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.
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
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
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
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...
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
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."
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.
...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
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
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'
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.
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."
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
- 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.
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!
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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.
yes they send special messages through you and test that they got them.
simular to mass snailmail mailing where you rent a list from someone and then if you continue to use it after the period you paid they know because they planted fake people in the list.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Though spammers have, as a rule, shown themselves to be pretty dumb in general, they are not, as a rule, dumb technically.
Trivial to have every nth (perhaps with some random deviation) email address be one of a number that the spammer itself monitors. If the mail does not get to those monitor accounts, you don't get paid.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Damn! I wish Gentoo would hurry up and build on this thing so I can start making $$$ !
Whenever you read this sig someone's refrigerator light turns on.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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 . . .
jrjBlog
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!
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?