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.
Fox, Flo
127 Rue Acadian
Slidell, LA 70461-5203
(985) 646-2225
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.
day 1: send emails
repeat
not that difficult, in my opinion
You can bet that this woman is a relative or trailer park neighbor of the "cajun spam gang" that's been operating in the area for awhile. I think most of them have gone out of business though.
Innate respect for the elderly clashing with innate disgust for people selling me ways to naturally enlarge my cock! AAARGH!!! THE CONFUSION!
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
"It is interesting to note that even a religiously zealous grandmother can mire our inboxes with junk."
The woman's age, grandmother status and religious strength aside, I'd still key her car if I ever saw it.
My home town is on slashdot!
Oh, great, it's about a spammer.
Crap.
I'm all shriveled up now.
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 love Flo's t-shirt! WWJD? Ask if you need a bigger rod and staff, and yea, only He can granteth THAT miracle!
Jesus would prolly open up a can of whoop-ass when he finds out she's sending "XXX HOT LATIN TW1NKS XXX FOR FREE rqewgkjtqwertnb" to random 13 year olds. How about some divine retribution with a vulcan cannon?
Hate me!
Comparing my daily inbox reading routine a year ago and now, I hardly worry about spam nowadays. I have three e-mail boxes, one at yahoo.com, another one for personal e-mails, and the third one spam-only, that I only check when I expect a registration confirmation to come from some site I register at.
Yahoo Mail has its own filters, my Linux mailserver has spamassassin, and the spam e-mail address gets discarded on a weekly basis automatically.
Yeah, occasionally 2-3 letters per day pass though Spamassassin, but they are easy to see right from the subject line and delete right away. Spamassassin and other free (as well as commercial ) products seem to do a pretty decent job at it, and 2-3 spam e-mails per day can be just treated as a cost of using the system.
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.
The fact, that spam is still worthwhile goes to show, that one person's spam is another person's valued information (worth clicking on and spending money on).
Therefore efforts (legal and technical) to define spam at the sender side seem inherently dubious to me.
On the other hand, weeding out spam at the receiving end doesn't do anything to conserve the bandwidth and other computing resources wasted on items, which ended up being identified as spam by the respective recipients.
So this is a fundamentally tough nut to crack.
If it's off shore, she originates messags from there, and the bandwidth require would be satisfied with a 14.4k modem. Upload one message, message list stored off shore, fire.
So who does she get her lease line from in the U.S.? Or is all of this just typical spammer lies?
"It's easy to rip people off you have never even seen," Fox says.
You mean just like its easy to steal bandwidth and send annoying or inapporopriate material to people you've never met, bitch?
She's a spammer. She's lying.
I like her "WWJD?" shirt. If Jesus were around today, one thing he would not do is annoy 40 million people with lousy penis-enlargemnet ads...
I'm sure I speak for all of us when we'd rather hear about the End of a Life of a Spammer.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
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.
You know, I've been thinking a bit. Spam is becoming a real problem and it's only a matter of time before email itself becomes nearly useless due to the massive amounts of spam. Something has to be done and it has to be done soon in order for it to still be effective enough. Stopping spam itself when it's en-route is not an option, as it will only lead to an arms race between spammer/virus writers and hackers/AV corps. Killing the bandwidth of the computers that send spam isn't an option either as it involves (D)DoSing, which is rather illegal. Killing the spammers themselves, as satisfying and tempting as it may be, is not an option either. Remember, even a spammer is someone's father/mother and/or son/daughter.
Maybe, MAYBE we have a chance by sicking the BSA on them. Yes, the Business Software Alliance, the same people who use some sort of legalized extortion and raid small businesses that "fail to comply" to their rather variable demands. Think about it, most small time spammers are technological idiots who use home computers. Do you really think every spammer who has 10 PCs churning out email has valid licenses for Windows? Maybe a few, but loads don't. And even if they do, MS licensing is so horrid that whatever the heck you did, you're bound to violate at least 3 licenses anyways, excluding other licenses like the spam software itself. This is how we might go after a few small-time spammers. And hey, it actually makes the BSA people do something useful as well! Maybe an idea?
Hate me!
About the time I switced to the new domain, I began seeing a significant amount of email spam. As of 2000, I began to see my rate doubling about once per year. Last year I got about 150/day -- this year it's up to 300 or so. Even using spamassasin, the emails that get through are a major annoyance, especially if I've been away from email for more than a day or two. At this point, it looks like I'll be switching to using multiple addresses, one semi-public, one for ecommerce, and one given out only to friends and family -- I really see no other way at this point (although even THAT isn't a perfect solution).
Of course, maybe it's because I live in St. Tammany Parish (a parish in LA is like a county in other states) -- the same parish as Slidell. In fact, Ron Scelson was our old babysitter's son in law. Maybe the massive spam load is some kind of weird misdirected digital karma bullet, that just happened to hit me instead of the nearby spammer. Dunno -- but I suspect its just the inevitable consequence of keeping a vary public email address.
In any case -- yes -- spam is a major problem for me, and I'm reasonably savy with most of the available anti-spam tools out there.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
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!
My company's mail server was filled and not accepting new messages. I've not had too much problem with spam before (I use yahoo mail, mac Mail, and Thunderbird on the 'Mail PC') My settings are off on the PC, set to not delete messages fast enough.
I finally realized the rage that most /.ers display at spammers - I found mysellf wanting to personally kill each spammer.
The title of this article is "The Life of a Spammer" - If the anger I felt this weekend is similar to others, I'm thinking the title should be "The Very Short, and Very Painful Life of a Spammer After Being Beaten By Angry People Who Don't Need A Larger Penis, Like the Interest Rate They Currently Have, And Don't Need Another Copy of Norton SystemWorks."
I'd like to see some variation. I'd like to see a spam pope.
To be more accurate, I'd like to see a spam pope on a rope.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
And you trust a spammer?
Spammer is only part of it. I don't trust anyone with all that Jesus crap hanging on the walls.
So now we have an AARP member spamming. Does it make any difference to me? It doesn't matter if the theif is a grandma wearing a WWJD T-shirt or a young fella with a ski mask. Theft is theft, and a thief is a thief.
Whats she say to defend her theft - things like "....This (spam) lets the little guy compete". What does she think about the time, energy and costs small providers have to dish out to defend their network against SPAM? How many small guys have had their machines shut down because of false return addresses, or an onslaught of spam that makes mail services crawl? What about those small guys BUZZZZ Wrong answer grandma!
She doesn't stop there, she goes on to say the even more bizzare "When I defend what we do, I talk about free speech". I looked at the constitution to be sure and nowhere did it say "You may steal from others, and then force them to accept your speech into their homes". I believe the consitution protects speech, but doesn't force others to have to accept/listen to ones speech. The amendment is about government cesorship, NOT about theft of services to promote a get rich schemes. BUZZZZ Wrong answer grandma!
So she makes 2000 - 4000 / week. After several years of college I don't make 4k a week, but then again, even if I could improve my economic situation, my personal moral compass wouldn't allow me to what she does. Perhaps she needs to read the bible more. What was it again?? Thou shall not steal?? Thou shall not bear false witness?? - Stuff like that.
With 80% or more of all e-mail being spam, the signal to noise ratio is heading south fast. To stop spam you have to stop spammers.
Here is the towns website
http://www.slidell.la.us
Now can any one let me know which provider provides this type of person with access? I have some IP blocks to add to my blacklist.
According to information -
Flo Fox - Slidell LA
985 646 2225
I don't know if that number is correct - but it's publically listed.
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
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
Of course not, she just sends viagra spam. Nice little loophole that is.
read my blog
musings on politics and technol
I remember what happened to rodona garst:
t es.com-m irror/RodonasBreastSize.jpg
http://belps.freewebsites.com/
(lots of mirrors, the first one is dead, try pressing directly on the "Behind enemy lines" text)
I hope someone could do a rodona garst on this woman.
They even found a pic of her boobs:
http://www.spamshield.org/belps.freewebsi
Dear Mrs. Fox, Please don't send any spam to taibmaps@astrobastards.net. Thanks! Yours truly,
Get revenge: Unsolicited Commando
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2003/Dec-14 -Sun-2003/news/22615610.html
from ROKSO, Bill Wagggoner
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I'm torn between my hate for spam and my hate for religious zealots...
because what hunting rifle has a bayonet lug
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
They only want free speech when it supports their viewpoints, From the article:
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. "When it comes to porn, I don't care about [the pornographers'] free speech."
So do I interpret the text anyway. Btw, The article have a poll if the new spam law is good, take your time to vote.
So the obvious coutermeasure to spam is to make stolen addresses worthless.
Use spamgourmet and only give disposable addresses to businesses, web sites, forums and friends running Windows.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I have been thinking about a good way to stop spam and I have convinced myself that the only way that will prove genuinely effective is to make it prohibitively expensive. Not through per email micropayments or any other such scheme, but by doing what the spammers are asking for: visiting their sites.
Imagine if everyone who got a spam visited the site mentioned in it, perhaps reloading periodically. This would be a slashdot effect that would cost the spammer a fortune. Some might say it would be a DDOS - but I'm not talking about flooding them. Just loading their website a few times (obviously one would remove any information from the URL that might indicate that your email address was live).
There are a few solutions out there to do this, such as active spam filters on mail servers. But those would be easily firewalled out by a spammer.
Take a look at http://www.astrobastards.net/uc/ - this is a program that runs in the background and visits spam sites. It gets it's list of sites to visit from a central server. I think this is the sort of thing we need, but it has to be more distributed, not under the control of a single person, and without a single point of failure. This is vital, because it has to be trustworthy, and it has to be impervious to DoS attacks from the spammers.
What are the thoughts of the community on this?
The geeks of the world can certainly build such an anti-spam network. We can make it work, and once enough people are using it, we can make spamming cost a fortune. And we can make it reliable and trustworthy. But will enough people support it for it to work?
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.
I didn't see in the whole Bible any anti-spam advises. Even more, the whole history of cristian missioneering reminds me a big spam compain to distribute the Bible around the world.
Less is more !
Acts 13:10. "You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord?"
Matthew 19:19. "Jesus replied, 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother,' and 'love your neighbor as yourself.'"
John 10:1. "[T]he man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber." (It's a slight stretch, but it's a little applicable.)
Mark 4:18-19. "Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful."
Matthew 19:23-24. "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
Revelations 3:16-17. "So, because you are lukewarm -- neither hot nor cold--I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked."
1 Timothy 6:17. "Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment."
Might want to tell her to read her Bible a little more carefully.
If she tells you, "The Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose," then point out that that's Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene iii), not Holy Writ.
(However, if Satan's on the Internet, Bible.Gospelcom.Net would sure let him do it.)
Here it is: 127.0.0.1
worldroot# make world install
Is that what you had in mind?
home
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
Wow, my second troll!
Come on, let's not lose our heads here.
Nearly every week there's a standard spam article on slashdot, every day the less savvy computer people like my stepfather get slammed with spam. The spammers are denegrated to the point of being dehumanized, and laws get bandied about to fix everything via litigation.
Meanwhile, there are a few people who have set up their own private mail relays, which reject all mail coming from "untrusted" servers. A fine step toward combating spam, but oboviously few are beating down their doors to climb on board. I haven't heard from them in years, so mabye they never hit critical mass.
And every two months or so, I read an article on how "redesigning email MY way" could save us all from the SPAM. Nevermind that there are tons of different ways, some of them fatally flawed, being presented. The lack of momentum in actually changing this is phenomenal.
But only on slashdot would suggesting that a less spam-prone mail delivery be designed, and then implemented, be considered a troll. What's next, would posting an article complaining about spam be a troll? Since that would seriously garner quite a few more responses than my quaint message.
Cheers.
Two weeks ago someone started spamming taiwan using my email address as the spoofed source. Now they are branching out to yahoo.com
I know this as I get all the bounce mail. Spammers get a lot of bounce mail, and 300+ mails an hour is enough to kill the inbox. Then there is all the 'stop spamming me' responses, or the 'j.user is out the office messages' -this is brutally hard to filter without destroying all useful content (like my own bounce mail)
So I have just been evicted from an email address (on my own domain) that I have had for five years, having to notify friends that is has moved, and generally suffer from trying to clean up the damage.
That is what spam does.
[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.
A1 E Services is Bruce Connelly and Flo Fox aka Mrs. Bruce Connelly.
& rq sdta=34331685D
A1E_Services (NETBLK-BRW-5021-A1ESERVICES)
1711 West Hall Ave
Slidell, LA 70460
US
Netname: BRW-5021-A1ESERVICES
Netblock: 67.96.78.0 - 67.96.79.255
Coordinator:
Hostmaster (ZB13-ARIN) hostmaster@broadwing.com
512-427-3700
Domain System inverse mapping provided by:
NS3.BROADWING.NET 216.140.16.252
NS4.BROADWING.NET 216.140.17.252
Connelly, Bruce (BC891-ARIN) a1esupport@aol.com
A1E SERVICES
1711 W Hall Avenue
Slidell, LA 70460
(504) 649 - 6248
http://www.sec.state.la.us/cgibin?rqstyp=crpdtl
34331685D
Name: FOXC, INC.
Type Entity: Business Corporation
Status: Active
Domicile Address: 1711 WEST HALL AVENUE, SLIDELL, LA 70460
Incorporated: 05/19/1989 | Effective: 05/17/1989
Registered Agent (Appointed 5/19/1989): FLORENCE F. FOX, 1711 WEST
HALL AVENUE, SLIDELL, LA 70460
Officer(s)/Director(s): FLORENCE F. FOX | CAROLYN J. FREDERICK |
BRUCE
D. CONNELLY
Incorporator(s): FLORENCE F. FOX
Wow, hard to believe anyone could be so ignorant of the costs of spam.
I own a small hosting outfit. The number one complaint of my customers is spam. I spend at least a couple hours a week dealing with it, either in adjusting/upgrading filters, teaching customers how to use it, or in cleaning out mail queues stuffed with it.
In labor costs alone, this is a big deal for me. It's lost income, since that's time I *could* have spent developing software for my customers. All this, and I'm just a *tiny* outfit.
Frankly, killing spammers is too good for them. I'm thinking more along the lines of tying them out in the sun until they're sunburned, then dropping them into tanks of fresh, pulped jalepeno peppers.
Well, I'll give you my own numbers.
73% of all the mail hitting my servers during the last week were either rejected via RBL, via access.db, or via SA. For the mail that was actually allowed to be delivered, 48% was tagged as SPAM -- meaning it met SA criteria for the thresholds I have set to be SPAM.
In the last month I've spent ~30hrs (not all at once) dealing with spam and spam-related tasks such as user Q&A, dealing with false-positives, dealing with false-negatives, RBL related, server maintenence and patching, etc. That's almost 4 working days.
Do I feel it's 'worth it'? YES. It's necessary at any rate. I'd rather cull out the crap or block it entirely, and my users are much happier, my backup jobs are quicker, and my servers are healthier for it. Do I enjoy it? NO! Are there other things I could do or that my employer would like done? YES!
I know you know this, and no it's not always a huge time-sink, but when it is it's a big one.
Hm. My first comment on /.s .pdf
http://www.eprivacygroup.com/pdfs/SpamByTheNumber
I see spam as a threat to ISPs because it makes increased expenditure on bandwidth and filters necessary. Also, as the above link shows, it decreases workplace productivity because people keep having to clean it out of their inboxes.
I get the free-market thing -- I'm a libertarian too. However, I think there's an essential conflict going on between spammers and other businesses. I wouldn't go so far as to compare it to industrial sabotage or anything melodramatic like that, but spam is interfering with businesses by decreasing productivity and increasing costs. I'm pretty weak on economics, but it bothers me that businesses should have to spend money dealing with a problem caused by someone who has no relation to their business whatsoever. It's like having to deal with the "ILOVEYOU" virus -- it sucks up resources and provides no benefit to anyone, anywhere, except the person who is causing problems for everyone else.
The problem is, of course, that you can turn it around and say that ISP filters are interfering with the spammers' business. I'd say, though, that people are going to pay spammers to do mass mailings regardless of whether the mailings get blocked or not. Getting blocked doesn't hurt the spammers' income, in my understanding, whereas the process of blocking hurts ISPs' budgets.
As for the companies who use spam to advertise -- "freedom to market" aside, how many of those companies would pass the standards of the BBB? I don't recall ever receiving spam from a company whose name or credentials I could trust in the slightest. For the reasons I mentioned above, plus the annoyance factor, I view spam as an underhanded, illegitimate advertising technique, and frankly I wouldn't shed a tear if companies who resorted to spam were deprived of their "freedom" to cause other people problems.
"When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can't read." -- Hannibal Lecter
SMTP was designed to be a robust mail protocol in an environment in which trust was perfectly reasonable. The environment changed, the protocol was retained. Fine - but then you have to do something about the lost appropriateness of trust. Some things have been done - they've been inadequate. That's not the fault of SMTP or of the designers.
It isn't just SMTP that is abused: open proxy abuse is a big contributor to the spam problem. There, again, trust is inappropriate - but still exists. Spammers take advantage of other system and human vulnerabilities to set up spam zombie servers. Too much inappropriate trust yet again.
Some basic human behavior needs to change - and the ISPs should be in the lead. They aren't. The security experts might be in the lead. They aren't. Many security experts appear to believe that securing a small fraction of systems and bitching about all the rest is adeqaute. Well, take a look - is it? Few security experts do anything towards identifying and stopping the abusers who constantly search the internet for vulnerabilites. It's like a city is plagued by burglars and the security experts simply make sure the doors and windows of their buildings can't be forced. They could put in cameras to get pictures of the burglars when they try the window - but instead merely complain about those who don't secure their windows. Of course in this case it's spam, not burglary, and the abuse commited on the other guy's system can hit the security experts own system, in the form of spam. If the security expert would help rid the community of the abusers then the abuse would be reduced. The security expert would rather point fingers at others and hurl blame than do what he himself could do beyond excluding just one form of abuse. Some expert - he doesn't even look to see how allowing the abusers to continue hurts him.
Who is better placed than an ISP to watch for attempted proxy port abuse? What ISP do you know of that watches? Recent actual experience by someone who did watch showed that many spammers commit the abuse form their own IPs. Watch for the abuse and you find the spammers' IPs (so much for the much-vaunted "anonymity" of the spammers.) The spammers aren't that particularly clever: it's mostly that those who could act don't.
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.
I have only this to say: WWJD? JWSTFU.
irb(main):001:0>
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.
So what you are saying is that spammers provide you with job security.
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.
I have two accounts on Hotmail that usually get 30-50 spam messages a day.
Now, 3 messages in each, total, for the last two days.
Did MS finally start filtering this stuff out?
*Still* negative function...
See it here
Wouldn't that make it pretty easy getting a verified address?
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
(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.)
You know I hope you're being sarcastic. But if you're not, I hope you are dumb enough to place a return address on the evelope so the police know how to catch you.
What if you've got the wrong address? I mean I hate to dash the idea of Slashdotters being infaliable. Gee, try explaining to the cops how you accidently sent a 80 year old grandmother a nasty threatening letter. Oh, and be sure to tell them of your hatred of all religions.
Secondly, I think you'd fit right into extremist religon. You're "anti-religion" seems a lot like the fundamentialists you hate.
Oh, and how was the parent even a remotely insightful post?
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
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.
Calling me ignorant, and then launching into a sadistic revenge fantasy, hardly bolsters your argument. In fact, I would say it automatically denotes you as being too emotionally involved to be a reliable source of information.
Ah yes, ten years of experience definitely disqualifies me as a reliable source of information, how amazing of you to have figured this out.
Surprisingly enough, it is possible to be highly knowledgable AND pissed off. You've got the pissed off part down, why not try being knowledgable next?
127.0.0.3 is always good, or 255.255.255.255, or 192.168.255.255, or 169.254.255.255. If you've got a BGP feed, so you can figure out their upstream provider, you could always hand them that provider's main mail server.
If they're an open relay, though, an obvious IP address to hand them is the address of another open relay. So it'll send the mail there, and that relay will try to send it - so it'll look up your-fake-domain.com, which you'll respond to with the address of another open relay... I realize that open relays are passe, and all the cool spammers use open proxies these days, but you can still have fun letting misconfigured Korean relays bounce the spam around each other, and you'll only have to do the occasional DNS lookup until they get the addresses cached.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
>I'm surprised I haven't heard of anyone running an operation to automatically read those addresses and fill in lots of webforms requesting free catalogues!
I was fed up with a certain set of mortgage spam that I wrote a vb app that used the browser object to open up the spammer's web site, then proceed to fill in the information with random stuff, but had the area codes match the zips and states. I let it run and put about 40-50,000 false entries into 3 or 4 websites. Pretty funny, IMHO. The nice thing about wrapping the browser object in vb is that you can load the page and then remove the validation code that loaded with the page. So this works equally as well with sites that do the credit card verification before it does a submittal. I had a site on geocities a while back but they deleted my program and the site for some reason. I called it "spam the spammer". Unfortunately, now most spammers embed a tracking link into the url so they can link the hit back to an email address. But if we had an open source project to collect the identifiers from spam trap addresses we could really screw up the spam operations. I don't think mortgage companies like getting 10,000 false leads.
--ngoy