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."

Comments

English text

[Karamchand]

is available here.

Sysiphus labour?

[DenDave]

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..

Re:Sysiphus labour?

[Timesprout]

I agree. I was so pissed of with all the junk mail I was getting through the post few years ago I abandoned my house so my address was worthless to them. Altering my lifestyle completely and living in a cardboard box under a bridge can be a bit of a chore but its worth it not to let the spammers win.

need anti spam adverts

[Anonymous Coward]

on TV etc.. encouraging public not to buy from spammmers citing illegality of approach & risks

They were good at something.

[Killjoy_NL]

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.

Re:They were good at something.

[LuSiDe]

Agreed. Rejo (from Spamvrij.nl) really did a lot of good investigations. When the accused ones attacked him, accusing Rejo for e.g. libel, he was always able to back up what he said, or did so later because he still depended on some details. His succesful research made various big spammers shitting in their pants.

Martijn Bevelander, Akin Franks, Patrick de Bruin among others, they really got bashed away in the media. Even when they tried to defend themselves, Rejo was able to be too smart, providing details which mattered and looked suspicious. And these discussions were sometimes even live, e.g. on Webwereld.nl. Search of Webwereld.nl for 'Rejo', 'Spamvrij', or one those names i mentioned earlier. Its in Dutch though. Rejo also did some interviews and debates on the public radio in NL, discussing the spam problem.

Thanks Rejo. You'd be a good cop ;^)

Re:CyberAngels?

[TeVi]

short answer: http://www.cyberangels.nl/

Looking for an Altruisitiic Billionare

[Alien54]

Maybe some Altruistic Billionaire would be interested in funding these guys. Especially guys who have a track record contributing to the public good. You know, get them some help.

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.

Re:Looking for an Altruisitiic Billionare

[gnu-generation-one]

"Maybe some Altruistic Billionaire would be interested in funding these guys. Especially guys who have a track record contributing to the public good."

Maybe he could secure the operating-system he sells first, so it doesn't get used to send spam...

Laws *can* do much

[decarelbitter]

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.

Laws could work

[Monoman]

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.

SPF, Caller-ID and Sender-ID

[Zocalo]

Once again, there seems to be some confusion over this in the linked articles, both of which were written after the situation stabilised, so for those that don't know:

• SPF (Sender Permitted From) is one of the original DNS based schemes for verifying an IP was authorised to send an email. It is an open standard using text only records that was proposed by Meng Wong of pobox.com and is still going just fine with many big mail domains (Hotmail, Gmail...) using it.
• Caller-ID is the original closed standard Microsoft proposal that uses XML records. It goes beyond SPF in its scope, but is encumbered by numerous pending patents which Microsoft has yet to adequately disclose.
• Sender-ID is a derivation of Caller-ID, also by Microsoft, that was proposed to the IETF as a potential "standard" mechanism for acheiving DNS based sender validation. Owing to it sharing many of the same patent issues of Caller-ID and a failure of the parties in the MARID working group at the IETF to arrive at a compromise that open source developers were happy with, Caller-ID was rejected.

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.

ddos the spammers

[wolfywolfy]

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.

standard "filtering is not the answer" post

[FooAtWFU]

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.

A modest proposal

[INT 21h]

"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!