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Spam's U.S. Roots
ahab_2001 writes "Notwithstanding how tired my finger is getting from deleting all of those unsolicited messages from China and Korea, Information Week reports that a study of filtered messages by the spam-blocking firm CipherTrust revealed that some 86% of spam originates in the U.S. Apparently, a very limited set of IPs with high-bandwidth connections is dishing out the bulk of the spam, according to this study."
What do I do find morally distrubing is that there are geeks out there making assloads of cash providing a conduit for this spam with high powered servers and keeping the senders essentially nameless.
a cursory scan of spambot reporting shows this is crap sampling
I skimmed the article, but couldn't find the answer to the question that, I'm sure, is on most /.ers minds: what are those IPS???
Everyone blames the chinese, but the ads are written in english, for american products, and targetted at americans. The Chinese are just a relay, and being blamed as spammers, when they should be blamed for not keeping their computers secure.
And I suppose that the sanctions on software, language barrier, and lack of skilled people have nothing to do with it?
Just yesterday I received spam from this guy at cybersmtp.com, advertising they can send bulk emails out. Check this out, I was surprised at the number of emails they have in their database, and the relative cheapness to send out nearly 300 million emails:
No Software to Buy - Nothing to download
Lowest cost for broadcast
E-Mail is a key component in maintaining contact with your customers
Email Broadcasting
Please choose from the following:
[ ] 1,000,000 e~mail sent $400
[ ] 5,000,000 e~mail sent $1,500
[ ] 10,000,000 e~mail sent $2,000.00
[ ] 56-70,000,000 e~mail sent $2,500.00
[ ] 224-280,000,000 e~mail sent $10,000.00
We use our own directory, so you do not need to pay one dime extra.
while [ true ] ; do wget http://www.emailsupply.net/lists.php -O /dev/null ; done
Try this also: large file, and hit the PHP, not a static page!
A lot of us in the IT world owe our jobs in some way to spam: the company I work for wouldn't need a 4-person server staff if we didn't have to
Would anybody else be out of a job if it weren't for spam?
All's true that is mistrusted
Crush those sites? A sound idea. Start here. It's a Spam Vampire site set up by one of the more vicious anti-spammers I've ever seen in action. Non-caching, image-reaping, website-burning, bandwith-sucking action, all with a scorecard and a throttle. Now if we can just get this modded up so that a few thousand people are all playing at the same time...
Spam is more like a nuisance crime than a disease. Diseases are natural occurrences, unpleasant yes but a biological function. Spam is a deliberate attempt to pollute a public space for private gain.
In a sense it's the fault of the original e-mail/internet designers. By creating a nearly free and unlimited communications channel for themselves, they never anticipated that the channel would be hijacked by advertisers who are claiming the internet for their own private personal gain (as a open medium through which they can sell nearly unlimited access to advertising agencies).
By hijacking it is. Spammers are stealing a public resource.
A situation like this occured about 80 years ago when radio was becoming popular as a medium. Advertisers set up stations and broadcast ads and chatter over each other's frequencies. Eventually in the early 1930's, the US Federal Communications Commission (and similar agencies in other countries) was formed and clamped down harshly on unregulated broadcasting. That solved the problem of overlapping stations but eventually led to the situation that we have today of stagnant and insipid radio.
Spamming is also like grafitti, which is a nuisance crime of a person painting a private message in a public space that is too low in value to be protected against defacing by a full-time guard. The public space gets trashed by messages considered ugly to all except the miscreant. Other countries punish this activity harshly and they don't have defaced public spaces.
Spam will continue until the techno community creates enforceable guidelines to deal with this problem, and then actually enforces them. This could be banning sending messages beyond a certain number or actually selling licenses to spammers to allowing them them to send X million e-mails per month. The only actual realistic solution to spam is to stop allowing unlimited private use of a public communications medium.
Don't rely on governments to address this problem. Spam will be solved by the open source community coming up with a definition of spam, justification of restriction, and effective cessation of spamming activities when the spammers refuse to follow published guidelines enacted by the open source community. In fact, it's likely that the spammers will use the police against the open-source community's spam-limiting activities.
In other words, spam will lighten when the open-source community uses their technology and skills to shut the spammers down, regardless of whether or not the spammers have legal authority to flood the internet with millions of unwanted messages.
It appears that his host is onlinehome-server.com which has a price list at here which shows their max monthly bandwidth as being between 25 and 100 gigs. At 90k/s bandwidth (their end) that's 324 megs/hour/person, so assuming 10 people do it it would take 30 hours each to hit their cap. 100 people could do it in 3.
:)
Sounds like fun
> while [ true ]
/bin/test (which is linked from /bin/[), checking that test != "" and eating the ]. Then test returns 0 (because it's true).
... done
/bin/true which does nothing but return zero.
... done
... done
/bin/false; do ... done
The square brackets are extraneous. Or rather, they give your loop the meaning you intended, but not the way you meant it.
You are testing that the string within the brackets is not zero length. You do this by running
What you want is
while true; do
This runs the program
while [ crapapples ]; do
would also loop infinitely. As would:
while [ false ]; do
Which could really confuse things if you meant to temporarily disable the loop by writing
while
This concludes our shell lesson for the day.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
That's great, but it doesn't show any images... just a blue background.
Thanks for at least explaining what the hell it is, but that doesn't really make it so I can use the site anyway, considering the site doesn't work...
Comment of the year
I've had a number of problems with a Cogent Communications customer (Glowing Edge) spamming the hell out of one of my addresses. After numerous complaints to Cogent (and a couple of phone calls to their abuse dept.), I determined that they really don't plan to drop this customer (despite being told by their abuse dept. that this customer generated the greatest number of complaints). I've since denied all of their netblocks (see below) from sending mail to me - I recommend others do the same. Don't support ISPs which allow their customers to spam!
1 83.224.0/19. 0.0/16. 0/20
Cogent Communications netblocks:
209.115.0.0/16
209.41.192.0/18
206.
216.28.0.0/15
209.146.0.0/17
66.28
66.250.0.0/16
66.132.0.0/17
207.254.144
38.112.0.0/13