Slashdot Mirror
NYT on Spam Cops
yet another coward writes "The New York Times reports on new measures against spam. (Sperm sample required, sorry ladies) Microsoft has increased efforts to track and prosecute spammers. Hotmail receives 2 billion (2 * 10^9) spam messages per day. In a twist of weirdness, the Direct Marketing Association is funding investigators who cooperate with the FBI on spam investigations. Spamhaus also gets a mention."
In a twist of weirdness, the Direct Marketing Association is funding investigators who cooperate with the FBI on spam investigations.
sounds like phillip morris funding anti-smoking campaigns.
This notice on their site makes clear what uses of their materials is acceptable. Reposting verbatim to other sites is definitely not.
Moderators should not be encouraging this type of behavior by making them "insightful". Slashdot should respect other peoples copyrights, don't forget how evil violating the GPL is.
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
Sperm sample required, sorry ladies
/., and that looks a bit unprofessional for the front page.
This is kind of off topic, but does anyone else feel that the New York Times, "registration required," jokes are getting a little out of hand. I mean, the first time someone said, "soul sucking registration," it was pretty funny, but now it's just getting lame. I think it's gone the way of the step 1 step 2 step 3 profit jokes.
No offence intended to whoever posted the article. I'm sure they were just joking around, but a lot of people read
Hopefully, some day people will realize bulk mail isn't effective...
It must be effective enough, or nobody would do it.
Yes, let's pay people to spam. Then a bunch of businesses and individuals who wouldn't even touch spam before now see a business opportunity.
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
Not unless and until they accept that the rules must be based on opt-in, not opt-out. Unfortunately, it has become clear that the only way there is any chance of getting them to accept this is to make it clear that an unsolicited opt-out advertisement from a "legitimate" business will be considered equivalent to the sleaziest "p3n!s pill" spewing.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Just tell em that the spams with random characters are really secret encrypted messages by terrorists ,and that will quickly get the spammers a 12 year holiday at Camp Xray.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Even though TV advertising could be seen as annoying most people, it would still need to be profitable, otherwise companies wouldn't do it. Generally companies don't like to "throw" money away.
People generating SPAM must be making enough money to offset the time/resources involved, otherwise what is their incentive for sending SPAM? I can't imagine that spammers are the charitable type.
Well, actually you don't need a fast connection.
As a matter of fact, it would be undesirable for these slime to leave that much of a trail back to themselves (ie, the IP they've connected to the internet would be included in mail they originated from themselves).
No, instead a lot of them look for open relay mailservers. For the uninitiated, an open relay is a mail server that will accept mail from anybody to anybody.
Then the spammer sends *one* mail to the relay with 10,000 bcc addresses. The victim relay then has the task of sending out the 10,000 messages while the spammer looks for another open relay to send more spam through.
This is where it is even scarier that spammers are "hooking up" with virus writers. Sure, it used to be the virus would just send copies of itself to your friends and family. But, now they're getting sophisticated enough to become open relays for spamming or even *hosting the website* that the spam points to (!).
You're right... it *is* far to easy, but much easier than you even thought. >8(
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
Just click Unsubscribe and you're free and clear.
I don't even want "legitimate" spam. Why should I have to unsubscribe from dozens or hundreds or thousands of marketing mailing lists that I never suscribed to in the first place? The DMA should be advocating opt-in rather than opt-out. I have no sympathy for their headaches.
I recently had a long conversation with the guy who runs the spamvertisements for a certain motel chain that sounds like FlooperBait. He said "We process thousands of unsubscribe requests per week!" For some reason, that little tidbit failed to clue him in that he's doing something wrong.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Oh please, the DMA thinks that it is possible for unsolicted bulk commercial email to not be spam. They are diabolically insane.
The DMA doesn't want to get rid of spam. They just want you to start thinking that there is such a thing as "legitimate" or "legal" spam.
Excuse me, no. All unsolicted bulk commercial email is spam.
Unsubscribe links? Yeah right. So all I have to do is give you some data about me (for free) and you'll stop bugging me (for a few seconds)? What data, you ask? Oh, just that the email address you are sending the mail to is valid, that I'm not interested in whatever product you're pushing, how often I read my emails, what time of day I read my emails, what time of day I'm at home vs at work, whether I can read my home email from the office or vice versa, whether I'm using a Mac or PC, what browser I'm using, etc. etc. Just clicking a link tells direct marketers A LOT about me, and about my system. That is all valuable data that they WILL compile into a database and then sell to other marketers!
The DMA is one of the most evil, sneaky, lying organizations that has ever existed. Nothing they say should EVER be taken at face value. They have secret reasons behind EVERYTHING they do.
The problem with "legitimate" spam is that there would be 'way too much of it. Let's say that there are 100,000 "legitimate" spam senders, each of whom sends me one spam per year. That's almost 300/day -- worse than I have now. 100,000 is very definately a lowball estimate, and one per year is simply silly.
The "unsubscribe" business is a con -- you will have to unsubscribe to every company and mailing list provider that might want you to buy something. I'll also bet that most of them will be set up as obfuscated web pages that will actually subscribe you to extra lists (unsubscribe to List A, be automatically subscribed to Lists B through Z unless you find the Magic Button).
Let's face it. There is *no* *such* *thing* as "legitamate" spam -- if we want to keep e-mail as a useful means of communication.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
"sperm samples winging their way to NYT"
Good Lord! What kind of sperm do you freaks have? My sperm SWIM thank you very much.Join the Constitution Party in its work to restore our government to its Constitutional limits and our law to its Biblical foundation.
No thanks. I'd rather not continue to allow for the "Chosen One" attitude that both GWB and our beloved RWR felt the need to indulge in.
After all, if you can charge the isp (who most likely is in no way responsible for the spam other than having end users with compromized boxen) why not them as well.
The crux of my comment (which I apparently didn't make clear) was that spammers get a lot of cooperation from the legitimate business world. If the legitimate business world that supplies them is aware of what the spammer is doing, they *are* part of the conspiracy and a member of an ad-hoc criminal enterprise.
"I didn't know" is only good for so far, until somebody turns (and somebody always turns, even in the Mafia) and squeals about the ISP who gets extra money to mask the spammers efforts, the credit card processor/bank burying customer complaints and refusing to issue chargebacks in exchange for $$$$.
It's a nice techno-fantasy to believe that all spam is spread by 0wned hosts from rogues running off of DSL living in their parent's basement. But it's naive to think that these spammers aren't living in the real world, using real-world resources to run their crooked enterprises, and that these real-world resources are totally ignorant.
By filing lawsuits known as "John Doe" suits, in which the identity of the defendant is not known, Internet providers are able to subpoena records from banks and others to determine the identity of spammers.
Someone tell me how this is different than what the RIAA has been trying to do with the ISPs getting John Doe warrants to find out who's behind the P2P violations?
Your post advocates a
(*) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante ( ) lack of an
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(*) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(*) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) No-lists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(*) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
#1. Buy the pills (in the article, they're already saying that they do that) and pay with a CHECK.
#2. Find the bank that accepted the check.
#3. Call the local field office
, leave a voicemail, spammer cashes your check, you get herbal pills full of lawn clippings, never hear from either again. You're an in-duh-vidual. You really think the FBI gives a shit?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
The DMA wrote the Can-Spam law, which doesn't outlaw spam. That is because they want to send spam. They sued the US government over the recently enacted Do Not Call list, because they want to telemarket to people that don't want to hear it.
Yes, the DMA would love to chase all of the small time spammers away so that they can spam to their hearts content without the problems that they have in todays email environment - but anyone who thinks they are "good guys" or that they are "on our side" is totally, completely, whacked out crazy.
If all commercial mail conformed to the rules that the DMA advocates, no one would complain to ISPs about commercial mail because the power to prevent it would be in the hands of the recipient. Just click Unsubscribe and you're free and clear.
How many legitimate businesses are there in the US alone? Under the rules the DMA wants, every one of those gets to spam you until you beg them to stop. If 10% of the legitimate businesses in the US send 1 email per year, you'll spend hours every day jumping through their "opt out" hoops. Fuck that. I shouldn't have to tell them "I have no interest in doing business with you, which is why I have never contacted you."
It shouldn't surprise us that the DMA will do anything they can to prevent spam.
They won't tell their users "Do not send spam". They won't lobby for laws to make spamming illegal, and actively fight any that are proposed. They want to do anything they can to prevent spam by people outside the DMA, while preserving what they see as their "right" to send spam.
If they want to shed the stigma of e-mail marketing, they must embrace opt-in. End of discussion.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.