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.
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
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!
Unfortunately this this reflects badly upon the truly religious people. All I can say is that I hope her church finds out and kicks her sorry ass out of it, I'd do it if she were in mine.
Needle Nardle Noo
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.
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.
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!
>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.
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.
[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.
Actually, I can think of a very good reason why a spammer might be heavily into religion - these scum require forgiveness by the truckload.
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?
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.