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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."
"The law was not written for a commercial e-mailer," he said. "I don't think what they are doing is fair."
I think that's the point, Mr. Ralsky..
Trolling is a art,
Well, ok maybe he doesn't deserve death. But he definitely deserves a very hefty fine and prison cell with Bubba.
Hmm, looks like we need to set up a open hunting season on spammers. Too bad they don't taste too good, never was fond of SPAM myself.
FuckTheFuckingFuckers.com - Post your th
Or,
"I personally hate clubbing old ladies over the head so I can snatch their purses. It's rough. But you do what you got to do."
I hope somebody clubs Al Ralsky over the head in a dark alley... Jerk.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Call some one who gives a shit Alan Ralsky.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I can't wait to see him wresting bread crusts from sea gulls in a K Mart parking lot. He's an excellent example of a selfish individual and capitalism at its worst.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Spammers are stupid
+
Ralsky is a pammer
=
Ralsky is stupid
Ralsky is stupid
+
Ralsky says "it would be stupid to violate" [the law]
=
Ralsky will violate the law
But I'll bet you'd figured that out anyway.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Wasn't CAN-SPAM meant to help spammers? I mean, it had loopholes large enough to fly a 747 through, for Christ's sakes.... so why is he complaining?
#define DRM chmod 000
There's a perfectly reasonable convention of prefixing adverts with [ADV] in the subject line so people who dont want to read them dont have to.
If they aren't going to play fair then i dont see why we should. We need to make sure that the financial penalties outweigh the potential profits to be made. If it's a small penalty per email sent, then it'd take a while to whittle away ralskys fortunes.
We need to make an example of people breaking these laws to act as a deterrent. Perhaps a 3 emails and your up for life in prison....
allowing people to opt-out of burglery, robbery, extortion and murder are killing me. I'm just trying to make a living. Do the law makers even realize that I have to let people go when they pass laws like this? It's costing jobs during an economic downturn. It doesn't make any sense.
On the other hand, the price controls on recreational drugs and prostitution are a partial compensation, but the state monopoly on gambling really put a crimp in my style.
What's the world coming to.
Well, at least I'm not a scum sucking spammer.
KFG
What the hell does anyone think some low life e-tard in Nigeria or South America care about American laws and spam, nada. Zilch zip nada. The law is a farce and being that its coming close to election, I'm wondering if it was solely sent through for whoring purposes...
MoFscker
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.
"He's an excellent example of a selfish individual and capitalism at its worst."
Sounds like the ideal candidate for President...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
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)
Here is a list of the Attorney Generals around the country and the world. Everyone should contact their AG and demand that they prosecute these crimes. Until the public puts pressure on the authorities to enforce the crimes these spammers commit, nothing is going to change.
Security by law sits right next to security by obscurity on the list of things that help a bit, but by no means make a complete solution. Making spamming illegal isn't going to stop spammers, because sending spam by a virus-infected computer is already illegal since virus writing is illegal too... those laws haven't allowed us to stop running anti-virus programs, have they?
The bottom line is that SMTP has got to go. We need to get wide adoption of an e-mail protocol with authentication that the "from" address being claimed belongs to the sender of the message. That's the only way to make sure that spammers lose their ability to send e-mail without reprocussions. The face-value "from" address has to be much more relaiable than the current system lets it be.
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.
From that description it sounds like he's a pretty damn good spammer. The world's worst spammer is probably some guy trying to send spam through his AOL account.
- New e-mail
- Paste address
- Paste body
- Send e-mail
- Dismiss popup ad
- New e-mail
- etc etc
- Profit!
No, I think ol' Alan is good at what he does. Of course that's like arguing who was the best serial killer...Good Lord above... What about the millions of private E-mail boxes, privately-owned servers, and God only knows how many other computing resources, belonging to other people, that Ralsky and his spamming butt-buddies have already abused, and CONTINUE to abuse in some cases?
I would be very interested in hearing how "fair" the owners of all those resources think the new law is. Oh, granted, said law is far from perfect. However, if it helps to force criminals like Ralsky out of business for good, I will be the first to give it a round of applause.
Ralsky's misguided belief that he has any right at all to abuse property that does not belong to him is typical of the spammer mindset. The sooner he, Scotty 'Snotty' Richter, Eddy Marin, and all their spamming ilk get shut down permanently, the better off the Internet will be.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
It's not hipocrisy. When I skip a television ad, that's my right. You may argue that the only reason that the television program I'm watching even exists is because of advertising revenue. Know what? That's not my problem. I have NO contract with any advertisers, and no obligation to watch their drivel. I have no contract with any broadcasters, and no obligation to hold up their end of a bargain with said advertisers.
Broadcasters sell commercial spots on the basis that the advertising will be broadcast with the show, and offer the advertiser some sort of assurance that a certain demographic will be OFFERED that advertisement for viewing. However, I never said I'd watch it. Neither did you.
Now, spammers such as the dipshit in question here are literally STEALING bandwidth and cpu cycles from servers worldwide. They are INFECTING systems and using them as zombies to mail their crap. There is a world of difference between commercial skipping and theft.
As an aside here, Ralsky also says that we have no clue what he's mailing? Maybe I can't pinpoint mail-for-mail the ones that dipshit sends, but spam is spam and very recognizable no matter who it's from, whether it's a legit business, or a single spamming schmuck.
...he's just a symptom. Imprison him and someone else will pick up his lost business contacts and opportunities. U.S. laws will simply mean his revenue taxes will go to some other country.
What we need is to get rid of the "demand" end of this issue. Tighten up email so it requires at least some level of authorization to send to someone else, even if it's just by having a certificate of trust or something.
Mr. Ralsky said that he was uncomfortable about this deception, but that he had no choice. "Is putting bogus information in your registrations the right way to do business?" he asked. "No. But the Internet world has forced me to do that."
Why do people still think this is a valid excuse. I am sorry I killed my husband but he didn't use a coaster. I am sorry i killed my child but she kept crying. I am sorry I killed one million people, but they were in the way.
No one makes you do something. You make a choice. You make a choice to go to school or not. You make a choice to go to work or not. You make a choice to live an honest life or not. You make the choice, and you should be man or woman enough to stand by them and take responsibility. Not be yet another sorry excuse for a human and say "I don't recall" or "I didn't know" or "I was ordered to".
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
http://www.wonker.com/spamking.asp -- this was covered here before though. Couldn't find the /. article...
What else would Ralsky say about this new "tough" spam law? Did anyone else ever tell their parents after a spanking, "Didn't hurt, didn't hurt!"? What was the result? After getting a harder spanking that did indeed hurt, children quickly learn to pretend to feel pain to avoid a worse punishment.
I think Ralsky is openly complaining about the slight inconveniences this law has caused in order to affirm this law as effective, hoping to avoid tougher legislation that would actually hinder his "business" practices.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
In general i'm not too bother about regular dead tree advertising. In general it's *fairly* well targetted and a good enough source of things like pizza coupons.
If spam was targetted to me and *clearly* marked so it didn't interfere with my regular emailling, and allowed me to easily unsubscribe - i dont think i'd mind too much.
I have no need for penis enlargement pills, but don't objected to what are technically unsolicited adverts from my local computer store. Even if I wanted to take advantage of 90% of spam I couldn't because i dont live in the US.... that's just wasteful.
Indeed. I receive around 70,000 spam messages to my account monthly. That's around one every thirty seconds, all day, every day. With filters and Spam Assassin, I was able to tag and delete the large majority of that automatically. But still, thousands got past, to my mailbox. I now use TMDA, no more spam, period. Though now that they legally have to use real addresses, I imagine TMDA will become less effective.
And to put this another way: I receive that many because I help run an ISP. I have a front-line view of the effect of spam. I can say with confidence that AT LEAST 75% of the email received here is spam. We don't have precise stats, but a conservative guess is around half a million PER DAY come through our servers. Those messages take processing power, disk space, electricity, so on to handle. Messages our customers agree to recieve, we have no problem with. But messages that our customers do not want, and cannot stop, and we cannot stop, we consider theft of our resources, our customer's money, and everybody's time. You as an individual user may think "big deal, I just press delete." But when there are tens of thousands of users at an ISP doing that, it really does add up, and really is a serious issue. And you as an individual user are paying for it, don't think you aren't.
Larry
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".
The geek way to stop spam:
Step 1: Create a mod for a popular first person shooter game involving a list of prolific spammer and relistic weapons.
Step 2: Distribute said game to those "evil teenagers that plays too much video games and get influenced and shoot up their classmates".
Step 3: Wait for problem to take care of itself.
That way loosers who shoot their classmates and random people are *educated* to shoot the actual varmints of this society instead of random innocent people. And for the rest of us who can learn to differentiate a game from real life, it does sound like a fun game...
He makes it sound like he's the victim because people block his emails.
Maybe he should figure out that those are not his networks he is sending the emails over.
And the "if you don't like it unsubscribe..." bit is funny. How about, if I want it I'll subscribe?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
Maybe you can try an experiment and steal some electricity. By your way of thinking it doesn't exist in physical form either so you should be just fine.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
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
moreHe even went so far as to say, if you dont want my stuff, I dont want to send it to you.
Every spammer says this, but remember the first rule of dealing with spammers: Spammers lie.
Spammers say they don't want to send spam to people who don't want it, then come up with ways to subvert spam filters. If the really didn't want to send spam to people who didn't want it, then why subvert a spam filter? Someone using a filter obviously doesn't want spam (by definition), yet spammers keep bitching about filters, and how they're making their line of work difficult.
If a user complains in the first place, you have a problem with them getting a newsletter that they didn't want.
It's not the ISPs fault, I'd much rather see them drop all possible offenders than spend a long time investigating each one, and as a consequence having a long delay between the time someone is reported and the time their internet account is dropped.
All you need to do is make it easy for the people receiving the newsletters to opt out, make sure they know someone requested it and it's not spam, and require some sort of verification to make sure anyone can't sign them up.
What would be REALLY nice would be forcing them to confirm every few months that they still want to receive the newsletter. That way you're not sending it to people that don't want it, and if they no longer care about it, they don't have to do a thing to stop receiving it - they just have to wait.
I do not have a spam problem.
/dev/null that sucker. Keep one address just for friends and compadres and you'll never have a spam problem..You'll also know who you can't trust cause it shows up right in the To: line....Sure, one or two might show up once in a while because they guessed it but I have had the same address for almost a year now and I get 0 in my inbox while my Spam box gets /dev/nulled with the full confidence of nothing getting lost.
1. Buy yourself a domain and setup a default alias that you check...
2. For each website you goto that needs an email, give them their own.
yahoo.com gets yahoo@yourdomain.com
cheaptickets.com gets cheaptickets@yourdomain.com
monkeysex.com gets monkeysex@yourdomain.com
and so on. If one happens to sell/use your address, big deal,
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
calling for the brutal anal rape of Ralsky is disgusting, uncivilized, pointless, and, frankly, disturbing.
... but justified...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
The main problem with all these statements is that a spammer is saying them.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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
We block approximately a quarter million inbound spam messages a day, not counting the millions of messages that we don't ever see because the source IP address is on RBL+, PDL, etc.
For server operators, a major criteria for the effectiveness (cost-effective, etc) of any anti-spam approach is the amount of resources (bandwidth, CPU, disk, hours of human effort) are required.
By that standard, putting ADV on the subject line and telling users "just hit delete" is a failure.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
He says he creates jobs. He says he has given up the business. Ralsky says that he hasn't sent any email out for weeks. The main problem with all these statements is that a spammer is saying them.
No doubt he can legitimately "honestly" say everything you mention:
- "has given up the business" (transferred to someone else - he still likely controls it)
- "hasn't sent any email out for weeks" (oh, you meant SPAM email?)
- "creates jobs" Sure, hiring down-on-their-luck people that have a computer
I hope these two Romanian programmers take him for a ton of ca$h.
You cant be serious. You want this person jailed? While i admit spam is obnoxious, I wouldnt suggest it an offence to warrant incarceration.
You bet we want him in jail. Just wait until you see the size of the "Buy Alan Ralsky good lov'n" fund after he gets incarcerated.
Looks 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
If Rawlsky follows the rules, not only will he be paying more to send spam but filters will be infinitly more effective.
The rules force spammers to reveal themselves. While spammers could avoid the rules without legal reprocusions they could circumvent filters that depended on those rules for effectiveness. Now that they have to follow the rules, filters will do their job much better.
For example, I've never gotten a spam that followed the rule of putting ADV: in the subject.
Yes spam is legal so more spam will be sent. But filtering out legal spam (hey wow, a federal distinction finally) will be child's play.
Sure you'll still have to put up with foreign crap but spam is like litter. Every little bit helps.
I can't believe how many people fell for the spammers' lies that this law would be good for them. Now that it's show time, the lie is falling apart.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
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
He wouldn't have a job if companies wouldn't pay him for his services. I wouldn't download 300+ spam messages a day unless someone out there was clicking on them. All falls back on the un-educated computer user. I would imagine they would also have bad credit, problems keeping it up, and an overwhelming curiosity to see a naked Paris Hilton.
*DrugCheese rants*
I think he's doing a PR spin. This law is actually good news for spammers.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Mr. Ralsky is Ferengi and spam is dealt with under the Rules of Acquisition. When Ralsky receives the death penalty his remains will be sold...wait for it...in cans of spam
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
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
Bastiat, the ~1870s French economist, was probably not the first person to explain this fallacy, but he's the best-known. Sure, successful spammers create some jobs, but they also destroy other jobs, as well as wasting everybody's time and annoying everyone.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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
The e-mail adddress is valid
The message slipped thru the filters
And the e-mail owner reads their e-mail
It's Bayes poison. They're trying to screw up spam filters by feeding them junk to train on.
Okay, I'm biased, but I can't wait until we see him in prison.
I'm also biased. I'd like to see him strung up by the balls and used as a pinata.
I guess that's why I'm not a Judge in a criminal court. Oh well. Might be fun though...
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
>>Alan Ralsky, commonly known as the world's worst spammer.
Ralsky's not the world's worst. That dubious honor goes to Eddy Marin of Boca Raton FL, convicted coke dealer, and generally believed to be the main impetus behind the SLAPP suit against the "nanae nine." Google around for 'rokso marin'.
The reason for Ralsky's supposed contriteness in the NYT interview is not any sense of having seen the error of his ways; the reason he's running scared is the recent lawsuit against fellow spambag Scott Richter of Denver CO.
All three of them need to be dressed up in frilly lingerie and dropped into Bubba's cell along with a bucket of chilled champagne.
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!
Alan Ralsky dies and re-incorporates in Hell. Startled, Ralsky asks "What am I doing here? I never killed or raped anybody." A bureaucratic looking demon in wireframe glasses sat him down at at a battered desk overflowing with paper and said "Look you're not here permanently. You just have to atone for your sins and you can go...well..to the other place."
"Oh! But what did I do?" asked Ralsky.
"You've sent a multitude of unwanted emails. You couldn't take no for an answer several billion times over. Look at this desk. Do you think that is all paperwork?" Ralsky pulled nervously at his collar as he noticed that some of the papers did indeed promise the demon a larger penis or fantastic real estate deals. "So what do I have to do?"
"Well", said the demon getting up from his chair and leading Ralsky out of the room. "You have clean up the spam." He led Ralsky to a vast warehouse stacked floor to ceiling with herbal viagra ads and other such 'valuable' offers. "How am I supposed to clean this up?!?!" fretted Ralsky.
The demon grinned maliciously as he wadded up a breast enlargement ad and said "Turn around and drop your pants."
But he *DOES* create jobs. This statement is correct. Look around and you'll see how many companies are developing anti-spam programs.
The same way as viruses writers create jobs at antiviruses companies.
The same way as wars create jobs, and it's a billionaire industry. Yes, at the expenses of human lifes, but what's some measly human lifes compared to gross money ?
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
I hate spammers as much as the next person, but calling for the brutal anal rape of Ralsky is disgusting, uncivilized, pointless, and, frankly, disturbing.
Ok, if you want to opt for the simple rack, thumbscrews, and Chinese water torture, I'll go along with that.
At any rate, it's important for society for Ralsky to be made bereft of every penny of his ill-gotten gains.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Now, that we've got that out of the way, please, please, please, stop exaggerating the problem to the point of insanity in terms of cost.
Last time I checked, the world GDP is roughly $4 Quadrillion (a 16 digit number) dollars a year, I'm willing to go on record right now, and say that there is no way SPAM represents 1% of the world's economy.
According to http://www.bea.gov (gov't economic data collector), the 2002 GDP was $10 Trillion (roughly the 14 digit number you claimed Spam cost on a yearly basis).
I'm willing to bet that 25% of all Spam is recieved by some one in the U.S. That means that 25% of the US economy is represented via SPAM. If that is actually true, stopping SPAM would cause a world wide depression of a magnitude never before conceived of. You should never ever stop SPAM if it actually constituted that much of the US economy. The costs of SPAM are actually, money that is spent, and is recorded as a profit by some other company, or is money spent on an employee. It's only bad if the profit or employee are in another country.
It's very, very important that the money be spent. The entire economy works when the money moves around it. The economy doesn't work when money sits in big piles. If what you are saying is true, Intel, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, and millions of IT workers worldwide owe their corporate profits, and personal paychecks directly to SPAM. Pardon me if I call nonsense at this point.
I'm going to go on record saying, that's patently false, but it's the only logical conclusion of what you are saying. Thus, what your saying is absurd. I'm willing to admit what you are saying is true in it's basic premise, but the details are a bit irrational.
SPAM, might cost lots of money. However, a lot of that money is going to an ISP. It's not like it's lost money that is never found. It's not like the Spammers get that money. IT companies do, sysadmins do, all kinds of people get that money.
If spamming up and disappeared, you are claiming that a huge portion of the national GDP would evaporate, because 99% of all that money is just cycling around the system. Somebody in the US got paid that money. That's really, really good for the US economy. That money not going around is really, really, really bad.
It's surely not being embezzled by the Spammers. Spammers only get the money from the morons who pay them (either by paying referral fees for advertising, or from the people who actually purchase a product from them).
Yes SPAM represents an inefficiency in the economy, but, it can't be of the magnitude you are talking about. Most of the inefficiency is given to other corporations, or given to employees as money to be respent in the economy. All of which is good. About the only people who truely would lose out is, people who run small business with no employees (thus dealing with SPAM costs them money directly, and prevents them from generating value that contributed to the GDP, however the portion that goes to the ISP is actually a contribution to the GDP, and thus good for the economy).
Kirby
Not to mention spin-offs in the rope, gun, tar and feather industries. Why, I received an email from a Chinese maker of horse-whips the other day that was very tempting.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Reading this article on Alan Ralsky leads me to believe that he lives a "sheltered" life away from his victims. He has a criminal record and apparently has trouble recognizing right from wrong. What's worse, he doesn't see the logic behind the laws, filters and rights of others to keep spam from thier inboxes.
I think it would be great to have a well publicized and open debate between this spammer and one of his victims. Furthermore, it would be even more interesting to allow viewer call-ins and people in the audience to ask questions. To be fair we would also have to have a non-spammer who likes to receive spam on stage as a third opinion (that might be extremely difficult to obtain).
On second thought, it sounds like an episode of Jerry Springer...
*CRASH - the chair splinters into pieces as the victim hits Al Ralsky with it*
Seppuku: Your solution to my problems!
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Hardly.
I mean, some poor mass murderer is actually going to have to fuck Alan Ralsky!
Where's the justice in that? The guy's already serving life in prison for mass murder, shouldn't that be punishment enough?