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U.S. World's Foremost Spam Nation In 2004
der Kopf writes "As reported by ZDNet, '42 percent of all spam sent this year came from the United States,' which makes the U.S. the unthreatened king of the 2004 spam hill. Number two on the list is South Korea (with 13.43%), while China can be found in third place (with 8.44%). The U.S. put out more spam this year than all the other countries in the top 12 combined." All depends who's counting, I guess.
We're good where it counts.
Do Not Eat iPod Shuffle
Finally, something to be proud of.
That one just isn't going to change. Never has, never will.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
All depends who's counting, I guess.
This study comes from the UK; given recent electoral history, I'm far more inclined to trust that they can count than I am to trust any study which comes out of the US.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
...with owned, unpatched Windows machines sitting directly on cable or DSL connections.
If Comcast and Verizon spent half as much on cracking down on their moron customers as they do on mailers begging me to use their Internet services, they'd have this problem under control in no time.
I wonder if we will begin hearing tales of admins blocking US based IPs as we have heard of them blocking Chinese IPs outright.
I am going to block USA, Korea and China on my firewall!
If most of the spam comes from the US, that means that any anti-spam legislation passed here could have a huge effect.
;-)
Of course, now we have to wait for Congress to actually do something about it.
-- Gone Crazy, Back Later
The US is supposed to have a legal tool against spam, and yet it's the worst offender in the world.
I guess we CAN-SPAM and we're mighty proud of it...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
So we hold the majority on manhood enhancement, hot free teens, and low low mortgage rates.
*sniff* I've never been so proud of my country.
The coolest voice ever.
It's pretty obviously really.
I mean, all the spammers living in the US have less distance to go to get Redmond to digitally sign their emails.
If you'd ask me, 90% or more comes from the US, through relays all over the world...
100% of Spam comes from the USA! SPAM is a registered trademark of Hormel Foods Corporation based in Austin, Minnesota!
How did they come up with their numbers? I can easily see the US leading because of zombified Windows machines, but where are the ISP mail relays those zombies are using?
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
Absolutly! There are some places in the world that don't count p3n|s enlargment email as spam!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Are these emails digitally signed?
They must have gotten their inspiration from military spending.
Fucking spammers!
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
This could explain South Korea's position near the top of the list, as it leads the world for broadband penetration.
Gee, poor guys, if someone threatened me of broadband penetration, I guess I'd send out unsolicited email too...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
These reports use records at arin/apnic/ripe/lanic to determine country of origin. Just because an ip was issued by ripe (for instance) doesn't mean it's being used in Europe.
And where the heck did you get those figures from? Its not in TFA. What's your problem with India?
In anticipation of yet another wave of proposed solutions, I have attached the standard spam-solution form for your convenience:
----------
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work.
Here is why it won't work:
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
in a land of counting your stocks and worrying about bottom line - this isn't surprising. we are nothing but a bunch lawyers and marketers - it's a joke - and I am embarrassed
I AM NOW HOLDING MY BREATH!!! Pfhtt... ..... ..... ...ske... ...thud.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
My understanding is that if you could close down the spamvertised sites, spam would largely be restricted to phishing attacks. If I didn't believe this, I probably wouldn't bother using spamcop!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Little bits from other countries. And some of them could not be determined where they came from. Obviously. Use TFB (The Fucking Brain).
The remaining 20% are distributed in other locations.
I would like to thank America. Not only for saving us during the great war, giving us democracy, human rights and capitalism, but also by making me instantly rich. I would like to thank America for enlarging my pathetically small tool, so now it almost matches my beloved's pink toy in size and magnificence. And I would like to thank America for giving me access to all those nude Britney pics. When I sit in front of my American made Windows Computer my beloved helps me use my enhanced tool getting off to the images of this wonderful and healthy country bumpkin. Thank you! Thanks to you, my fellow Americans, my life has so much improved.
That won't stop them from destroying our main cities with their nigerian scam tractor beam.
So the real solution is to educate users about security... nothing new here. Now if only people actually cared about things like security, maybe the ISPs could educate their users rather than just blocking ports (much good that does).
A more realistic solution would be to require licenses for internet access. Yes, I know all the privacy advocates are going to attack me for saying this, but there are way too many irresponsible people out there. A simple written test about security should be enough to make the average Joe aware of some of the issues out there. Then we can hold them at least partially responsible when someone hacks their computer and uses it to send spam, and getting them to use an alternate OS would be easier.
I know such a plan would carry risks, but if the licenses are distributed by a non-profit organization (in the form of a digital certificate / PGP key) and enforced by the ISPs, then it may just work. It's not like the ISPs can't track you already, so there isn't much of a privacy concern there. Besides the ISPs would be required to sign a privacy agreement. What I mean, is that the license would only be used for loging into the ISP, and would not be transmitted any further (but read more below).
Optionally these keys could also be used for online authentication. I for one would find it more convenient than standard passwords. Combined with a fingerprint reader, this technology can be useful (all based on open standards of course).
Oh, and back on the topic of spam: if these licenses become a standard (and I think ISPs would love the idea if it means less problem with spam, viruses, and other uneducated user problems), then the next step would be making digital signatures in e-mails a requirement. If making it a requirement it too much, then at least spam filters could mark unsigned messages as junk as long as signing becomes more common.
This is probably not the most sound plan, but it's a thought. Comments are welcome
Anton Markov
*** Linux - May the source be with you! ***
Its all because Microsoft ! Your email address ends up getting collected everytime a new email worm makes its presence because of a Windows vulnerability.
>> Techflock-flock onto the best bits of technology
I have a dumb question: Who are these people that reply to spam, making the practice profitable? If we could just identify these people, we could route around the spammers and tap into a fabulously rich energy source!
China controls manufacturing and India IT. But America will always remain #1 in penis enlargement.
as the center of the world's economy moves away from the US (which is is). Americans have way too high a Standard of Living. Worse, we've got a high SoL for most anybody here. The rich bastards of the world are busy ballancing the books and it looks like India and China (with their hugh, easily abusable populations) will come out ahead. Just give it time and the spammers won't have nearly enough Americans with more money than sense anymore, but they'll be plenty elsewhere.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I live in Austria (Europe) and all the spams I get at home and at work (over a hundred a day) are in English and address subjects relating to the US. All the mortgage spams refer to US mortgages, all the Viagra Spams refer to pharmacies that deliver to the USA, all prices are in dollars, and so on.
Most European countries have tough anti-spam laws. I get practically no spams that come from Europe or specifically target Europeans. The last Spam I got in German was from some dumbass dot-com newbie who had bought a CD-ROM full of "guaranteed legal e-mail addresses" from some US scammer.
The problem with spam is a problem with the USA.
Fix it.
Now.
But don't most major broadband ISPs like Comcast and Verizon already block outgoing connections to port 25? How do spammers acquires these armies of zombie machines and actually send mail via SMTP?
Hormel is located in the United States.
In other words, the USA has more computers than China. Once China reaches a higher level of prosperity, with the same number of computer desktops possessed by the USA, then China will easily exceed the spam level generated by the USA.
Now an article with research backing it shows the US as the major culprit, and what does everyone do? Make excuses or jokes. What makes you think the Chinese don't have zombie machines? Or is it ok for the US to spam, but no one else?
And the fact of the matter is, aside from a few random Russian/Chinese emails (1 in 100), most of the spam I receive is offering goods and services in English, directed at the North American market. 'Where' the spam comes from doesn't really matter, what the spam is selling and where that thing is should.
Where the heck are the mods? Mod parent as troll. He's just posting cooked up info. And if you're not convinced read this thread. He posted the same post as a reply to all the replies.
...you're American? ;)
(Merry Christmas!)
- Jax
It's unfair! The USA have the InternetS: Two Internets means twice the amount of spam...
See pictures of tits
You've managed to put your finger on the biggest problem in the Western social and economic system, that corps have the same rights than humans but none of the responsibility .
Though I don't think hitting the corporations financially as punishment really works. Large corporations will typically build in potential losses from economic punishments for misdeeds into their business model. A company may knowingly release a product they know to be unsafe, and simply put a portion of their profits aside for paying out of court settlements to victims.
In essense, this is akin to saying that it's alright for me to go around killing people without fear of jail if I can afford to pay the victim's families a large portion of money.
What I'd like to see is criminal charges brought on descision makers in corporations who knowingly use unsafe methods to produce a product that they know to be dangerous. In other words, a manager who makes the decision to save $0.02 on each product produced by using a less safe part won't be hedging those cost savings against the potential court costs from the families his company's product kills, he'll be hedging it against the very real possibility that he himself may face prison time for multiple murder charges.
We cannot give large corporations exemption from responsibility on a human level. We see corporations as faceless entities, but there are always human beings behind the scenes making decisions on how that corporation acts. If we start making those humans accountable for the actions of the company for whom they make decisions, I think we'd start seeing quite a bit more safety, envrionmental and social responsibility in the corporate world.
The Internet is generally stupid
Just because all of this spam is coming from America, doesn't mean Americans are the spammers. Most of the spam, I would be willing to bet that most of that mail is from stupid Windoze users getting pwned and having their "super-fast", "always on" connections that they don't even know how to use. But take a look at who writes these viruses and stuff, they whould be the ones held accountable for all of this traffic. Also, look at the spamhaus lists or such, how many of them are American? Not many. So before all of you foreigners go on your self-righteous, America bashing campaigns, take a look at the facts and not just some bullshit those dirty, dental hygienically challenged bastards from across the pond are spewing forth.
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementia (There is no great genius without a mixture of madness) - Aristotle
I block all email based on IP. If the IP is registered in APNIC, LACNIC, or RIPE, it goes to the SPAM bin. SPAM from U.S. and Canadian IP addresses goes to a different folder, then reported to FTC and originating ISP via SpamCop.
The ratio varies from 30/70 to 20/80, with the majority percentage coming from foreign (to the U.S.) IP addresses.
In other words, anecdotal evidence indicates most SPAM comes from countries *other* than the U.S.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Location of spamvertised websites != location where spam emails are sent from. Or at least, it's not generally the case.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Can you outline a brief tutorial on how you do that? Or provide a link or two?
Thanks!
I think this is a really great idea, but I see two problems :
- Proving intent
- Administrative focus on white collar crime
Being able to prove in a court of law that a CEO knowingly chose to market an unsafe product would be incredibly difficult. It's sort of like proving a bait and switch scam. You know they're doing it, the cops know they're doing it, but proving that there is an intent to commit fraud is still a difficult thing to do.Also , it seems to me that few government officials are interested in cracking down on white collar crime. Corporations donate extensively to political campaigns for just this very reason. Look at Enron. There's plenty of criminal wrongdoing there to go around, but how many of those guys got away with it or got a pitifully short sentence? Tougher laws regulating corporate behavior would be a great start, but until there is a commitment on the part of law enforcement to crack down on corporate crime nothing will happen.
"Seek first to understand." - Socrates
If your medicines were not sold at such ridiculous mark-up then there would be less profit in one area of spamming.
Two ways:
At the server, using iMail filters (if HEADER CONTAINS [nnn.nnn. send to FOLDER)
Locally, SpamBully does the same thing at the receiving computer plus Bayseian filters everything else (which is how I trap "domestic" SPAM).
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
..on what you think is more important: Fighting spam, or providing the world with unrestricted access to information.
Personally, I'd go with the second one.
It isn't just the source of spam - 95% or so of the spam is very obviously targetted at americans, too.
Ok, porn sites are international, but mortgage refinancing and what else the other crap is seems totally US-centric to me.
I'm sure 95% of the idiots who buy from spammers can be found in the US, too.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Yeah, most of the spam is also US centric. It mainly contains either Via9ra or P3ni5 enlargement programs. Most of the people out side US receive these mails and some stupid amongst those who really want to purchase those products by reading the mails can not buy since most of these products even don't have distribution network outside US.
One of my friends, who work for a US based company, which sells cigarretes online. All this guy has to do is get some working email ids and send the mail drafted by the US based company. He does this from location outside US though. This guy has written a UserAgent (Robot) which goes to Yahoo and grabs the email ids at random and mails them. Untill this it looks very bad but if you see inside they do get enough business through this channel for their survival at least. They do not have any other business channel other than this and they are doing fine.
Even if this guy is generating the SPAM from the location outside US, he is doing it for his master sitting there in US.
Now, who is the real badguy?
Lame reply to my own comment, but forgot something.
The majority of U.S.-sourced SPAM I receive comes from the following ISPs:
Comcast
Road Runner
EarthLink
Pacbell
Ameritech
In that order.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Okay, where is the -5, uber-off-topic, "Just blame everything on Bush" moderation?
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
All depends who's counting, I guess.
Yeah, right...
If I were counting, that would be more like 99% than 42%, sadly.
More precisely, I'd say that 42% of the spam being relayed from computers in the US sounds about right. But when it comes to the target audience, or the companies/individuals behind the spamvertised goods/services/scams, it suddenly looks like a 99% american problem in my (and most people's) view.
I had already commented on this
Sad, but certainly not Slashdot headline-worthy.
From *his* mail server?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I am considering to ban all mail coming from US.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
From my observations I find that Americans hire the Koreans and Chinese and send there junk from there ip space.
... but funded by an american(s)
Korean/'insert country name here' send spam - yes
Now in the case of Robert Solaway (as seen on spamhaus) I find he uses borked windoze boxes worldwide to send his junk (he also hosts in China - well thats what the dns reports)
Murky stuff this.
Send Peter Clifford Francis Macrae comdoms to 23 Bedford St, St.Neots, PE19 1AX, England
If blocking unauthorized port 25 connections stopped spam by 50%, that means the total received would go down 20%; What's wrong with that. I sure that there are a few that would object but not many. Most clueless windows owners would be mortified that their computers were being used to defraud others.
A little out-reach education on how to avoid and detect being owned wouldn't be a bad idea either.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
No, dark fiber. Global Crossing wired up the city of Ryleh, the Mountains of Madness, and the Plains of Leng several years ago. Now they can't shut down the damned Cthisco routers!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Just after Christmas last year I noticed quite an uptick in spam attempts on my mailserver from U.S. residential broadband IPs. Clearly this was from new computers received as Christmas gifts getting quickly zombied.
All the people who came downstairs this year to find a shiny new Dell or Gateway under the tree should be getting their machines owned by spammers right about..... now. So prepare for another post-Christmas onslaught as the spammers play with all their newly-acquired toys.
~Philly
Right!
Now, read the Book of Revelation again to understand what the corporations really are.
Then, read the history of the (U.S.) 14th amendment to see how the citizens were tricked into becoming corporations. Neat trick, huh?
Or not.
Though I don't think hitting the corporations financially as punishment really works.
-- Michael Fraase, When Elephants Dance.
Note that this has nothing to do with capitalism, but everything to do with a messed up legal equivalence between real living people and fictious collections of paper.
In the US if a *real* person kills someone we put them in jail for life or kill them. If a company kills someone we take some of their money, pat them on the back and send them on their way. It is the pervese opossite of the idea of making the punishment fit the crime. However, since companies already get all the benefits and rights of *real* people, it is simple to put a company on the same level of responability as *real* people
When a company kills someone, force the company to disband. When a company breaks a law that would put someone in jail, suspend that company's operations for the same amount of time.
The problem is that you would complaign about individuals in that company not getting paid during the suspension or after disbanding the company. I counter that within such a harsh environment, the only companies left and the resulting corporate culture of responsibility would self-police. Since most companes in the US are very small (95% have under 50 people according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) this would mainly be helping force small business owners to wake up to the negative impact of their (far too often) stupid choice. This scales all the way up to a national mega-corporation. If his job and those of many people who know his home address were at stake for every stupidity he did, CEO's wouldn't be green-lighting projects like SPAM. As it is, golden parachuts, very lightweight white-collar crime punishments and corporate greed make SPAM and standover tactics an everyday part of US life.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
I'm in the process of researching issues like this for a new business. Would it be possible for you to email me the numbers you have based this post off of?
I believed this for a long time as well, but it seems that the research is starting to show its coming from within... With the amount of people that just don't care about spyware and such, its really not surprising that, in some cases, their ignorance/stupidity is causing their biggest complaint.
Just because you're a mentally challenged, nazi-voting, mouth-breathing American doesn't give you the right to condescend to other countries. Apart from that, most of the spam I get advertises American websites, American fake Rolex watches and American drugs - in fact, I can use that as a pretty good spamfilter, since I'm a German living in Germany; I need only check for American English as the language and can dump it in my spam folder.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
Spam is a form of pollution that results from an inappropriate pricing of a common resource. In this case the resource is the attention span of millions of literate intelligent internet users throughout the world.
In other forms of pollution, a common resource is used for private gain because it is not correctly priced. For example, air pollution comes from a factory being able to dump its waste into the atmosphere for no cost.
The solution to pollution is first decrease it and then ending it by making alternatives less costly than using what used to be a free resource. The commonly accepted way to reduce air pollution now is to sell the right to dump exact amounts of contaminants into the atmosphere. These pollution permits are traded on the free market. Companies are market encouraged to develop alternative ways to deal with factory waste other than dumping it into the air. Then they can sell their 'rights to pollute' to the highest bidder.
While this seems backward and counterproductive, it does reduce the amount of air pollution in the real world.
The same approach to spam would be to sell the right to send a precise number of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages to internet users. The right to send X number of Spam e-mails could be bought and sold on the international market. Then over time, the absolute number of spam e-mails would be reduced. This would reduce spam by forcing the spammers to start doing market research and focusing their advertisments to specific audiences. This will make the internet advertising medium cost the same as other advertising mediums.
Spam exists because the net is free for spammers. It is an inappropriately priced resource.
Of course... Because spammers generally prefer open proxies and open relays outside of US to hide identity.
Just think about it: you usually get spam in english trying to sell something to english-speaking audience. It's not someone like random guy in China. It's US-based "marketers".
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
I can believe Comcast is still #1. That's my ISP and the number of spams I get (not to mention the number of worm propagation attempts) from Comcast addresses is remarkable. Of course, they do have a lot of IPs. I do know that, in my area at least, they've implemented a policy whereby if you send more than some {undefined} number of emails within some {undefined} interval, SMTP access is suspended automatically. I know because I had accidentally set my mail server to bounce unknown messages back to the sender. Since I receive over a thousand spams a day that made me a spammer, so far as Comcast was concerned. Okay, my bad ... but Comcast couldn't be bothered to let me know what was going on. Their assumption was that I was deliberately spamming: the fact that I might have been zombied didn't seem to occur to them. All I knew was that my SMTP access had been blocked, for no apparent reason, and their tech support had no idea what was going on. I finally found a person who had a clue, and he said it would take a couple of days for my access to return automatically.
I hear all kinds of noise about how to deal with spam from the standpoint of broadband users running as unwitting spam relays. Everything from "make it the ISPs responsibility" to "require users to get training and get a license in order to get online". What is the real solution? I don't know, but anything that requires passing a Federal law will probably cause more harm than good. Doesn't mean they won't try to pass one, though.
Personally, I liken people that run unprotected, unpatched machines as being "bad neighbors". You know the kind: the one that lets his dog run free and crap all over your yard. Yes, I realize that most of these zombied systems are in that situation because of the ignorance of their owners. But if that neighbor started building a garage extension on your side of the property line, you wouldn't let him off the hook because he couldn't read a survey.
People don't really think of security as being a social issue as well as a personal one. I believe that most people want to be good neighbors, and would take steps if you reported their dog taking a dump on your property. But there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of zombies out there whose owners have no idea that their systems are crapping in everyone's back yard. Somehow, we need to close the loop on these people so they a. know that they've been taken over and b. give them easy, effective steps to take care of the problem. Tall order, I know. Comcast is heading in the right direction with their policy, but they need to let people know when they've been disabled, and why. Maybe they are now, I don't know.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So I think the States - which has the largest pool of public IP addresses - will always come out ahead in this one.
As a Canadian, I am appalled, disappointed and throwing up by this biased and US-centric study that failed to consider our spamming abilities. Shame on them for failing to include us.
I had a quick look at Spamhaus. You have a pretty screwed notion of "many" if you say that 77.5% (141 out of 182 entries in the ROKSO list) is "not many".
Sebastian
Done. Check your IN box.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
It's not really discrimination against countries, but against ISPs. It is your duty if you are an ISP to police your network. Not like you have to monitor every single thing that goes on, but if someone complains of spam, you need to investigate and respond to that complaint.
If you e-mail our abuse line, we take it seriously. We see who has the IP, and check to see if the system is sending spam. If it is, it gets removed from the network until it has been cleaned. Even if not, we'll still give you an e-mail acknowledging that we looked in to it.
Ok, well China has only one ISP, the state run one. They just don't care. spam, hacking, whatever, if it isnb't polticial propaganda, they just don't give a fuck. If you send them an e-mail about it, you get a form response that claims they don't control the IP, despite the fact that APNIC records clearly show they do.
So I support the same treatment of them as of any other ISP: If they won't learn how to deal with their spam problem, they get banned as a whole ISP. The same thing applies to any US ISP. If they think spam isn't a problem and won't respond to abuse e-mails, I see no problem with blacklisting them as a group.
I work phone support for a DSL ISP. People get pissed when you tell them they've been suspended because of it. It's never their fault (or so they fanatically believe). Sometimes it's my fault, other times it's the ISP.
Slashdot is always raving about how SP2 does or doesn't protect against this or that... irrelevant. The number of people who call up wanting help configuring 98 and ME for DSL is astounding. None have ever heard of linux, mozilla, adaware. The exceptions tend to loathe the mentioning of such software ("You want me to use netscape, isn't that like 10 years old?". And yes, I'm aware of the irony in such a statement from someone wanting to get 98 working right).
They're all used to computers continually screwing up, and they've got everyone else to blame for their lack of taste in software, their lack of skill in configuring a safe machine, and the wasteland that the public internet becomes because of those shortcomings.
If the US government outlawed the users of spam campaigns then a large part of the volume would be eliminated.
See my journal, I write things there
I feel your pain. No one cares about anything until it happens to them. Then, like you say, they claim ignorance and blame anyone but themselves. Yea, I did 5 years of TS work...
I burned out about 3 years into it. My fourth year, I got a 'promotion' into E-Support (email support). Each email, from then on, started with "I'm sorry" then I read their message - honest to god truth. Oddly enough, I was the admin of the email box (Kana) and management wouldn't let me put that into the startup response...
I wish I could offer some advice, but I can't other than move up the ladder to get out of the shit.
Part of the problem is the company you're working for. There are ways to block what the users machines are doing, but the company just doesn't want to implement them - don't want to step on the toes of their users to create a little peace of mind...
So now we know the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything...
"Witch percentage of SPAM came from US in the year 2004?"
Because SPAM takes time off our Lives, seems to be a Universal problem and tries to sell us Everything!
As a power user though, I don't want them going nazi, deciding what OS's can be used with it, what ports are fair game. Too far away for DSL myself, I have to get cable, which *does* do that.
Personally, I don't get it. What happened with cars? I don't remember ever reading stories about the 1920s, with 9 out of 10 drivers being wreckless speeding maniacs, who didn't bother to tighten lugnuts, who flew down the road wearing blindfolds. Why do they do this with computers?
Well, I can see your point. Security has its issues but some things help.
As for your car analogy, the government stepped in, which is what the 'net community doesn't want. Technically speaking, the government kicked in after saftey became an issue. Heck, the first automobile accident was in 1771, 2 years after it had been created.
Now, until people start getting killed by their computers for stupidity (short of chat room issues0, I don't see things getting much better.
Hmmm. I get: 1700 spams a week Of these: 1500 are from "Texas Holdem Poker" sites that exploit a glitch in a blog's comment system... since apparently there's no "Disable emailing comments to the owner of the blog" option, I'm about to wade into the sourcecode and play mad scientist. These are, obviously, American in origin. 50 are Spanish. No idea where they come from, but possibly Peru, since this seems to have started after I logged into my mail service from a cafe' there. (The actual addresses are yahoo.com and such, but at least we know they aren't targetting the typical American.) Sometimes I get one or two in Esperanto, but they're not advertisements for anything. They're more "announcements of what's going on in the Esperanto global community" Several of those Nigerian-type things... And the rest are typical, junky American spam. For the curious... I live in America... but I am Dutch.
o o ooo zero to root in two seconds
Do the terms "APNIC, LACNIC, and RIPE" mean anything to you?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
you forgot one:
The self-centric zoo.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
It's because the US has a sufficiently large mass of people who have enough disposable income / per-capita income to constitute a purely domestic market capable of sustaining a single-country, multibillion dollar enterprise. US firms can target a solely-doemstic market for goods and services and still address a market that is larger than Europe, and which has a single common language, currency, system of mesurements and standards, transportation infrastructure, body of regulations, etc.
We, literally, don't need the rest of the world. Most of it could blow up tomorrow and we wouldn't miss a thing. (Sorry, it's the truth.)
All I see and hear is boring uniformity, braindead conformism, senseless mass psychotery, and culture devoid marketting lingo. The economics of law, money and ownership. I should not be surprised because they are the exponents of that old 'American Dream' illusion that you all were indoctrinated with from preschool onwards..
What the US exports into the world, besides all that material crap (and crap it is), is bad habbits and wrong ideology. And your last statement illustrates nicely.
Merry Christmass.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
I agree that percentage based fines are best, however some care should be taken to avoid abuse. What happens when the government targets primarily big companies, because that's where the money is. Incentive to grow become stifled. Also if we took it to apply to traffic laws, having those who got speeding tickets had to pay a certain percentage of their income, we would end up with mostly luxury cars getting pulled because thatswhere the money is.
I am starting to think that what we have created is institutionalized sociopathy; we now have entities with rights, with free will, with a desire for self-preservation, but with no conscience or empathy, only an awareness of penalties. They are proud of the fact that their only obligation is to the bottom line, they consider compassion to be inappropriate, they consider their fellow corporations to be food. We have set up an ultimate "ends justifies the means" scenario where we reward sociopathic behavior.
A human being with the ethics of your average corporation would be institutionalized. I hope.
There are two kinds of sysadmins: paranoids and losers. I'm both kinds.
Your reply doesn't address his point at all. Yes, you are filtering out non American IPs. But the point is that the "foreign" IPs that are sending SPAM are mostly sending SPAM from Americans to Americans, even though they are hiring foreign service providers.
1771? The first auto appeared in 1886. The steam engine hadn't even been invented in 1771.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
So, does cleaning the toilets at the Rochester Institute of Technology pay well these days?
Anyone that pays any attention knows that regardless of where the spam is sent from, and regardless of the hosting of the website being spamvertised, the vast majority is sent on behalf of Americans, and is advertising to Americans.
Also, look at the spamhaus lists or such, how many of them are American? Not many.
Only if by "not many" you mean "the vast majority".
The Spamhaus ROKSO list has 183 entries right now, the vast majority based in the US.
How in the name of even the most warped US-is-No 1 whacko math, if pigs could fly bullshit, is this crap marked Informative? Look pal, the US lags a good number of nations, globally, in a lot of areas, like infant Mortality, universal access to health care, etc. We're number one in areas, all right. Like bombing other countries, supporting right-wing terrorist paramilitary groups (who've killed far more people on our behalf than Osama could possibly imagine). Being a huge polluter of the world environment. Wake up. Where are the europeans, i can't believe this jingoistic crap can even get on here. Americans BUY more SPAM-adverted products than the rest of the World, so of course the ads originate here. That's just moronic yanks fulfilling their end of what is basically good old yankee capitalist free market economics, a need, a filling of that need, the marketing, etc.
You're not googling hard enough...
The History of the Automobile - Steam Cars
"Your reply doesn't address his point at all."
Of course it does. His question: "When you get spam in English, asking for US dollars, do you really think that foreigners are behind it?"
Whether it is in English or whether "foreigners" are behind it is irrelevant. The fact that it comes from a foreign ISP makes the probability 99.9 percent that it is spam, ergo, I block all foreign IPs.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
That's what's relevant to you blocking it. But there's a bigger world of relevance that this article and everyone else posting comments is talking about. It's about the people not the IP addresses. Try and turn down the geek control from 11 to something more normal for a moment.
You are making no sense at all. What does "the people" have to do with anything? I am not communicating with any "people," and the only "people" (I use the term loosely) trying to communicate with me are spammers. Are you saying I have no compassion for spammers? If so--damn straight! Obviously, something in all has touched one of your nerves, but darned if I can figure out what or why.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Of course I'm not saying you should have compassion for spammers. They are scum. But they are human scum, and therefore don't have an IP address.
OK I'll lay this out as simply as I can. Computers don't write spam. Computers don't have business models based on spam. Spammers are people. So just because the IP address that you are getting the spam from is outside of America doesn't mean that the spammer who wrote that spam and is promoting his business with that spam isn't American or living in America. That's all the poster that you tried to patronize was saying. Your answer to him was ignorant and missed the point.
If you take the percentage of spam received by the honeypots and weigh it against the number of internet users per country, the top 12 looks something like this:
1. South Korea (4.4 mess/user)
2. Canada (2.8 mess/user)
3. US (2.1 mess/user)
4. Brazil (1.7 mess/user)
5. China (0.92 mess/user)
6. Mexico (0.89 mess/user)
7. Taiwan (0.86 mess/user)
8. Spain (0.82 mess/user)
9. France (0.59 mess/user)
10. Japan (0.39 mess/user)
11. UK (0.32 mess/user)
12. Germany (0.22 mess/user)
South Korea doubles the average spam production of the US, and Mexico is far from being as well behaved at Sophos puts it.
One should study the spam control measures in place in Japan, the UK and Germany, since they seem to be working pretty well to limit production.
Stat calculations are based on a hypothetical 1e6 messages received by honeypots, and internet users by country were taken from internetworldstats.com
I wouldn't know, but being in charge of their Windows technical support staff does.
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementia (There is no great genius without a mixture of madness) - Aristotle
Sure, other countries are *relaying* spam to you, but where does it originate? I.e., who is it that's trying to sell you something?
Follow the money, then try telling me that most Spam comes from countries other than the US.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
Not really. Forget IPs, follow the money! Who is it that's trying to sell you something?
I get the odd Spam in cyrillic and chinese characters too, we all do, but the majority of all Spam I receive is from some scumbag US spammer or other.
"Only available in the continental US" my ass, why are they spamming a .no email address then? And what would I want a mortgage in a US bank for? Would I even qualify? Is that a Norwegian outfit spamming me about the US green card lottery? Not bloody likely.
No, Spam was invented in the US and remains a primarily American "industry". The only thing CAN-SPAM has done is outsource the actual hosting to China. Yay, another outsourcing success story!
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
"So just because the IP address that you are getting the spam from is outside of America doesn't mean that the spammer who wrote that spam and is promoting his business with that spam isn't American or living in America."
Funny, at no point did I write anything about the country in which the spammer(s) live, just that the SOURCE IP of the spam was outside the U.S.
To further restate my point, for the purposes of blocking spam, where a spammer is located is irrelevant. Where spam comes from IS relevant.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
You people are the ones who voted the Nazis into power and invented industrialized genocide (another fine example of "German engineering" that was).
Oh, but you aren't referring to the National Socialist German Workers' Party as Nazis, you're referring to the Republican Party as Nazis.
In that case, you should be committed to a psychiatric institution for your delusional statement. Maybe some shock therapy will clear your mind.
Irrelevant TO YOU. Not to the rest of us. YOU may not talk to the rest of the world, but many of us do. You might not be interested in tackling the source of spam but plenty of other people are. The other poster asked a perfectly valid question, you answered him ignorantly. End of subject.
Again, nowhere did I write that this involved anyone but me and my personal solution to spam. Gawd, you guys are touchy on this subject. What's up with that?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Because I upgraded the server software and it changed a default setting. So shoot me.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
All the attention focused on who sends the spam and how, and from where it comes, leads nowhere.
Filtering, if you get really good at it, keeps your inbox fairly clean but does nothing about the huge volumes of spam flying around the Internet.
The only tactics that have hurt spammers are those that have increased the costs of the sponsoring Websites. The Lycos screen saver was delicious but failed because it depended on a central server and because a bunch of complete nitwits clucked and wrung their hands over the appropriateness or lack of same in hammering spamvertized Websites. Meanwhile spam continues and those same whiners do nothing meaningful about it.
The one controlling fact that seems to have escaped most of the discussion about spamfighting tactics is that almost all spam contains explicit invitations to visit sponsors' URLs. It's really that simple. If a sponsoring Website hires a spammer to send out millions of emails advertising the Website, the sponsor can't complain if millions of people accept the invitations and visit. Visitors to a Website have no obligation to buy anything.
Active spamfighting was first articulated in 2003 by Paul Graham in Filters That Fight Back. Graham is the person who popularized Bayesian filtering in 2002, about a year before he suggested that filters might actively punish the spamvertized sites they identify. To date no good tools have emerged for independent, distributed spamfighting of this type although many individuals have built scripts for using curl or wget to download files from spamvertized sites.
Until an open source, personal spamfighter is developed and released, the best way to fight back against spam is to use one of the Web-based "vampire" pages, either as maintained by someone else or customized to hit the sponsors of the spam you receive. They are called "vampires" because the suck bandwidth from the spamsites, thus increasing the costs of running spamvertized businesses.
Any of the SpamVampire-type pages may be saved locally and modified. Once you have one of them running in your browser just right click and Save As to your desktop or other convenient place, then edit the list of sites/files at the end of the HTML page. The pages run just as well from your own hard drive as they do from servers.
Of course it's a pain in the butt to keep such an HTML page current, so there's something to be said for running someone else's updated page if it targets spamvertized sites of interest to you. LadVampire, for instance, targets fake bank sites that scam people out of millions. The Spam Research Tool is updated to target spamvertized sites and redirectors manually identified from spam received at its several hosted domains.
One of these days someone will build a bridge between the excellent URL de-obfuscation and identification contained in many of the filtering tools on the one hand and local spamsite downloaders like the SpamVampire genre. Then we'll be able to quickly and easily verify our own spamsite targets and pass the information to our own spammerhammers.
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
So, I can deal with those effects. Just give your users some options
Do it based on percentages, or maybe 5 years worth of profits. But along with this would necessarily come more inspectors for oversight...because if the threat of severe punishment were enough, we wouldn't have any drug users in the United States, especially New York state. However, the fines would probably pay for the inspectors, and then some.
This would also help reduce the number of lawsuits. Right now a lawsuit and a good attorney are your only weapons as an employee/consumer, but advocates of "tort reform" want to limit lawsuits so much that they are meaningless to any defendant who has enough money.