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Stichting Spamvrij (spamfree.nl foundation) Closing
TeVi writes "Stichting Spamvrij.nl (Spamfree.nl foundation), the authority on spam in The Netherlands, has decided to stop.
Spamfree.nl gained international attention for their fight against the CyberAngels spammers.
More information can be found on their website regarding the shut-down." It's the classic story of too much work to do, not enough time; meanwhile another reader notes: "Some new anti-spam products out there - but everyone seems to agree that even Sender ID ideas and laws won't do much."
is available here.
A sad thing but the reality is that there is nothing they could do to stop spam. In fact the only thing anyone can do to stop spam is to stop using email. Yep, the spammer wins.. I abandoned my email account. So in effect he loses because my address is now worthless..
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
on TV etc.. encouraging public not to buy from spammmers citing illegality of approach & risks
... and another one comes, ... and another one comes,
/. :-()
(repeat ad nauseum)
Unfortunately, the subject refers to the spam-fighting groups, and the body refers to spam itself. Sad.
Simon
(Assuming the site was to do with fighting spam, since I can't get to it after it's gone public on
Physicists get Hadrons!
From what I read this morning in the dutch news, they did find out that a notorious dutch spammer didn't stop spamming, so they got him into a lot of trouble. There was also something about some more "detective" work that they were good at, but I can't remember what it was at the moment.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
What are (were?) the "CyberAngel spammers"? I missed that one.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Sure, we know of billionaires giving the money away to things like cancer research. Computer Industry Billionaires
Maybe something like just a mere few hundred thousand or a million for these dedicated warriors. Get them some help.
But then, my cynicism kicks in hard, really hard.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The postings states that people seem to agree on the fact that laws can't do much in the fight against spam. I disagree on that. At the moment many countries have fairly good laws against spam. However, the problem is not with those laws, but the lack of enforcement of them. If countries aren't willing to setup a group/agency/team/etc. that has the technical expertise to trace and track the spammers and the legal abilities to use the existing laws to their full extent than those laws aren't going to be of much help.
Oh, and the correct URL for the English Spamvrij.nl website is www.free-of-spam.nl.
Why are you people so hip on censorship? Isn't it just enough to reply with your own opinion and let the readers make up their own mind instead of imposing your opinion on everyone by making the comment not visible to everyone?
Here's an idea. Give the spammers what they want, which is more traffic. Create a small client that anyone can install on their machines, all it does is use your spare CPU cycles and Bandwidth to repeatedly hit the links that are advertised in spam. If the servers can withstand the mass DDOS, then the bandwidth costs will make them think twice before sending out emails. Use P2P to distribute the list of links to be hit and the spammers will have no central "black-list" server to bring down in retaliation.
The reason spam is hard to stop is because right now it costs next to nothing to send out those emails, we need to raise the cost of sending out spam, and I think a DDOS will do it. Put the slashdot effect to good use!
The only solution to the problem is to start paying for sending emails. Before everybody starts modding me down, tell me is it a problem for you to pay 1 cent per sent email? Of course not, except if you are a spammer and planning to send billions of emails. Why are spammers not using regular mail for spamming purposes (well, they do it, but in a much lower scale)? Its because its not free.
I don't understand all this cry about spam. I've been using bogofilter almost since day one and today, if I see one spam a month I'm surprised.
/.
Meanwhile, my spam folder is autocleaned via cron job from messages older than five days. Sometimes it accumulates 1500 messages (yes, that's 1500 spams in five days)[1].
But I had to ignore some guidelines to achieve these results. I didn't teach bogofilter from dead corpus, I just installed it over empty database and taught it live. Also spam cutoff is set to 50 instead of the default 90 (?). I do have occasional false positives (much rarer than false negatives) this way, but I like it anyway.
The best testament to all this is the unmasking of my address on
And there are better filters than bogofilter.
Robert
PS I work exclusivelly on Linux, but viruses are annoying anyway, so I installed Clam AV, hence viruses don't increase my spam count.
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
The problem is that everyone keeps trying to create laws to specifically address the spam problem.
There are already existing laws against fraud, computer B&E, etc.
What needs to changes is obviously the mail protocol and the parties held accountable. I know you could joe-job someone to frame them but in some countries you are innocent until proven guilty.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
It still doesn't make any sense that there is as much spam as there is: these people are out to make money, right? It's not just to annoy people, is it?
But nobody even reads this shit, do they? Much less buy whatever it is they're selling... do people actually give money to these fuckers?
Art Schools Dietzilla
Was the site linked from slashdot 'cos it shutdown,
or shutdown 'cos it was linked from slashdot?
Reginald Molehusband. Edinburgh, Scotland
Spam exists because it is profitable. If each of us would take the time to select just one spamming business per day, and tie up their resources by calling their agents, requesting literature, doing whatever we can to decrease their profit, we could end spam by cuting it off at the root. As long as spam is a more affordable delivery vehicle, it will get used.
Keep the bucket simple and have lots of Magnets for the people you normally interface with and Spam is a thing of the past. You can even put the server on a remote location so it is available when you travel.
You can even redirect your spam to a Gmail account and have it all marked Spam thereby helping Google et al improve their filtering tools.
Help fight continental drift.
and hence another argument to disable anonymous posting...
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
That shut-down notice need a serious apostrophectomy. :-/
Anyway -- too bad, though I hazard to say it's their own fault: if you do consulting you got to charge for it.
Caller-ID and Sender-ID are currently languishing in Redmond, with Microsoft yet to make any announcements about whether or not it intends to implement them anyway. SPF-Classic on the otherhand is still gaining momentum, with tens of thousands of domains registered as having SPF records, plus an unknown number of unregistered ones. SPF-Classis is also supported by most MTAs and anti-spam solutions, either directly or via a plug-in, and is most likely to become the "default standard" as things stand.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
...one giant leap for spamkind.
Well, I have been promised 20 Mio. from a wealthy billionaire to fight spam, but the sponsor wants to stay unnamed, so could you please help me in this business transaction - call me at NIGERIA-1414-14124
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Moderation is not censorship. Learn to like it or else you'd better leave Slashdot.
I have an idea for beating spam -- renegade style. Everyone forwards their spam to a server(s), which intelligently sorts the mail, finding culprit websites, then a massive distributed network (SETI@home style) retrieves worst-offending URLS from the server, then DDOSes (./ effect s) the spammers websites. Their bandwidth is quickly maxxed. IANAL but I imagine this isn't law-friendly. It's using the zombie-network theory against the spammers (except this time we opt into the network).
I've set up a SF project, anyone wanna help?
The simple version right now just uses a javascript auto-refresh page to draw images off several sites at a time, display, then request the server for more URLs. Once a site goes down you get a 'kill'. You could run teams like seti.
Ideally it'd run as a daemon or win service, and be bandwidth-limited.
*meep*
Yes, Big Brother.
War is peace. Ignorance is Strength. etc..
Filtering! You think spam is "OK" because of filtering?!? My site has had 4 gigabytes of traffic these past six days, and I'll tell you: Most of that is not the httpd. It's just spam spam spam spam spam to the umpteenth degree. Someone has to pay for that bandwidth and the processor power to do that filtering. And it's not the spammer.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
"Spamhunters" the tv-show. I'm serious! Think about it, several episodes of pretty ppl running around with wifi-gear and blinkenboxes and having lovelife-problems while hunting down spammers, crackers, 419ers, identity thieves, pedos, virus writers, whatever. It seems to be the only way of educating the public these days. CSI: Internet, you know it makes sense!
How is moderation similar to censorship? If you want to you can always read at -1
Please tell me where your cardboard box is located,
i might have an interesting mortgage offer for you.
You can safe many $$$ on loans that way!
Because a reader unfamiliar with the system here will not see -1 posts and may not know that a modded down post exists or how to view any such posts. So yes, its a disguised form of censorship.
I find it disgusting that people would mod down an opinion they do not agree with and then justify their censorship by clamiming its not.
If spam fines were earmarked to support exactly these effective antispam groups, the scaling of spam would scale their efforts. The predator/prey relationship would keep spam to a minimum. Once at the top of a sustainable foodchain,feed on other privacy/security vermin in the abundant ecosystem could allow them to hunt spam to extinction. Now that fines are actually being collected, the rest of us can learn from this negative example.
--
make install -not war
i felt the same way for a long time about my primary email address... after 9 years of using the same address, i think i was on pretty much every list around, and was getting somewhere around 300-500 spams a day, up to 800+ on particularly bad days...
i tried filters... i tried stuff like spamassassin... i tried dns black holes... nothing worked...
then one day i decided to try a challenge / response package called TMDA (tmda.net)... it took quite a bit of fiddling with to get things just like i wanted, and a lot of testing with other email addresses before i felt comfortable with it, but it turned out to be well worth the effort... since implementing this for my main email account, i have received ZERO (yes, really) spams in my box... its been about 3-4 months now, and i dont know how i ever lived without it...
i suppose its possible that i may have missed one or two legitimate emails from people to offended by the challenge message or too stupid to understand the challenge message, but odds are i missed or accidentally deleted at least that many legitimate emails while wading through the daily spam...
The delete key. Press it once for each piece of spam you get.
Let's say your spamgourmet account is joeblow. This gives you unlimited addresses of the form prefix.accountname_at_spamgourmet.com.You post on some web forum with the address web.forum.joeblow_at_spamgourmet.com. But you give your bank the address mybank.joeblow_at_spamgourmet.com. If a spammer collects the address from the web forum and sends you a phishing message, you can 1. disable the web.forum.joeblow address except for some selected senders, 2. immediately know that the phishing message is a scam because your bank would not write you to this address.
Note: Yes, I _did_ have to abandon my old email address because it was mass-spammed all the time. The spamgourmet server filters out the crap (spammed addresses are disabled) and then forwards my email to a private "secret" address.
There are also various features that limit the ability of a random spammer to attack your account.
The code is free. Right now there is only one public spamgourmet server. It would be nice if someone picked the code and created his own replica. And of course, the project could use more coders.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
As an active participant in a FOSS community project, I can tell you, this is the underside of things that we all need to be very clear on: time is money. Not in some proprietary, corporate sense, but in a real sense.
When you're in school, you have time to work on projects. When you're in college, you can make time to work on them. But when you enter the working world, there are problems. It's not some simple 'work == no more volunteer time' equation. It's subtle, and it's slow---you spend more time at work, you get a family, there are demands on your time, and over the next decade or so, a lot of people slowly slip away from the FOSS community. Unless you've got a job with IBM or Red Hat or OSDL, you might well find yourself doing the same.
There has to be a way to fix this, because these are some of our most experienced people, slipping away. Don't kid yourself---time is money, in the sense that money gives you the opportunity to work on things you want to work on, instead of having to spend that time working on your own survival.
Reply to all of it!
If everyone replied to every spam message, the spammers resources would be overwhelmed, and they would not be able to determine which are the legitimate replies, and their reasons for sending spam would disappear. It would take a while, and take general cooperation (but not necessarily from everyone.)
Of course, this isn't something one can do on their own; it has to be a movement. Everyone ready?
The sad thing is, I can envision some hack writer using this idea right now to propose a script.
Sadly, this is Hollywood we're talking about here. You know, the people who brought us "The Net" among others *shudder* I dread to think just what "facts" people would be taught in their shows. Then again, Hackers, for all its flaws, had some parts that were real (recording the long distance tones, the names of certain programs, that method of bank fraud was used once, though without the extra, elaborate bit about sinking ships, and the ending was clear out of whack).
Speaking of which, I think I'll go make a little "pi" icon, and link it to "youareatotalmoron.com" or somesuch...
will we now see all /. ers are starting to shed a tear for it? So what folks? This organization/research/project/ or whatever it is called was created by the some scumbags who saw the lack of any authority and started to fill their pockets with money and 'advise' high ranking IT and governmental agencies that abviously had no idea what these guys were talking about. They have enough money now so it's time to give some excuses to honest public and buy some tickets for bahama. Bye Bye spammers! No seriously, who wants to fight spam? Do you?
From now on Spamvrij.nl will concentrate mainly on investigating and analyzing spam sent by Dutch organizations and will assist CERTs, abusedesks of providers and officers of the law to the best of its capabilities. Is this called 'closing'? Are we a bunch of morons? These people were tired of doing a 'dirty' work. From now on, they just work as anti-spam advisors. More money in the banks, that's all.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/11/1 23241
But others want to make sure their filter doesn't filter out email they were supposed to read! It happens, you know.
I'm happy for you. You don't care if you lose a few non-spam messages. Well, I do, and even using filtering, spam is a major pain in the neck, as I need to go through it anyway, to make sure the filter didn't catch anything important.
Clever signature text goes here.
are the good answer.
Lew
I replied to this topic last year (I think). what I (sort of) said then still applies.
A fix depends on email server software allowing the email recipient to easily define and edit an approved list based on content of one data packet. SPAM in one data block is not really possible, but a bank ID, purchace transaction number, many other unique identifiers like family or friends names, email addresses, fit neatly in one content data block (beyond routing history) and leave little or no room for SPAM content. As the recipient on an innitial email, a user would deceided to receive or reject the email that would update the email account accept list and forward to client/host all future emails. Rejection of a marked "possible/innitial SPAM/Email" would place the SPAM source server/domain/IP on an automatic reject list unless later deleted/edited by the email recipient account user.
SPAM fails to achieve purpose and dies a slow death across the internet over three to five years. This method takes the decicion process out of government and/or corporate control.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
No. Think about it again.
Spammers just get one of their owned zombies to host a web site for a given number of reciepiants. In effect using distributed web servers. DDoSing an ip in spam only DDoSes a zombied machine.
Certainly make a nice weapon to use against a competitor. So what happens when someone joe jobs, or otherwise includes a legitimate web server URL in a spam message.
You need people to review the web sites. Making someone criminally responsible for initiating a DDoS . Good luck finding volounteers.
That's where you use bayesian filtering of target websites. Spammer websites are even more obvious than spam emails. Imagine going to a site in spam-ese obfuscation! Heh, I can't wait
*meep*
In some cases.
The theory is that spam websites aren't equipped to handle traffic (1/10000 responses or whatever) so once you send them traffic, the ones with actual hosting use up their bandwidth, and the zombies.. well.. their computers get even slower, until they eventually get some geek to clear the junk out, or install sp2, or buy a new computer.
It certainly makes it harder for the spammers IMO.
Even if you only used it on phishing sites. (I've seen one in action before, seemed to be effective)
*meep*
Mod up the guy who defends spam and mod down the guy who opposes it.
Since when did spammers start moderating on Slashdot?