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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."
I'm getting really tired of hearing spammers painted with this huge brush. When SCO gets DDOSed and they blame it on the open source community, everyone drops an angry turd.
When anti-spam pages get DDOSed suddenly it's ok to talk about how the spam community is this huge group of lawless, horrible people. Tying it into terrorism is icing on the cake.
I work in the hosting industry and I've met small to big time spammers, and they're all fucking idiots. Most of them have a basic understanding of the internet, but i would say the vast majority have no idea what a DDOS is and have never forumlated a crazy scheme to take down spamcop/spews. In reality, things like SPEWS are such an everyday occurance to people who spam it bugs them way less than legitimate users who get thier ips listed.
Spammers are dumbasses and annoying, but then again so are the people who post in news.admin.net-abuse.email. I really i could round up both groups and make them knife fight, it would solve so many of my problems.