Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
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
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.
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*
If really important that person most likely has other means of getting hold of you and relaying on email is folly.
What I am trying to say is you have to amortise the problem of one false positive with the effort involved in getting better accuracy. Not worth it and most likely not doable.
By the way a mis-directed email does not mean Spam but often is Personal stuff that goes to a Subscribe or Business bin.
Help fight continental drift.
"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!
I really wish people would stop thinking SPF is only a spam stopping thing. Really, it's not! As you can see if you really read about SPF for more than 30 seconds is that SPF is a way of checking to see if a server claiming to send mail from some domain is really authorized to do so.
Lots of people on /. think this isn't a problem, most of them are clueless. For those of us that run mailservers that see any kind of real traffic we know that a LOT of mail is sent with spoofed domains. Some of it is spam, some virii, some just annoying but it IS a problem and SPF solves it in a pretty easy to implement way.
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
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?