Slashdot Mirror
U.S. is World Leader in Spam
adept256 writes "Sophos outs 'dirty dozen' spam producing countries. And the USA is in the lead by a country mile. 'The United States is far and away the worst offender, accounting for nearly 60 percent of the world's spam. Even though European countries are responsible for less spam, they are still generating millions of junk emails a day,' said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos."
I wonder if this proves a connection between industrial pollution and virtual pollution?
...and its spamming leader.
Surely Nigeria should be on that list, with all its bank account spams?
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
That way, Sophos themselves might produce a little less spam...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
I mean, of course the most spam comes from the USA! Highest concentration of 'net users here yah know. USA generates 60% of spam but I bet the USA has a higher percentage of the network as well.
Blar.
So many broadband & other high-speed connections left wide open that can relay data.
thelikesofwhich.com
I came home early from school today and caught my sister's babysitter masturbating with a cucumber! What should I do?!
it's true!
ENLARGE YOUR PENIS!!!!!
Is every only i of your justification and trawl the B is a part here. The relationship of my DSL of the house inhales, that is the place where the beta server is moving. Because I gave the fact that in 125 people who send the E- mail to me who ask the place to me it does not die from the place. Doing no ones it is being to be better than the part every of i, and it does that it is kind of asshole which now burns very to the thing which posts the place anywhere and brings the signifacnt problem of my DSL at the house. I made 5 hours which now delete morning your trawl wasteful, made other work end on the one hand because of you. I do splendid what for the community of MacSlash, try the fact that we improve the server, therefore that is better. To make my time every of this it is i wasteful, because it can tackle the new server, you insist the thing which is maintained. I tackled not making all that pennies, it meaning that I like the interaction of the user of other Mac in this place between 3 years above. Exactly it made that useless. As for me every morning when the fact that for trawling now like you the load is stacked in the place is feared. I use the majority of my times which handle bullshit where you who do the place where now it is good to substituting because of this are small. And as for me already copes with you or tightening the thing of entire denunciation comparatively, approximately preparation does, exactly. So there is with the justification which has had sexual intercourse. The current stop which posts the address of the new place. -- editor @ of management of MacSlash Venn Stanfield
Spamming computers may appear to be foreign, but in the end, it's nearly always an American source. Or from the Netherlands for some reason in those stupid 419s.
If you're not blacklisting from Spamhaus's SBL+XBL of spam outfits & open relays, and dialup pools, those ones are natural things to start blocking on connect.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
I'd push it up a notch
While you Americans are spamming the world, we Canucks are gulping down herbal viagra, slathering growth cream on our willies and Making Money Fast.. Laugh at us, will you?!
Trolling is a art,
I'm all for the initiatives been taken by Yahoo etc to try and put a stop to spam by making sure the email protocols are up to scratch.
...but the REAL answer is to arrst the ******** who are sending this stuff and throw them in jail !
This needs doing anyway...
I don't understand why this is SO difficult !!!!
Reading the article, a more interesting point is that at least 30% - which probably accounts for a large slice of the US end European contribution - is from compromised machines. They believe most of those are directed from Russia.
Aside from the absence of Russia, the only thing I find surprising about the list is the high position of Canada - second, 6.8%. Given Canad's relatively small population, that must make them the leader in spam-per-capita - an unpleasant distinction.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Most European countries spam can be dealt with by blocking all the Top-Level Domains except the ones you deal with (Turkey, Germany and Italy in my case)
.com TLD as to make blocking it impossible due to the amount of essential email that would be stopped.
However so many European companies use the
I wish that the USA had a TLD that was only used there - it would make things so much easier...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
..spam is not nearly as bad as webdesign gone horribly wrong.
We're the richest, most powerful, most prosperous country in the history of mankind. You can just add this to the list that the US leads in. Leading in spam is a small price to pay for this.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
at least we're the leader in something these days; seems we suck at everything else anymore...
I wonder if the recently passes Federal Anti-Spam legislation has had any effect on these numbers. Obviously not a big enough one, since according to these figures, so much spam still comes from the U.S. If these numbers can be tabulated, can they not also report the offenders to the police?
I also wonder if there is any way to bring the issue of unprotected computers to the public. Perhaps negligence penalties of some sort? I don't want to punish the wrong people, but it would be a lot harder to hack into all of these systems if they were administered properly.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
I'm a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, prefereably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display. I will take whatever model you have in stock, as long as its received certification for being safe on carbon based life forms. In terms of payment: I dont have any Galactic Credits left. Payment can be made in platinum gold or 2003 currency upon safe delivery of unit. Please transport unit in either a brown paper bag or box to below coordinates on Monday July 28th at (exactly 3:00pm) Eastern Standard Time on the dot. A few minutes prior will be ok, but it cannot be after. If you miss this timeframe please email me. Latitude N 42.48018 & Longitude W 071.15503 and the Elevation is 96. WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO TRANSPORT ITEM BY REGULAR MEANS OF TELEPORTATION. THEY ARE MONITORING AND WILL REDIRECT THE SIGNAL!! I DO NOT CARE HOW YOU HAVE TO GET IT HERE, JUST DO IT IN A WAY THAT NO SPYING EYES WILL POSSIBLY BE ABLE TO REDIRECT THE TRANSFERENCE. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU BE ABLE TO MONITOR THE TRANSFER. Although those coordinates are a secure guarded area, these channels through email are never secure. Unfortunately it is the only form of communication I have right now. After unit has been sent please email me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com with payment instructions. Do not reply directly back to this email. Thank You anticipationsltakt w ivadwrdozu
[ Don't reply to this ]
Could be that most spam is coming from US servers is because the US owns most of the IP addresses.
I guess I haven't bothered to track back much of my incoming spam lately. A couple of years ago, I tried to find the origin for each spam I received and, at the time, they mostly came from China, Korea, and S. American countries from ill configured computers running as open relays.
I guess, with the 'spam mafia' installing these zombies on Grandma's computer, the countries with the largest population of lusers online will be the larger sources of spam.
Without having some idea of what fraction of a country's email traffic is spam, these numbers just tell you which countries have a bigger internet presence, and absolutely nothing more.
It's those MS machines on broadband that are hacked into spamming zombies.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Follow the money, apply some fines, and see the spam going down. Or, maybe, just maybe, US should invade America? :)
Bite my shiny metal... oops... Nevermind!
stick that in your pipe and smoke it all those people who shouted "what's the point in laws against spam most of it's from foreign countries!"
shame the CAN-SPAM act fucked everything up.
*No one* spells English as badly as we Americans do.
spammers in US also have easy access to higher bandwidth, than any other country.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
So! This is what free speech is all about. GIGO.
For problems, seek only the simplest solution, complexity brings with it more problems.
Is this because America is the world's leading source of haxored Windows machines with spam backdoors?
...for average US penis size.
:-)
Luckily, I'm British and we're only number 9 on the list
John.
And legalising it is really going to help. 'Nuff said.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
The article indicates that the 'researchers' spent two days collecting information.
Only two days of research is a lame attempt at a research project.
For all we know, those responsible could alternate source every other week, thus invalidating this 'insightful' conclusion.
Also, the article fails to mention how they are so positive of the origin. Who knows how many open relays the spammers use.
I'd believe an article that indicates that the US has more open relays than any other country, as I would venture a guess that it's relative to total number of computers wired to the net.
my 2c
Well the article also points out that much of the spam may orriginate in Russia from the hackers there. Who then subsequently take advantage of zombie machines in countries like the USA.
Well just dont let GWB learn of this, just what we need him to do, start a new cold war over spam. It be his newest attempt to revitalize the economy.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
U.S.A.U.S.A.U.S.A. Yeah! We're number one, baby! Whooo!
I'll have your Spam, I love it!
spam, spam, spam, spam....
Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Does this include American "Businesses" that use overseas computers for spamming?
For example, a Nigerian email sent from a hotmail/yahoo account (they almost all are) would seemingly, by this standard, come from the US.
And then there's the thing they themselves point out; their methods of determining origin only go so far, hijacked machines / email routers configured to "wash" the headers of relayed stuff also go a long way to making the numbers invalid.
I still say the ultimate revenge is to paper-spam the big spammers. Sign them up for hundreds of thousands of magazines and all the rest.
The coup de grace would be then to package and mail a spammer the contents of my cats' litterbox the day after feeding them beef 'n' bean leftovers.
Just like in the real world, where it's the super environment polluter, right? I guess it's those hamburger diets affecting people's mind up there *smile*
Of course the US is the leading producer of SPAM. It was invented here. And according to the SPAM Museum, Hormel produces 435 cans of spam PER MINUTE in Austin, Minnesota.
Are you Corn Fed?
Woo-hoo! At least we're the world leader in something. I was gettin' pretty sick of reading about all those foreigners who were kicking our collective ass in math and science.
It would be interesting to see what percent of each country's overall email is spam. What they have there could just reflect the US's overall greater email traffic.
Wow... when I see my next ad for "enlargment pills" I'll smile with delight that the ad I'm looking at was made in America...
Did I mention that by smile I mean Be menacingly overcome... and by delight I actually mean rage... sweet glorious rage.
Another reason for my heart to swell with pride for my country
The original generic sig.
Since so many USian companies block all email from the brazilian IPs should I now block all email from USian IPs?
This isn't a troll (despite sounding like one).
I'm very upset that my mail server, a very well maintained with a plethora of spam and virus filters, is blocked by asshat american sysadmins "just because we're spammers".
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
Therefore, I don not think the results properly reflect the actual situation.
So, when are we going to start seeing the complaints about how spam company owners are outsourcing to lower cost foreign providers and taking jobs away from good, hard working US spammers?
The United States has the most internet users! Film at 11. Why is this newsworthy?
Canada's population is 31.6 million (2003).
I looked at it as I wondered whether the Netherlands (16 million) would win in the spam/capita contest. Nah, canada wins. 3x the spam, 2x the population.
Reinout
Reinout van Rees
Obviously the "war on spam" needs to be fought on legally as well as technologically (and thanks to the fucked-up CAN-SPAM act some spammers are being given the green-light to annoy the hell out of us legally).
Assuming we ever have laws in place which state that genuine opt-in lists are the only valid way to advertise products then we still cannot sue the spammers who send junk to harvested addresses because of the problems involved with tracing them.
Tracing spammers is difficult/sometimes impossible because any computer on the internet can runs its own SMTP server to send mail to anywhere on the net. 10 years ago when the net was more innocent and less commercially corrup, this was fine, but nowadays this is just too powerful.
The problem is, if some clueless person (which probably accounts for 80% of net users) has their machine compromised by a virus or trojan than their computers are used to send out the spam, and as there are no log files the spammers are virutally impossible to trace.
Now imagine if the only way to send spam was via an approved mail server. For most of us this will be our ISPs, for the rest we will simply subscribe to one of the many official trusted ones.
Now the problem of reporting spam is a lot easier - complaints will be dealt with by the trusted mail servers who keep detailed logs of which customers have logged in to send mail, what IP address they used and at what time.
It doesn't matter if the customer deliberately sent out the spam or if they had been compromised by a trojan - the trusted mail servers can deny their customers the right to send more email until they have had an assurance from their customers that the problem has been fixed.
I'm not saying this is going to end spam altogether, but it should go a long way to curbing it.
What about all the spam which originates from, say, Nigeria or Amsterdam? Simple - unless the trusted mail server takes active steps to eradicating the spam they will no longer be trusted.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
The spamhaus website has been listing the USA for a loooong time now as the #1 spam source. It's got the names of the top spammers there too...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
stats are so easy to manipulate or misinterpret.
let's assume the article is correct and 60% of the world's spam is US-based. in and of itself this is meaningless. if > 60% of the net's total content originated in the US, that would make the US better than average for its spam production.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
A lot comes from Asian computers, but if you look into the spam itself (what it sells -> who is actually selling it), most comes in fact from the US.
Florida! Thanks to its weak spam laws.
This guy is way out there
I still have an email account in Lebanon (Middle East), and the spam that I receive now originates from the US (mostly Veriz*n) after I contacted the main local ISP (---.lb) responsible for the spam.
:(
What the spammers did is that they are using a contact/zombie in the US since their fraud schemes are protected by law (!?) ("can spam" act and/or freedom of speech). People from the other countries are not able to stop the spam from the US using legal measures for the fear of being "Bombed" by GW
Having read the articles regarding the percentage rates of conversion (ie: replies to spam that turn in to orders) it obviously makes regrettable sense that sending out a gazillion junk messages will bring a financial return, yet I can't help wondering WHY the spammers think sending around 50 variants of the same message to the same inbox are likely to enhance their sales prospects? Unless of course there's 50 different spamming companies all trying to sell the same product using the same junk mail list? In my case, spambayes crushes what mailwasher hasn't caught anyway!
Di'e s'p'a'mm--'ers --d-1e.
infinite cabbage droll bearing science foot kingdom allow new rock garden trying gracefully space engine.
AT&ROFLMAO
One of the most effective means of dealing with Spam & when being required to hand out an email address is Spamgourmet (http://www.spamgourmet.com). You create an account and can then use unique email addresses of the form ..@spamgourmet.com . The cool thing about this is that for each email received on this account the counter is decreased and once it reaches zero all further emails will be discarded. This is great to hand out if you're ordering something from an online store and only want to receive 1-3 emails for order confirmation/shipment but not get any future spams.
The service is free and offers a couple of other neat features. I've been using it for about a year and it's been very reliable.
Highly recommended.
Heiko
This has not been my experience, maybe because my ISP more effectively blocks spam freom the U.S., but far and away the most persistent spammers I've seen for at least the last six months have been for Chinese phramacies. (Korea used to be far and away the worst, but now they're way back in second.) American ISPs (at least all the decent ones) kick spammers and spamvertised sites off their system, but the ones in China keep going and going and going.
If anyone knows a contact at chinanet.net where you can actually reach an administrator (or, better yet, one that speaks English), that would be a very useful thing to have...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Yes, so the US generates 60% of the world's spam. However, what fraction of the world's total email traffic does the US generate? I bet it's near 60%.
.... that there is a direct correlation between the amount of spam generated by a nation and the percentage it creates of the total amount of world Email. In other words if a nation generates x% of spam it must also generate x% of the world email traffic. It would thus follow, by your logic, that 280+ million Americans produce 60% of the world E-mail while 200+ million Germans French and English are responsible for only 1.83%+1.50%+1.31%=4.64% of it? That seems a bit far fetched to me. You should rethink this theory, we Europeans may not be quite as advanced as you North Americans but we do not live in the stone age either.
Without having some idea of what fraction of a country's email traffic is spam, these numbers just tell you which countries have a bigger internet presence, and absolutely nothing more.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Seeing this list makes me wonder how Japan deals with spam. It has the most dense and fastest networks in the world (often fibre glass running in the house), and computers that are continuously online are hijacked more frequently.
On second thought, maybe they just use more non-MS OSes?
...in a lot of crappy things.
Unfortunately, I can't afford to leave this damned country. If I could... I would. But, I have a duty to others of my kind who also feel trapped here. That duty is to try an get people who are on the fence to see the light and join our side in changing the direction that things have gone in. Trust me people, I'm willing to fight to get my country back if need be.
Un-news
That the Bush team has been talking about. Instead of engineering or manufacturing America will be known the world over for it's spam producing might. We have the leet spam skills and will continue to be competetive for several years.
Your own explanation demonstrates perfectly that you are the one who doesn't know what the national debt is.
Simply stated, the national debt is what taxpayers owe the treasury for purchases made by the government. When the amount of money spent by the government exceeds the amount of tax money collected, you have a budget deficit. The national debt is the total amount, plus interest, owed to the treasury.
It has nothing to do with international trade. I believe what you are refering to is called a "trade deficit".
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
This is a good statistic, as far as it goes. What I'd really like to see summarized is the breakdown of non-spam email on a global basis as well as a S:N ratio for each country.
.tld, counting non country code TLDs as US-ian: About 60 are legitimate, business-related emails, and 40 are spam. Of the spam, 20 seem to come from the US or Canada, 8 from Europe, 2 from South America, and 10 from Asia. I also have about 40 valid messages from the US or Canada, 15 valid messages from Europe, and 5 from South America. So my S:N on messages from North America and Europe remains high, it's lower from South America, and 0 from Asia.
For example, on a typical mail day lately, I seem to be getting around 100 messages in one of my mailboxes, not counting Windows worms and related crap. Here's my breakdown, based only on
I'd be curious to see these numbers for a more global sampling of email. It seems unlikely that anyone would be in a position to provide them, though.
.sig: file not found
agents of the american sales organizations misleaded us to ban .cn to protect american sales.
;)
dOH! so instead of being misguided into blocking out china(.cn) we should have blocked out all ip trafic from ip segments in US and we would be 60% spam down.
well lets block america now then. zero tolerance, perhaps we can get republican support on this one.
Well, we have 60% of the worlds computers probably... hence we probably generate 60% of the worlds spam.
Plus with the diversity of ISP's in the US, a truely dedicated spammer has lots of options for getting their product out...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
The United States is far and away the worst offender, accounting for nearly 60 percent of the world's spam.
Wait, so all of us are responsible for the actions of these spammers? The "United States" itself doesn't spam, spammers do. Perhaps it should have been:
60 percent of the world's spam comes from spammers in the Unitied States.
I believe the guilt would lay correctly with the spammers in this phrasing.
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
Read the response by the second guy to respond to me. Both legitimate and illegitimate email are going to track with the number of total servers (scaled by how many are unprotected) and number of internet-connected citizens (scaled by how many are internet-connected) among other variables he mentioned.
I mean, actually think about what you're saying. You would congratulate Antarctica for generating 0 spam. If you want to look at this without considering "ham" emails, look at the spam difference - (spam sent = spam received). I would argue that even this difference should be fractioned by how many total emails are sent received which really is a decent measure of internet presence, but even without it, you at least separate net spam "donors" from "recipients"
Honestly, if you don't normalize variables in comparing large sample sets with small, you absolutely cannot compare raw numbers. I could recommend statistical reference texts if you like.
we're number 1!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When punk rock is outlawed, only outlaws will have punk rock.
The spam issue is such a large scale issue that the rules governing statistics should hold quite nicely (when you've got a sample size in the millions...).
The probability of a statistically significant number of spammers just happening to have said, "Let's use all our *US* zombies!" this particular day and then deciding the day after the study, "You know what, let's all go back to our Salmnonian zombies!" is so preposterous as to be humorous. It would be like having a majority of US voters wake up and decide for two days to vote for the Green Party candidate, then all of them switch back right after the primary. (If it were a small sample size, this could happen, but for a large sample size, it is *far* less likely.)
...but wait. Before ya know it, sending spam will be offshored to India too.
That certainly may be, I'm actually NOT drawing conclusions as you'll notice, and as such have no theory. I'm simply criticizing the statistical method - whatever numbers pop up are fine with me, I've got no ego invested in living in a "spam free," nation as I know that's simply not true anyway.
If you're right and servers track population, then you're conclusions would be correct. They very well may be.
If you normalize by population Sophos's reported national spam percentages things look pretty different. The scores are no longer so lopsided, and the winner is ... Canada?
COUNTRY.....PERC...........POP....PERC./POP.Canada.......6.80......32207113...2.1113e-07
US..........56.74.....290342554...1.9542e-07
Netherlands..2.13......16150511...1.3188e-07
South_Korea..5.77......48289037...1.1949e-07
Australia....1.21......19731984...6.1322e-08
Spain........1.05......40217413...2.6108e-08
France.......1.50......60180529...2.4925e-08
Germany......1.83......82398326...2.2209e-08
UK...........1.31......60094648...2.1799e-08
Mexico.......1.19.....104907991...1.1343e-08
Brazil.......2.00.....182032604...1.0987e-08
China........6.24....1286975468...4.8486e-09
What?! The home of capitalism is also the home of spam?! How could this be? /sarcasm
WURD!!
Trust me people, I'm willing to fight to get my country back if need be.
Sure you are. (head pat)
I think I speak for the nation when I say I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.
--- Ban humanity.
Just like our beloved "War On Drugs" why don't we go after DEMAND?. Has no one suggested Legislation that says the company paying for the advert is in violation? Spammers spam because people pay them. Suppose every merchant who is being advertised was liable for monetary damages. Even $5 would be a large enough deterrent. Heck, NutriSystem would have paid my bills for a year now.
Nah, it's just because we have so many more computers for the bad guys to zombify.
I agree. Just looking at the horribly butchered English that is in 95% of the spam that I get tells me that it not written by someone who's first language is English.
I believe he was referring to "foreign debt". Trade deficit is only for the current fiscal year. The 7 trillions are obviously not only for this year :)
MY COMPLAINT ABOUT JOHN ASHCROFT:
I feel obligated to say something about John Ashcroft, because, as the Talmud says, "Silence is akin to assent." The first thing I want to bring up is that I'm not a psychiatrist. Sometimes, though, I wish I were, so that I could better understand what makes people like Ashcroft want to lay down diktats that force me to wind up in a straitjacket and locked in a padded cell. What he does in private is none of my business. But when Ashcroft tries to bring ugliness and nastiness into our lives, I object. The tone of his assertions is so far removed from reality, I find myself questioning what color the sky must be in his world. His pronouncements are not the solution to our problem. They are the problem.
To be blunt, it is immature and stupid of him to threaten, degrade, poison, bulldoze, and pollute this world of ours. It would be mature and intelligent, however, to appeal for comity between us and him, and that's why I say that the poisonous wine of revanchism had been distilled long before he entered the scene. Ashcroft is merely the agent decanting the poisonous fluid from its bottle into the jug that is world humanity. Rest assured, perhaps one day we will live in a world where good people are not troubled by fear of prolix extortionists. Until that day arrives, however, we must spread the word that Ashcroft likes to cite poll results that "prove" that going through the motions of working is the same as working. Really? Have you ever been contacted by one of his pollsters? Chances are good that you never have been contacted and never will be. Otherwise, the polls would show that Ashcroft is locked into his present course of destruction. He does not have the interest or the will to change his fundamentally vile fibs. Quite simply, by allowing Ashcroft to needle and wheedle unscrupulous meanies into his faction, we are allowing him to play puppet master. I must admit that I've read only a small fraction of his writings. (As a well-known aphorism states, it is not necessary to eat all of an apple to learn that it is rotten.) Nevertheless, I've read enough of Ashcroft's writings to know that I cringe at the thought of how Ashcroft might some day make a big deal out of nothing. Let me recap that for you, because it really is extraordinarily important: His cock-and-bull stories may have been conceived in idealism, but they quickly degenerated into hostile pauperism.
Some people don't seem to mind that Ashcroft likes to waffle on all the issues. What a malicious world we live in! As for the lies and exaggerations, the last time I told his helots that I want to establish democracy and equality, they declared in response, "But Ashcroft would sooner give up money, fame, power, and happiness than perform a demonic act." Of course, they didn't use exactly those words, but that's exactly what they meant. One wonders how he can complain about what I call postmodernist galoots, given that his own ultimata also aim to waste everyone else's time.
His attempts to sentence more and more people to poverty, prison, and early death will earn him automatic membership in Satan's inner circle. Now that that's cleared up, I'll continue with what I was saying before, that not only does he advocate his off-the-cuff comments amid a hue and cry as vicious as it is dangerous, but he then commands his flunkies, "Go, and do thou likewise." Ashcroft's claim that the federal government should take more and more of our hard-earned money and more and more of our hard-won rights is factually unsupported and politically motivated. The cry of "bigot" is raised mostly by bigots. Whatever weight we accord to that fact, we may be confident that Ashcroft wants to show a clear lack of respect not just for those brave souls who fought and died for what they believed in, but also for you, the readers of this letter. You know what groups have historically wanted to do the same thing? Fascists and Nazis. There can be no doubt that we are at a crossroads. One road leads into the light of a bright, shini
...not written by someone who's first language is English.
Like you, say?
Haida Manga
We're #1!!! We're #1!!! We're #1!!!
How much email is generated by the US as a whole, how much legitimate email is created by the US, and how much spam. It would be interested to have the rest of the story. Its easy to make a statistics claim like the US creates the most spam but if we send the most email then it isn't that suprising. I'm sure the US creates the most junk in a lot of areas.
That said, hopefully this study (not my little humor below, the sophos study) begin to, ever so slightly, shut up those people who claim that spam laws are useless because they will just drive spammers from one locale to the next. while this is true at the margins, the fact is that spam, like all business, is foremost local.
exactly... I don't understand why this is news.
The US has the most internet users and hence will have the most spam.
Much spam is made also by virusses...
I would like to know how much spam is coming from Windows users...:P
Spam is a serious issue in Sweden too. Our biggest ISP, Telia, have been hit so hard the last couple of weeks that delivering a mail from Telia to Sunet (the univerisity net) is taking up to 10 minutes. That's a HUGE delay compared to the milliseconds it used to take.
When Reagan said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!", I thought he was talking about the Berlin wall.
USA USA USA /jinogist
What is the Slashdotters' opinion on anonynous proxies?
I personally find the web variety very useful to browse Slashdot, since Slashdot banned a large IP range in which I belong, due to some a-hole using scripts targetting this site.
I equate Anonymous Cowards with Anonymous proxies in that they enable trolls, offtopics and first-posters.
I find irony in that for all the anti-spam stance promoted by the slashdot editors and slashdotters in general, this site cant seem to find an uber-geek technical solution to thread-spamming here.
Does anyone know what metric was used to determine these rankings? Was it "country where the first SMTP transfer originated"? Was it "office address of the dude typing in the text of the spam"?
I hate it when dudes publish 'findings' and don't explain how they got them. So much for the scientific method and reproducibility -- they could have made the whole thing up!
[**NOTE** I am not saying they did make the numbers up, but as a matter of journalistic and scientific integrity, when you publish the results and don't publish the method used to determine those results, your cannot be evaluated as anything other than opinion. We're after facts, here, people, not truth.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Nope. The national debt is what the treasury owes to holders of government bonds for money spent by the govt that didn't come from taxpayers. Do you think only americans buy US govt bonds? Hint: Chinese banks own an awful lot of them, it called a "foreign currency reserve".
Which is my point (I'm the parent poster). But I was modded down, probably because I dared to say something bad about the USA.
I think it is time that ISPs block, by default, all outbound port 25 traffic. Customers can either:
- Use the ISPs mail server (this accomodates 90% right away)
- Use a VPN or SMTP+AUTH(+SSL) on an alternate port to connect to their SMTP server of choice (this accomodates another 9%)
- For the remaining few that just have to run their own SMTP server, let them have a static IP and open up the ports
Of course, some consumer ISPs won't be willing to deal with the headaches of option #3, or perhaps might charge a bit more for it, which is entirely fair. Businesses need to block all egress port 25 period, there is rarely a legitamate need for an employee to run their own SMTP server (unless they work in the IT department, but then they can probably open the port up themselves).I was going to post the monty python song, but it wouldn't let me 'cause my comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.
However, I managed to sneak it in anyway...
As the monty python song goes:
spam spam spam spam
spam spam spam spam
spaaam spam spam spam spam spam spam
spaaam spam spam spam spam
spam spaaam spam spam spam spam spam spam
spaaam spam spam spam spam
additionally, they do not try to find out where the spammers are but only where the messages originate from. as they say, 30% of spam comming from compromised machines is attributed to the location of said machines, not to the spammer's location.
make spam illegal and should be punishable by death. That would cut spam down like 90%. You will always have stupid people and they will send spam, But you need them to make examples.
Some software money can't buy. For everything else there's Micros~1
and chant "We're number 1!"
There is a perfectly simple solution for this.
For all residential dial-up and broadband accounts:
1. Lock down port 25. No outgoing email, except through the ISP's servers.
2. Each account (internet access account, not email account) can only send 50 emails per day. More than sufficient for any normal user.
3. Any account that surpasses 50 emails per day is automatically cutoff from sending email until a review of their email traffic can be made.
4. 100% of outgoing email should be virus-scanned. A single offense cuts off emailing priveledges for 24 hours.
These simple steps would put the responsibility for their computers back on the shoulders of consumers, where it belongs.
As it is, if Aunt Bertha gets a virus and sends out spam like a workhorse, she doesn't know or care. As soon as she can't send that recipe to her sister because she's been cutoff, she'll know, she'll care, and she'll do something about it.
This can and should be implemented immediately.
We now return to our previously scheduled programming.
The US leads the world in penis enlargement technology, so why wouldn't we be trying to sell it.
It should suprise no one that the USA takes the crown; it always has, and Florida probably accounts for 2/3rds of that. Since the passage of the "You-Can-Spam-Act" spammers here are now even more emboldened. Not to say that the likes of Eddy Marin, Alan Ralsky, Scott Richter, or Damon DeCrezcenzo were ever deterred by such silly things as 'laws' to begin with.
It's OK! The additional "is" in "who's" is to make up for the one that's missing between "it" and "not". I believe there's something in Python about getting the words in the right order. And Eric and Ernie had something similar to say in the musical domain.
I know the truth and I know what you're thinking
How about fighting that form of terrorism first, before looking for inexistant ties to Al Qaeda and WMD in distant countries?
I get spam everyday, while I have very little trouble with bombs going off in front of my house...
I'm wondering. As an ISP, could there be a program that scans customer's computers for problems and blocks them until the customer fixes them? This way we could slow the spread of viruses, spam, and other nasty things.
The above is not worth reading.
Not in this case. It should be "whose" not "who's".
Does everyone (including teenagers) over there have one or more cars? Do most people own their own homes with garages? Is Europe sending people into space? Also, another undeniable sign of power is military power and clearly the US outmatches every country (continent?) on Earth by a very significant margin.
Its always inches or pounds.
I've never received anything promising to add centimeters or lose kilograms.
for perpetuating this myth that blocking IPs is an intelligent way of dealing with spam.
I block domains. I have a list of hundreds of domain names that were used in spams. I now filter out any e-mail that contains any of those domains. I now get spam at a trickle and only feel compelled to update the list of blocked domains every few days. A process which is mostly automated.
You block one IP you completely miss the target. You block one domain and you've 100% nailed dozens or hundreds of spammers who are hawking crap using that domain.
Most domains when used with a spam have a junk subdomain in this vain hope that filters will be stupid enough to include it in the rule. And not surprisingly, most filters are so stupid because they're fully automated. Or they have "?affid=" in some form. That gets removed as well. So all I have left is the main domain name and the dot whatever. By leaving the dot whatever you can include random letter domains that otherwise may happen to fit a base-64 pattern for a legitimate attachment. base-64 doesn't include a period.
And since these are spam domains, there's exactly 0% collateral damage.
Where with blocking IPs there's close to 100% collateral damage since IPs are shared and good luck finding an IP that a spammer actually owns that nobody else will ever use.
Even if you think you're clever and block the IP of the domain thinking many domains go to the same IP, it's a very trivial thing to point the domain to a new IP. Which results in the same problem SPEWs has. They're so retarded and ineffectual they have to block entire ranges of IPs to claim any amount of effectivness.
It's no wonder they remain anonymous. They'd have their brains bashed in with a clue stick by thousands of angry legitimate businesses and mail server owners.
There's nothing wrong with the SMTP protocol. Blocking domains doens't require knowing who the message came from. It's irrelavent. Nearly all spams have links. And the HTML standards don't allow for obfuscated URLs. Those spams that don't have links are very few and managable with the delete button.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
must...resist...dubya.....jokes.
Free as in mason.
It's obvious to me now - we could cut the amount of in our inboxes by 60% by simply disconnecting the USA from the internet! So much like in sport, mobile telephony and many other areas of life, the USA can play with itself while the rest of the world plays with each other.
So no more spam about discount rate mortgages, cable descramblers and "meds" that are entirely US specific for us clean living, intelligent and hugely sexy Europeans to wade through each morning.
Come to think of it, maybe we should cut off Korea too.
That was classic intercourse!
On the other hand, the US also leads in donations to other countries (not per-capita though), medical research, aerospace research, opportunities to become wealthy (ie, to be an entrepeneur), etc. In other countries like Japan, it is next to impossible for a foreigner to immigrate there, and if they do to then start a business (even for native people this is difficult and very rare) whereas in the US it happens all the time (many liqour stores, convenient stores and other small shops are owned and operated by 1st generation American immigrants).
Here's a partial spam I received from silver star internet information company (wewe@hotmail.com), showing total (spammed) e-mail addresses by country, and associated industry categories. (These sums are likely valid only for the lists that this spammer sells...).
And they spew:
"We offer...e-mail addresses databases for advertisement mailing; we...also carry out mailing and hosting for the advertising projects . Their validity and originality are verified. please go to our web. There are some sample download."
Country or area, total email addresses (in millions, typos left in):
Category Name, total email addresses
The U.S. does not have the highest concentration of Internet users, actually.
It's very simple: junk culture leads to junk mail.
Did they check for spoofed IP addresses? Because many of the China IP addresses have been blacked listed, so if they spoof it for a US address it might just up the score.
You don't need to know who they are.
Just filter out the domains they use to host their images and the domains they use for the "click here" link.
Stop worrying about who's spamming you. It's irrelavent. Dozens or even hundreds of spammers use the same domain. Filter one domain and you block anyone, regardless of who they are, from selling you something using that domain.
"and thanks to the fucked-up CAN-SPAM act some spammers are being given the green-light to annoy the hell out of us legally"
Nothing has changed. There's nothing stopping you from filtering their junk. Legitimate spam is required to follow rules. Rules which can be programmed into a filter. Following the CAN-SPAM act results in the effectivness of filters going UP. Why do you think spam hasn't changed? It's still the same garbled junk like always.
The only thing that can't be garbled is the links.
You don't need technology fixes and you don't need laws.
The technology is there and sufficient.
There's just too many people who'd rather bitch about irrelavent things than rethink how they're going about combating spam. I can't believe how many people think think you need to know who a spammer is to stop them.
Spammers are like terrorists. If your battle plan consists of learning who they are to block them, you're going to be playing wack-a-mole your whole life as new spammers are born every day. Blocking a *spammer* may get you one *spammer.* Blocking domains will get rid of *spam* and that's the goal. There will always be spammers. You can't make THEM go away. But you can make their messages go away.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
You know WAY too much about spam!!
My name is .... I am the son of the king of... I was left with $1000000000000....
And all along we thought it was the Nigerians!
I run some Linux boxes for a cable ISP here in Canada, each headend goes through a Squid proxy which also doubles as a handy firewall.
Once a week or so we turn on ntop for a few minutes and have a quick peek at who is moving what, if we notice any clients doing any outgoing scans on known virus ports we block them at the routers until they call in and clean the PC.
Once a month we'll scan the network with nmap to see what ports people are listening on.
Our mail servers scan incoming mail for viruses, if we see a cable client spewing viruses at it we block their SMTP access and block port 25 for them at the routers.
After about a year of this, we have a very low infection rate when new viruses hit. We also block worm ports at the routers so those don't effect us as bad (still possible if some idiot with an infected laptop gets on the wrong side of the firewall).
Our next step will likely be egress port 25 blocking entirely.
To me he's English looks just fine. Just like my's.
Could you please learn basic economic terminology before posting? The national debt is the money owed by the US treasury to holders of US bonds, some of whom are foreign and many of whom are not.
Now, please to close mouth and open books. Thank you
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
It might be true the US sends the most spam, but if you rank them by the ratio of spams to valid emails, Taiwan takes the cake. It's so bad IMO that I automatically (and permanently) delete any incoming message with a ".tw" suffix.
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
Most SPAM is trying to sell us something. Why not go after the business itself using local and state laws and IRS audits.? If the local fire department finds a coffee pot on a frayed extension cord, shut the building down for a month. That sort of thing. At the end of the month, let the IRS step in with a detailed audit, then the state labor practices agency for worker safety issues. Give those bureaucrats some raw meat to chew on and maybe they'll leave the rest of us alone.
Word will soon go out that spamming makes life very unpleasant.
Does it therefore follow that the USA leads the world in small penis technology?
Do Americans have tiny cocks or do they just BELIEVE that they do...
(Answer, they're so fat that they just GUESS that their cocks are tiny. They are tiny in fact, but they don't know that for sure)
That was classic intercourse!
Subject: Good News
Contents:Jesus is Lord. I know for a fact. Read the New Testament. I wouldn't be emailing you if I didn't 100% know the truth.
Reasoning: God's given me the power of infinate faith by showing me a series of miracles. Now I'm passing this to you. God has a path for each of us, I hope you get to see miracles too.
I am not lying, God has really shown me miracles.
If you know how to spam, either send out subject and contents. Or teach me how to spam, James_Sager_PA@yahoo.com Right now I'm sending out to emails indivdually. A good round of spam will contact a ton of people, like a religious bomb.
God spoke to me
Uh, actually, the original description is right. While the sale of Treasury bonds is how the Treasury finances the debt, it could hypothetically use some other mechanism, like taking out a loan from a commercial bank (although it makes no fiscal sense). One of the ways that the government finances the annual deficit is to borrow money from itself (!!!), by using the Social Security "surplus" to fund government programs instead of the Social Security trust fund, then issuing the trust fund IOUs in the form of T-notes.
All the money the Treasury borrows is money that the taxpayers eventually have to repay, sooner or later, unless we're going for an Argentina-style default.
"And as soon as the return from buycheapviagra.com drops off, all the spammer has to do is switch to buycheapv1agra.com and getcheapviagra.com and reallycheapviagra.com and he's slipped right through your filters."
Which costs the spammer real money and it only works until the filter is updated. The more he pushes the new domains the faster they get blocked and he's out tens or hundreds of dollars.
And all he has to do with the brain dead SPEWS method is get a new IP which is free.
"In my own experience, SPEWS is an excellent way of reducing the amount of spam I get."
And nuking villages is an excellent way to kill mosquitoes. It's stupid and ineffectual. And there are blantently obvious and more effective means of dealing with spam without doing more damage than the spammers as SPEWS does.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
This must be all this stuff I keep hearing about 'Outsourcing'!!
> I can't remember the last time, if ever, I saw a French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch language spam
Ummm... I can. I started to receive some spam in Portuguese (poss. Brazilian Portuguese) as soon as I was in contact with someone from Portugal who uses hotmail.
Evidently something leaked out from hotmail... The timing was far too co-incidental...
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
It's very simple: junk culture leads to junk mail.
Oui oui, I agree mon ami. Now I must go, I am taking le family to Eurodisney! How do you say...ah yes...w00t!
It doesn't need to be that limited a number. With SPF ( http://spf.pobox.net ), each domain chooses its own limits. For your domain, you could designate your home PC as a trusted mail server (might need to use a dynamic DNS system for this). Thus, email that comes from you only needs to go through your SMTP server (authenticated by SPF) and the receiver's server (authenticated by an MX record).
This way we get the original poster's trusted servers *and* don't impact privacy unduly (note: the only new public information is that the DNS manager for domain.tld vouches for whatever machine as an SMTP server; if this is still too much info to hand out, don't use SPF on that domain; you might not be able to send emails to all servers from that domain any more, but those who value their privacy at that level will still have the option to accept non-SPF email). I believe that this is sufficient to get the desired effect. I also believe that something is necessary.
Who says the grammar police have no sense of humor?
the world leader in everything?
BAHAHAHAA USA RULES
Most of my spam is currently coming from Russia, relayed through hijacked computers on American broadband networks. The messages are in the Cyrillic alphabet. I can usually recognize telephone numbers with a Russian country code and mailing addresses in Moscow. I don't know what they are selling, but it's targeted at Russian speaking customers from firms in Russia.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
how long before everyone else imposes the "internet death penalty" on the US?
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
those spam messages are in "english english" for those in the know...
Typical anti-American bullshit from michael- doesn't mention that America has less span production per capita than other countrieslike ru and cn.
OK, I'll bite. What allows spam to linger as a problem are the limitations of SMTP. I think we need to eliminate those shortcomings, in particular the ease of assuming whatever identity one wishes when mail is sent, and the ability to use almost any server to handle the mail transport for you. Some people have been utilizing those shortcomings for non-abusive purposes. Many more have been abusing those shortcomings for spam and fraud.
When cars were first invented, you did not have to get a licence-- either for your car or to allow you to drive. The earliest cars didn't even have keys, anyone could crank it up and drive. Times changed, and some of the freedoms enjoyed by early automobile pioneers dissapeared.
For the most part, yes-- I want to eliminate this type of anonymous email (using any random SMTP server that you may or may not be authorized to use). There are many other ways to send messages anonymously, for example posting as an AC on Slashdot (your method of choice, which is fine with me). However, blocking port 25 does not necessarily have to do with anonymity, it has to do with correcting a problem with SMTP. I am not as concerned with being able to track the sender of a message, as much as I am concerned with tracking the source (as in computer) of the message. Any source that has an unusualy high amount of abuse (spam, viruses) needs to have its operator informed. Random Windows machines on cable modems infected with [insert virus of the week here] do not have an operator, and should not be permitted to connect to SMTP servers for the purposes of abuse. ISPs can help by blocking egress port 25.
Well, that's probably because US penises are routinely shortened. (Around 60% of US men are reportedly circumcised, for quite dubious reasons, if I may add.)
Sky Is Discovered To Be Blue.
In other news... Hell Is Apparently Very Hot, Occupants Now Requesting Ice Water.
"I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it." - Oscar Wilde
While I don't doubt the US has just as large (if not larger) spam problem then the rest of the world, these statistics are useless. They dont explain anything you need to make use of the data. What counts as a spam message? All unsoliticited emails ? What about "legitimate" spam with a working opt-out link, or all that crap people willingly sign-up for. How is the country of origin determined? Most spam tries it's hardest to conceal it's origins. It can be difficult to determine the country of origin of legitimate traffic. Finally, how was the spam collected? I can't think of a way to quickly collect a lot of spam without introducing a bias. Finally, do comprimised machines count? Does the location of the person causing them to send spam count, or the comprimised machine? If they want their data to be taken seriously, they need to be open about the process they used to get it. Also it seems a little convenient a company that sells anti-spam software in the American and European market claims those countries produce the most spam.
At the end of the day,
n ko rder/2067rank.html
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ra
I'm surprised there hasn't been a coordinated effort amongst more pro-active members of the community to counter-trojan compromised machines, and deprive the spam gangs of zombies.
hmm.. I think the parent should be mod insightful...
Well I guess you finally admit it in paragraph #3, but there is enough hedging to become a landscape architect. Why is it so hard to admit?
/.?
You don't want to track the user you just want to track their computer? So, in addition to a verifiable identity you have to know the exact location they sent a particular email from? And this is supposed to be mitigating? If I want to send a message to my father without the fucker being able to track me down, I have to post it to
All the reasons to possibly eliminate anonymous email; national security, child abduction, libel, etc., combined are still not justification and spam isn't even in the top one hundred reasons.
Honestly it is an embarrassment to offer to trade your own anonymity for the possibility to reduce spam, but to offer the anonymity of others in the deal is deplorable.
On the upside, the painful dance you did around your answer makes me think you might agree with me or you realize you true intentions are a nonstarter.
chill dude. What's your hardon for anonnymous email? Actuly you're the one sounding like a whiney little pussy. AOL Micorsoft Yahoo are all prormoting way to add authenication to email. Its not 1996 anymore Wake up! Maybe it will be a little more difficult to be AC in the future, deal with it. You sound pretty selfish to me, you want total freedom do anything you want and take no resposibility for the affect on the world around you. COme to think of it, you sound just like a spammer.
One's a continent and one's a country
For one thing, Europe makes up a demographic region in the same size ballpark as the United States of America. Population-wise, the European Union is about 20 to 30 percent bigger than the USA, so all other things being equal, a fellow would expect 20 to 30 percent more spam from the EU than from the USA.
For another, with all the law harmonisation going on in the European Parliament, one could almost think of the EU as a single country much like the early United States.
Actually your spelling, random capitalization and lack of logical thought is not quite setting you apart from the spam crowd, but I would never accuse you of being a spammer without evidence.
I will try to say my point one more time with as little invective as possible considering my feelings on this subject.
Spam is the tech generation's drug war. For some reason everything is on the table to end the "menace." Even if we had a society that made 1984 look like woodstock, we could never stop spam. Yet everyone is willing to do anything just for the hope/appearance of doing something about the spam problem. Your post full of accusations and straw men could not be a better example of the hysteria I am talking about.
Is your highest goal really freedom from unsolicited email?
Your argumentative methods are, creative? Where to start...
Admit what? That anonymous e-mail has serious issues? I never said I wanted to eliminate anonymous e-mail. I have suggested technical changes to the status quo. I have "admited" that this will make anonymous messaging more difficult. My friend, the world is not a binary place. It's not a choice of either 100% e-mail freedom versus draconian Nazi oversight. While it makes your argument easier to look at it that way, as you get older you will realize that often compromise is necessary for progress. I have suggested a compromise, that I believe will make e-mail more useful for everyone-- even you. That's right, besides less spam and virus infections in your inbox, your e-mails will be more likely to be read.
Yes. If you connect to my SMTP server, I want to know what computer was responsible. I will do everything I can to block any message originating from systems that mask, obscure, forge, or otherwise make it more difficult to track down abuse. So will AOL, and other large ISPs that are tired of dealing with the rampant abuse that comes with the status quo. If you run your own mail server, you are free to allow whatever you want. God bless America.
I was not suggesting that the only way you could send mystery messages to your father was through Slashdot. I quite clearly identified that suggestion as an example (hint- I used the word "example").
See above. I did not propose eliminating anonymous e-mail. I proposed technical changes that will make certain types of behavior more difficult.
Once again, I offer no such trade. No embarrassment at all-- where did you get that? You are making things up, nowhere did I suggest embarrassment on my part. However, I will admit I am embarrassed when I set e-mail up for the first time for a friend or relative, and a few days later their inbox is filled with penis enlargement salves and breast enlargment pills (or the other way around).
Again, I offered no such binary option. You might want to look up the word "deplorable". It is one of those big words that is overused, mostly by people running for office.
Not painful at all. I did not consider my only options for addressing your concerns to be:
As I noted above, my suggestions do not consider anonymity at all. Smarter minds than ours will find a way to deal with such things, as long as there are people who want it. I am proposing technical changes that will reduce the amount of abuse of the e-mail system in everyone's inbox. Current estimates peg that at 60%-- six out of every ten e-mails are spam (that does not include virus breakouts). I consider that a problem and I propose a solution. You are twisting any argument that threatens your ease of anonymity-- something you have taken for granted. With all due respect, you are not making a positive contribution to the discussion. Perhaps you should step aside-- or even better, volunteer to administer a large e-mail system. Offer to pay for the additional hard drives and
We thank you, big fat still living with his parents and spamming the $hit out of everyone guy.
$>man woman
$>Segmentation fault (core dumped)
The original description said the national debt was money "owed by the taxpayer". The taxpayer does not "owe" anything as long as he/she/it pays their taxes. It is the government that owes. The government is not the sum total of its citizens - it is a separate entity.
it could hypothetically use some other mechanism, like taking out a loan from a commercial bank (although it makes no fiscal sense)
Yes. But it frequently makes pork-barrel sense, cf. the (aborted) boeing tanker lease deal. (which would have amounted to the same thing)
All the money the Treasury borrows is money that the taxpayers eventually have to repay,
No. The treasury has to repay it, not the taxpayers. Tax revenue is the obvious way of raising the money to do so, but not the only one.
We keep hearing a lot about spam and most people know exactly how the things are propagated. There was a story of that Connecticut spammer who got something like 45000 mails (snailmail)per day after his home address was published on the net. Why doesn't the fed wake up and close the loopholes? 70% of emails are junk and that's a big loss to the nation's economy..
I would first like to say that you have offered me much more respect than I offered you in my posts and for this you have my admiration and my apology.
I would also like to say I have administered large email systems and donated my time to help friends and strangers lock down open SMTP relays. In computer terms I am a very old man. I am very aware of the issues of spam both socially and technically.
The spam war is the drug war redux. We can pass the most draconian laws and institute total technical lockdown and it will not make a dent in the amount of spam. I respectfully submit your summoning of the virus issue in relation to open relaying is a wonderful example of what I mean. Viruses have about as much to do with email as drugs do to theft. Tangential at best and purposefully inflammatory.
You want to eliminate spam. I believe spam is a necessary consequence of free communication, just as drug abuse is a necessary consequence of a free society. I would support your idea 100% if I thought it would do anything to reduce spam, but I don't. I just hope if your suggestions are implemented and they prove ineffective you will then consider my position instead of moving on to the next solution.
Just to reiterate, I am not against anonymous e-mail. True, I do not consider it as vital as you do. This is a philisophocal disagreement, fair enough. But I do run a mail server, with many clients and a great many e-mail accounts I am responsible for. My clients have expressed an interest in keeping their inboxes as free of junk as possible, and I hope to oblige them.
This is my choice, and I have outlined this to my clients. They are aware of the multiple RBLs I use. They are aware I have the server set to reject any incoming mail from non-existant domains. They are aware that I will continue to explore and implement further techniques to help what we feel is a very real problem.
Forging e-mail headers to bypass methods that I use and that I propose is illegal-- under current fraud laws. I certainly do not think sending anonymous e-mail should be illegal. If someone wants to set up an anonymous remailer system, that is fine with me. If I notice abuse, however I wish to define it, I will block incoming mail from that system. No laws are necessary, only technology.
I am not delusional, I do not think any of what I propose will eliminate spam! Someone will still be able to get an AOL account, and send out a couple hundred stock market pump-n-dump spams. Nothing can premptively stop that (AOL will cancel that account, of course). But right now, shady marketers in the U.S. are paying criminal gangs in the former USSR to send out millions of messages-- via hijacked home computers on cable modems. All anonymously. To use your drug war analogy, it's not the drug use/abuse I have a problem with. It's the carjacking and murder I have a problem with.
You really have the John Gilmore impression down pat. It's like you're channeling him or something...
Just a minor correction.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.