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."
I thought everyone on Slashdot hated the RIAA, the MPAA, and Microsoft. Why do you keep hyping CDs, movies, and Windows games?
Big corporations are what they are. They sell us cool stuff with one hand and tighten the screws on our freedoms with the other. We hate them every morning and love them every afternoon, and vice versa. This is part of living in the modern world: you take your yin with your yang and try to figure out how to do what's right the best you can. If you think it has to be all one way or the other, that's cool, share your opinions, but don't expect everyone else to think the same.
In short, there are some advertiser communications that we don't welcome into our lives and call "spam", while there are other advertiser communications that we invite into our lives when we go through the Sunday Newspaper looking for the ad circular from our favorite store so we can see what's on sale without having to go there.
Wording a rule set so that spam gets shut down but ads we want to see still get through is quite a tough task to do on a one-viewer basis. It becomes even more difficult to do that on a comminity basis. Some of us want to know what's on sale this week at Best Buy, others couldn't care less.
I just don't see a solution that pleases everybody being possible in this area. It'll always be a game of new regulations constantly going up, but only being effective until somebody finds a way to work around them. We can hate spammers as scum, but that seems like the worst we can do to them at times.
Finnaly, now i can track down this person and kill him as revange for all the porn mail I'm receivning. Wait, that i want... hmz pr0n&spam or no pr0n&no spam... Difficult decison
God,root what's the difference? I read slashdot, there for I errr... am stupid?
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.
He's nothin' but a low-down, double-dealin', back-stabbin', larcenous, perverted worm!! Hangin's too good for him!! Burnin's too good for him!! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive!!!
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
There are some things the US Government is just plain contradictory on because, well, We the People are contradictory on the topic.
We shout out that we have the First Amendment rights anytime somebody tries to tell us not to speak, but then we strugle to find a way to make other people we don't want to hear shut up. The fact is, anywhere you create an unregulated communication medium, the smut, scum, and scam people will definitely show up to play. It's just the way things work.
This is more proof of why Spamhaus called CAN-SPAM the "National Right to Spam Act."
Blech. Shoot 'em all.
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?
On page one of the article:
And on page two:
If he ain't scared, why hide behind a false name?
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
- reject_unknown_client is on. This means
that a connecting client MUST have a reverse-dns
lookup for its IP, and the resulting name
MUST resolve back into that IP. This alone
blocks most spammers before their client
can even begin to send a message.
- I use xbl.spamhaus.org. This is a wonderful
thing. This blocks not only any box known
to spam, but also any box found to be
infested by some virus, ie zombies.
Once again, this stops them dead before
the message even starts.
- In the unlikely event that they get past
those hurdles, I have a homebrewed filter
that watches for bogus HTML tags, since
they like to intersperse bogus empty
tags in the middle of words in order to
foil content-based filters. This simple
filter actually blocks 90% of anything
that made it that far.
- Spamassassin. The few brave soldiers of
spam that got this far rarely pass this.
I leave this filter near the end because
it's rather CPU intensive...
-
Finally, a simple procmail rule: If my name
isn't in the "To:" or "Cc:" line, file it
as spam.
I haven't seen a spam message in, uh, maybe a year or two?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.]
Not american, but still... Yes, free speech. Everyone's entitled to free speech. Everyone's also entitled to not listening if they don't want to - and for me, this is where spam crosses the line. The mere fact that you have to go through so much pain to keep your e-mail box spam free is indicator of how annoying these people can get in order to FORCE you to read their advertisements.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
8:35 AM: Morning stretches and exercise.
8:55 AM: Pray for forgiveness for being a subhuman piece of filth, hoping to save already-rotten soul from the deepest pits of Hell.
9:00 AM: Shower.
...etc.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
"the simple situation is that I don't need _any_ advertising through email"
That's a bit draconian. I would like to be notified when Blizzard is releasing a new game or the new Glen Cook book is being released. To get this info from the web sites, I would have to poll (check regularly) the web sites. I would rather receive a notification.
The key to this is opt in only lists. One way to do this is to make a server with your email provider that allows you to register an email as requested (bulk mail whitelist). Those can go through. Other bulk mail is prevented. There are other methods as well; that is just one example to handle both.
The real key is no *unsolicited* email advertising. If I request it, I want to be able to see it. Frankly, if a newspaper (to get back to that example) drops off their product unrequested, I would like to be able to prosecute them for littering. Further, a newspaper includes other things besides advertising. Spam does not.
And they're sponsored by our old friends, The Bulk Club. Can't we spread a rumour that Osama is actively funding spammers or something?
Carousel is a lie!
... about spam, is it just doesn't apply to me. You see, I have a degree in computer science. This means:
1. I don't want a degree from a prestigious non-accredited university.
2. My sex life is well beyond being helped by Viagra, or anything else in pill form.
3. Outsourcing means I can't afford a mortgage (okay, actually I'm employed, but work with my joke).
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.
While your techniques will all stop spam, they will also stop a great deal of legitimate mail (ham). Stopping spam is not the hard problem Stopping spam while letting ham through is the hard problem.
If businesses did what you did, most of them would go out-of-business.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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.
I think many people aren't quite clear on the first amendment. It says roughly that we have the right to say what we want. However, it does not say that we can force people to listen or that we have any right to be heardd.
It should be noted, before I say anything else, that corperate speech does not fall under free speech. General unsolicited email might be covered under the first amendment, but spam advertizing something business related isn't.
Additionally, sometimes what people consider free speech crosses over into things which are illegal. You can tell something, but if you follow them around and continue telling them, that could be considered harassment. You can put up a protest, but if you threaten people or indimidate others or keep people from getting to work or cause a large disturbance or many other things, you're protest has crossed the line of what is legal.
The point is that you can say whatever you want when it doesn't affect anybody else, but we don't live in a vacum and your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
The actions of spammers are destructive and cost people time and money, even if you ignore fraudulent spam. To say that it should be legal by first amendment is to ignore much of the issue.
This is yet another content filter. The real solution to spam will prevent my servers and bandwidth from being overloaded by spam, rather than use even more of it to to accomplish keeping it out of my mailbox. The ultimate solution is to have spammers disconnected from the internet by their ISPs, or disconnect their ISPs if the ISP continue to help spammers steal and waste the resources I pay for. You say you don't have a mail server and don't need to be worried? How much is your ISP charging you? How much is your ISP taking out their own profits to cover the costs of spam you just end up deleting?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars