Slashdot Mirror
Paid To Spam
Lathiat writes "It seems that spammers have taken a new distributed approach to sending spam, and you get paid for it.
Virtual MDA will pay you $1 per CPU hour their program is running to relay spam around the world. Obviously this is not something you should do, most users are all to familiar with the atrocity of sorting through up to hundreds of spams a day just to find one real email, Although it has been previously reported that some users love spam, I for one don't.
Is there any way end users can fight back against people like this?" At $1/hour, this sounds like a low-gain way to infuriate both your friends and perfect strangers.
I say we sentence the people who like/read/send spam to filter through all the email that the filters tosses, just to make sure no legitimate email has been accidentally deleted. Maybe if the know what it's to sift through this crap all day long (like I do when the server filter goes down), they'll get the drift.
Can I bum a sig?
So keep your editorializing to yourself, Timothy. If I can finally get that ISP account closed AND earn $2-3 in the time it takes my ISP to sort through the hundreds of complaints against me and kill my login, then I'm all for it.
If you're really so high-and-mighty against this, sign up to sell those "CPU hours" the site says they wayt, and iptables -I OUTPUT 1 -j DROP -p tcp -s 0.0.0.0/0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 --dport 25, tough guy. You can bet that you'll never see a dime. Of course they're going to insist that they only send a check once you reach $100 or some number like that. And how many ISPs will tolerate four days of spam complaints? Hint: None of them are in the USA. And if you're not in the USA, ask around and see who's heard of an "international small claims court."
What happens when other spammers adopt this business model? That $1/hour assumes that you would only work for one spammer at a time. If you were really trying to make a career out of it I'm sure you'd be working for as many spammers as once as you can handle. That being said, it's still a very sleezy way to make a few bucks considering the majority of people hate spam.
I for one would feel like I was selling the rights of everyone else for a living. I'm not sure how people can feel "good" about doing something like this.
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
and plus I'm still waiting for my check from All-Advantage!
Great. Way to give them free advertising on a very popular website. As much as Slashdot has users that for the most part hate spam, we also have trolls and people who just don't care and see this as a way to make money. I can hear them cheering right now.
On another note, perhaps legislation should be put forward to outlaw distributed (this would have to be defined further... perhaps third party or in a different physical location, obviously wouldn't want it to affect legitimate servers) mail delivery like this. There's not really any point in a widescale distributed email delivery system OTHER than delivering spam that I can think of... Though I'm sure spam companies would try to come up with something. In this case, I think legislation may be a good thing.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
(1 x 24) x 365 = $8760 per year.
The money is tempting. Imagine all the toys that could be bought with it.
Evolution or ID?
It also needs to be said that this is also illegal in many places (due to spam laws). Spammers are very good at hiding their identities. Stupid users are not, and would be relatively easy to get caught. Honestly, it sounds like a money saving scheme, get someone else to break the law for you, and you come out clean as a whistle. -Sean
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
...ph33r the /. effect ;o)
I am NaN
Most ISPs prohibit this in their T&Cs. So unless you have a direct pipe to the Internet, you're surely going to be cut off as soon as they realise what all that 24/7 traffic is?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Does that mean that for a buck an hour, you also get your own set of legal issues if some ISP, like AOL, decides to come after you for spamming their customers?
Ayup
Are those spammers who are paying to use peoples computers to spam, such losers that they cannot even hack together a virus/trojan to hijack unprotected computers to spam like the real spammers?
--
I wonder how long it will take before someone finds out that they can use captured, trojan infected, computers to relay spam and earn money through this scheme.
I guess it's tempting to think that "ahh, I have 500 "clients" and could earn thousands each day!".
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
How can they check that you're actually processing the spam? Sign up, block the outgoing non-meat product and take their money.
$168 a week? Cool! I'll do it!
:) /dev/null.
Psst.. don't tell the spammers: I'll fix the spamming problem by putting a black hole transparent proxy between the machine running their program and the internet...
Anything they'll try to mail gets sent straight to
No, not really, but it'd be a nice way to cheat them...
.sig: No such file or directory
1)install VirtualMDA
2) At a dollar every hour, I think I'll go check it out, and let iptables limit my outgoing bandwidth, or even better, drop everything with outgoing tcp/25.
3)PROFIT!!!
For us geeks, why not just run the program and use our own outgoing mail server that just drops the emails? Easy way to make money without actually sending out emails. I don't think it'd be too hard to trick their program.
So keep your editorializing to yourself, Timothy. If I can finally get that ISP account closed AND earn $2-3 in the time it takes my ISP to sort through the hundreds of complaints against me and kill my login, then I'm all for it.
If you're really so high-and-mighty against this, or just want to keep your account with your ISP, sign up to sell those "CPU hours" the site says they want, and then iptables -I OUTPUT 1 -j DROP -p tcp -s 0.0.0.0/0 -d 0.0.0.0/0 --dport 25 since there's no rule against it, tough guy.
Shouldn't the end user decide how much to charge per hour of CPU time. What I would do is price the use of my CPU so high that the cost of doing business for the spammer would be detrimental to his operation, effectively shutting him down. The money would then be used to pay off all the legal fees, fines, etc. owed to the ISP. But then again the best thing to do is not to partake in this silliness.
1) Setup firewall
2) Filter all emails that don't go to their domain
3) Profit
Getting paid and cutting down the spam rate, sounds like a good deal to me
"perhaps legislation should be put forward to outlaw distributed (this would have to be defined further... perhaps third party or in a different physical location, obviously wouldn't want it to affect legitimate servers) mail delivery like this"
There are may legitimate companies that have distributed mail systems in may different locations. Yahoo and M$ for example. This is not only for load but redundancy. Something like this might be hard to do.
Evolution or ID?
It runs as a service (or whatever windows calls daemons nowadays) so you're not getting even close to a CPU hour in an hour.
All's true that is mistrusted
Oh, come on! This is a perfect opportunity to scam the scammers! Remember AllAdvantage or whatever, that thing that displayed a banner ad and paid you some fractional penny per minute that your mouse was moving? There were applications to jiggle your mouse while you were away, or even to hide the ad-bar.
/dev/null.
Why would this be any different? Drain $1/hr from the pockets of the spammers, but use a crack that sends all the spam either to their joespam@spamco.com address or to
Scam them, my fellows. Scam them hard. If anyone deserves it, it's the spammers.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Including their phone number and mailing address:
Sendmails Corporation
P.O. Box 195
Manchester, NH 03105
TEL: 603.622.6999
FAX: 603.624.9089
Of course what you choose to do with that information is up to you...
Wouldn't this make people accessories to the crime of sending email?
You can bet that when your PC is on every blacklist on this planet, your employer will look for another sucker. It is at this point your friends start telling you they never received that mail you sent them...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
It would be interesting to see if you could setup a system where all the emails didn't actually go out. You'd be reaping money from this company, and preventing spam at the same time! How could would that be.
:)
This would be ESPECIALLY good on those ISPs that block port 25... again, you get money, no spam gets sent!
This summer I was living on about 5 bags of ramen a day, and was in danger of losing a place to live. About all I had to my name was my PC, and a free internet connection.
As much as I hate spam, if I was ever in the same situation again, I would sign up for this in a heartbeat. $720 per month is more than I would make with a legitimate part time job (considering that I am a student, making Canadian money). Spam isn't going away, and I would be more than willing to run the risk of losing friends, and making enemies of perfect strangers if it meant putting food on my table, and giving me a roof to live under.
At the moment however, I am doing fine, and in spite of the nice things I could buy with $1000 a month, I will not be signing up for this, as I value my principles more than material goods.
Just something to keep in mind before slamming people who give CPU time to this cause.
Folks, they are paying PER CPU hour, not per wallclock hour.
Since in almost every case you will be I/O bound, while this thing may tie up your entire connection it will not run more than a couple of CPU minutes per wallclock hour.
Thus the spammers screw the people doing this - they think they are going to get 24*7 = $168 a week, but they really are going to get about 24*7*.1 = $16.8 a week. Then they will get nothing because their account was terminated.
HOWEVER, this gives us a GREAT way to screw the spammers - run this sucker on an UNDERCLOCKED machine.
WAYYYYYY underclocked.
Like about 100 kHz.
That way, even with a modem the program will be CPU bound.
www.eFax.com are spammers
It should be easy to fool that tool:
Computer behind a firewall. Firewall redirects all port 25 connections to some other server. This server accepts all mail and dumps it.
24 h sending mail, 24 earning money !
Just out of curiosity, are there any legitimate companies out there that pay for CPU cycles? I'm sure the hordes of unemployed on slashdot (myself included) would like to know.
-Colin
You can bet that you'll never see a dime. Of course they're going to insist that they only send a check once you reach $100 or some number like that. And how many ISPs will tolerate four days of spam complaints? Hint: None of them are in the USA. And if you're not in the USA, ask around and see who's heard of an "international small claims court."
It doesn't take long to get blacklisted by Spamcop doing this kind of thing. I know my servers are not going to see much SPAM from home cable/DSL users getting paid to relay.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
This is going to cause havok for every person that runs their own safe smtp server at home (like I do).
There's already some email services that use spam blockers that will not accept mail sent from IP addresses which are known to be DHCP blocks for large ISPs, since they just assume that such traffic is either virus or spam related, but it's a bitch for me. Now that any Joe Schmoe can run this crap, I can see far more spam blocking services go the same way, and I'll be stuck using my ISPs notoriously unreliable smtp server again.
I think we need to bust the people whose machines are sending spam. Some may say that it's cruel, but i think it's the only way to get people to be responsible.
People will claim that they got a virus, but they're still negligent. If you get paid for it, that pretty much blows out that excuse.
1. Install on all computers at work.
2. Quit.
3. Profit.
(not that it should take a new sysadm long to notice...)
TC - My Photos..
First of all, does this mean that the mail is sent through your own mail server? If so, that's a major TOS violation for most ISPs. If your computer is going to be its own mailserver, that may not work either, because of the number of ISPs now blocking outbout mail servers on their networks.
Secondly, check out their own TOS. For example, this line:
So, not only are you helping spammers, but if they "accidentally" drop that table in their database, they don't have to pay you a thing. Sounds like a really good scam to me. I should go buy a house and put in the contract that if I forget to pay, the house is free for me to keep and the loan is forgiven."Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
This could be coupled with upstream filtering, and used to collect hashes of known spam in order to block spam all over the world.
How about getting paid $1/hour to help STOP spam ??
This sounds like a great idea for an open source project!
You cant make anything foolproof, they'll only invent better fools.
This is going to be extremely appealing as easy money for college students who often have broadband connections and very little extra cash. This amount of money goes a long way. The smarter ones will even figure out a way to throttle the connection so they don't catch hell from their ISP for bandwidth usage. This is extra appealing to people in countries outside of the U.S. where the U.S. dollar has more buying power. Add 25% alone in value for us Canadians. I expect to see widespread adoption. Most importantly, this will really make the use of blacklists irrelevant as I expect these machines will act as their own SMTP servers.
A solution to this might be to block mail from mail servers with residential cable and DSL IPs. Many ISPs are already doing this.
Evolution or ID?
How about allowing them to use your computer for 1$ an hour, but blocking outgoing connections on port 25 (smtp)?
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
...when their internet connection gets pulled. Which would probably happen within the first week.
Think about this: I offer you a free broadband connection on a couple of terms: #1: you must leave your computer on at all times, and #2: You must install and leave installed my special little distributed computing applet. When your machine is idle, it would connect to my servers and become a node in a massive cluster. I could then sell time on this cluster to companies and individuals with needs for extreme processing power. Interesting idea, no?
"Hand me the bullet-shooty-thing and a box of little hurts" -Overheard on a USMC Rifle range
Pipe it through to Spam Radio so we can all enjoy it!
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
It's $1/CPU hour. If your CPU was running at 100% for an hour you'd get $1/hr. For server based operation like an email relay, the CPU will sit almost completely idle waiting on the network and waiting on the disk. So it's going to take a lot longer than an hour to get your $1.
Alternatively. Get your shitest old 386 and shitest pre-IDE hard disks and watch the CPU spend ages sucking data from here and there.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I'll install their client on a Sinclair Z-80 operating over a 110 bps teletype line and make out like a bandit!
-- Improve Windows - Buy a Mac!
Sure I'll run it. I'll also setup a firewall so that this program can't send any actual data. After all, you're getting paid per CPU hour and not per email actually sent. Who cares if the program sits there and spins the cpu trying to send and resend it's first email message? Sounds like easy money to me! ;)
moo
Site's down, so I can't verify, but $1 per CPU hour means you'll get no money, as e-mail is all I/O. At best, you likely won't get more than a couple dollars a month.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Atriks, LLC
55 Bridge Street
Manchester, NH 03101-1188
US
Administrative Contact:
Host Master hostmaster@atriks.com
Atriks, LLC
55 Bridge Street
Manchester, NH 03101-1188
US
Phone: 603-624-7008
Fax: 603-624-9089
Technical Contact:
Host Master hostmaster@atriks.com
Atriks, LLC
55 Bridge Street
Manchester, NH 03101-1188
US
Phone: 603-624-7008
Fax: 603-624-9089
Someone needs to set up a huge server room that accepts only incoming packets so the spammers can seed the servers. Then no spam is sent out, but you still get paid. Make spam more costly that the revenue it generates... (Yea I know server rooms are expensive... just a thought)
... considering the value of a dollar in some countries. I guess this program's demographic includes any computer up to spec in 3rd world countries.
Hey, all the more reason to go to war with them!!!
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
This is actually a heckuva way for the spammers to get around RBLs such as the ones used by Razor for blocking high spam domains. Now instead there will be god knows how many spammers coming from more trustworthy domains such as att.net, comcast.net, msn.com, etc. Granted each person may be only able to do 100 or so a day before tripping their ISP mail server off, but if a few thousand people are doing it... sheesh...
And I just installed SpamAssassin/Amavisd-New/Razor/etc, then they go and do this.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
At Sendmails Corporation, we move the data that drives the Internet, delivering millions of emails daily for a large number of Small business and Fortune 1000 corporations. When you don't need your computers, we do. And, we're willing to pay you for them.
/. readers decide to run the client, I'm sure VirtualMDA will look back on this date favourably as the day their company soared to new heights.
Way to go, guys. You just informed about 2 million readers about a way to make easy money. Even if a very small percentage of
Sometimes the way to fight people is to ignore them; you chose to give them front page exposure on the most read tech news site in the world. I'm sure there's a lot of handshaking and celebration in the VirtualMDA offices this morning. Maybe other companies will try and get a 'negative' story published on Slashdot as the way to grow their business.
Marketing Mantra: "There's no such thing as bad publicity"
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Surely someone with a fast CPU on a fast connection is worth more per "CPU hour" than someone with a 486 on dialup? Disclaimer: I didn't read the site; it's now slashdotted and it's not in the Google cache.
I hate to blow some people expectations here, but these are _cpu_ hours we're talking about.
Let me demonstrate: here's a section from my ps -ax:
PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND
1 ? S 0:05 init [4]
and here's my uptime:
16:45:07 up 4:31, 4 users, load average: 0.09, 0.34, 0.34
(yes I turn my PC off at night, so what...).
To sum it up, init has been running for 4 hours 30 minutes, but only has 5 cpu seconds on the clock. This is an extreme example, X on my laptop has used 15 mins on 2:30 hours uptime, but it get's the point across.
Sending out spam is bandwidth limited, not cpu limited (unless you run this on a 486 over a T1), therefor, you are going to be hammering your connection, whilst only using a small percentage of your cpu, and only earning mabey 2-3 dollars a night (and I'm being optimistic there, it could be a lot less).
So in short, this will work until people realise that there being had, and then it'll just disappear into the mist.
Nice try, but zombies are more effective...
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
There will be plenty of anti-spam tirades and jokes, so I will not bother duplicating that effort. However this is the first instance I've heard of commercial distributed computing (I'm sure there are others). If this trend continues, and I have faith that it will, some very cool sh!te could be in our future. I for one would welcome $1 dollar a processor hour for something not connected to penis enlargement and illegal nigerian money transfers. Though I have to wonder if eventually the computers will unionize and demand a higher hourly wage.
Riiiiiight! We'll pay you, sure. Your check is in the mail.
and beat the crap out of them.
That will end the spamming quickly.
Insightful.
I'm a commercial bulk emailer. We've wanted to do something like this for a while but always got scared off by liability issues.
This is a brilliant solution because the one thing we're always short of (even as legal bulk emailers) is IP blocks that aren't blacklisted (since a lot of the blacklists run simply on volume of email sent or take the word of somebody who's too stupid to remember he actually did sign up for a mailing list). I would assume actual spammers have an even tougher time with their IP addresses. Now they can spam up all the cable ISP's IP blocks, and once a block gets blacklisted they can just switch to a new set of users. Brilliant.
All's true that is mistrusted
One thing I have noticed in this world is, nothing gets fixed until there's some major crap hitting the big collective fan.
Now here we have an email system which is increasingly broken, taken over by spammers, yet no one can agree to cooperate on a solution. Even the laws we make dont have any teeth.
I think we should promote this new thing, and all jump onto the bandwagon.
We should be able to definitely slashdot the email system at a planetary scale, thereby causing massive amounts of media aired/printed 24/7 for a few weeks.
The repercussions on spammers would be spectacular, to say the least.
I bet there would also be some political clout to revamp email to eliminate spam and prevent it from ever occuring again.
I equate this to a spammer saying: "here's a perfectly working gun. now use it to shoot me."
Excuse me, but what does CPU usage have to do with spamming? It's not like spamming is a CPU-hogging task. Unless this is a distributed computation, meant to defeat bayesian filters (/me putting tinfoil hat on...), I fail to realize the connection.
1. Let's all get paid for giving them our CPU cycles, while having our favorite firewall block its outgoing connections on port 25!
2. ???
3. Profit! (for us. Expenses for spammers!)
Oh man, killing two birds with one stone. And I thought this day was going downhill...
Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.
According to WHOIS, it looks like the folks at Atriks are behind this. You can contact them directly (toll free!) at 866-624-7008. You know, if you wanted more information about this, or something.
On the other hand, there are alternatives to legislation:
/. $p4m h4t3rz! Let's have a BONFIRE"
"Hey, spammer buddies, let's have a big ol' LAN party!"
(Aside)-"Calling all
I am glad someone pointed this out so I didn't have to. Now I am going to go fire up my TRS-80 and make some money!!! :-)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
A powerful computer to pump out spam quickly and a decent firewall to block it will pay for themselves quickly if you keep them running 24/7.
A powerful computer is counterproductive, since you're paid by the hour, not by output. Use the slowest CPU you can find.
Netcraft says they are running:
NT4/Windows 98 Microsoft-IIS/4.0 14-Apr-2004 216.204.150.246 Atriks, LLC
My moral obligation to not deal with a company using NT4 or IIS 4.0 trumps the spam morality dilema.
- un1xl0ser
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
Providing you have a Linux(tm) (or something) firewall handy, and a junk windows box to run the proggie on, you can set up a few rules with iptables, bind, and sendmail to put this together as follows:
1 - install crapware on the junk machine
2 - on the fw, have iptables transparently redirect all outboud smtp traffic to the local copy of sendmail
3 - configure bind on FW to be a root, and put a wildcard MX record in to point to your FW as the MX for world+dog
4 - have sendmail configured to accept all messages from everywhere (the wildcard MX record above will aid in this)
5 - work some virtusertable magic to get sendmail to dump all messages to a local account whose mailspool dumps to dev/null
6 - ???
7 - Profit!
Of course, we would have to include some exceptions to allow some presumed "test" or "tracker" messages through to let the company know that the program is running, and to fool them into thinking you are sending the spam out, but hey...
Anything else I am missing?
John
It seems that spammers have taken a new distributed approach to sending spam, in which you the end user gets paid. Virtual MDA contains secret patented SCO code which is in breach of our interlectual property contracts.
To avoid legal action SCO will provide you with a license to use our technology from as little as $1 per CPU hour if you buy now. SCO will be taking legal action against bulk senders who have not purchased a license within 90 days.
You can avoid stuff like this by turning on both sender_verify and reverse_host_lookup.
:
:)
The spam friendly user will be doing something like:
Helo some-domain.com
mail from: spam-tracker-id-1223456@spammy.com
Actual host adsl.isp.com (1.2.3.4)
So by turning on these features we can test that they are not really some-domain.com or spammy.com, but actually adsl.isp.com.
Those of you who dont want to break stuff then an ACl like
warn !verify = reverse_host_lookup
delay = 60s
log_message = Lame arse spammer
Slow down spammers, but let through badly configured mail servers.Game over
(waiting for flames from proper exim guru's (guri ?)
I'm unemployed too, and I'd love it if there was an _ethical_ way to make money from idle CPU time.
:)
:(
PS: need some Java coding?
HMMM... thinking about it... if you wanted to buy CPU time, you'd just rent a server. $100/month for a nice machine on a fat connection...
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
- They're paying by CPU time
- Sending mail is by nature completely I/O bound
- Computers are really really fast these days
- They're not paying anyone until they build up $50
It's almost a certainty that they will never have to pay anyone anything before they are put out of business. It would take months if not years to build up fifty hours of CPU time sending mail over a cable modem. And if they actually manage to hook someone with a rediculously large pipe, they're getting their money's worth in spades.This is a brilliant scam for people who don't know what CPU time means.
That didn't take long. Don't forget to email the site administrator at webmaster@greenhorse.com to let him know about the issue. Might want to use a throwaway email account, tho.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Wouldn't this make people accessories to the crime of sending [spam]?
No, it would make them guilty of the crime of sending spam.
And what might "their" program do when, after approximately one CPU hour, the IP that it is running on has been blacklisted and is no longer of use for spamming? Join a DDoS net? Download and host some very dodgy software or porn? The list goes on... Still, at least you'd be able to afford a quartet of two bit lawyers when you get busted for hosting a kiddie porn site or something.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Can i run it on my TI86 and give it 100% CPU time, that'll prolly be about 3 messages per day (especially if i set the unit to runset that shit up to run in a virtual 33mhz environment so it is getting "100%" of 33 mhz, oh and give the virtual machine a TCP/carrier pidgeon connection
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
We will make no distinction between the terrorists (spammers), and those who harbor them.
:-D
- George W. Bush
Nuff Said.
Their own servers and accounts are no longer cut off the internet, but the accounts of perfect strangers.
If I were a spammer, I wouldn't care less...
Privacy is terrorism.
Please read it carefully. It is $1 per CPU hour, not $1 per hour. Sending email is not a CPU-intensive task. One CPU hour can be equivalent to as much as several weeks of saturated modem traffic!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Of course, considering spammers are such honest and legitimate business people, they will pay me fairly for the amount of CPU time I have given them. I mean, people who spam do not have questionable business models and serve as role models for entrepeneurs of all levels.
Excuse me, the nurse says it's time for my medication again. I need my happy fun pills!
Hate me!
Does this mean the flood of spam will now reach biblical proportions, just because some shitheads pay people to send even more spam? Yes, please clog up the internet with even more crap, since clearly there's not quite enough of it! We want you to waste more bandwidth, and to chase away users from using email and the internet. Actually, spammers must be some of the most irresponsible people out there. Why is it so impossible for them to understand what they're doing? They should be treated the same way as the retards who vandalize public property with tags and graffitti.
Wouldn't this create a money trail that would lead back to the spammer? I don't expect the spammers would be sending actual dollar bills.
This doesn't make sense in another respect. It would only take less then two months of 24x7 running for the expense to equal purchasing a computer. This expense doesn't decrease as the quantity of computers involved increases. Why pay for CPU hours when the amount you would pay would buy that CPU in less than 2 months?
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
This is a perfect way to bite the spammers...
someone write a virus that spreads looking for this program.. it pathces it to report back that is is sucessful but doesn't spam to any addresses . and make it slowly ramp up and down to simulate net changes...
Voila! spammer is paying for nothing to lots of people.
it's time to use their tools against them.
Do you need matches and gasoline??? I'll be happy to pay for it! Nothing is better than Spam roasting on an open fire.
1. Set up dummy email server that goes nowhere. 2. Sign up for spam program. 3. Send spam to dummy server. 4. Collect $24/day ($8760/year) The more people who do this, the broker the spammers will become.
I noticed recently while trying to diagnose an email problem that Time Warner Cable now limits its "unlimited service" to 1,000 emails sent per day. Obviously, you'll hit your limit well before that CPU-hour, so you'll never make more than $365/year and eliminate your ability to send any personal email.
You'd make more money hanging out at the street corner holding cardboard sign that says, "Will compute for food."
Yeah, right.
Just run this sucker behind a firewall that intercepts all outbound port 25 connections, and proxies them to an SMTP server that *pretends* to accept the message. That way, you run the program, pick up the cash, and no spam ever gets out...
Should be pretty simple if you put your box behind a Linux box with some firewall rules, or perhaps if you're cunning, you can hack up the box you're running the app on.
Of course, they might send emails to certain addresses to prove that your email is getting out, so you might have to be doubly cunning and not filter that out... Or, fake a bunch of rejections so that the stats look correct or something.
I didn't read the article, where do I sign up?
Step 1, set up 3 or 4 boxen on lan
Step 2, allow spammers to pay you for CPU hours
Step 3, have all outgoing traffic routed through a box that sends all outgoing smtp traffic to dev/null
Step 4: PROFIT!!!!
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
So this scam pays more to run on slower machines?!!
If I were an ISP I'd be pretty pissed if a subscriber got my valuable name and IP addresses blackballed as a spamspewer.
Require a deposit or credit card for service and impose a contract clause that imposed monetary penalties on subscribers who did that either through negligence or, heaven forbid, on purpose.
Of course big providers like AOL and MSN with millions of subscribers don't worry as much about being blackballed because it will always be the little ISP's help desk that will get the query about why Aunt Agatha's email from aol.com didn't get through. The explanation that Aunt Agatha is using a spammer-friendly ISP is a hard sell when so many people are using it.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I first read this article about 10 minutes ago. Checking back, I now see this at http://www.virtualmda.com/:
Error Occurred While Processing Request
Error Diagnostic Information
An error has occurred.
HTTP/1.0 404 Object Not Found
Note to self: Do not try and use Slashdot to gain publicity on what they perceive as negative activity. It ain't worth it!
Ruby on Rails Screencast
1. Dredge up that old P75 from the closet
2. Underclock it rather dramatically
3. Sign on with spammer for $1/CPU hour
4. Send only 3 spam an hour thus slowing the bastards down
5. PROFIT!!!
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
Sure; you just need to figure out a way to sign up and get the money without actually spamming. Scammers are not entitled to honest dealings, and thieves are not entitled to respect for their property.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I'm thinking that the cost of bandwidth more worriesome than the ressources it would use up on your pc. For some, the rate increases exponentially. Besides, I think that the amount of data sent is a more reliable way to measure your contribution than the cpu load.
At $1/hour, running round-the-clock, this would generate more income per month than some people make flipping burgers (1 * 24 * 30 = 720), with the added advantage that you can still flip burgers. If I ran 4 or 5 machines, it would make more than I make working. Rest assured that people will sign up.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
By their definition, what IS a CPU hr? Sorry for my ignorance, but the website just got /.ed off the face of the planet. Wouldn't the amount of bandwidth have more to do with spam output than CPU cycles? So, If I get my dual opteron's with a 56K connection going, I'll make more than my Athlon 800 connected via an OC15 line?
I don't get it. Illuminate me, oh who got on the site before it got annihilated.
Is anyone planning to sign up and run it in a closed environment to determine what it is sending out? It strikes me that this could be very useful for the writers of various anti-spam filters. It would provide a database of known spam that they would use for tests.
This will seem very attractive to a lot of people. Running 24/7/365 it's $8760 per year, and would seem to only require a $500 dedicated computer. After taxes, that's about $5000 take-home for no effort at all!
People have commented on the difference between CPU-hour and clock-hour. Perhaps the details of this scheme prevent people from actually making money. But at first, I think this will appear very lucrative and attractive to people looking for a few extra bucks. I expect college students would be immediately drawn to this (easy cash, and they've got the network and computer already setup).
ShoutingMan.com
With Intel HyperThreading on my P4, I can get $2.00 /hr!
Time to give Spam hunters some extra tools. Trace, Ping, Whois, Frequent Flier Miles, Louisville Slugger.
In addition, Atriks' own policy insures that they will NEVER pay you.
Believe me, this news hits slashdot late. The folks at your ISP almost certainly are aware of Atriks, and its owner Brian Harberstroh by now, and if not, you can point them to THIS. Spamhaus does not add listings to ROKSO until after a spammer has had three documented terminations. In fact it often takes several before one can get three which are documented, as most ISPs don't announce when they've terminated a spammer.
--Og
Better yet, just hex edit it.
even better, reroute the outward port 25 of that computer to something like a /dev/null email server (i.e. acceppt anything, then discard it), so the client actually thinks it send out the emails :)
I am sure that people by now have seen the interview on the daily show. :D too funny.
NT4/Windows 98 Microsoft-IIS/4.0 14-Apr-2004 216.204.150.246 Atriks, LLC
My moral obligation to not deal with a company using NT4 or IIS 4.0 trumps the spam morality dilema.
- un1xl0ser
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
For the great introductory price of only ONE DOLLAR per CPU HOUR, I can have friends and enemies alike want to COME TO MY HOUSE and SMASH MY COMPUTER to bits with SLEDGEHAMMERS!!
What can be the downside to that?
Sarcasm mode off.
At $1/hour, this sounds like a low-gain way to infuriate both your friends and perfect strangers.
Hey, how'd you know I only have two friends...?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
As in POP3, IMAP, etc.? Why would they want to use pop3 and IMAP to spam???
Razor does not use blocklists. Razor is a database of message signatures. The more messages received with the same signature, the more spammy the message likely is. Using a distributed network should not affect the effectiveness of Razor, but other factors totally unrelated to where the message comes from will.
I case you couldn't get to the site like me, here are the terms of service from the google cache.
Terms Of Service
1. ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND ACCEPTANCE OF TERMS OF SERVICE. Atriks, LLC
("ATRIKS") web site, VirtualMDA and other ATRIKS services and web properties ("Service"),
owned and operated by ATRIKS, is provided to the
member community under the following Terms of Service and any operating rules
or policies that may be published by ATRIKS. The Terms of Service comprise the
entire agreement between Member and ATRIKS and supersede all prior agreements
between the parties, regarding the subject matter contained herein. By
participating in the registration process, members are indicating their
agreement to be bound by all of these Terms of Service.
2.Payment. Upon completing the registration procedure, you will be given a unique
identification account number ("UID"). You will be paid by ATRIKS $0.25 for every
Central Processing Unit Hour ("CPU HOUR") used by the VirtualMDA software located
on your personal or business computer(s) (either or both of which shall be the
"Installed Computer(s)") is actively connected to the internet ("Online"). The
Installed Computer may accumulate a maximum of 24 CPU HOUR's in one day. If
your UID logs more than 24 CPU HOURS in one 24 hour period, your account
may be suspended or terminated for unusual or suspicious activity. In order to
receive payment, you must submit a request to ATRIKS using the electronic request
form provided to you via your member account webpage. Your member account webpage
will contain a calculation showing the amount of money accrued in your account.
In case of a dispute as to the amount accrued, the amount shown in your account
is final and binding upon you in all respects. You may only request payment, and
ATRIKS shall only disburse from your account, when your account is equal to or
greater than $50.00 for United States residents and $90.00 for those residents
outside the United States. In the event of technical problems or data loss which
causes a loss of account information, your account will be reset at $0.00, and
you hereby waive any and all claims for any amount previously accrued but not yet
disbursed. All payments shall be by check, made payable to you, and sent to you
at your last known address via the U.S. Postal Service, first class mail. There
will be a check processing fee of $3.00 (three dollars) and any payment returned
to ATRIKS shall be voided, and your account shall be deleted and any accrued
amounts will be forfeited
3. DESCRIPTION OF SERVICE. ATRIKS is providing Member with Internet services and
opportunities to get rewarded while using the Internet in exchange for performing
certain actions as desired by our advertisers. As part of this service ATRIKS provides
Member with proprietary software ("SOFTWARE") for relaying email messages.
In consideration for this Service, Member agrees to: (1) create only
one account per household and, (2) provide certain current, complete, and accurate
information about Member as prompted to do so by the Service and, (3) maintain and
update this information as required to keep it current, complete and accurate and.
All information requested on original sign-up shall be referred to as account
information ("Account Information"). Furthermore, ATRIKS will not share, sell, trade,
or give away personally identifiable Member information to third parties without Members'
explicit permission. Upon registration, all users grant to ATRIKS their explicit
permission (1) to contact them with important information about Members' accounts and
updates to our services, policies and business practices, (2) to access and use the
Installed Computer(s) for relaying permission based (opt-in) email for ATRIKS and/or
third parties, and (4) data gathering activities, without further notice to or permission
from Member. The users have the option to choose not to be contacted or t
Dual Processor Xeon Server system w/2gigs of ram: $4000
Single Professional License for Vmware from ebay: $200~
The ability to milk a spammer for 30 bucks an hour: priceless.
Is there any way end users can fight back against people like this?
...
You could've started by not advertising their product for free on the front page of Slashdot
-jacob
I believe All Advantage tried something similar. What ended up happening was a bunch of people who used hacks to simulate client behavior. Because of All Advantage I was making 1000$ a month doing nothing until the company eventually crumbled. Now for the real question of ethics: "It is ok to cheat a spammer?" Is this just bullshit? Do they actually intend to pay out the money?
nothing happens. This ucks,,, i want my money...;
guess i'll keep trying a few more hours.
I know they want me. I have such a big one two...
I'm the best of all what one wants....
I'll give it to'em so i can make egood money....
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
and if I bought every product that was spammed to me my penis would be growing faster than the speed of light, I would be debt free for 10 trillion years, my website would be number one for every search query imaginable, its design would be changing faster than is comprehensible by humans, and Nigerian princes would make me the richest person in the universe
I'm sure Virtual MDA is not stupid enough to leave themselves with no way to check if emails are actually being sent out. All you need is a testing account set up expressly for the purpose of validating whether certain accounts are actually sending email. Then have the user's (victim's?) account attemtp to mail that account every 100 emails or so.
Everyone here seems to be assuming that they're actually going to pay you if you do this. But with most spam being sent by criminals much more interested in quick $ than customer loyalty, what's the chance that they'll actually cough up?
This signature is not in the public domain.
Maybe this is the crap they advertise through the work at home - earn big money spam?
Note to self: Kill allm idiots who us word "boxen".
The next step is to go after the domains directly. The domains inside the spam messages are using name servers. Those nameservers need to be checked for correct whois info, and if they are using yahoo or hotmail contact info, yahoo and MS/hotmail need to 1. disable the accounts, and 2. pressure the registrars to drop the registrations of the domains used by the name servers. This also needs to be automated. I need to be able to go to SpamCop, paste and submit, and then the service needs to be able to send spam reports to not just the open relay owner or isp of the open relay, but also to the domain owner's isp, and the isp of the name servers. And at the same time, the registrars need to be pressured to drop the registrations of not just the domain in the spam, but the nameservers as well.
Tucows, you fuckers, stop providing a safe haven for spammers. Tucows keeps popping up when I'm checking the whois info on the domains contained in spam messages, and in the registrations of the name servers. Stop providing a safe haven for spammers Tucows. And
Anyone using DomainPeople for domain registration? How's this for their attitude on spam? (I received this after getting spammed repeatedly by one of their customers, and complained to them, this is the response I received):
I hope no
Presumably a single S/390 can handle thousands of low-cycle Linux images simultaneously. You're being paid by the *hour*, not by the message, KB or any other piecework metric.
1000 images * 24 hours = $24k per day. Rate limit the aggregate pipe to the internet for all images to 9600 bps, to mitigate the real damage.
In a week the spammer could owe you nearly $200k.
How many S/390s can we get to collaborate on this? 10? 20?
The same thing might work on a more limited scale with Mac and PC based virtual environments, as well as maybe FreeBSD jails.
If they can afford to pay that, they should probably buy a bigger pipe for when we hit their server.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Do they have a way to verify that the spam you send out actually gets where it was intended?
/dev/null?
Could you trick their system into thinking that you were pumping out spam while your firewall routes everything coming out of that box to
Imagine what a few thousand Slashdotters could do to skew their statistics and devalue their advertising packages.
1. Run spam program.
2. Cook the CPU numbers.
3. ????
4. Profit!!!
Oh yeah, and
5. Screw spammers out of $$$!!!
I can make $1 in 30 minutes!!!
Wooo hoo!!
You got moderated "funny", but that's perhaps one way to stop that kind of new spamming practice ?
____
nico
Nico-Live
Here's what you do:
Subscribe.
Set up this program on as many computers behind a closed network.
Setup a DNS system that points to another machine for a wildcard domain (have it respond to one machine for ALL DNS lookups)setup as a local email server that responds to all domains for all send requests.
Run their program on a massive array of computers, getting paid $1/hour of CPU time to email to a blackhole.
Or, block outbound SMTP requests from all machines you run it on (assuming they don't verify send - which they probably do) and run it on as many machines.
Anyways, the best way to fight this is to sabotoge it. (And get paid for it at the same time.)
1) I like this idea.
2) It is legal (apparently).
3) It doesn't create spam for the well-informed.
Anyone want to guess what your chances of ever actually seeing a penny from these people are?
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -RAH
Let me explain. In normat botnets the criminals use a long chain of infected machines to hide their location. So from their HOME->infected A -> trojaned B -> rooted C -> IRC D -> botnet E -> target
But with this would not be possible. TARGET (the trojaned machine doing the spamming) would have an ID that would link directly to the criminal. Namely the ID by wich he is known at the spammer.
In order for this to work each spamming machine must have some kind of ID that it sends to the spammer to identify who did how many hours. This ID is of course linked to payment details (if you believe spammers would actually pay out) and this would be trivial for a police force to find out and track back to you. So then you would face both spamming and hacking laws as well as profitting from them. Not good I think.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
alternative blurb from parent company: here.
When I have time, I visit the sites being advertised and fill out their online forms with bogus data. My theory is that this activity burdens the spammer/scammer and if enough people do it, the benefit of spamming is outweighed by the cost of sorting out the good data from the bad.
Bottom line though, good luck finding an ISP that will sell you a T1 without SPAM restrictions. Perhaps more importantly, you would be 1/2 or 1/3 responsible for any CAN-SPAM violation law-suits. That would put a hamper on your day. The lawyer fees alone would swallow your profits whole.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Would be to sign up for this, setup their "proxy" or whatever, and feed the results straight in to razor to instantly blacklist the spam messages. Of course you'd block outgoing port 25 too so that the spam didn't actually get anywhere. I'm sure they'd catch on, but in the mean time you have a 100% fullproof spam corpus coming in.
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
But I got a technical question. How much power does a PC consume anyway? I sure know my electricity bill ain't cheap. You got free internet but you got to pay for the rest.
I think this is like the alladvantage idea. Remember them? Being paid to browse? Anyone ever received 1 cent from them?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
1.) install on a bunch of machines...
2.) firewall and snort everything off at your gateway
3.) profit!
4.) laugh as you're taking spamers money.
*granted this assumes the program does not report back to home about its successful deliveries...i should RTFA...
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
What is to stop me from signing up for this, taking thier cash, and routing thier crap right to /dev/null?
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
"Braden Bournival, vice-president of the New Hampshire Chess Association and his business partner, the former neo-Nazi leader Davis Wolfgang Hawke."
Wired Story
Talk About Spam
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I hate spam too, unless it comes in a can, but...
Imagine a beowulf cluster...
---
Lousy rotten karmic retribution.
Set your cable or DSL router to block all outgoing SMTP traffic. Pure profit, and no spamming.
You: Is this the Atkris Company? Operator: Yes You: I am calling to find out why I have not received my check yet. I have over 500 *CPU* hours. Operator: Let me check. Please hold (waits a few mins) Operator: Sir, we sent you the check by email. You didn't *delete* them without reading all your junk mail, did you? You: D'oh.
The people who install this are sitting ducks. You see spam from them, do one of two things:
how about using a bandwidth throttling application to only allow the application to only send 1 byte per minute?
Great, so now they're paying us to send spam. If only they'd just pay us to receive it, there'd be no problem...
If I was paid $1 for every hour I spent deleting junk mail, why... I'd have at least 2 dollars by now!
Also, to anyone who's tempted, I would say remember they're paying you per CPU hour, and it doesn't take an awfully long time to send emails, so they probably won't actually use your CPU for more than a dozen minutes every day.
This is why we need to get the major ISPs to contribute to centralized IP address lists of all broadband DUL space. Legitimate mail servers should refuse to accept mail from cable and DSL SMTP traffic. Then these spammers' schemes won't work, and it will also dramatically cut down on virus/worm propagation. I'm unaware of any really good DUL RBL except for Maps which is now pay. Does anyone know of a solid DUL RBL that's free?
Ha! I'd like to see those damn trolls troll from the clink!
Oh, crap, they have net access there don't they? Doh!
Another brilliant plan to destroy all trolls obliterated...
virtualmda site is down...
but visit(not so nicely i hope) the root(PARENT company)of evil http://sendmails.com/email_deployment.html?a=
Good luck trying to collect your payment if the company decides not to send a check. I wouldn't be surprised if the "payment" ends up being vouchers good for use in purchasing the products advertised in the spam you send. $48.00 off that $250.00 penis enlargement kit? Who can complain about that? The kit is probably a bargain at ANY price!
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
I wonder, is there any way one could setup a dummy machine between your "CPU" and the internet to trick this software into thinking it's sending out spam? Some kind of dummy MTA that responds to all outbound port 25 requests and "accepts" all emails.
It would be fantastic! Take the spammers money and have all their spam flow into a big blackhole. This has possibilities....
From the description below, you can see that they don't want your ISP to block your connection. They only send you 100 emails at a time. I would speculate that their service is very difficult to uninstall, ensuring stability in their network.
Atriks Description:
Email Deployment
Reliable and Effective Email Campaigns
Atriks has created relationships with over 60,000 individuals throughout the world who act as sending agents for the Atriks Distributed Email Delivery System. Atriks has developed a software called VirtualMDA (see www.virtualmda.com ) which resides on these sending agents' machines and periodically talks to an array of servers within our data center, looking for messages to deliver. When messages are available, each agent machine can receive up to 100 emails to deliver. For example, with 20,000 agents sending 100 emails each, the Atriks Distributed Email Delivery System can deliver 2 Million emails in one quick shot.
Politeness is key
There are approximately 4500 "well known" mail servers within the US and Canada, so being "polite" on how we connect and deliver the messages is important. Atriks doesn't want to cripple the receiving mail servers with millions of messages, so we create delays and meter traffic so not to overload the receiving server with connections.
Distributed delivery prevents blocking
Atriks developed our Distributed Email Delivery System because many email providers will obstruct otherwise legal emails from very large senders at will and without notification to the sender/list owner. Using sending agents and VirtualMDA, blocking is much less likely.
Creating a campaign
Once signed up with Atriks, most customers can create their campaigns in a few easy steps through our web interface:
Create the campaign
Test and OK the campaign
Set delivery date and time
Upload your data records
Set the campaign to "Ready."
Our system automatically starts delivery at the time and date set within the campaign.
For more information about using Atriks to deploy your next email marketing campaign, contact us.
DSL/Cable Method:
Sounds good: $840 per week
First, Taxes: $500
DSL/Cable gets cut off after a week, weekly replacement, non refundable: $440
Two day wait for installation of new DSL provider (cuts funds by 2/7): $315
Give two months, and you have likely run out of providers.
T1 Method
Sounds good: $840 per week
First, Taxes: $500
Pay for T1: $375
Now were talking!
Oh, but wait - assuming you find a provider that offers a T1 that doesn't cut you off... then, within 6 to 12 months, you become a Co-Defendant in a CAN-SPAM law suit. Assuming the judge does not find you responsible... Good luck paying yourself and a lawyer on $375 per month.
There's another thing here as well. There's very little likelyhood that ANY computer can dedicate more than 95% CPU to a single task (unless you are running this program on DOS). It also assumes that they give you enough addresses to process to actually make this type of money (very doubtful).
However, assuming everything were to go your way, T1 provider that likes you and no law-suit...Yeah, you can live on that, but you'd probably want to steal candy from kids to suppliment your income.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Sign up but make sure your outgoing port 25 are blocked. The spammer will think the spams are going out.
However, the spammer could just send out multiple copies of the spam to each address from a variety of sources to ensure that the recipient is sufficiently annoyed.
Once every 100 emails? That would make it easy to spot! Once per spam run is virtually impossible to spot. Or just have lots of verification accounts in the list.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
(1) set up this on a system; ;)
(2) kill all services except this;
(3) set this service's priority to realtime;
(4) set firewall to deny any outgoing email from that system;
(5) set firewall to allow for their method of verification;
(6) profit!
Voila! We all get paid and there's no addition to the spam problem.
The Intel 80386SX processor is definately the way to go here. It will run Linux / Windows / Whatever, unlike many earlier processors, but the clock speeds are low by modern standards. Furthermore, this has to be one of the least efficient microprocessors ever designed, it certainly gives the least bang per clock cycle of anything Intel ever put out. Make sure you have a good network connection to the next hop of the scheme, and you're pretty much guaranteed to be CPU-bound.
The next hop, of course, being another machine on the same LAN: an SMTP server to quickly and efficiently accept all the emails put out by the spammers software and happily dump them in a bit bucket.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Do you wonder why spammers are now trying to sign up individual users to help them relay spam?
The answer is because relay-blacklisting is working!
None of the client-side, server-side, content-based filtering has made any difference. What HAS made a difference are mail servers which are utilizing relay-blacklists of known spammer IP space and refusing to connect with them. This has forced the spammers to begin abandoning their havens in China, Brazil, Korea and other areas. Now they're trying to infiltrate domestic broadband IP space. First they tried it via propagating viruses and worms and that isn't working out as well as they'd like (and they probably figure sooner or later, the Feds just might actually prosecute one of them), so now they want to sucker people into spamming for them.
All this is an indication that relay blacklisting IS effective.
RBLs are becoming more sophisticated nowadays. Spamcop can usually ID a spam source in real time within an hour of it beginning operation. AOL and other major ISPs are now looking at RBLs to help them block spam. It's much more economical than strip-searching e-mail content using filters.
Let's keep up the pressure. Let's continue to force the spammers into smaller areas of the Internet where they can be identified and dealt with. This latest effort is a good sign they're getting desperate to figure out where they can send spam out from. None of the content-based filtering schemes have come nearly as close to slowing down their efforts as much as RBLs.
Probably a comparison of how much damage your PC does compared to 1 hour of there reference PC doing as much damage as possible.
;)
I'm guessing they will have a Supercomputer classed as a CPU and then you lovely opterons will socer 0.1CPU hours even when working at full wack.
There will be many waying in which they can stop you being payed. If they did do it on actual CPU load then you best bet is to get the old 2/3/486 and dust it off, remove it from it's position as a door stop and set that going. Of course you could then proxy it, watch for what it does and get the proxy to drop all the succesfully sent e-mails
I've had my mailserver blacklisted, and I tell you - $1000 an hour couldn't possibly be enough to blacklist-bait yourself like that. You never realise just how totally your business relies on email until suddenly it mostly stops working.
Of course, then there's the fact that this proposal is offensive, anti-social, and just plain retarded.
How were we blacklisted, you ask? We use an exim server as the gateway, with sendmail internally. The gateway server was marked as a trusted host for relaying on the internal server (indirectly; it was part of a subnet of hosts that needed to be able to relay). Normally that's not an issue, because the exim gateway would refuse to accept messages asking for relaying anyway.
Unfortunately, the exim gateway permitted percent-hack messages to pass, permitting an attacker to bypass the gateway server's checks, and deliver a message for relaying to the sendmail server. Which promptly relayed it, because the gateway was a trusted host.
Fix: disable percent hack (Why TF is it even supported anymore anyway?) and set the gateway to be able to deliver, but not relay.
1. Take 2 computers.
/dev/null -filler.
2. Connect them with a LAN.
3. Run Windows and this spam generator on computer A. Set it's network settings to use machine B as its gateway.
4. Run Linux on computer B. Hijack all connections and packets originating from computer A and destined for port 25 (or all which are targeted outside the spammer's IP, to be safe). Let other packets to travel to Internet normally, so that the spammer can download new spam definitions.
5. Run a mail server on computer B. Forward all mail coming from computer A to be study material for a Bayesian filter and then
6. Profit !!!
7. Watch as all the other geeks get the same bright idea.
8. Watch and enjoy as the spammers go bankrupt.
9. ??? (it is impossible to predict what a post-spam Internet will be like).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Uh, yeah. Very simple way - do not post a message that amounts to recruitment-advertising to Slashdot...
One issue with your suggestion comes to mind immediately, and that's mailing lists. Are mailing lists not, in fact, reflectors designed to send email by proxy from another location?
From the old:
1. Hack machines
2. ???
3. Profit!
Now we know step 2 is "rent the CPU for $1 per hour". Dang, 50 machines, $1/hour, 24 hours/day, gives $1200/day just for sitting on your ass.
You don't need the "don't subscribe" link to avoid subscribing (ignoring the email works fine), it just lets us know that person X chose not to subscribe at time Y from IP address Z.
All's true that is mistrusted
Whois:
55 Bridge Street
Manchester, NH 03101-1188
Phone- 603-624-7008
Fax- 603-624-9089
hostmaster@atriks.com
Atriks is a mailing list company. "Atriks offers targeted public record data that comes entirely from publicly available Internet sources. We collect, compile, aggregate and provide the most high-quality, complete, and up-to-date data possible for every individual and business with a presence on the Internet." They're a member of the Direct Marketing Association. They claim a server farm with 330 servers and seven terabytes of data. Here are some of the lists they offer:
-
Atriks Broadband Consumers "1,000,000+ consumers who have demonstrated a thirst for better technology and a willingness to spend money for enhanced products and services are included."
-
Atriks Personal Domain Owners with Credit Cards "7,000,000+ consumers have registered a domain for their own personal use and have created Web sites that share everything from jokes to family pictures. A key part of their registration is supplying credit card information, resulting in a file with all major credit card selects available."
-
Atriks Subscribers by ISP "6,700,000+ subscribers identified by ISP are included in this database. Mailers can target these subscribers by more than 100 selectable ISP providers."
Those are just the "consumer" lists. They also have business-to-business lists.Atriks is co-located with a local ISP, MV Communications.. MV has been in business for many years. They have modest backbone connections for an ISP; 6Mb/s to Global Crossing, 12Mb/s to Level 3, and 12Mb/s to Paetec. Unclear at this time if MV and Atriks have common ownership.
They're what the DMA would call a "legitimate spammer".
make that $10.00 an hour and offer health benefits and you can have my 286 spam for you 24/hours a day, although when port 25 is rediected to /dev/null it's not my fault that someone spammed that box with a trojen and ownzored the bitch. but hey as far as you are concerned you see 1000's of email being sent an hour.
So, the thing to do is to set up a lab full of old 386/20 boxen, all diligently churning away sending spam on the slowest processors you can find... and filter all of your outgoing port 25 traffic through a faster machine running SpamAssassin.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I just *can't* believe it!! You mean, the spammers might be making up bullcrap units of measurement that are arbitrary and designed to screw me, by paying me as little as absolutely possible to send their spam!?! But, but. . . But I thought spammers were honest! Paragon's of the virtual community. Trustworthy. I'm confused. . .
There are IP-based blocklists, but there are also message-content-hashing systems like Vipul's Razor, DCC, etc. that block messages that are roughly identical to reported spam. If you're a good enough firewall hacker to build something that captures the message and feeds it to those services, you're probably already running your own email (:-), and of course your ISP's AUP almost certainly bans you from sending the spam, but it's an entertaining gedankenexperiment.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
well, a slashdotting never feels good, so, thats off to a good start..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I, for one, welcome our new spam overlords!
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Let's all sign up for it, for the sole purpose of finding out who owns the originating mailservers! Then we can ddos them, and blackhole 'em, and report 'em, and order pizzas for them...
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
This seems like a no-brainer way to improve the efficiency of spam filters. Sign up for the service and shoot everything through your local mail "gateway" - which just happens to be a filtering process. Everything that comes in is designated as SPAM. If they don't intend to pay, then they won't immediately shut you off for not sending messages.
firewall/route all outgoing SMTP traffic to a dummy box on your LAN; the spammers think their mail went out, and it goes to straight to /dev/null. If they never pay, so what? You've spiked their efforts, and can turn'em in to the Feds for a reward.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
http://sendmails.com/email_deployment.html
Sendmails Corporation developed our Distributed Email Delivery System because many email providers will obstruct otherwise legal emails from very large senders at will and without notification to the sender/list owner. Using sending agents and VirtualMDA, blocking is much less likely.
Time for that old clunker that you have in the back of your closet to get jacked up with the latest version of DOS not only will you get paid fast
but they'll only get like 100 emails a month!!!
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
I have tested a number if penis enlargement pills bought from the Internet over the last two years and I can say they all work! My penis is now over 5 yards long and still growing several inches per day! Pretty soon I can use it to fetch beer from the fridge, put a new disc in the cd-player or scratch my back. Then I will be a happy man.
Thats funny, I thought you wanted to be a spammer and earn $2-3 before the ISP nukes you? Also, does your ISP charge you less then $2, or do you like losing money?
Install Wine.
Run with nice -19.
Run everything though a spam filter.
???
Profit
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Sorry, I prefer to determine what is and isn't spam myself. I worked for a company whose legitimate web/mail server was blacklisted for no reason other than being on a cable modem. It was a business cable account, with static IPs, specifically designated for servers. It was secure and all information on the website and in the WHOIS entry matched and was accurate. I contacted the blacklist maintainers and explained the situation, to no avail.
We did everything we could, short of buying a T1 (for about 10 users doing mild web and email). When you're willing to buy a dedicated connection for every legitimate mail server that can't afford one, then I'll put all my trust into RBLs.
Some RBLs go so far as to state outright that their purpose is to cause collateral damage. If one person gets one spam from a Comcast address, the RBL blocks all of Comcast. The idea is to hurt Comcast's legitimate email enough that they're pressured into getting rid of the spammer. Do they block one area around the spammer? One state? The whole nationwide ISP? And considering how many spoofed virus emails still get sent back to the "sender", I don't trust network admins to even correctly figure out where the spam is actually coming from. (The point of that is not that finding originating mail servers is like finding email addresses, but that people are generally incompetent.)
Sorry, but RBLs are far from perfect. As such, I won't rely on them. But thanks for trying to force your opinion of software onto me.
I hate to say it, but opening a mailbox to the world, - saying that anyone can store bytes on your hard drive is asking for abuse. It may be that a combination of bulk email filters and whitelists are the only way for those that don't want a box full of spam to get any usefulness out of email.
Maybe there will be email certification services that you can subscribe to for a fee that have TOS that will forbid spam. ( basically the fee pays the cost of administators handling spam complaints and cancelling accounts ) Then you could whitelist any 'certified' mail, and not depend on any uncertified mail you send to actually pass people's very strict spam filters.
This would make anonymous email still possible, but not guaranteed to get past spam filters or get delivered to people who don't wish to recieve anonymous email.
Market forces will decide what people do about spam. If someone opens a registered email service if/when ISPs stop cancelling people's network accounts in response to the flood of willing paid spam-hosts, and people decide to use it then that's what'll happen.
ISPs shouldn't really be responsible for the 'usability of the internet at large' anyway. If some dingus decides to DOS a site let law enforcement take care of it. They at least are paid to help ensure the usability of the 'mean streets' and the internet too.
Eat at Joe's.
At $1/hour, this sounds like a low-gain way to infuriate both your friends and perfect strangers.
Well, that sure beats doing it for shits and giggles by being a punk in Counter-strike or Day of Defeat. Heck, it even beats welfare at $720 a month for loaning out CPU time on a $25 Pentium 100.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
From the sendmails website:
Sendmails Corporation
P.O. Box 195
Manchester, NH 03105
TEL: 603.624.8936
FAX: 603.624.9089
352 Lowell St, Manchester, NH 03104
Who ya gonna believe? I'd hate do unleash some slashdot wrath on an innocent.
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
Easy, Just write a quick app to monitor the emials. You could even write some logic to "randomly" send your obligated message back to Virtual MDA. Sounds like a shell script to me. :-) The rest of the time, just pipe to /dev/null.
SPAM solution made easy: 1 spammer, 5 cords of rope, 5 hourses, and fireworks. Be creative.
Worth reading through their T&Cs'. One major point is that they don't actually ever need to pay anyone, as long as they delete the logfiles which tell them how much they owe you. They have language in there which basically says "If the data gets deleted, either accidentally or on purpose, then we owe you nothing".
Pretty much true. I recommend reading this book*. It's slightly dated, but with all the things that are happening in the economy, I doubt that being poor has gotten better, and with the ranks being swelled with former IT. Not only will principles go by the wayside (Food, or principles?), but the people doing the spamming will be technically literate. Sucks yes, but then humanity has made their bed, and will now be required to lie in it.
*The "evaluation" chapter is especially interesting, and very relevent.
I can't get to the site at the moment, so I can't say how this app credits you for the work, although some have said it is based on CPU time. Since this is spam that is being sent out, why not just setup a box that does the spamming, behind another box that accepts these spams and tries to relay them on to your firewall, at which point, your firewall drops everything coming from the relay box? As far as the spam app is concerned, the email was sent, and it was accepted for delivery. Also, since all these boxes would be located on a local segment of your home network, the spamming machine wouldnt waste time in io wait, but instead would be able to churn out mail at a pretty good pace, all for nothing (except money in your pocket)
http://bike.stu.ph/rides - free GPS routes available for Garmin, Magellan, GPX and Google Earth
I got paid! No, really, I got lots of money from them! I got rich, and I did it quick! Now go sign up and tell them luser#29766628 sent you!
While you're at it, don't forget to make your order for viagralax, the only viagra alternative that's also a laxative. I'm not only a peddler, I'm also a satisfied customer!
(As if you could really trust someone who said they got paid.)
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
So now that Spammers are paying other people to do something that's questionable legally, aren't the spammers then breaking a law? It's like if they paid a hitman.
Yeah, yeah, I know. CPU-hour doesn't mean wall-clock time. Still, too funny to not say.
I checked out there web site. They only pay you when you've 'earned' over fifty dollars. If you are running a Spam relay, most ISP will cut you off before you ever get to 50 hours, and so you never actually qualify to get a payment.
From their license agreement: Examples of information that we collect, other than through the registration form, include URL of visited pages, registration for offerings and IP addresses. Examples of data gathering activities include web page retrieval, domain tld discovery, and internet port/proxy discovery. Upon termination of the online session, closing of the browser and/or termination of your membership, this information will no longer be collected. We gather this information to improve the administration of the services and to increase the earning potential of our members. What a deal - lose your ISP, get sued, give them free marketing data, then have them lose the info to pay you. They even charge YOU a $3 check processing fee just to pay you.
from their terms of service:
Member will not use the
Service for chain letters, unsolicited email, spamming or any use of distribution lists
to any person who has not given specific permission to be included in such a process. SENDMAILS CORPORATION
will cancel membership privileges, terminate service and take legal action against any user
of its service that utilizes any of the acts described above.
And yet the majority here, have no problem with P2P'ers abusing networks, and when those ports are blocked, the ISP is somehow evil (Hey! I paid for this connection. I can do whatever I want==Hey! I paid for this spamming connection. I can do whatever I want).
this state of affairs.
>I was...in danger of losing a place to live
>...I would sign up for this in a heartbeat
Cut the line cord off an appliance.
Strip each free end.
When you have enough bare copper, wrap 1 end around each wrist.
Plug the cord into an outlet.
The planet has enough mercenaries.
gewg_
In the event of technical problems or data loss which causes a loss of account information, your account will be reset at $0.00, and you hereby waive any and all claims for any amount previously accrued but not yet disbursed.
SENDMAILS CORPORATION collects online behavior statistical information for our members. This information will be made available to third parties.
Member agrees: (2) not to use the Service for illegal purposes; (3) not to interfere or disrupt networks connected to the Service;
15. AGREEMENT NOT TO BRING OR PARTICIPATE IN CLASS ACTIONS: repeated twice
raj
Sarovar.org Hosting for open source projects in Indi
Did anybody notice (or did I not do a deep enough search of the /. trail) but their company name is 'sendmails'. I wonder if anybody will confuse them with 'sendmail' and thus give them a underserved veneer of legitemacy...
Dr. Rick
- "It's such a fine line between clever and stupid" (Nigel Tufnel)
- Zort! (Pinky)
Yes, I signed up, so sue me. The way I see it, nothing I do will stop spam. These guys claim that all they are doing is sending emails to opt-in subscribers, and I see no problem with that. If they are willing to pay me a $1 per CPU cycle, that's better than nothing. I've been averaging around a 3% load since installing and setting it to the highest level, so that equals around $20 a month. Every 10 weeks or so I'll be getting a $50 check in mail, and I have no complaints about that.
The user agreement is ambiguous about using multiple computers, but I have a couple of spare PC's that I'll test this out on and see if it will work. It's not a $168 a week (unless I get 30 PCs), but it's an extra bonus.
http://www.virtualmda.com/services.htm :
"When you decide to cash out, Sendmails will transfer the money into your paypal account within a short period of time."
http://www.virtualmda.com/download_vmda.ghc (The Terms of Service page):
"All payments shall be by check, made payable to you, and sent to you at your last known address via the U.S. Postal Service, first class mail."
As if it didn't smell funny enough already...
Anyone volunteering to do the coding?
At least this is a more honest approach to spamming than covertly installing spam spoftware via worms and other exploits.
:0 H:| send-mails|sendermailer|\w offer|wwwreports|activeserv ermail|citymailserver|\e mailserver|dedicatedemail servers|emaildeskserver|\r versgrab|instantvoicemailse rver|mailserver2Grab|\r biz|mailserverboss|sendm ails|mailserveruser|\v ers|openbsdmailservers| ourmailservers|ourskymail|\r ver|proofmailer|savedmessage| sqlemailserver|\v er|worldmailserver |yahoomailserver|\o odserversemail|foods erversemail|hotmailservers|\r vermail|myskymailserver|ntmail servers|worldwidemailserver|\o m|\| proudmailer)\.net) /dev/null
That said, "sendmails.com" has ahd a generous entry in my procmail spam recipes for some time now:
* ((4mails|emials|mailinthebox|mailnotice|mailspool
sendmial|wwwanswers|ww
cookmailserver|dedicated
fastmailserver|imailse
mailserver3Grab|mailserve
marksmailserver|myemailser
server|privatemailse
themailorderserver|turbomailser
airmailserver|fanmailserver|f
indiamailserver|ise
zapemailserver)\.c
(sendmails|dailyemail)\.org|\
(sendermailer
All those domains belong to sendmails.com and I suspect there are even more by now. I keep adding them all the time.
Forget emailing themselves, blocking with a firewall is functionally equivalent to not plugging in the network cable. The SMTP connection won't get through. If they aren't at least checking that you *can* spam (i.e. that you can make network connections), then they are pretty pathetic.
Sending all the spam to a local machine that just answers on port 25 for any IP (suggested elsewhere) would probably work, but is easily found out by the spammer including emails to themselves. If they aren't checking, this would be a good use of that 386 machine with network for which you can't find any other use. Note that one gets paid by the CPU hour, so the slowest PC is best.
This is what lots of people do for a living. Timber corporations, insurance companies, PAC's and quite a few other types of entities spend billions on legions of lawyers, agents, and lobbyists to do just this.
If I could nullify their effect as easily as I can with spam (a few mouseclicks a day and a marginally higher ISP bill) I would be overjoyed.
I don't imagine that the processor will be the bottleneck, but the internet connection.
Full ToS is on their website
.sig
http://www.virtualmda.com/terms.htm
I've paraphrased their clauses.
My comments are in italics after.
1. By signing up, you agree to this ToS
2. You get $1 for every "CPU HOUR".
You have to ask to get paid.
We won't pay unless it's at least $50.
If there's anything suspicious, or we make a mistake in accounting, you get nothing.
Comment: it's not clear what a "CPU HOUR" is, but I suspect despite the many claims on slashdot, that they really do mean $1 for every hour your computer is running their program and is connected to the internet sending email. But their program doesn't run unless both you and they tell it to, so they could guarantee that it runs less than 40 hours if they wanted to.
3. You agree not to cheat.
4. We can change the Terms of Service whenever we want.
My guess is that this happens if you would actually get paid if they didn't.
5. You are responsible for security.
6. There is no warranty.
7. We aren't liable for anything.
8. Our software has a copyright.
9. We decide if you violated the ToS.
10. You can't resell the service.
I wonder why they're worried about that.
11. You are responsible for anything we send.
Yes, they really do expect you to take the fall for what they are doing.
12. You indeminfy us.
And if they should happen to take the fall, then you have to pay for that too.
13. All you can do if you don't like it is quit.
14. The legal jurisdicition for everything is New Hampshire.
15. You agree not to participate in class actions against us.
And that goes for all time, not just this.
In other words, they know you're going to want to sue them, so they want to make sure it's not worthwhile to do it.
Mostly, the ToS is the usual collection of stupidity, but that last clause is so out there that I had to comment.
-- this is not a
It will become quickly evident to someone who is getting $1 per hour for their CPU time that it's not worth the time and effort. Even if you filed in small claims court, where you can represent yourself, you could make an argument to the spammer that it's going to cost more in time an hassle than he/she makes, even if they successfully defend themselves.
Alternative not involving the legal system:
suggest to the spammer that the price of a kevlar vest exceeds their spam income. Or that paying for a body guard would quickly eat up all the income. If a spammer asks why they'd ever need either one, don't say anything! They might be recording the conversation.
VI@GR@ X@N@X @ND M0R3 ALL 4 FR33
I can see the spam a new trend in spam coming now... get spammed to spam.
SSL Certificate
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
Unless your friends make a living by robbing banks and muggling little old ladies, you might want to be careful about mentioning that you've decided to dedicate your computer to spamming 24 hours a day.
ISP's won't have to get rid of everybody, as not everybody is going to join leagues with the spammers. ISP's don't want to be blacklisted - that kills the use for their legitimate customers. They don't want massive bandwidth bills for allowing their customers to spam 24 hours a day (most don't have that kind of bandwidth available, if as you claim, *everybody* did it.) Most realize that spam is bad for their business, and will fight against it.
"You may only request payment, and
SENDMAILS CORPORATION shall only disburse from your account, when your account is equal to or
greater than $50.00 for United States residents and $90.00 for those residents
outside the United States."
nice one:
"In the event of technical problems or data loss which causes a loss of account information, your account will be reset at $0.00, and you hereby waive any and all claims for any amount previously accrued but not yet disbursed."
and it includes spyware:
"SENDMAILS CORPORATION collects online behavior
statistical information for our members. Examples of information that we collect,
other than through the registration form, include URL of visited pages, registration
for offerings and IP addresses."
I installed the client just for kicks (Don't expect them to pay out, I'm curious):
Time Run: 1:31:14:999
CPU Time Used: 0:01:05:199
CPU % Usage: 1.69%
Oh yeah, did I mention it has a trojan?
Typed screenshot from AVG Antivirus:
AVG Residant shield
Virus
Trojan horse Downloader.4.Small.BT
is found in file
D:\Program Files\VirtualMda\package.exe
To remove this virus, please run AVG for Windows
If you read the fine print of the Terms of Service you'll find an interesting tidbit where you state that you won't use this program for spam. Huh? Section 11 states:
Member agrees: (1) to comply with US
law regarding the transmission of technical information; (2) not to use the Service for
illegal purposes; (3) not to interfere or disrupt networks connected to the Service; and
(4) to comply with all regulations, policies and procedures of networks connected to the
Service. Member agrees not to transmit through the Service any unlawful, harassing, libelous,
abusive, threatening, harmful, vulgar, obscene or otherwise objectionable material of any
kind or nature. Member agrees not to transmit any material that encourages conduct that
could constitute a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability or otherwise violate
any applicable local, state, or international law or regulation. Member will not use the
Service for chain letters, unsolicited email, spamming or any use of distribution lists
to any person who has not given specific permission to be included in such a process
Apparently, you're only sending out spam that people have "signed up" for? How could you prove that I wonder...
"According to the Turtle" www.paperbackreader.com
I downloaded this client to see how much bandwidth it would use, and during the installation my anti-virus found a trojan.
That's strange. Spammers have never lied to me about numbers before...
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
So it is 1 $ per CPU hour? How to make money for nothing:
Step 1: Dig out that old 486DX33 from the closet. 1 CPU hour on a 486 goes buy much faster than on a modern machine.
Step 2: Block outbound port 25 at your router.
Step 3: Run program 24/7. Get free $$$.
At 0.2% CPU usage:
24x365x.002 = $17.52/yr
You can bet they've optimized it for minimal cpu usage, and that it'll suck up nearly all of your bandwidth. You'd be paid about $20 a year for most of what you pay over $300 a yr for. A very raw deal, not to mention the high probability of it getting you in trouble with your isp.
Well this is just too tempting for me. I hate spam but I love weed more. Thats alot of weed i could buy for 168 bucks a week.
However, since that $4.90/hour won't even come close to covering the potential bandwidth charges they'd accumulate, it seems only prudent that I configure a mail filter to route outbound messages to /dev/null . . .
They have taken our mailboxes, now our MTAs, next...
better yet, VMware. run a couple dozen virtual machines on one p4 and only allocate about 10MHz CPU per VM. just watch the clock ticks add up in a real hurry!
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
I tried it. It will take 18.75 days running Non-Stop to get my first $50.
With everything set at Max on a standard Cable Modem. You get about 1 Min of CPU time for every 10 Min of actual app run time.
No thanks.
Luckily this is my test pc which I can totally wipe.
You can make it work so slowly that it turns out to be $1/email.
Stick it to them! Dig up your old 386's and get them running it.
Or you can intercept outgoing emails as they're sent and simply drop them on the floor.
Put a box in an isolated network whose gateway "fakes" dns and smtp responses and just keeps all the mail.
Spammer thinks you're spamming, you get paid (drain spammers assets), no one is hurt.
Not like they're going to try and sue you in court for not doing something illegal.
- Upon registration, all users grant to SENDMAILS CORPORATION their explicit
permission (1) to contact them with important information about Members' accounts and
updates to our services, policies and business practices, (2) to access and use the
Installed Computer(s) for relaying permission based (opt-in) email for SENDMAILS CORPORATION and/or third parties, (3) to access and use the Installed Computer(s) for domain name resolution,
and (4) data gathering activities, without further notice to or permission
from Member.
...
Examples of information that we collect,
other than through the registration form, include URL of visited pages, registration
for offerings and IP addresses. Examples of data gathering activities include web page
retrieval, domain tld discovery, and internet port/proxy discovery.
With a Terms of Service like these, there is no need to even bother having you send out ANY spam. They can make a nice profit just by tracking you.I'm going to try using a program like speed gear to get my max (according the the T&C) 24 CPU hours in one day very quickly, then turn it off.
1) Build a SMTP spoofing router that silently eats SPAM without passing it through
2) Install their software on computer behind said router
3) Register for service
4) PROFIT !!!
Better yer, a beowulf cluster of such boxes
How's that for hitting all the buttons
Join the program, have the software all set up and running, But have an outgoing firewall blocking the mail port so none of the spam leaves your network! Drain the spammers of their money wothout causing a problem! :)
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
How about writing a spoofing SMTP router that sits between this computer and the Internet, that absorbs all the messages before they leave your infrastructure ?
:-)
To make it more fun, harvest the destination email addresses, build a nice big list, and resell the addresses back to the spammers
jrjBlog
Spamhaus sez NOT LEGIT - I'll belive them. Time to toast MV Communications I guess. Adios spammy.
From: Prez
:)
TO: Logistics Staff
RE: TEST PHASE/ FRAUD
Finding morons who think they'll get away with spamming their family, friends, and neighbors is no problem.
Issue: those who will find a way around the system with successful results that we haven't even thought of yet. Test phase provided some unexpected results in regards to fraud and you numbskulls better way to conteract this.
Come up with something fast!
Prez
To: Prez
From: Logistics
RE: TEST PHASE/ FRAUD
We have assmebled a special IT team working on this issue. Our team will be of no additional cost to our company. They are a volunteer, international team, working 24/7, for the sheer delight of exploring our new brand of technology. What's more, with minimal information, they will soon provide us with enough ground level feedback to foresee any possible avenues of fraud and/or minimize any such activity. Some of them will even sign up or the service themselves just to "test" it.
The situation is under control sir.
*giggle from the IT team over the memo after they hit SEND*
The slashdot folk will find out about us soon enough. They'll figure out all the possible ways anyone could possibly think of for fraud, and post their answers, theories, and countless possibilities for us to go over whenever we get a sec. Let's go to lunch!
This is simple, people. Just find a way to send the spam to the bit bucket, while still getting paid. Talk about sticking it to them!
wouldnt the spammer use this money to buy his own computer and t1 lines? this is stupid, a dollar an hour is far more than this is worth, further, could the cpu really send out enough ads to generate a dollar an hour for the businesses? maybe i suppose, but i rather doubt this is even a possibility
On today's modern machines, what miniscule percentage of CPU would it actually use to send this outgoing spam? I could easily see one "cpu hour" equating to one "spamming week"...
Makes me wonder, though...
1) Pull 386 from basement and install spamming software (1 CPU hour = 1 hour)
1.5) Optional: ever heard of Underclocking?
2) OUTBOUND HOST MODIFICATOR: tracker.virtualmda.com unchanged; all others routed to all.roads.lead.to.localhost:25
3) Spam spam spam spam spam
4) ???
5) Profit.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
They are in the same building. That's it. They do NOT share a circuit.
At $1/hour, this sounds like the spam fighting is working. Keep it up.
Run 100 virtual machines on a single box with 32Mb ram, It'll thrash it's hardware to death, each individual 'machine' will be running balls to the wall, and you'll probably not max out a 2400 baud modem.
Allight, this is just scary...
Upon registration, all users grant to SENDMAILS CORPORATION their explicit
permission (1) to contact them with important information about Members' accounts and
updates to our services, policies and business practices, (2) to access and use the
Installed Computer(s) for relaying permission based (opt-in) email for SENDMAILS CORPORATION and/or
third parties, (3) to access and use the Installed Computer(s) for domain name resolution,
and (4) data gathering activities, without further notice to or permission
from Member. The users have the option to choose not to be contacted or their
information shared by terminating their account. SENDMAILS CORPORATION collects online behavior
statistical information for our members. Examples of information that we collect,
other than through the registration form, include URL of visited pages, registration
for offerings and IP addresses. Examples of data gathering activities include web page
retrieval, domain tld discovery, and internet port/proxy discovery. Upon termination
of the online session, closing of the browser and/or termination of your membership,
this information will no longer be collected. We gather this information to improve
the administration of the services and to increase the earning potential of our members.
This information will be made available to third parties. If any information provided
by Member is incomplete or inaccurate, SENDMAILS CORPORATION retains the right to terminate Member's
membership and rights to use the Service.
No thank you....
O_O
Joseph?
There will be two internets. One where spammer money is gratefully received and pink contracts abound, and one where spammers are despised and utterly rejected. The light side will have the dark side totally firewalled.
So, no problem, then? Sign up for an account on the light side, don't spam, and you're all set? Well, maybe not. Problems:
the Dark Side will probably include whole countries. Brazil, China and the South Korean school system, I'm looking at you...
the Light Side is unlikely to tolerate some of our own misdemeanours. P2P apps, fair use technologies, dubious binaries newsgroups, unlicensed Hungarian DVD players...
So everyone will need to have an account on both internets. Damn.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
How, and how often is the program polling for this information? Is it checking total CPU usage, or just what the program itself is using?
If its doing its workload, then checking the cpu usage afterwords, its going to be very low. Unless it has a seperate thread to check cpu usage while the program is actually sending the emails, its going to return almost no cpu usage if anything at that time.
Imagine the source code like this:
I really doubt they would write the code to use a seperate thread. Also, if its rounding the number to an integer, you can expect it to return 0 often.
Also, the program may simply just LIE about how much work its done. Unless someone writes and runs a program to keep track of this service's cpu time, its not likely anyone would know otherwise.
Whooooo, I'm finally gunna get paid to download spam - I mean, my CPU is being used to deliver spam to me, so it's about time they paid me to download them.
The terms of service field is fully editable, I just signed up with the following very reasonable terms:
.
.
"Terms Of Service
ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND ACCEPTANCE OF TERMS OF SERVICE. Sendmails Corporation
("SENDMAILS CORPORATION") web site, VirtualMDA and other SENDMAILS CORPORATION services and web properties ("Service"), owned and operated by SENDMAILS CORPORATION, is provided to the member community under the following Terms of Service
The Terms of Service comprise the entire agreement between Member and SENDMAILS CORPORATION and supersede all prior agreements between the parties, regarding the subject matter contained herein. By participating in the registration process, members are indicating their
agreement to be bound by all of these Terms of Service.
Payment. Upon completing the registration procedure, you will be given a unique
identification account number ("UID"). You will be paid by SENDMAILS CORPORATION $1,000,000 (one million dollars) for every Nano Second that the VirtualMDA software is located on strorage media on your personal or business computer(s).
In order to receive payment, you must submit a request to SENDMAILS CORPORATION using email containing your UID. You may only request payment, and
SENDMAILS CORPORATION shall only disburse from your account, when your account is equal to or greater than $50.00 for United States residents and $90.00 for those residents
outside the United States. In the event of technical problems or data loss which
causes a loss of account information, your account will be credited with $1,000 (One Thousand US Dollars) by way of appology for our poor administration.
We ( SENDMAILS CORPORATION ) hereby waive any and all rights to ammend or terminate this contract once you the individual or corporation downloading our software clicks "I agree to these terms"
All payments shall be by bank transfer in a currency of your choice, the fees for which we shall be liable for. All payments not made by us to you within 5 working days shall be subject to 15% daily compund interest."
On their front page, they claim: "At Sendmails Corporation, we move the data that drives the Internet, delivering millions of emails daily..."
Shouldn't they instead claim: "At Sendmails Corporation, we move the data that slows the Internet to a crawl and costs businesses and individuals millions of dollars in lost productivity..."?
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Also, did you notice that this company, which makes its living by delivering email, doesn't publish its email address on its website?
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
and here it was, right before my eyes!
God bless you, VirtualMDA!
I didnt notice it was editable. Unfortunately I have a feeling that they dont store the terms of service for each user when they click agree. Worth a shot though. A million dollars per nanosecond... man you are already richer than every person on the planet combined!!
Joseph?
Well the intent was to show what's left (not to show what is taken out). But you are right, 340 is a little too much.
I really don't think the point is diluted by the poorly chosen tax figures though.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I would love to run it on my 386 connected ...
with 4kbit/s connection
Ill post an update later on how well it works. Since I'm a 50 year old ham artist and not really a windows geek, can anyone give me instructions on how to set up these nifty VM devices?
-The Not-Yet-Registered Anonymous Coward!
But just wait to the dark side gets split into chaotic good (where p2p is allowed but no spam) and chaotic evil (no restrictions)!
And it'll keep splitting and splitting until we're not dealing anymore with a few individual networks but a bunch of single computer networks hooked up to one giant... umm internetwork.
Isn't this slightly similar to what happened with AOL, Prodigy, Compuserv and most of the early networks offering access to internet.
As of right now and as far as I know, VirtualMDA does Not verify that you are actully sending spam. I am running the program right now and my bandwidth isn't being touched by spam (filtered by zone alarm) and im getting money (or so I think?).
Anyway, they give you $5 for signing up, and as of right now I have $6.17 - assuming they pay.
So yeah, big whoop, I made $1.17 (assuming) and I had it running since Wed. (4/14) night (11PM). So here's what we must try and figure out - how do we get this program to suck up more CPU time?
I did some research and found a nice little option for DOS programs called Idle Sensitivity, but this isn't a DOS program so thats out. What I tried last night was I ran 8 (yes, 8) VMWare Win2k pro machines (win2k pro seemed to get higher CPU usage (around 8% as opposed to 2% I get in XP and 98) in safe mode with networking). My cash flow was higher then normal, but not much.
Also what I tried was a bootable XP Pro CD (BartPE) and that didn't get my CPU usage any higher either, maybe knoppix-STD running WINE?
Also I've been working with ethereal and trying to find out what packets get sent where with this program so maybe I could send a custom packet to whatever remote server and boost my cash flow that way. But as far as I can see, ethereal is all hype. Anyone know anyway to edit and send your own custom packet in ethereal? Etherpeek can do it, and it's easy to use.
But yes, back to virtualmda, anyone know anyway to force a program to use more CPU time?