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.

Comments

ISPs

[Zog The Undeniable]

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?

CPU hour, not normal hour

[Theatetus]

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.

Re:CPU hour, not normal hour

[gerardrj]

You are assuming that a daemon/service is incapable of running at 100% CPU utilization, which is just an entirely erroneous assumption. Background processes can hog just as much CPU time as your newest 3D shooter.
It all depends on what the thing it trying to do. Look at Seti or Folding, bot run as daemon/service/background processes and both will use 100% CPU.

And don't forget their WHOIS Info:

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Don't get too excited

[Welsh Dwarf]

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...

Re:Fight back!

[The_Mr_Flibble]

You know it only takes 15 mins of elevated mail traffic on our systems before your ip gets locked down.

$1 per *CPU* hour

[Pan T. Hose]

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!

Re:Thousands per year

[aastanna]

From their terms and conditions:
"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."

You can't claim until it gets to $50, and your account can be reset to $0 at any time.