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What You Get When You Buy a Spam CD
defender writes "Recently over here in The Netherlands, the spam versus anti-spam 'war' has hardened. More professional spamming coming from a handful of hard-core spammers utilizing bulletproof hosting in India, chained open proxies, more and more false whois information, etc. One of the more known anti-spam people has been sent one of the subjects of those spams: a CD with millions of e-mail addressess of 'individuals' and hundreds of thousands of 'businesses'... Rejo Zenger has done an analysis of such a CD, which is fuelling new debate as to why the recent EU anti-spam directive was weakened because of businesses complaining or indicating that spam wasn't a big issue for them."
Sadly the bad guys can DDOS the good guys, but the good guys can't (easily) DDOS the bad guys... at least not without either using the tactics of the bad guys, or getting caught... =(
perl -e'print$_{$_} for sort%_=`lynx -dump svanstrom.com/t`'
The /dev/random method is world reknown[ed]
You joke, but this algorithm was sufficient for human evolution. (Hmm, spam as sperm?)
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I can't stand spam and won't use it in business practices, but I don't thin kit should be any more illegal to sell a CD with aggregated e-mail address than it should be to sell a phone book CD with telephone numbers. There is value added in the indexing and providing of tools to manage so many addresses.
... organ" and patronize the spammer, then the spam will continue.
What should be illegal is selling generated, known to be false, addresses. This is basically false advertising.
What should also be illegal is bulk mailing to people who do not subscribe to a service. We need better mail servers that optionally require a "key" to receive mail, otherwise it goes straight to "File 13".
Sadly, all this bulk mail, even if "bounced" back to the sender, uses tons of bandwidth and is ultimately a tremendous waste of everyones time.
Unfortunately, all this Spam would stop is people STOPPED BUYING FROM THE SPAMMERS, but even if 0.0001% of recipients say "yeah, I DO want a larger
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Pointing out spammer's mistakes and helping them evolve/correct the problem.
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
As for the author's assertion that the "bulletproof" spam hosts are in India, I give you ... China, Brazil, most of the Pacific Rim, as well as clueless/malicious providers such as Level3, Wanadoo.fr, etc. I can count the number of spams I've received from Indian sources recently on one hand, while the Chinese/Brazilian spam numbers in the tens of thousands.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Bittorrents, for example, must have a seed site out there somewhere. This site can be taken out, and any other "offical" site that mirrors it. If the data is signed, then the offical sources of such signed data are vulnerable (if you need to revoke the key). The general problem of anonomizing traffic, while being able to trust the data on it at the same time, is Hard.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
The entire analysis boils down to one thing, which I call Rule #5, the King of All Rules: Spammers don't give a shit.
They don't care who you are, what you think, what you would or would not like to receive, what sex you are, if you are a minor or not, if the address they are sending to is valid or malformed, or if you are dead. All the lying that they do and the rationalizing of their behavior exists soley because -- lets chant together -- "Spammers don't give a shit"
The notion that a spammer should clean up a spamming CD to remove duplicate addresses or to remove role addresses at ISPs is simply ridiculous. Why spend the time? It will have zero impact on the number of sales that they make and -- chant it -- spammers don't give a shit.
So forget all the other rules. It is a waste of time to assign qualitive analysis to the behavior of sociopaths. They want money, and they don't give a shit about how they go about doing it. Once you realize that, you will see that all the other "Rules" for spammers are superfulous and stem from Rule #5.