's traditional to use people like you to fuel a fire with which to burn spammers at the stake with.
The company I work for is looking at using one of these boxes to send our opted-in newsletters. IronPort may be popular with spammers, but I have to agree that there are perfectly ethical reasons to send out millions of emails per day (per hour in fact!) The IronPort systems are by far the fastest mail servers around.
Gee, d'you think this sort of thing might have happened before, like perhaps among the vendors of security and anti-virus sectors? Nahhh, couldn't be.
Wrong. It's measured in electoral votes, you idiot, not in aggregate popular votes.
Well, that's not such a bad idea. It worked for television advertising (stopped watching television) and for telemarketers (stopped the phone service).
That Valentine research who makes radar detectors also made radar guns that the cops used.
Don't know if they still do it but this was established last century.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
So the question here is: are there alternatives to SpamCop if one wants to continue reporting spam and helping building spam reference corpii?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
In the previous discussion about Ironport I asked about its reputation and whether or not I needed to start looking for a new email address, given that I'm a user of Spamcop. I will start moving everything away from Spamcop today.
The answer is that which will make them the most money. Unfortunately, that will be spam.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
I don't know, isn't it a "traditional" mail sender/relay? Most spam these days comes via open proxies etc. A spammer operating with his own mail server like SenderBase would be blocked by all anti-spam lists fast and would not be effective for long.
And lets not forget proper uses for the box. I sure would like an appliance box for handling the daily newsletters and etc. Sure it's fun to sit and tweak Postfix on a Linux box but if you were to setup a new system it might not be cheaper to build an entire system yourself, with the tuning, tweaking and scriptwriting, and the following maintainance like updates fixes etc.
Part of the SC "reasoning" was that if they didn't make their decision right away, if they actually allowed a valid recount, if they went to the trouble of ensuring Floridians weren't disenfranchised, the country would be left in the lurch. If they'd have ever read the Constitution, they'd have realized that that was a steaming load.
I don't understand why you ACs are so upset: your candidate is now the Selected President*.
Senderbase.org is an invaluable site for fighting spam, not a way to send junk email; it is a scourge for spam factories.
Larry
It's a database that identifies high-volume email sources. So you could say Senderbase is pretty much neutral.
These are also the people who came up with Bonded Sender - a whitelist with an economic incentive to keep senders honest. So they're hardly new to the anti-spam world.
The controversy seems to be over IronPort's hardware: they sell mail servers. Big friggin' whoop.
The SC decided to overrule the Florida Supreme Court ignoring the fact that issues like this are States issues. They overrode the sovereignty of the state of Florida. The selected a President without knowing the actual count, thus invalidating all the votes in Florida.
The * means that W will have always have an asterisk next to his name in history books, because he is the only Selected President*, chosen by the SC. I would have thought that obvious by the context. Every other President got there through Constitutional proper methods.
"so-called deadline was in conflict with the Florida laws concerning recounts"
:)
No, it was not. The deadline came after the recounting had been done.
"and wishing to ensure that Floridians were not being disenfranchised, they declared for the recounts. "
" They overrode the sovereignty of the state of Florida."
No, they protected it.
"The selected a President without knowing the actual count"
Everyone knew the actual count. The voters of Florida selected him.
"thus invalidating all the votes in Florida"
That is what the Florida court wanted to do, but was balked.
Since there already was an accurate count, the voters were ended up enfranchised.
"Florida Supreme Court ignoring the fact that issues like this are States issues"
A national election is a national issue. The Florida court decided to ignore the law and try to overturn the actual election results. The Florida SC ended up being lawbreakers who were trying to destroy a lawful election.
"The * means that W will have always have an asterisk next to his name in history books, because he is the only Selected President*, chosen by the SC"
Only the far left fringe believes this, everyone else accepts what turned out to be the typical result of an election process.
So, the * means "we left wingers really hate him a lot, and will tell lies about how he was really not elected just because we don't like him and can't accept the fact that people will sometimes elected a a president who is not left wing.
It will be at the bottom of the page with the ** next to Clinton's name, put there by impeachment which resulted from the right wing doing something similar.
..who lets Cassanova Frankenstein out of the Assylum in "Mystery Men" (1999) because he'd put away all the other supervillains and was starting to lose sponsorships.
"You must lash out with all you limbs like the octopus who plays the drums!"
I don't know if they still do, but for years, Cincinnati Microwave made both radar guns and radar detectors. They generated a technology war with better and better radar guns and more sensitive detectors. They seemed to have been very successful with this strategy.
I'm sorry I never paid for SpamCop. Dunno if it would have helped, but of late (the last two months) the spamming has only gotten worse. I've had to implement the very hard to use AT&T Worldnet whitelist. It doesn't use your email address book. You have to enter each address one at a time. Nor does it bounce back to let you know your email is blocked (when testing the filter from another account). I guess it's time to check out SpamAssassin.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
SpamCop owned by IronPort can't be anything like SpamCop is now. All the real work on SpamCop is done by volunteers. Nobody is going to volunteer their time for IronPort.
Bush was (elected/selected) !!
(Bush/Gore) REALLY won the election!
The (Democrats/Republicans) tried to steal votes!
The Constitution was (violated/upheld)!
Where will it ever end? I know: it will end when everyone realises that my pro-(Bush/Gore) side is absolute truth! Everyone who disagrees is a victim of (leftwing/rightwing) propaganda! Agree or shut up. NOW!!!
Ironport's website mentions transaction confirmations as one of the uses, and that is certainly legit... when I order stuff online, I like to get an email confirming it, telling me it's been shipped, ect.
There are legitimate advertising emails. I buy alot of electronics, so I regularly get emails from companies I've bought stuff from in the past, and I'm glad I have - they have alerted me to some good sales.
To me, there is a huge difference from me getting an email from Compgeeks, TigerDirect, eCost, or another company that I've bought stuff from (and could opt out of if I want to) and getting emails to BUY DISCOUNT VIAGRA, or MEET CHRISTIAN SINGLES, or the like. If IronPort is doing the former, then that's fine by me. If the companies are using their stuff to do the latter, then there is a problem
I have blog like everyone else
Hi, this is Julian, the long-time owner of SpamCop.net. I must say I was a bit dissapointed in the NYT coverage of this.
;)
7 1.207.query.bondedsender.org has address 127.0.0.10l .spamcop.net has address 127.0.0.2
.. and here I was coming to slashdot to read the news and relax. Little did I know I'd be spending the next half hour writing this rebuttal ..
First of all, I was not *forced* to sell SpamCop to remain solvent. I am proud of the fact that I have been profitable since 1999. If anything, this deal makes SpamCop a charity case within Ironport. I still get paid of course
The NYT article quotes me as saying (referring back to my dead-tree version): "After a while, I found that this had become a job, and I had to find a way to make money from it". That quote was taken out of context - I was referring to my 1999 decision to take SpamCop commercial, not my 2003 decision to sell the *profitable* company to ironport.
It is true that the akamai bill is not cheap. But I think I would have survived the same way I have always done without selling the business. And that leads to my next point - I'm not cashing out. I will be with the company for the forseeable future, doing what I have always done - fighting spam! I sold it to ironport because I felt they would support my goals. They offered me a nice lump of cash, help with the non-spam-fighting part of the job (sysadmin, administrivia, lawyering, DDoS protection, etc.) and most important, a credible promise to let me keep it on-track.
The very fact that I am here talking about this, and expressing my doubts about bonded sender to the NYT should indicate that I'm not just rolling over here.
I don't control the bonded sender program and likewise the people who control it won't be calling the shots where SpamCop is concerned.
Oh, and BTW, I know ironport boxes are good for spamming. They're also good for sending (and also receiving) tons of legitimate mail. Noone with ironport has ever claimed that "our customers aren't spammers". Some might claim our *bonded sender members* aren't spammers, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.
Are we arming both sides? Sure! But as with all arms dealers, the real point is that we make the best weapons on the market! Don't like spam from ironport customers? Use the spamcop blacklist! If this were really some big conspiracy, would spamazon's IP be in both the spamcop blacklist and the ironport whitelist?
$ host 207.171.188.101
101.188.171.207.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer mm-outgoing-101.amazon.com.
$ host 101.188.171.207.query.bondedsender.org
101.188.1
$ host 101.188.171.207.bl.spamcop.net
101.188.171.207.b
(Note, the blacklist changes quickly over time, it was listed when I wrote this)
-=Julian "10 hot comments" Haight=-
In fact, that applies to SMTP email in general. Consider all the mailing lists you read; they're "bulk email". That's one reason why spam filtering is harder in email than other protocols like IM; bulk one-to-many contact is a lot more common in the SMTP case. The IETF recognised this, and hence we have ESMTP.
Given this story, if I was Eric Allman or Wietse Venema, I'd be worried about people complaining that sendmail or postfix are spammer tools...
Amazon is a member of IronPort's Bonded Sender program. I think that speaks for itself - Amazon is certainly a spammer, which casts a shadow of doubt on the Bonded Sender program as well as all of IronPort.
And this is like assuming that anti-virus software developers aren't releasing viruses into the wild to boost the sales of their products...
The1Genius - Littera Scripta Manet
Also note the "Spam Farmers" post, where AT&T is promoting "viral marketing" as a benefit to developers of their new mMode service.
--
make install -not war
u r gay
Just like the example in the text: it like a anti virus software supplier that spreads virusses.
I used spamcop for quite some time. I no longer use it to filter spam from my server because spammers change tactics too often for spamcop to keep up. I now use content filtering exclusively. What do I filter? Only spamvertized websites, the domainname.tld part. I only have to keep up with the websites, not the email addresses.
-- There is no spoon. Only fork.
Some organisations that receive spam reports either have wrong contact information or ignore the spam reports. If spamcop sends lots of reports and they bounce (bad email address) or are ignored (e.g. the ISP doesn't like receiving (munged) spamcop reports and has told spamcop not contact it or the ISP never does anything with them) then the report goes to /dev/null but a record is kept so that they can be statistically tracked.
Why shouldn't the same company produce exploit code and the tools to combat it? It's common for security groups to do that.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Now Ironport knows who is reporting their activity to abuse admins around the world. Furthermore, they can now examine Spamcop's spam-fighting mechanisms. Also, they can easily leave one or two servers off of their blocklist now if they feel the need.
It's probably good for Spamcop users, and bad for the rest of the world. As a Spamcop user, I intend not to renew my subscription next time around.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
Rules concerning vote count disputes for elections, either state or federal, are states rights concerns. The SC had no standing to overrule the Florida Supreme Court. They had no right to disenfranchise the entire state like that.
The last time there was a disputed election like this was with Rutherford B Hayes. The votes of four states (including Florida) were in dispute. Tilden had 184 votes (one away from election), Hayes had 165 and there were 20 in dispute. The case took months to resolve, but the SC never stuck it's nose in where it wasn't needed. (In the end, Republicans bartered a deal with Democrats to pull out the Reconstruction troops, and a committee of 8 Republicans and 7 Democrats gave all 20 votes to Rutherfraud. So Republicans have stolen two elections involving disputed Florida votes.)
While he was always be remembered for his horrendous economic policies, his vile environmental policies, his astonishing ability to alientate practically every country on the planet, and the fact that he led the first net loss of jobs in 70 years, W will always first and foremost be known as the Selected President*, the only one handed the job by the SC.
There are lots of Presidents from the right I don't like. W is the only one who was selected.
Should have been troll, the original was off-topic, but that's moderators for ya.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
It's good to have a single word to throw at these kinds of things.
I for one welcome our new two-faced overlords.
Berrik
Current karma: Terrible (due to mods without a sense of humor)