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?
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.
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
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.
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
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
These aren't "good Xian soldiers" here (not that that would be any better). Do you REALLY trust them to pay?... I somehow doubt that they're willing to cut you a cheque or M.O. Wouldn't surprise me if they were running a double-scam: "Yeah, umm, your $1723 weasel payment is coming right up. Can we just have your account and routing numbers?"
Not that we would fall for it, but just think about who will.
...when their internet connection gets pulled. Which would probably happen within the first week.
Yes, very "brilliant" of them. The only thing this will accomplish is getting port 25/tcp blocked all across the Internet completely whether you're an offender or not. Thanks asshole.
Good thing you didn't go for something like this. All it would do is leave you broke and without an internet connection, after it was shut off for spamming. And as other people have pointed out, its unlikely that you would have gotten paid. I'm sure the agreement has enough technicalities in it to let the company use almost any excuse not to pay you. Its unfortunate that sleazy companies do tend to prey on those who don't have a lot, since they tend to be the most desperate for any offer of money, no matter how unlikely it really is.
True although, Windows for example will never let a single application always run at 100% CPU, because if so, the OS wouldn't be running now would it?
Look at it this way, if you let it use 100% CPU usuage, but only give it a 1bps internet connection (use a router to alterate the uprate speed or something), do you still get paid by CPU? Isn't the problem with spam bandwidth not CPU? I'm so confused! Would a person running a 486 with a modem get paid as much for 100% cpu as someone running a zSeries IBM mainframe on bundled T3's??
Mod +5 Drunk
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 **SNIP**
Except for the fact that *legitimate* "commercial bulk email" uses confirmed opt-in (note that I didn't say "double opt-in", a term used by spammers to imply that it's somehow extra work), has a simple and effective unsubscribe process, never purchases or rents lists, never assumes permission to do anything (email, phone, physical mail, etc), provides something of real value (weekly commentary newsletter, real sales specials, etc), and doesn't send it out too often. I have colleagues that support companies with thousands subscribed to weekly newsletters and the like (industry commentary, etc) which they send directly from their own mail server and they've never been on an RBL or had a spam complaint.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I dunno, if I were writing a program like this, I'd insert mail addresses I monitor into the stream of addresses I sent out. If I send one of those addresses to you, and I don't get my mail back, no soup for you.