Slashdot Mirror
The Life of a Spammer
An anonymous reader writes "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an interesting article today about the life of a "small time" spammer. It is interesting to note that even a religiously zealous grandmother can mire our inboxes with junk." That's Flo Fox, of Slidell, LA.
It's the fact your product and actions are not wanted.
Simple capitalism- Sell a product people want in a manner people want it and you will make money. Spam does neither as such will eventually die out.
I'd love to firewall her off preemptively. I dont care how much she thumps her bible, she's still just another piece of trailer trash attempting to abuse my bandwidth and my server. And while we're all here, lets get her address modded up so she can practice turning the other cheek with a flood of snail mail spam.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
To circumvent U.S. Internet companies, spammers may ricochet their e-mail through less secure networks in China, South Korea or South America before the junk winds up in in boxes from Georgia to California. They share or sell information on how to crack various systems.
"Less secure networks"? Riight... They're all equally insecure, the US as much as anyone else.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
$25. A compilation of e-mail addresses of those who have purchased items offered in spam -- known as the "suckers list" -- costs more.
Two interesting things in that paragraph:
1. When someone says "Don't respond to spam", it's really good advice.
2. The spammers themselves don't even believe in the products they sell, labelling their customers "suckers".
Yes. And we should blame knife makers because they made a weapon that was used in a brutal stabbing, or a gun-maker maker for a brutal shooting, and the DMCA is a perfectly justified law.
Of course that's proposterous. The tool is not the crime. Sociopathy and lack of social responsibility knows no limits or bounds, and self-justification for such behavior is limited only by the imagination. Little old ladies who go to church and feed the homeless can have areas of social irresponsibility as well.
I know that one of my grandmothers, who is one of those little old ladies who goes to church and feeds the homeless, just happens to be racist. Does that make racism justifiable?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
It is interesting to note that even a religiously zealous [...]
Even? I suggest that's precisely the kind of mental handicap ("disconnect" if you want to be nicer) that's required.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It is very bothersome for me. I get so much spam on the email address that I've had for 10 years that I now don't even look through my filtered mail for false positives. If my software says it's spam, it just gets deleted right away.
I'm sure I'm deleting real email too, but what can I do? I don't have time to look through hundreds of messages a day to see if one is legitimate. (Maybe Flo Fox can do it for me from prison.)
She's a spammer. She's lying.
I'm wondering when the first article on just another "small time" serial killer will appear. This has always been an activity that has been burdensome on the public general and now is often criminal
I know I'm at risk at being modded down, but when I'm allowed to legally allowed to carjack or otherwise rob people to make ends meet, I'll have a little sympathy for this sort of person.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
If there are any Slashdot readers in that area, perhaps someone should double check that that this is the person in question. (Does the person living there look like the woman in the article?).
We don't want to give grief to an innocent person.
Just a guess: It's a lot easier/more lucrative for to turn a blind eye to a spammer with a $1000/mo T1 bill than one on a $35 DSL connection or a $15 dialup.
For the end user like me, its probably not all that bothersome. I have a spamassassin / bogofilter rig built into my evolution filters that takes care of most everything.
Now how about the sysadmin reading slashdot. The one that maintains that mailserver and has to find storage for all of that crap that comes pouring in. The one that has to setup spamassassin on the servers and teach people (which is probably the worst part) how to setup their outlook clients to filter all of this. The one that has to hear complaints about the 2-3 spam getting through over the 3 trillion that came in during the week and the one that has to requistition the money to maintain the spamfiltration instead of it going elsewhere in the company.
Spam costs the ISP/Company/User time and money whereas the spammer pays next to nothing and most slashdotters (IMHO) have a problem with that.
Think about how many spammers Slashdot has "featured" and then think how many say "We don't send porno spam", but then how much of spam is "Adult stuff". I bet you most, if not all, of the spammers are lying...
And you trust a spammer? They'd prolly even send kiddie porn out if it paid enough. They spam, that's enough proof their moral compass is seriously misaligned.
Hate me!
Hmm a spammer in face of bankruptcy and mebbe starving to death. Perhaps she should have spent time working on a marketing skilled trade.
I don't know about most people, but isn't this business model just too too tempting ? The act of spamming, by whatever name, is here to stay. And the fact of the matter is that when the Big Boys move in they will edge out the small time spammers. United States set to Legalize Spamming on 1 January 2004 http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=150 Spam by Any Other name will not sound so Odius.
Frankly, I hear the same thing about how much crap there is on TV - but is anyone really doing anything about reducing the crap on it today ? Why because it is the Big Five or Six Companies that control it ....
Here I do disagree. Land's End spends hundreds of thousands designing and illustrating it's catalogs so that they can entice the customer to buy. The spammers don't do any such thing, and their main goal is to design the messages so that it evades the spam filters - that is why the strange characters and mangled words ...
Someday, when the Big Companies start designing Spam with Mega-Budgets, and they can make the eye candy hypnotizing like it is on TV, I am sure few people will complain. I know many people who will spend hours watching nothing on TV, and occasionally complain about it - but then do nothing.
Diversion and Delusion is the Opium of the masses.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Dear Mrs. Fox, Please don't send any spam to taibmaps@astrobastards.net. Thanks! Yours truly,
Get revenge: Unsolicited Commando
>The woman's age, grandmother status and religious strength aside,
What difference does it make?
Religious people are no more 'decent' than non-religious people.
Women are just as capable of doing wrong as men.
Age does not make one wiser or a better person.
Procreating doesn't make one better than a a childless person.
Yeah, it's practical to roll out the protocol, which, if backwards compatible, would not solve the problem. The alternative would be to upgrade the WORLD all at once. Yeah we should do that. Maybe we can patch the windows boxes while we're at it. I would love to hear your ideas for rolling out this new protocol.
ymmv
That's a good idea, actually. Then publish the site with those tech support sweatshops (Convergys, et. al.) so that when the workers there get calls from people who are mad about spam, they can say "If you go to www.spammer-info.com, you can call them and tell them personally what you think about them..."
Of course then you have the problem of innocent people getting on the list... and anyone who says "hurting one innocent person is worth it!" just joined the ranks of spammers as far as moral decay goes, imho.
--- 11 meters/second, or 24 miles per hour - the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow. Really.
Since I've been admining mail servers since 1992, here is what I can tell you.
1. The amount of spam has increased dramatically, and the amount of computing horsepower required to run a mail server has increased as well.
2. Currently we routinely refuse connections from more than 75% of all computers that ATTEMPT an SMTP connection - private open relay block lists. If we didn't do that, double the amount of disk space and computing horsepower required to continue
3. We loose customers when spam assassin doesn't keep up with spammers. They move to Earthlink and other providers that have more money to throw at the problem
4. A server with a common domain name associated with it, that has about ONLY 40 legitimate accounts on it routinely gets more than 100,000 connection attempts every day.
Filtering costs money, CPU disk space and adds expense and complexity to a very simple protocol. The amount of spam is such that some companies have stopped getting mail at their primary domain all together. This is becoming an option exercised more and more. Spam is stopping companies from posting contact information on their website, and pornographic spam, even filtered, makes getting a child an e-mail account risky unless you personally approve every message.
In the end, it's time, money, time and money time and money that the provider spends, that could be used to bring the cost of yoru internet service down, instead of inflating it.
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Yes, in fact there was one quoted in the article:
In other words, spam has already destroyed email as we knew it. There was a time when you could put your address on your webpage without fear of getting spammed to death. In fact, this was true as few as five years ago. This allowed people to connect easier with people they don't know or people they used to know.
But now, it can take less than nine minutes for you to start getting spam after posting your email address somewhere. So those who don't install spam filters will guard their email addresses or go by pseudonyms, which lowers the usefulness of email.
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
Place collect calls to this number.
Sign her up for every catalog and physical mailing list you can find!
I'm sending her a Christmas card as we speak. It will bring tidings of comfort and joy. There will also be a wish that she gets colon cancer and that her granddaughters are raped by pedophiles.
(Why wish bad things happen to her granddaughters? Well, they obviously carry her defective genetics. But, more importantly, it's one of the few things you can write which will probably upset her very badly.)
Why is it that so many fundamentalist members of organized religions can fail to see blatant hypocrisy in their own actions? Can't she spot her own violation of "do unto others"? Forget the lowering of the signal to noise ratio in her mailbox, can't she figure out that it's crap being delivered postage due and that she's merely making everyone's ISP bills higher? Would she like it if people were sending her millions of viagara ads and cranking up her ISP bills?
Why is it that the poorer and less educated someone is, the stronger they embrace religion? If, as lots of them claim, "God helps those who help themselves", I'm sure God would be thrilled if she put down the Bible long enough to read a book which would teach her a useful skill. This is no different than kids in Afghanistan being forced to memorize the Koran - if they can memorize that, surely memorizing something useful would be easy *and* help them feed their fellow countrymen.
[sigh] This just infuriates me.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
[Why do I get the feeling the AC who posted the parent is a spammer?]
From the article:
But Fox and Connelly have their limits. They don't peddle Viagra, breast enlargement pills or smut, they say. "When I defend what we do, I talk about free speech," says Connelly, a rugged man with silver hair and a full beard.
Spam is commercial speech and as such does not enjoy unfettered First Amendment protection. This is a property rights issue no matter how you slice it, and the First Amendment does not apply to spam any more than it does to spray painted graffiti.
"When it comes to porn, I don't care about [the pornographers'] free speech."
This makes me hate them even more. Pornographic spam may be more offensive (and politically useful for getting people riled about the issue of spam in general), but strictly speaking, whether or not the spam is pornographic is irrelevant. Spam is not free speech, and your spam gains no legitimacy for not being pornographic. And legitimate free speech doesn't lose its free speech status simply because you don't like pornography. Who are you, a pair of spammers with creepy pictures of Jesus all over your walls, to be announcing which forms of free speech you "don't care about"? What nerve!
Plus, this whole defense of "letting the little guy compete" is just as appropriate for pornography as it is for spam. All you need for pornography is a girl, a camera, and a room! (Plus a T1 and a few other things.) And unlike spam, porn is an honest living- as long as you don't market through spammers. Larry Flynt had way more insight into free speech than these guys. (Although Larry went through his own creepy Jesus pictures phase.)
I have to admit I got a smile when I saw she gets migraines. My poor wife gets migraines and she never spammed anybody. If I had this woman's email address, I'd arrange for her to receive several hundred special offers a day for Imitrex.
Fox might not send any XXX spam. What she did is not condemned by the church.
Sure it is! Do Unto Others.
She sends a million spams. She knows that it costs her nearly nothing and that the recipient is therefore paying to receive it. By her own stated understanding of response rate, she's making millions of people pay for something they don't want.
Is that doing unto others?
Not in my books.
Therefore, it *is* condemned by the church, and it demonstrates her hypocrisy.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
To some extent I agree. We shouldn't blame those who leave thier doors unlocked. But I'm not sure if the analogy holds, I would be less sympathetic to those who buy homes without doors.
I'm not saying that they should be robbed, but that they are naive, and will sadly learn the hard way. Funny thing is email is "good enough" for it's users most of the time that they never hang that door, much less lock it. As problems begin, they quickly accept that it's a small price to pay for shelter, and finally when it's obovious a door should be hung, most gripe and complain that it would bar their ability to enter and exit the building.
And I haven't even mentioned those who claim that door building is irrelevant or useless, as all doors can be opened, therefore premitting possible entry anyway.
Well, I met my quota on bad analogies for the day. Back to work for me.
Back when the current system for email was invented, irresponsible people were kicked off the internet by their provider, or their provider was.
Many of the standards we use were originally designed with only responsible end users in mind. I remember no spam on usenet, even though anyone could post anywhere even moderated groups. Those days are long gone with the release of irresponsible people onto the internet by the availability of large amounts of public access.
I noticed the article mentions she pays $1000 a month for her internet connection, but through WHICH company, and why has that company not taken the responsibility to withdraw her account for abuse? I don't care how much you pay a month to your ISP, if you're using your service in an abusive manner such as spam it should be taken away from you.
Anyone have any info on her internet provider? There should really be laws against allowing this behavior at all in the U.S.
If she tells you, "The Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose," then point out that that's Shakespeare
Yes, but it's a biblical principle nonetheless - see Matthew 4,1-11
the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. 6"If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down. For it is written:
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
You live there? What are you doing posting on /. instead of heading over and beating her up? She's a spammer, and I couldn't care less how old or fragile she is. In fact, that reduces the chances that you'll ruin a perfectly good baseball bat.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Actually, I can think of a very good reason why a spammer might be heavily into religion - these scum require forgiveness by the truckload.
Spammers can eat sh!t and die. Spammers feel it is ok to stuff my inbox full of crap and do it on my dime? They should be lynched. Spammers deserve to be homeless.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
As cited in the article she's doing it to make a living, not to make big bucks - completely understandable in her situation (and for everybody who's been in a similar situation). Heck, I wouldn't complain once if I could "do some good" deleting my daily dose of spam.
The ends do not justify the means. Spammers are thieves by definition. They offload the cost of doing business to ISPs and their customers. I don't care if the pope was doing it. It's still wrong. Furthermore, most spammers are also liars (forged headers) and criminals (many states now have anti-spam legislation). I feel no sympathy for even moderate income grandma spammers. It costs the country millions of dollars that could otherwise be spent on closing the digital divide.
If you apply the same reasoning to people sharing files you're making a very strong case for the copyright holders
What a nieve assertion. Sharing files of copyrighted material is also wrong. But the system of sharing files is legit. Some criminals use roads as their getaway means. Let's ban roads.
Spam == Wrong, Illegal, Immoral. Get over it.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
So, she breaks into other people's machines to send spam about money scams, and you think peddling Viagra is beneath her? You think she does business, i.e. trading e-mail addresses with only non-Viagra spammers?
I've got some swamp land in Florida, if you're interested.
In reality, what's happening is they are probably squandering large amounts of money on church tithes, "charity" and the like. Oh, and however much she spends on computer equipment, bandwidth, etc... We don't have access to their finances so there's no way to really know.
The idea that the spamming is OK because it's for a "good cause" is reprehensible. Is it ok if I shoot you in the head? I think it's for a good cause. No IT'S NOT OK!!! The ends do not justify the means. There's an unlimited number of ways one can do chairity and good in the world without simultaneously doing bad.
And what the fuck does that have to do with the rest of the entire topic? Dumbass.In the darkness of future past, The magician longs to see. One chants between two worlds, "Fire, walk with me!"
I can't believe this goes on in every spam story without anyone having the shred of maturity it takes to say "this is wrong". Physically assaulting other people is wrong. I don't care if they're spammers. I don't care if they're child molesters or genocidal dictators. We're living in the year 2003, and we've seen what happens when we use violence as a solution to our problems. We've built countries with laws and courts and all that other good stuff so we wouldn't feel a need to engage in such vigilante barbarism. Everyone deserves a fair trial and a fair punishment. If you don't like what someone does, work to change it but work under the rule of law. Don't encourage people to beat up other people. It's not civilized.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.