Slashdot Mirror
A Day In The Life Of A Spammer
kaip writes "Internetnews.com has a story of a spammer. The individual sends 60 million spam emails for four days worth of work and claims that one in 19 of AOL users clicks the links in his mortgage spam (this number should however be taken with a grain of salt, see rules 1 and 2). Maybe not
everybody has heard of the Boulder
Pledge... The article also tells how the CAN-SPAM Act,
which legalises spamming, is turning the US into the spam haven of the world. Currently, 86 percent of the total spam volume is coming from the States."
SPAM will continue to exist until people stop making spam profitable. It's a bad side effect to greed. People will do anything for a buck.
Legislation won't help. Technology hasn't been able to help that much yet. Basically, advertising is here to stay, and you can do one of two things, make yourself invisible so you can't be advertised to, or accept it.
Companies want you to be a consumer, so that they can keep being producers. There's too many companies, so they are going to fight hand over foot to get their product into your mind in whatever method they can.
-Eric
hrrm.
I just don't get it. I mean, Congress bending over backwards to legitimize obnoxious behaviour by big corporations I can understand; that's pretty much what it's for, these days.
But spammers? They're not particularly organized, as far as I know. It's not as if the Viagra-and-penis-extension lobby is a major campaign contributor. So what gives? Are Congresscritters really so consistently stupid right across the board, AND their staff, AND all the IT and telecoms industry lobbyists who must have had something to say?
Or were they worried about the effect of (useful) legislation on political direct-email campaigns? Maybe. But I can't see how that would benefit one party more than the other, so why care?
The article also tells how the CAN-SPAM Act, which legalises spamming, is turning the US into the spam haven of the world.
I think CANSPAM is an awful law. It overrides much better and stricter state laws, and it doesn't really do anything to reduce SPAM.
However, it seems like a stretch to say that CANSPAM is turing the U.S. into a SPAM haven. I think most spam recieved in the U.S. is tied to U.S. businesses, even if it's sent or bounced through servers abroad. Just because spam from US servers have increased doesn't mean CANSPAM is the cause - you can use logic like that to "prove" that pr0n is good for kids.
I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason for the increase is that there are more virus-laden compromised computers in the U.S. to relay spam off of.
I have blog like everyone else
It is amazing to me that the ultimate benefactors of mortgage spams are generally banks, one of the stodgy, conversative types of organizations around. (And rightfully so). Now, they need several layers of spam-laundering in order to hide themselves with plausible deniabilty from the spammers. But, it seems to me that an organized campaign to lobby and educate banks and other financial institutions ought to be able to eliminate mortgage spam.
It is the same sort of rage that you feel at someone who cuts you off in traffic, or listens to their voice mail with the volume cranked up. Hatred is a common reaction to extreme rudeness and spam is rudeness taken to the nth degree.
The gut reaction of hatred caused by spam has very nothing to do with logic. When I think about spammers logically I think they should be fined to the point at which their business case is destroyed and in extreme cases (fraud, illegal merchandise) they should go to jail. When I waste 30 minutes filtering mail or miss an important mail because of spam then, just for a second, I'd like to bloody the nose of the assholes responsible for it.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
No, seriously. If 80+% of spam originates in the USA, and the US congress is daft enough to pass laws like CAN-SPAM global ISPs should hold a "cut the link" week and block email traffic from the USA. Just imagine the chaos and media attention that would cause. And it would be media attention is something that makes politicians squirm. A question, though. Can anyone explain to me what would make US lawmakers vote in favour of this bill? It seems like the kind of thing that any semi-sentient 14 year-old would be able to critically dissect as narf idea in about 12 seconds.
...allow me to pimp two of my favorite projects. First up is the Unsolicited Commando project. It's a little java app that spends its day quietly and merrily filling out forms on spamvertised websites with completely bogus - and yet totally real looking - data. It's especially effective against - surprise! - mortgage/refinance spammers, which seems to be the specialty of the dirtbag mentioned in the article. Go check it out, and the source code is available just in case you think something fishy is going on.
The second page I'd like to point you to is here. It's a 'Lad Vampire' antispam page that also targets spamvertised websites, but in a different way. The page links to individual images on the sites and constantly reloads them without caching, thereby burning up the spammers' bandwidth and driving them out of business (or at least costing them some money and forcing them to sell their children on the black market). Be forewarned that the page has no help, no documentation, and *only* works in IE, so don't yell at me about that. The source code is available for that as well, so here's hoping someone can make it more usable in Moz, Opera, ThunderFireBunnyChicken, or whatever browser is your fave.
The most effective tool I have seen so far is greylisting. greylisting reduced the amount of spam from 3000 to 6000 a day to 5 to 10 spam a day. Include spamassassin and the spam that does get through greylisting gets nailed. spam problem solved.
Now if everyone greylisted the spammers would be out of business. But people here, which should be technologically knowledgable, seem to just complain about spam. Implement greylisting on your servers along with spamassassin! You will not regret it.
Since doing this I have actually been able to get back to real work instead of worrying about spam.