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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."
luckily, with republicans in office, my spamming is assured to continue because the laws that are written are for my corporation's benefit! we don't need anyone telling us how to run our business.
you guys need to wake up and understand who runs the show -- if you're receiving a paycheck from a corporation, you're a member of the working class.
those of us who write your checks realize the extreme importance of marketing, and we will stop at nothing to achieve it.
since we have a debate on our hands about legalizing drugs[marijuana, coke..], how about we legalize spam , companies can register,float public offerings. From the pro's side, it would make companies accountable for illegal access of other computers to send spam. This still doesn't mean that there wouldn't be rogue spammers. But if there is more money to be made and acceptance, big fishes will choose to register - may be charge these companies per packet basis, like the old days.
If you're having problems with that, use a different popup blocker. Some tools can be configured to still load popups and blocked images, but not display them on your end. To the server, there is no way to tell the difference.
In every interview with Ralsky that I've read, I've seen him mention that he had to use open proxies, open relays, etc, etc. He doesn't seem to ever admit to having any systems that do the actual mail sending, instead he has always stated that he hijacks other systems to send out his garbage. There are many computer tresspass laws on the books here in the US already, and Ralsky is in the US. With his public statements, why hasn't the FBI picked him up for computer tresspassing charges?
With all he has done, it would not surprise me in the least if the examination of his computer network revealed the source for at least a few of the worms/viruses used to turn an Outlook Express user's computer into a spam sending drone. Again, there are laws on the books already that cover these sorts of illegal activities in the US.
Another thought that popped into my head, is why the IRS hasn't come after him for tax evasion? With all of his wealth, and his admitted morals, you know he hasn't claimed all of his income on his 1040's. A nice tax audit in the face of an FBI investigation would likely reveal all of those companies that are paying him to break the law and send their garbage out through these (essentially) hacked systems. They could also be brought up on charges as accomplices in any computer tresspass actions.
I guess the biggest problem is that there would need to be damages shown. Well, having run a regional ISP's mail servers for the last 10 years I can tell you, there are a lot of damages to be accounted for that are the direct cause of spam. The countless hours writing and implementing anti-spam filters, the angry customer phone calls, and all of the emails we get accusing us of selling our customer lists to spammers, etc. Not to mention the lost revenue from people switching providers because they were getting too much spam. The damages to our company over the last few years alone amounts to tens of thousands of dollars if not more. The AOL's, Verizon Online's, etc. have lost a lot more.
Its next to impossible to quantify in exact dollar amounts though. The process goes like this, "our mail servers need to be upgraded because the volume of mail is higher". Can it be attributed directly to spam, or to a growing customer base? Things may get easier after January 1st for us, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.
So if anyone out there sees this, and has a cousin or friend that works for the FBI or the IRS, you may want to turn them on to Ralsky and crew. Make him an example and others may (but probably won't) be deterred from entering the same line of (ahem) "work".
But he definitely deserves a very hefty fine and prison cell with Bubba.
This is one aspect of American culture that really disgusts me (and I'm American). So many of us believe that if you go to jail, then you deserve to be raped. It's such a common belief now that it's as if the punishment for crime were rape instead of prison, and prison is just the place where the punishment (rape) is carried out.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
is just another SPAMmers new mailing list.
This is all driven by money.
Wouldn't it be nice if companies that use SPAM as a form of advertising had to indictate that on their website (i.e. target audience has an easy way to check).
Then people could vote with their $$$s and people could refuse to deal with these companies.
If people seem to be getting SPAM for these companies then it would need to be investigated - either the company is lying (big fine) or someone is commiting fraud (trying to use the company's name without the company's permission).
After enough voting with their $$$s the correct situation would finally be obtained.
Well maybe not a prison cell, I'd rather see him locked into a set of stocks, with a nice big pile of cans of spam nearby his victims could fling at him for a few weeks ;-) It'd be worth the plane ticket for me!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
As an asside, spam would be an excellent way to communicate with terrorist sleeper cells. Nobody reads it, everybody gets it. Nobody could tell that a message was even sent. If somehow they did know, they wouldn't know to whom it was sent. Ever notice the random words or characters added to spam to attempt to fool spam filters? It would be trivial to make it a code instead.
Good for you, but not so good for others
In other words, you send out over fifty thousand "challenge" emails a month, most all of which will be to innocent third parties who were unfortunate enough to be joe-jobbed. Not only are you bombarding others' inboxes with crap they never asked for, you are effectively doubling your own bandwidth consumed by spam. TMDA not only doesn't solve the spam problem, it actively makes the situation worse.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
That doesn't nessicarily work. The problem that many of us have, myself especially, is my parents are on the internet, and I get at least 10 messages a week from my mother with "Send this message to 10 people, and the the answer to this joke will pop up on your screen! It really works!"
If my mother sends that to 10 people, and I'm one of them, and someone she's forwarded that to sends it to someone else, and it eventually gets back to a spammer, my mailing address, and everyone else's, gets put onto one of those 1 Million email address CDs, which are then sold to spammers.
And, no matter how hard I might try to tell her not to, my mom keeps doing that.
____________________
Clouds in the Sky,
Water in a bottle
During the past few weeks i've seen a reduction in the amount of garbage in my hotmail inbox, I thought Microsoft implemented a new spam filter - maybe not.
From the article:
But he has not sent a single message over the Internet in the last few weeks.
Maybe the reduction in spam was due to this guy taking a break.
-ted
The e-mail adddress is valid
The message slipped thru the filters
And the e-mail owner reads their e-mail
It's obvious from his capitalism-uber-alles attitude and his insistence on his right to make money however he wants that he's an American.
The above scenario gets at the heart of why 'anti-spam' measures will never work.
The email system, and the Internet as a whole, actually, are based on a flawed 'consensus' system where everybody reads RFCs and follows them voluntarily. Said 'consensus' based system doesn't scale well to the whole world. It only works well in small communities, and, perhaps, networks the size of Fido-net from back in the BBS days.
Spam won't 'go away' until there are fundamental changes in how the Internet is structured. Anybody who claims otherwise is fooling themselves, because we're not one big happy family. The very notion that we are one big happy family implies a hierarchy and rules that break the whole concept of 'consensus.'
The Net just needs to balkanize, to break up into entities with gateways, and rules within said gateways. Unfortunately that's the only way it's ever going to 'work.' And it's happening. It wasn't a band of autonomous individuals who sued Ralsky. It was Verizon, one of the 'overlords' who own one of said 'entities.'
A Good Intro to NetBS
By his own admission, he once produced more than 70 million messages a day from domains registered with fake names, largely by way of foreign countries--or sometimes even by way of hijacked computers ...
Does this make him liable for criminal charges if anyone can find one of those hijacked computers? IANAL, but even admitting to a crime without any evidence should still have a prosecutor sniffing around, shouldn't it?
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Visit project web form flooder at http://formflood.sourceforge.com and you can hit back the spammers that annoy you. Or check out Unsolicited Commando at http://www.astrobastards.net/uc and hit back spammers in general. Or do both, but for cripes sake, do something other than reelect representatives that think that CAN-SPAM is going to help at all!
Okay, let me get this straight.
You go to a convention. You voluntarily give your email address to the guy at the door (not required for entry). A week later you get an email from a company that was at the convention, who informs you that they got the email address from the convention.
I'm sorry, how is that spam?
Engineering and the Ultimate