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Spam Turns 100, By One Reckoning
mkavanagh2 writes "Spam is 100 years old today! But, surprisingly, the first spam wasn't sent via e-mail. In fact, 100 years ago, Cunard sent out telegrams to selected (rich) members of the British social elite, advertising tickets on a new liner, and becoming the first spammer. Let us all take out a moment to consider how to best 'repay' the spammers who followed for the 100 years of 'joy' they have given us. ;)"
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
I'd kill him if he weren't already dead.
In terms of Internet spamming - it's closer to 26 years old - link.
I can't see anything about Cunard from the submitter's link.
But, surprisingly, the first spam wasn't sent via e-mail
Shouldn't that be "But, unsurprisingly, the first spam wasn't sent via e-mail".
It would be really a surprise if they sent spam by email 100 years ago. Don't you think?!
Free XBox, PS2
Let us all take out a moment to consider how to best 'repay' the spammers who followed for the 100 years of 'joy' they have given us.
I have the kind of love for spammers that makes me want to light them on fire and throw them down a flight of stairs. That's love baby.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
We joke and complain about spam, but personally I am wondering how much the internet can take before things just start to slow down drastically. Spam is increasing, not decreasing, and it is most certainly doing so with or faster than the pace of technology. We really need to find some solutions to this problem before spam becomes so widespread that the only way to fight it is to increast bandwith. (I don't mean just email spam, I mean popups and flash banners and such. The bandwith they take up must be massive, I'm amazed that the internet still functions with all the waste)
Those who study history are doomed to watch others repeat it.
There are really two kinds of person-to-person communication medium...
- An open network, where anybody can send to anybody... and that means you can get messages from people you never heard of, for better or worse. Lowlife types are allowed to thrive and spam away.
- A closed network where in order to stay in the club, you've gotta play by the rules. Lowlifes are bounced out on their first offenses. This keeps the trouble away, but it also limits the number of people who can reach you over that channel.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
We need to get tough with them.
Charge them, arrest them.
This is a good start
Of course this was not just spammers but they are all as bad as each other if you ask me.
Games Programmer And Designer
I say we take use of modern technology, get al the spammers onto a luxury cruise ship, and then chuck a meteor at it while sailing it thru a hurricane.
Google says:
;P
Spam: Unsolicited "junk" e-mail sent to large numbers of people to promote products or services.
Note the e- in front of "mail" in the defintion. If it ain't e-mail, then it's just plain old junk mail.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Or not. What they did was more akin to direct-mailing (or perhaps even more specific than that). They had a target audience, and by being limited by cost, they could only send to the select of that target audience. Now, Spam is essentially free. In fact, there is no "target audience" per se; the demographics of those who reply to spam is representative of much more diversity than those who Cunard targeted.
The Spam in my cupboard is only 50 years old, so I guess I am doing well...
There are signs that this is changing however, with fewer mailservers handling e-mail, better bandwidth, and larger hard disk sizes it is quite likely that we are approaching a point at which spam begins to achieve parity with junkmail in terms of that sender/receiver cost relationship. At which point it may be wise to at least consider including spam as a marketing resource alongside more conventional services.
Junkmail keeps the cost of stamps low and helps subsidize other uses of the postal system. Perhaps if the same occurs with spam it won't be such an ugly concept?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
The first unwanted advertisements were probably scrawled on cave walls and advertised "Atok's fine-carved spears, extra cheap! Kill many deer and bison!!!!!" a few hundred-thousand years ago, if we're going to get all technical about it.
The exploitation of technology will no doubt continue, as our leaders are neither capable or willing to prevent spam. Clearly our only option is to rise up and exterminate these digital whores.
Give them a free ticket on Cunard's most famous ship -- The Titanic. (No lifeboat, of course, just like for most of it's passengers). Of course, they'd have to swim to the deck themselves....
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
1) Ebola research
2) Cost effective replacements for crash test dummies.
3) Cost effective replacements for animals in cosmetic testing.
4) Cost effective replacement for ballistics gel.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
How can I ever repay them for the huge gigantic penis I now have? The girls love it!
Boil 'em
Mash 'em
Stick 'em in a stew!
So, did you make that up, or do you have a link to back up the Cunard canard?
sulli
RTFJ.
(Posting as AC because it's too easy to whore karma with this one - just Google for "first spam") It was the DEC Spam of 1978 from a DEC marketing rep to every Arpanet address on the west coast.
Of course dollar for dollar the first spam sent was quite a lot cheaper. But when you account for inflation and the reduction in volume per can (from roughly 0.00084 Volkswagens to roughly 2 iPods) the price is actually $0.40USD/Can more expensive
Don't believe me? Check my references.
In fact, 100 years ago, Cunard sent out telegrams to selected (rich) members of the British social elite, advertising tickets on a new liner, and becoming the first spammer.
For all we know, illicit advertising could have started even back in as far as the caveman days...
There was once a caveman named Ug who would hurl rocks from far away at unsuspecting dwellers. Each rock would have a pictures etched into it depicting a caveman holding a shield to protect himself from flying rocks. One day, Ug threw a rock from far away at another caveman, Og, with the usual picture etched into the rock. Hit and startled by the incomming rock, Og picked it up, gazed at the picture, scratched his head, and looked at Ug. Ug threw another rock, which this time hit Og right on the head. Angry, Og threw the rock back at Ug, only to see Ug hold up a shield and deflect the rock.
Og was very impressed. He and his tribe of other cavemen then walked over to Ug. Ug held up a picture showing himself handing another caveman the shield, and the other caveman handing him lots of furs. Og smiled, took the shield, and hit Ug over the head with his club, killing him. So Og and his tribe feasted on Ug, striking fear into the hearts of marketers who were not strong enough to defend themselves against a bunch of angry cavemen. Such a utopia prospered for generations, until the invention of the telephone.
100 years ago they probably called it Invasive Nuisance®.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I've been trying to track down a spammer in my state.
[The originator of the free iPod scams]
I was surprised [sarcasm] to see that he had written a piece on the internet on how the CAN SPAM ACT would bring a renaissance in email marketing.
This 100 years of SPAM reminded me of this because this "essay" describes how email marketing has now reached the protections that attorneys have desired for decades.
I plan to do a story about this guy and his business [freeslide,producttestpanel, subscriberbase, consumer research corporation] on my jackwhispers website, but first I have stories planned for the local newspapers. I'm going to the attorney general office tomorrow to discuss it.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
If you know where to sign up for spam mails, please help me pop this address in:
bait@infosynaptics.com
(not, it is not my enemy's mailbox, it is one of mine)
I've decided that with modern day spam the best way to combat them is to always stay one step ahead, bayesian filters! statistics! spam word corpus! the works! all these will slowly wipe your inbox against the scum!
(shameless plug)
Anyway I'm using popfile, a opensource spam filter, it is really excellent except it starts off pretty dumb.
Hence, please give me more spam!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
"Listen to me, you; when I catch you, I'm gonna pull out your eyes and stick 'em down your pants, so you can watch me kick the crap outta you, okay? Then I'm gonna use your tongue to paint my boat!" -- Moe
spamming the hell out of everyone we know.
One thing I rarely see mentioned is that spam is mostly micrososft's fault.
All those owned boxes for sale that can send a deluge of millions of e-mails for a fee?
Those are owned because Billy and the Boys from Redmond simply have no idea how to build an operating system to run a computer that's attached to a network. We all complain about spam. We should spend more time vocally blaming one of the major causes: Microsoft
From Wikipidia: "In this article and those related, the term spamming is used broadly to refer to all of these behaviors, regardless of medium and commercial intent."
Notice the regardless of medium.Personally, I consider spam to be the automatic supply of unwanted information. For that reason I wouldn't consider mailing lists and telemarketers as spammers. You signed up for the mailing list and telemarketing is not an automatic process. Besides, telemarketing provides (provided) a lot of people with jobs (even if bad jobs, some people need the money more than the good job).
For instance: You can be spammed with junk mail. A channel can be spammed by bots. You can be spammed with emails. You can't be spammed over the phone unless a recording is calling you. You can be spammed in the grocery store (oh wait, that's different...)
Of course, this is just my personal way of looking at it, so what do I know?Don't use so many caps. It's like yelling. Don't use so many caps. It's like yelling.Don't use so many caps. It's like yelling. Don't use so many caps. It's like yelling. Don't use so many caps. It's like yelling. Don't use so many caps. It's like yelling.
o--o o -o oo ooo / o -o o-oo o- o-o --o o -- o -o - / o--o oo o-oo o-oo ooo
In case any of you were wondering where the widely applied term "spam" came from here's an informative link
This link gives Hormel's position on the use of the term "spam" and the history behind it.
The link in the story has nothing to do with the text used.. there's nothing on that page about spam being 100 years old. Worse, it's a link to an other useful resource which could do without being hammered by tens of thousands of Slashdot readers. Remember the recent stories about Wikipedia being overloaded on Slashdot recently?
Without an article to substantiate the claim, maybe mkavanagh2 simply sent a fake story to win a bet.
OK, so admittedly Cunard didn't buy into White Star Line until some 18 years after that little mishap with the Titanic, but didn't we show 'em, what hey old chap, shiver me timbers and all that!
$diety{'God'} is apparently omnipotent and all knowing and all that, so what's to say that he didn't plant the iceberg in anticipation of the fact that those people would become spammers in the not-to-distant (for 'him') future! Dumb bastards didn't learn, spammed anyway.
Well, it's a great fantasy, anyway.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Let us all take out a moment to consider how to best 'repay' the spammers
While I agree with all the disgust the community has against spammers, please try to control your responses.
As a recurrent victim of "Joe Jobs" where a spammer forges my domain name in the Reply-To field of their junk, I'm already having to deal with thousands of bounced messages (currently about 120/minute) as well as the attacks of well-meaning but misguided people on my website.
I'm not sure what I've done to attract the attention of the spammer, but at the moment it looks like they'll succeed in putting me out of business - I can't use email while this is happening, since any filtering which brings the traffic down to a managable level also drops real messages.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Leaving me wondering: what did they call it before 1937?
I would say a more insightful comment would be "he was probably being sarcastic," perhaps with a postfixed "dummy."
Out of a post involving cruise ships, meteors, and hurricanes, the ONE flag that would not describe this post is "redundant."
Actually it was. Spam is defined as unsolicited e-mail (or a type of meat). What you are thinking about is just normal junk advertising.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
I'd say that we should repay them with SPAM.
That's right... a vigilante "SPAM squad" manning a truck carrying dozens of tons of SPAM, along with a delivery system not unlike a tree chipper that can accept SPAM by the ton and spray greasy SPAM puree hundreds of feet.
The SPAM squad would pull up to the houses of known spammers and douse the house, car, grounds, mailbox, and anything else in sight in 6-12 inches of greasy salted pork goo that would take years to clean up. If the weight of the flying SPAM puree hitting their front windows just "happend" to break them and fill their living room with chunks of SPAM as well, by "accident," that would just be too bad.
Say, 50-60 tons of SPAM per spammer in flash vigilante "actions" out to keep each of them busy for a few weeks (months? years?) at least trying to clean up their persons, personal effects, and lives and drive the smell (and flies) away. Just spray-and-go and let them come stumbling out, slipping and sliding and cursing, realizing that they have finally gotten their comeuppance.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Thus, to get rid of spam, one of three things has to happen:
1) Individuals have to stop supporting SPAM by clicking those emails and purchasing those products.
2) Companies must be prevented from advertising in SPAM fashion and must thus be fined.
3) A new protocol has to be implemented.
All three have problems. The first group will not stop using spam. Obviously, these are people who purchase porn, penis enlargements, diet pills, and things of that nature. Why should they stop if the SPAM email offers what they're looking for? The second on the list is more controversial, as it goes against free speech and all that good stuff, at least to some people. And last - and the most expensive - a new system has to be devised, but as with everything, vulnerabilities will be discovered and the system exploited.
A blog like any other.
Nahh... this is better. Make them use the products they sell, one time for each message they send.
This idea has been proposed before, but has been vigorously fought by spammers as unconstitutional. (I'm sure spammers are really concerned about the Constitution.) Their reasoning is that without the ability to send anonymous messages, free speech would suffer. Technically, they have a point. But you can satisfy the requirements of the First Amendment, while curtailing fraudulant headers/return addresses by simply saying that anonymous messages must have an explicit return address and sender id of (for example) 'anonymous@anonymous.anom'. Requiring the "ADV:" tag in the subject line is also a good defense against spam since it is easily filtered, yet can maintain anonymity.
None of these ideas are new, and there have been attempts to get them into law. But until we as spam haters generate enough spam of our own in the form of consumer compliants to our elected officials in an effort to overcome the lobbying dollars being spent to keep spam alive, then nothing is going to change.
When all else fails, run.
I though there was a can over 100 years old....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Spam is 100 years old today! But, surprisingly, the first spam wasn't sent via e-mail Surprisingly? And I thought everyone had a computer 100 years ago. Homer - What? They have internet on computer now???
"Let us all take out a moment to consider how to best 'repay' the spammers who followed for the 100 years of 'joy' they have given us. ;)"
How about locking them in a room with a bunch of *Anxious*, *in debt* guys who have just taken their *viagra* and *need horny teens*. ... Either that or overnight packages filled with rabid weasels, their pick.
Mak'tal shree lok'tak mek'ta sa'tak Oz! - Daniel Jackson
I think the word spam has been invented much less than 100 years ago...
....Spammers would be caught, jailed and made to share their cell with people who have enlarged their penis, taken viagra and are looking for a new relationship :^).
-Dracken
It would have been Spam if the Cunard line had sent the telegrams collect!
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Wouldn't it have been appropriate (not to mention eerily foreshadowing) if these telegrams were for passage on the most famous Cunard ship of them all - the "Titanic"?
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
"But, surprisingly, the first spam wasn't sent via e-mail. In fact, 100 years ago"
Oh come on. What about that guy that went through town yelling "Bring out yourrr deeeaad!"??? He's got at least 500 years on that Cunard guy.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Nugster is Offline:
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processing Quote: Originally Posted by excelbru
Can someone advise me a reliable bulk proof credit card processor not shutting me down after the first complaints?
...
We can do such processing for you. Take a look at our site www.oxbill.com
And much, much more.
If you deal with spam, it's worth some time spent visiting that site. There's a whole criminal infrastructure to support spamming. You'll find "bullet proof web hosting", domain laundering, credit card laundering, virus/worm distributors selling access to zombie machines, mortgage lead buyers, and "pharmacy" operators.
Yes, it's been reported to CERT/Homeland Security and NANAE.
It is hypothesized that certain neanderthal societies used to write inscriptions on large rocks before hurling them ferociously at passers by.
Coincidently enough, this has significant commonalities with one of todays more successful spam counter measures, which involves incribing "stop sending me spam" on similarly large rocks and hurling them ferociously at spammers.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Here's an excerpt from the page you linked to:
2. To send (a message) indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups.
Um.... email who? What about spamming google, or spamming a bbs, or spamming yo' mama?
IMHO! IMHO!
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I would assume that even such early spam was soon frowned upon. In its infancy unsolicited communicaiton was probably novel but it wouldn't take long to become the burden it is today. But because it has remained a burden for so long proves its success.
It is no more ingenious than a brute force attack. However, wherever else brute force fails it succeeds in the marketplace. If we tighten our email schemes, turn off pop-ups in our browsers and so on it stands to reason that spam will simply evolve, not die out. It has survived the shift from telegrams to email and all steps in between, it will likely not be quenched by anything less than a superior competitor: something that provides the same service - pairing potential buyers with sellers of questionable goods - yet isn't a burden to anyone who isn't interested.
Much like factoring prime numbers and brute forcing encryption it may well be impossible to replace spam with something "better". But if it will be stopped that's the only way.
Spam has definitely become the scourge of the internet. It follows you everywhere, and you can't get away from it.
I hate the stuff.
______________
Free IPods
It actually works!
"Cunard are able to offer a half price fare for a one leg trip on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Unfortunately Cunard are unable to offer return trips."
It's all their fault. They also invented dandruff.
You may now up-mod me. Ta!
Besides, even if you expand the definition to fit any unsolicitated advertisement, the first spam still wasn't 100 years ago. It was much older when merchants would yell out advertisements for their product.
And spamming Google still doesn't make any sense, Google is not a mailing list, individual, or newsgroup.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Yes this is wildly off topic but /. is one of the few sites that still work on the www and I want answers.
That sucking sound you hear is my bandwidth.
There is a new trend of having a personal opinion of the poster on /. Does anyone care? I find them annoying. For instance, in this post:
;)
Let us all take out a moment to consider how to best 'repay' the spammers who followed for the 100 years of 'joy' they have given us.
Thanks for wasting bandwidth.
So their punishment would include 42 meters of penis enlargement theropy, several hundered skanky Russian mail order brides and a heavy overdose of viagra and vicadin? Interesting punishment ;)
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
Hey! Wipe that grin off your face.
Repay? How about Hellfire missiles? Then put the survivors in federal prison where lifer rapists can pound them in the ass with mutant cocks.
Or give me time. I can probably think up something really nasty where the fresh, steaming baboon semen will be the least of their worries.
Oh, there will be an accounting, a tallying of sums and a distribution of damnation, I tell you.
--- Ban humanity.
stealing from people's credit cards is not "Money Laundering", and there's nothing illegal about using a proxie. YOU LOSE.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Everyone knows the first spam was 6,341 years ago when the serpent offered Eve an herbal remedy to not only give Adam more staying power, but add cubits to his manhood. Turns out it was just an apple, and Adam & Eve got blamed for the whole scam and banned by their ISP.
--- Ban humanity.
Let us all take out a moment to consider how to best 'repay' the spammers who followed for the 100 years of 'joy' they have given us. ;)"
Let's flood them all with telegrams! We'll start from the very beginning:
everyone nail: 1.800.7.CUNARD
btw... "rich" is probably an unnecessary modifier for "British social elite"
ôó
Maybe this is slightly illegal, but let's get some vigilante justice going and hack the spammers / spywarelords. Especially with spyware, you could probably modify the program to do something crazy to them...
yes, I can see the members of the British social elite wondering : "Where the hell is this Nigeria anyway?!"
class he-man extends man!
Tired of at homezzzzzz money making schems. Heres the REEL DEEL!!!! seng 19.99,99 to 456 Happee Striet in Delanore, Island, NYC.. for yr paket(swtiching) 2dey!>!!>>! f.a.444fasklag3m3f0ckerrrzrite,//noew
...and it should be known by now
I only take one issue with your post: I don't believe that offering proxy lists for sale is necessarily a bad thing. There are any number of reasons why someone may want to use a proxy to visit a certain site. Concealing sexual preferences when visiting a gay or lesbian porn site, trying to read up at the English version of Al-Jazeera without leaving digital footprints, etc.
Proxies are generally web only in nature. Of the more than 100,000 wide-open proxies that I've cataloged over the past several years, only a slight percentage of them were able to relay arbitrary connections (e.g. HTTP CONNECT protocol). The vast majority of proxies only relay standard web requests, and are harmless as far as spam is concerned. In fact when Joe Jared's Osirusoft RBL was running, my proxy database fed directly into its RBL (proxy.relays.osirusoft.com), just to prevent any possibility of the proxies being used to spam those who subscribed to RBLs/DNSBLs.
It's unfortunate that the media, as of late, has taken to calling infected/trojanned Windows machines which relay spam "proxies," instead of "zombies," a term widely attributed to Steve Gibson at GRC. When GRC was DDoS'd a couple of years ago, he took to calling the trojanned machines "zombies," and the media went with it full force. More recently, the media has been calling them "proxies," which creates negative connotations that aren't necessarily deserved. Yes, there is the occasional proxy which leaves itself wide open to HTTP CONNECT, but most proxies have nothing to do with spam.
Of course, if some idiot is spamming spammer message boards trying to sell proxies, he deserves whatever he gets. There have been clear cases where alleged spammers such as Jamie Baillie have attempted to buy proxies that they can spam through. However, I chalk this up as the exception to the norm, and in most of these cases the spammer was clearly foiled anyway. The above link is an extreme example of how spammers get "victimized" themselves, and start bitching holy hell, trying to buy proxy lists.
Please, don't equate proxies with spam. Most of them are simply being used to facilitate anonymous browsing, and this is an ability which needs to be maintained as long as possible.
I have my own domain name, and a few months ago some spammers discovered it, and it now receives about 10,000 spams a day, completely easy to filter because they are for nonexistent accounts, but I am on dialup. My modem is onliine for 2-3 hours a day just receiving and throwing away that spam. If I drop the connection when it starts, as soon as the envelope header is determined to be bogus, it still has been received by my ISP and all intermediate waystations.
Don't pretend your small world of a single email account has any bearing on the amount of spam you never see but which is still sent.
if someone told me that the first piece of hormel spam was still sitting around uneaten after 100 years i'd believe that too
I receive dozens of legitimate emails per day, and almost no spam (maybe a couple per week). Why?
- my email is at my own domain
- only my friends know my email address
- for sites I use sitename@mydomain, if any of them spam me, I disable it
- once my "friends only" email was exposed. I changed it and notified all my friends. if it happens again I'll do it again. It's no big deal and it only takes my friends a second to update my email address.
Spammers can spam all the want. Where's the problem?
Sorry, but there simply *is* no technological solution for it. The problem is that users have a certain set of requirements for electronic communication (namely, that it's free aside from connection time and fairly easy to use).
Do you think spam is one computer sending out email after email? Are you nuts? Spam is sent by a network of compromised computers, connected via any available port.
You cannot increase the cost of sending spam to the point that it has a low enough return on investment to not be worth sending without adding a usage fee for email (and even that won't really fix the problem, as the wrong people are going to pay the fee ).
5) Ablative armor for APC's in Iraq. Just strap a few spammers on, and you're good to go!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We need a +1 Unintentionally Funny for things like the juxtaposition of that message and sig :-)
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
my wife replied, 'it tastes like it too'
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Nope. Not Even Close.
Postal "spam" has existed since the
post office was first founded. In
the 19th Century, the typical
addressee would be:
The Best Farmer In
Smallville, Missouri
or
Progressive Businessman In
Littletown, Iowa
The worst was before stamps,
when all letters were
sent collect. If someone was dumb
enough to claim one of these, they
paid the postage!
Hmmm, kinda familiar.....
Who would buy a proxy from a company that can't spell it?
Oh right, spammers.
oh these junk mail artists !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
and there's nothing illegal about using a proxie
.US and don't have permission to use that proxy, then there IS
(and this is without the U SAP RIOT act amendments).
As you so eloquently put it, YOU LOSE
If you're in the
The real link is HERE
The Lusitania sinking in 1915 had nothing to do with the US' declaration of war in 1917.
That had more to do with the Zimmermann note promising Mexico territorial adjustments in exchange for a declaration of war against the US, as well as sinkings of US flag merchant vessels in the North Atlantic.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Didn't the Vikings invent Spam?
Everyone is trying to get rid of Spam. Why? I love the stuff. I can't get enough. I am a junk-mail junkie, and proud of it.
For the last year, I have put my email address on any site that I can find. Life has never been better. Let me count the ways.
At first I received a spam mail that said: You Qualify for a Gold Card. Right after that, another asked me: How many Credit Cards can you get? The wheels started spinning. As it turns out, I can get a lot of Credit Cards!!! I have replied to every one of these spams, so now my combined credit limit from the 100 or so cards is now $500,000! This is a lot of credit, and I'm not so good at repaying it, so it is good that the fine people who sent this mortgage refinance offer, Refinance without perfect credit, do not check my credit. These generous lenders have allowed me to refinance my house so many times that the banks now pay me money every month!
When I was asked Are you paying too much for Auto Insurance?, I assumed I was, and I now pay nothing for auto insurance. I hope that company is still in business.
I am a big fan of learning, so when I got many emails touting U N I V E R S I T Y D I P L O M A S , I started working on my first PhD. It wasn't my last PhD, though. I now have 12 PhDs in every subject imaginable, and I have more brains than the Scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz". I am truly a doctor of thinkology.
Along with my newfound brains I have money rolling like never before as I Make a Fortune on eBay! selling all the junk in my house!!! I am now starting to sell my neighbors junk, too.
Now that I can Get Your 2 FREE Air Tickets, 2 FREE Hotel Nights, $100 FREE Cash, I have become a world traveler. I go from city to city, and as long as the spam keeps rolling in, I may never return, sort of like a Johnny on the MTA. I am snapping pictures like crazy now that I replied to Claim Your Complimentary Digital Camera. I haven't joined the "mile high" club yet. That spam mail hasn't arrived yet.
Because I print out every spam message that I receive, I use a lot in inkjet cartridges. But, not to worry, I get 50-75% OFF your Printer Ink- Ink Blowout Sale!...
Now for my personal life. I have had my teeth whitened so much with Get Your Teeth Whitened In 2003 that the local Lighthouse commission wants to use my mouth as a backup to the Cape Cod lighthouse. Santa Clause may use me to lead his sleigh team this Christmas if Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer doesn't want to.
I have received so many penis enlargement spams that have promised to Increase your Penis Size in just weeks! that I may have to take some of my eBay fortune and hire a full time assistant to assist me in getting around town.
But, this may not be necessary. I have a lifetime supply of Viagra & much more which keeps my private part constantly "firm", so, combined with my increased penis size, I may not be able to ever leave the house. But that is OK, because I now Earn $6,000.00 per month, working from home!
I have been keeping my libido going with Natural herbs that ignite the fire of desire. I have also sprinkled some of it on my wife's cereal in the morning (when she is not looking). With all that fire of desire, I have been spending some quality time on-line checking out 500 CUTE GIRLS and Wild dorm room webcams. If my wife leaves me as she has threatened to do a lot lately, I will consult my newest reference manual: The Ultimate Guide to Meeting Women!
The best news is that I am a $2,000,000 Instant Winner. And even better, I sent every penny that I made to a corrupt government official in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation who will be sending me millions of dollars soon! The check is in the mail.
What my wife likes best is that I now can Lose 30 lbs. in 30 days! She is encouraging me to continue on that diet for a whole year. She figures that at the rate of 30 pounds per month, in one year she'll be rid of me and my spam for good!!!
--
shamelessly copied^H^H^Hborrowed from somewhere
the Christian way, with hot Christian singles just like you....
Signing all your emails with PGP/GPG/whatever might be the answer. To make this work, first of all, just discard all messages that aren't signed. This, of course, relies on the assumption that most people in the world sign their emails, which, of course, isn't the case at the moment. But for now, assume that it is.
This means that all your contacts will send you signed messaged. Spammers wouldn't have this option. To sign ever single one of their messages correctly would take an awful amount of computing power. This may be enough to make it not profitable for mass spammings.
Is not possible to add a new header to email, something like "X-Signature" that contains a signature of the whole email encrypted with a key like "destinyemailaddr@mydomain.com-senderaddr@hisdomai n.com"?
Something like a message-digest (MD5, SHA-1... etc). I mean, someting that takes about 5-10 sec to compute in an ordinary computer. Using that we could filter email very easily (if the email has not that signature or if it's invalid, just reject it, if it's valid, pass through a bayesian spam filter). That way an owned computer will only send 6-12 emails a minute, not thousands. Or thousands of invalid-to-be-easily-rejected emails.
In a case like this I will wait 5-10 seconds per email just to have a cleaner inbox, instead an inbox with 80% of spam.
Maybe mr spammer can buy a very powerfull computer to generate valid signatures and send spam fast, but because most of the spam comes from zombie pcs that are not beowulfs... Should not end with spam, but probably will make a smaller problem for us.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former" - Albert Einstein.
Who does that mean we should blame?
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
Post the urls to their websites on /. and use the slashdot effect to remove them from the internet.
I mean, I'd click on that link.
Everybody.... click on the links in the parent. Hit refresh. And again.......and again.....
Good slashdotter...
I never metaphore I didn't like.
Many things are old. But, surprisingly, they are older than the Internet. Film at eleven! But seriously...
The answer is very simple. If we stop buying from spammers, spam will instantly disappear. Unfortunately this is not going to happen, thanks to all of those cretins who keep buying from spammers. And those very cretins are the ones we should go after (by legal means or otherwise) because there is no other way to stop this madness.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Heh. How many people have been busted for using a proxy?
Doesn't make it legal, and WILL work against you if you end up in court for other spam-related charges.
May I be so bold as to inform of the simple fact that all those freeipods/porsches/lcds.com links are just as worthy of being called 'spam' as the wacky Nigerian prince adventures or the mortgage offers. No, just because it is you who gets the 3. PROFIT! doesn't make it any less reprehensible, thank you for asking.
I am, for one, disabling sigs for the next month or so and hope for the better.
www.somethingawful.com have timely pranked this annoyance in their new fake index.htm, which is to be available only today (Tue 14, September)
Sailors. Oh man!
4 years earlier, in 1888, they started including trading cards in packages as a marketing technique, if I remember correctly.
29 May 1864: mass telegrams advertising "Messrs Gabriel, dentists, Harley-street, Cavendish-square". See letters to The Times 1 June 1864 p.11 and 3 June 1864 p.13.
June 1864: National Provincial Clothing depot sends mass telegrams saying "your suit is ready for collection", when in fact it hasn't been ordered at all: The Times 1 July 1864 p.12.
1875: a furniture company sends 5,000 telegrams for simultaneous delivery at 8pm: Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians, p.39.
OK, I finally figured out how to get Slashdot to do proper indentation ..... so here is the SpamJavelin code. Put the following between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags:
.= sprintf("%02X",$j);
<?
function spamjavelin($address, $link) {
global $HTTP_SERVER_VARS;
$alpha = "abcdefghjklmnpqrstuvwxyz1234567890";
$packed_ip = "";
$ip_array = split('\.', $HTTP_SERVER_VARS['REMOTE_ADDR']);
foreach ($ip_array as $i=>$j) {
$packed_ip
};
$packed_time = date("y") % 10 . $alpha[date("m")-1] . $alpha[date("d")-1]
. $alpha[date("H")-1]. date("i") . date("s");
list($user,$domain) = split("@", $address);
$new_address = $user . "-" . $packed_time . $packed_ip . "@" . $domain;
return($link ? "<A HREF = \"mailto:$new_address\">$new_address</A>" : $new_address);
};
function sj($address) {
echo spamjavelin($address,1);
};
?>
Now where you want an e-mail address to appear, put the following code:
<? sj("myname@mypatch.myisp.co.uk") ?>
I'm sure I could have optimised it to run faster but then it would have been less obvious what it was doing, and maybe less instructive. This code is in the public domain, because I don't believe the licence should outweigh the work it protects.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Spam costs the user nothing to send because the recipient either buys in or deletes. What would happen if recipients who have no intention of buying string the spammer along, pretending to want to buy, getting quotes for bulk orders, wanting to know about origins, asking all kinds of pointless questions, etc..
Of course, if only a few people did this, it wouldn't have any effect, but if it happened on a huge scale, it would make spammers' lives more difficult.
Several folks have done this with the Nigerian Bank Frauds, sometimes getting the would-be fraudsters to make multiple trips to the airport, spend a lot of time in correspondence, and so on. Some have even gotten a bit of cash out of the scammers.
Get on the root of the issue, the SMTP server systems of many companies and private networks exposed to the world don't require an authenticated connection, and of those that do, few if any verify that the from address is also a correct sender attached to the verified account.
To spam, all the simpleton needs to do, is log in to an unsecure server whose logs aren't working if they even keep one, change their from address, and blast away. This is not a failing of the protocol, this is a failing of the administrator!
Paul and others sent letters (epistles) to people in other cities telling people how to behave. Somne of these are colected in the New Testament of the Bible.
I can pee standing AND have multiple orgasms!
You're a woman who doesn't mind the feeling of pee trickling down your legs?
"Are you being weird, or sarcastic?" said Emma. I said I didn't know because I get the two feelings mixed up.
Dip them in a weak acid and let them melt over several days.
They just have to announce that clicking the "more info" link in one in a million of their e-mails wins that person $1000, which they promptly pay in full. The procedure to check whether you've won would have to be protected by a captcha to prevent automated checking.
It's like Nigerian scammers sending out a totally legitimate offer of money to a few people, then exploiting the reduced skepticism engendered when those people actually get paid what they were promised.
Let me tell you a little secret: I actually was on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, in the bad old days of the Cold War. It also happens that several family friends were doctors.
Guess what? If such wonder drugs ever existed, the soviets (and the whole soviet block) didn't use them either. Wonder why. Maybe because such wonder drugs only ever existed in crackpot conspiracy theories, but never In Real Life?
And don't tell me it was also the "evil" westen pharma corporations who were stopping the Soviets from using their own medicine. (I don't remember the West stoping the Soviets from building nukes or breeding hot strains of smallpox, for example.)
I'll tell you something funny: the whole Eastern European block had a very liberal policy when it came to antibiotics. And plenty of corruption. One way or the other, you could get pretty much any medicine you bloody pleased, whether you actually needed it or not. (Or whether it could even work at all for your disease or not.) Kids were routinely stuffed full of antibiotics and sulphamids at the slightest sign of a cold.
Yet noone ever got such a miracle cure. Even there, when you did get prescribed medicine, it was 3-4 times a day, for a week or more. Just like in the West. Go figure.
And if you needed an operation, they didn't just sprinkle some magic potion. They used sterilized equipment and aseptic rooms, just like in the West. Go figure.
So please spare me the bullshit conspiracy theories.
There is no magic wand that you can just wave and make the illness go away. There never was, never will be. Not on the Western side, not on the Soviet side, and not in China either.
And if there was one, those same pharma companies could patent it and have a monopoly on magic wands for 20 years straight. The one who had a magic wand that cures, say, diabetes, could sell it for a fortune per milligram, and make one helluva lot more profit from that than from being the 100'th guy selling cheap generic insulin.
Plus if there was one, what do you thing would happen the first time a pharma executive, or doctor or pharmacist got a fatal disease? Do you expect me to believe they'd just patiently await their own death, rather than threaten their profits? Better yet, that millions of doctors and pharmacists _all_ keep the secret rather than save their own lives or the lives of their children.
Dude, there is no amount of money in the world that could buy that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Don't you think that we need to go after the companies that hire these spammers in the first place? I mean, if it wasn't for those companies that crave the attention from the 10 or so people that might actually click on the junk email, the companies would not have any reason to hire spammers to send massive emails, and thus no spam?
Anyway, who never "cron"'ed an 1 minute "Happy birthday" e-mail to a co-worker gone for a couple of weeks?
The best method for "rewarding" the spammers:
Make them attend an oral recitation of all the spams they've written... narrated by Fran Drescher, Gilbert Gottfried, Carrot Top and the woman who plays Janice on "Friends"
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
*agrees* BTW: They also have a more permanent link: http://www.somethingawful.com/fake/epharmacy/
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
The problem with curing a disease is that you have to kill some cells which aren't that fundamentally different from the normal cells in your body. In the case of viral diseases, they _are_ your normal cells, only slightly reprogrammed by the virus.
Hence most of the medicine is actually mildly toxic. Almost all of it, in high enough concentrations, can cause severe damage to the liver, kidneys, and/or other body parts.
So the trick to treating a disease, is to maintain a concentration just high enough to sorta harm the bacteria over time, but low enough so the normal cells aren't _too_ harmed. Hence taking small doses 3 times a day, for a week or more.
A dose which could kill all bacteria or mutated cells in one pill, would have an effect on your liver comparable to a shotgun blast at close range.
Point in case: my own mom, who basically stuffed herself with antibiotics and sulphamids back then, is now struggling just to stay alive. Her liver is basically destroyed. Maybe it's not a coincidence. She also thought that she was smarter than the doctors back then. Looking in retrospect, maybe she shouldn't have been that smart, eh?
So maybe the next time a doctor tells you some pills to take 3 times a day... maybe it's not some evil pharma conspiracy. Maybe the poor bugger is just trying to not cause permanent damage.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
He was driving a really flashy car.. top of the line BMW.. so I asked him how he was able to afford it, and he said "I work for Cunard" to which I replied "Well I work my bollocks off mate, but I still can't afford anything like that"
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal!
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Of course, it was just a regular infrastructure before CAN-SPAM made it a felony... So, then, which of the following goals have we accomplished?
Remember, there wouldn't be so many criminals if there weren't so many laws. Food for thought.
main(){char I,l,O[]={'-',1-1,0,(1<<5)-1,0+'-',-10-1,-10,11-0,
This would not be very profitable at all in the long run because it cures the disease. Over his or her lifetime the average diabetic spends at least a six-figure amount not only on insulin but also on many other offerings of the diabetes industry, such as blood sugar test strips, syringes, medical consulation etc. It is evident that the existing markets have to be preserved. This means a cure for diabetes or even cancer (there is another industry built around cancer) would have to be restricted to a select group of people. This could be best achieved by artificially pricing it so high as to be unaffordable for at least 80% of all diabetics. Doing something like that, however, would be a tremendous threat to social stability. People IN A LARGE SCALE would most likely start to violently demand access to the cure. This we can't have for a number of reasons:
First of all, we can not let the people question the Pharma/Healthcare industries motives IN A LARGE SCALE. The benign concept most people have of healthcare in general is one that is carefully fostered and reinforced.
Second of all, and this is the most important reason of them all, we can not let people learn that they can make changes to system. We sometimes encourage protest and half-hearted acts of violence, because it gives us an opportunity to reinforce the most important lessons of them all: Nothing ever changes no matter what people do. If we allowed the cure to be distributed to an exclusive group of people we would also need to resort to the most extreme measures to keep the status quo.
Plus if there was one, what do you thing would happen the first time a pharma executive, or doctor or pharmacist got a fatal disease? Do you expect me to believe they'd just patiently await their own death, rather than threaten their profits? Better yet, that millions of doctors and pharmacists _all_ keep the secret rather than save their own lives or the lives of their children.
Most of the people you consider important such as CEOs, political leaders etc. are expendable and expended if need be. Most of the people who consider themselves important and informed are serfs and disinformed. I will not confirm whether cures for diseases like cancer, rheumatism or diabetes exist, but consider this, serf, if we can hold the going-ons and details on an entire Airforce Base secret from you, don't you think we can hide a lot of other things from you??
Dude, there is no amount of money in the world that could buy that.
Pal, for you money is a carrot to waste your life chasing after. To us it's a vegetable we grow to feed our cattle.
One thing that bothers me about this post is the connection between SPAM and direct mail without any mention of advertising or thier differences. In one case, direct mail is paid for by the sender; like advertising. Yet, there isn't any outrage about advertising.
Warren Buffet has sucessfully raised the name 'gieco' to visability; but only the rich can play this game. This is how the rich stay rich; the public only knows about things that the people that can afford to pay will tell them about.
SPAM, by effectivly lowering the price of advertising to zero, ironically inflicted it's own death on itself. Instead of the new medium nutralizing the power of the elites, now it's only criminals and crackpots that break through. Then again, that's not much different than advertising.
Jeff Carr
So basically the CEO and politicians are just expendable pawns, and there's some super-government so secret... yet so well known that even a dying president or pharma CEO doesn't dare fund a cure. Riight. So _millions_ of people around the world are affraid of this super-power, but still noone knows it exists.
Do I need to point out the idiocy of this standard conspiracy theory, or do you start realizing it yourself by now?
Air bases are easy. Mostly noone gives a damn about what's happening inside. And those who do go in and out, mostly don't have anything noteworthy to say anyway. "Yeah, today we ran around and then we had a meal." Doesn't make for a big newsflash.
But when something noteworthy does happen, such as the recent torturing of prisoners, guess what? All those people start talking. And when what they say is interesting enough, people start listening.
_That_ is the real problem with these conspiracy theories. Real conspiracies and secrets tend to not stay that secret, once more than 2-3 people are involved. Conspiracies which involve millions of people? Heh. Dream on.
Either way, it never ceases to amaze me how many people want really hard to believe in basically magic. There's always some silver bullet which solves all problems, ends world hunger, cures all diseases, makes untrained burger-flippers write enterprise programs, etc. Guess a fairy tale beats actually facing reality, eh?
And since we're in a topic about spam, it's gullible idiots like these which make spam work and keep the spam tsunami coming upon the rest of us. There's always some such magical solution they're willing to believe: some magic cure-all drug, some bullshit diploma that noone will question, some loan they'll never have to repay, etc. And no shortage of scammers taking advantage of that lack o' brains.
And the really sad part is that these bullshit stories would be damn easy to prove: e.g., you don't even need to try too hard to find out what medicine did the Soviet block actually have.
But naah. Let's believe what the nice spammer said. Surely he wouldn't lie about those pills he's selling. Surely they're really some super-secret Soviet miracle pill. And those who say it's really pressed chalk with some funny dye, are all part of a conspiracy funded by the big pharma.
Heh.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...it came to me today when I was relaying the story in an email and I couldn't resist sharing.... Now to make teeshirts, and other memorabilia! Finally a way to recycle my warehouse full of bicentennial stuff!
Oh no! I bought a list of people who have configured their systems to allow traffic to go through it! They must not want me to do so, otherwise they might have done something like configured their systems to allow traffic to go through it!
You still lose.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
The "spam" desccribed doesn't seem to really be spam.
...". Those ads were targeted to a very specific audience. They were not sent to railroad operators. One important characteristic of email spam is that it is completely untargeted. It is sent to your email address because it is an email address, not because someone invested in research and decided that you might be more interested than the average person in what they have to sell.
Two reasons:
1. "Cunard sent out telegrams to SELECTED (rich) members
2. Salesmen going from door to door trying to sell stuff probably worked much earlier than a 100 years ago. Those are much closer to email spam in my opinion because they go to every home in the area they work in, not just to a list of addresses determined by preliminary research to be possibly interested in their product. (though they probably still choose to work in neighborhoods where a higher percentage of residents would be interested. That's some king of targeting. Junk snail-mail often has this characteristics: a big chunk of it advertises local businesses, and if you look in your snail-mail junk you will find that a reasonable percentage actually advertises stuff you are planning to buy anyway, such as groceries, at perhaps lower prices.)
>The cost of a service (or lack there of)
> doesn't/shouldn't define that service
Right! How that cost/lack of cost is used matters. In the case discussed, one hundred years ago someone has carefully compiled a list of possible customers based on their ability to pay and perhaps on info available on their lifestyle, and spent money on informing them on something. In the case of email spam no such research occurs. Every existent/nonexistent email address receives the same message regardless of the recipients need for the advertised product (size of P#|\|1$ is not taken into account B4 pressing "$3nd").
Incompetence setting up a server doesn't imply consent for you to access it.
Most of those systems are MIS-configured. Ever wonder why they're updated so frequently? Because occasionally, someone gets a clue and fixes it.
"It's there, so I have a right to use it" is bullshit spammer-think[Quirk Objection noted]
"_That_ is the real problem with these conspiracy theories. Real conspiracies and secrets tend to not stay that secret, once more than 2-3 people are involved. Conspiracies which involve millions of people? Heh. Dream on."
Maybe that's what is at the center of it that gets people like you upset. It is true, most of what happens in the world is not kept secret but simply given the correct "spin", omitting the important parts of the news, deemphasizing and emphasizing bits of it as required and tossing the occasional scapegoat to the people. The biggest "conspiracy" of them all, even though I wouldn't call it a "conspiracy" myself is this process where a group of people actively and on a large scale shape society to their own needs. This is also where your millions of people are involved, for they are for the most part people like you who unthinkingly regurgitate the facts and attitudes they have been provided with and are unwittingly accomplices to this. I don't care about your "Soviet miracle spammer", who I agree is very most likely a fraud. I care a bit about your kneejerk reactions, though.
As far as miracle cures are concerned... common sense should tell you that "certain interests" are "not at all amused" if their power base is threatened.
There is no evidence of any felonies going on. That is the ONLY point and somehow you have explicitely missed it.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Lets keep in mind how excelent service was on the Cunard line and it explains why they were so agressively SPAMMING:
1. Columbia, wrecked near Cape Sable, Nova Scotia, 7 Feb. 1843;
2. Balbec, beached after hitting submerged wreckage off Cornwall, 28 March 1884, and declared a total loss;
3. Karnak, wrecked off Bermuda, 1862;
4. Melita, burned at sea, 5 Sep. 1868;
5. Stromboli, lost off the Lizard, 1878;
6. Sidon, wrecked near Malpica, Spain, 27 Oct. 1885;
7. Malta, wrecked near Lands End, 15 Oct. 1889;
8. Demerara, went missing en route from Liverpool to Gibraltar, Dec. 1887;
9. Oregon, sank off Fire Island after collision, 14 Mar. 1886;
10. Lucania, burned and sank while in lay-up at Liverpool, 14 Aug. 1909;
11. Slavonia, grounded at Flores, Azores, 11 June 1909
12. Lusitania, Sunk by U-Boats, off southern Ireland, May 7, 1915
I do not understand why we overlook the obvious solution. Why not go to the source - the top of the food chain. At the top of every "legit" spam message there is some commercial entity trying to increase their profits by selling more crap to some dupe. Why not legislate fiscal penalties for the producers of the products in the spam. You may not be able to catch the middle man or the spammer but why not punish the ultimate beneficiary. Or if the legislators won't do something then how about denial of service attacks against these manufacturers. Sooner or later they would get the message. Then we only have to deal with the spam from hackers who want to propagate their virus's. Certainly harder to catch but not impossible. We just need to have extremely harsh penalties for the few we catch. I personally favor boiling in oil or public castration.
If interested, complete details here.
It is Freeware/Shareware.
I am actively using the Freeware part of my solution.
'Eating my own dogfood.' as it were.
My email address is not obsfucated. It doesn't have to be if virtually all the spam I get is automatically deleted!
I am persecuted at times for even mentioning it like this yet nobody complains about Slashdot stories about established antispam solutions that appear here.
Lately, an Anonymous Coward jeered me for basically re-inventing SpamAssassin. That is not true. Though both programs are email filters, they both take different approaches to the spam/malware problem.
For example:
SpamAssassin has over 900 rules to 'score' email.
My solution only uses 8.
Why so few rules?
My solution attacks the structure of spam and not the content of spam. Hence, hundreds of rules are not needed.
My solution 'renames' all known potentially hostile HTML tags and all file attachments that appear in the recipient's email.
By doing this:
1) Privacy is preserved.
2) No one is exposed to offensive images.
3) Malware is prevented from running and compromising the computer system.
1 and 3 above will prevent the increased spread of spam and malware if the system has not been compromised first and the recipient is cautious when handling emails with inert (but still hostile) content. As a bonus, 2 will prevent allegations of sexual harassment as pornographic images sent/linked via email and the IMG SRC HTML tag are simply not displayed by HTML-aware email clients.
Lastly, SpamAssassin is solely an email filter and requires Perl to run.
My Shareware solution is a complete email and antispam/antimalware solution, no other software is needed to be effectively free of spam and malware. Widespread, proper use of this program would eliminate most email spam and render all emailed malware 'useless'.
Ironically, I could tout my solution by email spam and possibly 'make a bundle' because it actually works!
But by doing that, I would be no better than the spammers that are already out there abusing the internet email system.
As it has been said in the past, email spam is ultimately a sociological problem. Since the hardcore spammers won't stop their abuse, filter them out for good!
...Slashdot got Farked today.
It didn't say anything about EVIDENCE, only a single, unqualified, and erroneous statement that it was not illegal.
Even ASSUMING it's true that there is no evidence of proxy raping (and that would be naive at best), that doesn't make the ACT of proxy raping any less illegal, which IS what your original post said.