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Alan Ralsky Gripes About Can Spam Act
fdiskne1 writes "The New York Times has an interview with Alan Ralsky, commonly known as the world's worst spammer. CNet News.com is running the same interview. Ralsky admits using open relays and virus-infected PCs and not honoring unsubscribe lists. He complains about having to comply with the new CAN-SPAM law will cost him an additional $3000 in costs to set up a genuine opt-out list. Anyone here feel sorry for him? Okay, I'm biased, but I can't wait until we see him in prison."
Here's a start
Alan Ralsky's brand new 8,000-square-foot luxury home near Halsted and Maple in West Bloomfield has been a busy place this month.......It's an operation still very much in business, despite last month's much-hyped settlement of a lawsuit against Ralsky by Verizon Internet Services. The suit used Virginia's tough anti-spam laws to get Ralsky to promise to stop using Verizon servers and pay an undisclosed fee for sending out millions of unsolicited e-mails to its customers.
Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam. It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened. "This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
Want to bet that was Windows Messenger? (no, not the IM service, the net send command in DOS)
Name: Alan Murray Ralsky
6747 Minnow Pond Dr,
West Bloomfield, MI 48322
AKA: Alan Ralsky
5016 Patrick Rd. West Bloomfield, MI 48322
248-661-3355
photograph
moreLooks like meat's back on them menu boys!!! (that is for the /.'er who referenced eating his flesh)
6747 Minnow Pond Rd
West Bloomfield, MI
48322
His home phone# is 248-926-0057
His work phone# is 248-926-0668
He also has two celluar phones which I traced back as AT&T Wireless numbers. Not sure if both still in service - give a call, don't forget to block your numbers!!!
248-766-5996
and
248-766-6362
Send SMS Here
I suggest we all gather our junk mail/coupons/fliers and start mailing it to his house, and all start making collect calls to his house/work and cell's. We pay for OUR internet access - and he uses our time/money/bandwidth without consent, its only fair that we return the favor.
If anyone has any viagra (I'm sure someone does) - pleaes mail him some - with a lovely note attached on how to enlarge his penis. Maybe his boyfriend will thank you...
Cheers,
Anon
I run a large corporate mail system - about 25000 user accounts.
I can NOT operate a mail server in this day and age without the use of these blocklists. We use a highly elaborate system rbls - spamhaus, njabl, ordb, along with others and some of my own design - as well as spamassassin and virus filters. Of the > 1000000 emails we process dailt, better than 85% is spam by every metric you choose to go by. I still get tons of it in my mailbox since the 'postmaster' and other administrative addresses are posted in spider-friendly plain text on our websites (I've complained to no avail).Think about that - I get 1 milllion emails a day running through my mail server, 850000 of which are spam.
A few weeks ago, easynet.nl's rbls were taken down, whom I was using as my only means of blocking mails from dynamic ranges, as well as one of my open proxy lists. The load on our mail server went through the roof as we were flooded with hundreds of thousands of junk mails poring in from dynamically assigned ip ranges and hijacked proxies, all of which have NO BUSINESS WHATSOEVER sending my users their garbage.
You have to understand that Ralsky and his criminal contemporaries are costing businesses like mine billions of dollars. Billions with a "B". The authorities have so far proven incapable of dealing with this problem, and this new law won't change a fucking thing. While blocklists are hardly perfect, it's one of the most effective tools I have at my disposal to limit the ammount of money Ralsky and his kind can steal from me and my employers on any given day.
I don't give a rat's ass if you and your "online business" can't adequately manage a confirmed opt-in mailing list. Either hire someone to do it, or get off the 'net until you can.
"Oh my God! The dead have risen! And they're voting Republican!" - Bart Simpson
Personally, I get nearly 200 spam messages daily. I know people who get spam into the thousands. He is costing me, and my associates, a *LOT* of resources.
- Bandwidth -- That junk mail, more specifically all the images in the email, take bandwidth. About 20K per message. Multiply by trillions (quadrillions?) of spam each year. Multiply by the number of hops that messages must go through, from my ISP, through my shared T1 where I pay per megabyte. Hint -- It's a lot of wasted bandwidth.
- Direct Time & money -- Thanks to my business, I can't run a spam filter, for fear of it catching stupid people's email. I've tried it, but I just can't configure SA such that it blocks the spam and doesn't block the idiots who have open relay ports, speak in ALL CAPS, and include a few URLs in their messages. I spend probably a few hours each week on spam, which costs my company a lot of money. Repeat for millions of internet users. I've heard the cost here in the 13 or 14-figure dollars per year.
- Indirect money -- I think just about everybody has deleted a legitamate message when culling out the spam. How many important messages have been accidentally deleted? How much money has this cost? Nobody knows.
I have no problem with the ads you mentioned (billboards, TV, radio, junk mail, etc.) Why not? Because the person who sends it pays all the cost. The net cost of sending a trillion spam is nothing; it costs more to collect and maintain the list of names. The cost of putting up a billboard is several thousand bucks. The cost of a radio ad (locally, in a fairly popular show) was $15,000 for a series of 15-second spots, to run for two months. The cost of a TV ad is similarly priced, I'm sure. My company has sent out mass mailings to its customers, and and that also costs us thousands of dollars. I've seen checks cut to the post office for thousands of dollars in postage.The difference is clear. Traditional ads cost the advertiser. The spammers cost society more money than the US national debt -- every year.
These people are essentially embezzeling money from every corporation and individual who has email. You don't think that deserves jail time?
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement