Slashdot Mirror
Dutch Fine Spammers, AOL Reports Drop in Spam
teun writes "This morning the Dutch Telecom Authority, responsible for enforcing the anti-spam law in
the Netherlands, announced their first two fines for Dutch spammers: 25,000 and 42,500 euros. These fines are based on the anti-spam law that became
effective in May this year. Spamvrij.nl is very pleased with these results." gollum123 writes "According to AOL, its subscribers are getting less spam this year. There has been a reduction in both the number of daily email messages to AOL (from 2.1 to 1.6 billion) and in the number of customer complaints about spam." And finally, Saeed al-Sahaf writes "We hear so much about China being the source of spam. But a new study shows China and South Korea as distant second to the United States as the source of spam. Sophos, a leading anti-virus maker has released some findings, which claim that the good old US accounts for almost 42% of spam mails sent out this year, and they chalk it up to lack of security on most desktop computers."
Less subscribers = less spam! AOL has found a way to reduce it, for sure: reduce the number of customers through overpricing and degradation of services. This results in fewer inboxes: Viola! Less Spam!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Now my AOL email will have only 42,000 spam messages a day, instead of the 162,000.
This is definately good news. Thanks OPTA, finally a useful thing out of you. Now let's hope they get Patrick de Bruin as well.
:)
Internetayatollah's forever
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Surely you jest.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Are spam crimes really being enforced correctly? Some would say no. Shouldn't government be focused on combating spam itself by catching each and every spammer, rather than making an example out of a few? It's the same as the RIAA and music; no one worries about getting caught because the odds are so low.
Until we have a centrally-implemented system that tracks every spammer by IP and reports them to ISPs, we won't be making any real progress.
As long as they can rake in more cash than they pay out, fines are useless.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
LOL LMAO ROTFL.
If it weren't for Spamassassin I'd give up on email.
I bet non-US sources are probably still the biggest source if you count operations that are knowingly in the business of sending spam, and the majority of the US sources are from zombie armies of owned home computers.
Your name is apt: I can only assume this is a troll.
Tom Geller
AOL reports a drop in spam because they falsely classify REAL messages as spam! Most network admins I know have had to deal with AOL at one time or another. They are pretty strict for a large ISP: they require valid rDNS records, last I checked, for one, and many times have my parents (stubborn AOL'ers) found legitimate mail in their spam folder).
In my company, one blocked false positive is considered a mortal sin. Report less spam doesn't mean you are great at blocking it, it might mean you're just too damn aggressive at fighting it.
AOL keeps accounts around long after you leave the service, in the hopes you will one day come back and reactivate. I had an email address there I deleted years ago, only to reactivate it and find I had mail waiting (mostly spam!).
Execute? [Y/N] _
Why, because he points out the general Slashdot concensus that copyright violation isn't really a crime (unless it's a GPL violation which of course worse than mass murder), yet spam is treated like the personal demon spawn of Satan? Troll or not, he makes a point.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Thanks Opta now i can set my spam filter to mark Dutch mail as good and all English mail as spam.
But how do I convince friendly foreigners to send their messages to me in Dutch only?
What's more surpsing is that ISP's have not done more to stop being the source of spam (ala blocking port 25 outbound).
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
RTFA, the spammers aren't in america, the zombied boxes they use to relay spam are.
No doubt windows in Korea or China is just as insecure, but does the average housewife in Korea have a 3.6ghz P4 with a gig of RAM and 120 gig HDD?
Plus, most of Asia has been RBTL'ed by now, no point in spamming from compromised Korean box.
I think that given sheer amount of insecure PCs with respectable specs in US, that are connected 24/7, the list makes alot of sense.
PS, upon re-reading, Sophos also includes Worms and trojans in their statistic, many big email worms have exploited a bug only exists in the US version of OE, IIRC, so now the list makes even more sense.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I'd like you to give the Slashdot community rational arguments for why copyright is a good thing. Can't do that? Well, fucking stop posting here.
What the bloody heck are you talking about? I never said it was a good thing. I'm simply pointing out the nonchalant attitude around here regarding things like mp3/movie distribution over p2p (oh come on, lots of you do it). Spam sucks, sure, but there are ways to deal with it that don't require massive government intervention. A better security mentality (particularly among windows users) alone will decrease spam.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Sure it's a theft of resources. Who is denying this?
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Perhaps, but then again I'm not terribly interested in the party line of an organization that does as much as they can to assimilate other people's work under their holy GNU banner (the whole "Oh, you should really call it GNU/Linux" mentality).
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
I find this quote particularly interesting:
"...which claim that the good old US accounts for almost 42% of spam mails sent out this year, and they chalk it up to lack of security on most desktop computers."
So is this saying that there's a larger percentage of users in the USA than elsewhere, thus we are responsible for more unprotected PC's, just based on having more users?
Or is it saying that American users tend to be ignorant on security, and PC-education, as opposed to the rest of the world?
I'm betting most of the viruses that infect these systems into becoming spam bots in the first place are coming from China.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
First, good going, if it's true.
Any reduction in spam is good.
Second, if you want to cut delivery of spam down by 90% to 98% get all ISP's to implement greylisting and spamassassin and block port 25 (but provide an easy way for users to request port 25 be opened if they want to run an email server).
Third, track down the dolts that buy from spam messages and permenately take them off the Internet. If the spammers can not make money from these dolts they will have to go get a real job. (to track the dolts down send out spam and wait foor them to reply, go to their homes and cut their power and take their computers away. Get the ISPs to refuse to provide them connectivity.)
The word "theft" means something. Spam certainly does not meet the definition. Nor does unauthorized copying of digitial music files. Just because it is bad does not mean it is theft.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I'm hearing that a lot of linux newbies are running full blown sendmail servers on their home connections, and don't know how to set them up properly, so they happily allow people to anonymously relay mail through them.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
When it's easier to imagine yourself as the victim than the villian, then the law seems just.
When it's not, it doesn't.
Most get spam and don't make it.
Very few make CDs, many copy them.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
No offense, but you've got to be kidding.
You do realize that a large percentage of spam comes from compromised systems, whether it be someones personal home computer hooked up to their DSL/Cable connection or a formmail CGI script sitting on a web site somewhere, right?
A centrally-implemented system that tracks every spammer by IP would do nothing but track everyone BUT the spammer.
As an example, my formmail honeypot gets hundreds of attempted attacks every week. If it was actually sending the spam, a centrally implemented system tracking IPs would accuse me of being the spammer and not the spammers themselves.
Arguably, you could say this would be a good thing -- the power to track all compromised systems -- but I really don't want any government organization that involved in anything related to the net.
Using that kind of definition, any kind of inconvenience can be called theft. I'm parked in your driveway? I stole your use of it. I secretly poured Miracle Grown on your lawn at night? I stole money by causing you to spend more on lawnmowing gas. Etc etc etc.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Back when the Euro was introduced, 1 Euro was worth 1.something dollars. Over the next few months, it dropped below the 1 dollar treshold and you stupidos were laughing at that European toy money of ours that wasn't worth anything. Nowadays we're on our way to 1 Euro equaling 1.5 dollars (yes, I expect that to happen, even though it's bad for European economy and thus we Europeans are not in favour of it) and (no surprise) again the US stupidos are laughing. I guess that's the best proof that they are ignorant: they always feel like being on the winning side no matter what happens. Like during war: all parties claim "Gott mit uns!" and all of them fail to objectively understand and deal with the naked facts of reality.
By the way, guess who currently is paying less for oil products: Europe or the US...
Hmmm. That explains the fast "Friendship" between Laverne and Shirley. Although, truth be told, the constant attentions of Lenny and Squiggy weren't exactly conducive to their heterosexuality.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I bought one, too. Looked a lot like this. A lot was explained when they told me that alien flesh does not decompose. Rather, the innards evaporate in Earth's atmosphere, leaving a flexible thin exoskeleton that bears a remarkable resemblance to plastic. The "Made in China" sticker does not refer to manufacture. They told me that they had to do this because at one time it was processed through an alien morgue in Shanghai. I feel very fortunate to own an actual corpse of an extraterrestrial.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I'm hearing that a lot of linux newbies are running full blown sendmail servers on their home connections, and don't know how to set them up properly, so they happily allow people to anonymously relay mail through them.
Sounds like there is a serious usability issue then. Shouldn't sendmail default to a reasonable configuration? Most newbies I know change as little of the configuration as possible to get something working.
My boss asked me to put together a graph of the amount of spam we've blocked over the past 18 months. I've seen a pretty steady (other than the occasional trough or spike) increase in spam the whole time. The number increases week by week and I don't see an end in site, unless you consider the point when my mail gateway gets overwhelmed by the amount. For 1200 email users, we're sitting at just over 150,000 blocked spams per week.
But why is the rum gone?
Well the US EPA has a few charts and graphs on their website none of which provide the exact 25% figure but do show we are the biggest pollutor. Now one interesting graph though is http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/cont ent/emissionsindividual.html
which shows that our emissions per capita hasn't gone up much and interestingly enough our emissions per GDP has gone way down which I assume means we are being much more efficient. I think we can eventually turn this efficiency into less emissions in the long run, but that is yet to be seen.
RTFA, the spammers aren't in america, the zombied boxes they use to relay spam are.
I usually don't look at spam anymore as my filters work quite well, but I don't recall getting more than one or two messages that were not directed at English speakers. Most of the ads seemed to be for American companies as well. Maybe the companies sending the spam are not in the U.S., but those doing the advertising certainly seem to be U.S. companies. Has this changed?
Here is a good reason: I create the intellectual property - spending my time, money and effort. I should be able to do whatever I please with it and have it enforced in any legal manner I see fit. I should also be able to have it protected - and since I am the tiny guy working out of my garage and do not have the money to do the research or enforce such a law - I ask that the government help protect me from the big mean people who would steal my work because they are too inconsiderate to respect my hard work.
As for stopping to post here well you are a stfuing AC so who the hell cares what your assinine wishes are. The original posters comments are 100% valid
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Because the federal government shouldn't be so actively fighting on the part of for-profit organizations. The organization should do their own fighting. Beyond which, most /.ers feel the copyright laws that ARE getting inforced are rediculous or outdated.
/.ers that the government whom (again, many /.ers feel) do not focus on real or relevant are finally doing something that pisses off millions of the citizens these politicians represent.
The government 'focusing' on spam (passing the can-spam act, not exactly focusing IMO) means to
As a right leaner myself, I have to admit that Fox News does lean slighty to the right, but is still more balanced than most.
:)
On the other hand if you were constantly being attacked by every left winger in the country, you'd lean slightly to the right yourself
Wow, we are finally getting rid of the Constitution!
:)
Good News!
Ahh, remember that "Good News" show that was on TV in the mid 90's wow.. hhehe. Wonder what they would have said about the Iraq war, probably replayed that video of the Iraqi girl who got surgery here a thousand times already
I block mail from most of China and South Korea, the mail blocked by these rules accounts for about 80-90% of all spam blocked by the server.
Before I started blocking I saved all spam, and looking into the headers I have found that while the mail was received from a host in China or South Korea, the true origin was a host in US, typically an IP in the range 24.0.0.0/8 which is reserved for cable users.
> Fox News is known for being centrist and balanced. (measured from the center, of course).
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
With a newly installed Linux box (Fedora Core 3) I specifically did not install the mail server as part of the initial anaconda build. Was rather surprised upon looking at the detailed startup that sendmail was turned on. Fixed that one in a hurry. I didn't check the running processes to see what might have been installed by mistake. My bad.
Your math is wrong. If 2 out of 3 women were raped, it would be a national scandal. I would lay odds they said 2 out of 3 women were raped OR sexually assaulted. But this does not mean even though women outnumbered men 2 to 1, that every man must have attacked a woman. It simply means that 2 out of 3 women were attacked. This could have been by non-members of the school, a small number of men haveing multiple victims, etc.
As for the definition of rape, unwelcome sex fits into the legal definition. Some people are reluctant to call it rape, even when victims, due to the stigma attached to being a rape victim. Also, if a person is unable to give consent (ie when intoxicated), it can be considered rape under the law.
And before you get riled up thinking I am a woman, please note that I am male, and deal with victims of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape (all three are on a line form mild to extreme). As a result, I have had to do a lot of research and study into this issue.
Ok. So what you're saying is that even when a woman says "Yes" it may mean "No" and if that's the case she may later bring up charges and I'll be convicted as a rapist?
What a wonderful world we live in...
OK, this is obviously a touchy issue. Yes, the previous poster's numbers were poorly thought out. Yes, rape and sexual assault are a lot more common than is generally supposed. No, the survey he described was probably not accurate. Its questions were vague and poorly worded. "Did you have sex when you did not want to" is not equivalent to "were you raped?", nor is it equivalent to "were you sexually harassed?" I know women who had sex because they though it would make them popular, because they wanted someone to like them, from peer pressure, or because they wanted something from the person they were having sex with. This in not rape, but in all of these instances women would probably answer yes to the question in the survey. This is getting way off topic from spam stats.
Well, nowadays, everyone can get their open source browser, instant messenger, mail client, office software...
If an OSS Virus checker caught on and became popular, ( On Going or This) I wonder how much of these zombies would be decreased.
Sig it.
Follow the money!
Who is it that's trying to sell you something? Who is asking for your money?
Unless you get very different spam from what I do, they are almost always American companies. "Mortgage refinancing", "Herbal Viagra", "Green Card Lottery", do any of these ring a bell?
Yeah, there are quite a few 419 scams and other phishing out there, and also some spam in cyrillic or asian character sets, but that's peanuts compared to all the "great offers only available in the lower 48" or whatever.
It just drives me nuts how America has been spamming the world for 10 years, but when the rest of us try to point that out, you Americans immediately cry foul and start blaming everybody else.
42% these days? Sounds about right. It used to be more before, but I guess the rest of the world is catching up.
BTW, here's the list of the world's worst spammers. Notice a pattern?
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
...we've already done this http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/25/141 8247&tid=111
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I'd rather see 'viola' than 'wa-la'...
Decay! Decay! Decay! -Helium
I'm sure this is a problem, but it may also depend on the case and the specifics of how it was prosecuted. There doesn't seem to be enough information here to be sure.
Many countries' legal systems are designed so that money made from illegal activities is... well... illegal. The spammers might have been required to pay back any money that was made from spamming in addition to the fines, or it might have been included in the fine. (Or alternatively they might have ended up keeping it.)
Of course, if the prosecution was only able to specify a particular instance of spamming among many to prosecute on, the fine probably wouldn't have made a difference.
The article shows the location of the computers which send spam to legit mail servers.
In this day where most spam is sent from zombied PCs, of course the US leads... Lots of computers here, lots of always-on broadband connections... and what's the ability of our users compared to the rest of the world? US computer owners include a lot who only know how to plug in and turn on.
The number two country is Korea... Again, lots of computers and even higher penetration by broadband.
Where are the web servers for the spamvertized sites? From the spam I see here, the bulletproof hosting seems to be in China and eastern Europe.
Where are the merchants who advertize with spammers? And, where are the spammers themselves? I'll bet the US leads in this as well.
-- Sally
" Why is it that when governments enforce copyright laws, people piss and moan about the other more important things they should be focusing on"
Have you got examples of people doing this? Or are you just setting up a straw-man?
"Troll or not, he makes a point."
No, he doesn't. For one thing, people generally do not moan that government should look the other way when they are copying cds. He is setting up an argument that he can refute, even if nobody ever uses that argument.
Second, he is asking "why is it". Who could ever answer that? Can the OP look into people's heads? Can I?
He is just trolling, and you know it.
" Here is a good reason: I create the intellectual property"
It's not property.
"spending my time, money and effort. I should be able to do whatever I please with it"
No. You should not be allowed to bother me with it. Yours must be the uggliest website of 2004. I should not have been exposed to it. But since I have been exposed to it, I think that entitles me to one or two things.
Your works are yours until you publish them. Then they become public property. If you don't like those rules, I suggest you move to some planet where they care about what you like.
"and have it enforced in any legal manner I see fit."
Have what "enforced"?
You are making so little sense, that I suggest you ingest some of that intellectual property you're going on about. Perhaps you'll learn something.
"I should also be able to have it protected"
Surely you mean you should have your interests protected? Protecting a work can only be done by allowing as many people as possible to run with it. Information wants to be free. So far you seem to be arguing against that, so your application of the word "protect" in this case seems unfortunate.
"and since I am the tiny guy working out of my garage and do not have the money to do the research or enforce such a law - I ask that the government help protect me from the big mean people who would steal my work"
It's not stealing. Stealing means you cannot use it anymore.
"because they are too inconsiderate to respect my hard work."
There's no law that obliges anyone to respect another person's hard work. If ever such a law was passed, the makers should be taken out back and shot. And their newts too.
This is a free country--if you want to work hard, that is your prerogative. If you do not want to work at all, that's your choice too. If you push the products of your work onto my lawn, those products becomes mine.
Copyrights are a form of welfare--and although I am not opposed to them in principle, their current application causes more problems than they are worth.
"Maybe you shouldn't have given up our right to bear arms..."
So, when is the last time you shot a cop? Ask David Koresh what the right to bear arms means in America. Oops! He dead you smart-ass mo-fo!
Ah, OK, you see, you can prove anything with facts.
So, now you have identified the people who think the US government should focus on catching spammers rather than filesharers, why don't you go ask them your question. Seems to me, they're the only ones who can answer it.
"Some truth", is that the same sort of thing as "a little bit pregnant"?
Definatly completly true, in general it probably happends a lot. You start with someone who leans left socially but is centralist economically, after being attacked constantly for their "liberal views" sees comfort in the friendship of other liberals who are more left leaning in their economics.
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