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
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.
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.
I will also confess/be honest and say that it is tempting. That's money that would seem free to the person "earning" it.
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
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.
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
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
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.
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
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)
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."
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."
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 ($8760/year) The more people who do this, the broker the spammers will become.
5 computers runing 24/7 is 120$ a day runinng 7 days straight is 840 a week you could live off that easliy.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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