"Spam King" Agrees to Stop Spamming For Now

Sandman writes "The AP is reporting that so called "Spam King" Sanford Wallace has agreed to stop spamming... at least temporarily until the FTC suit is settled" At best this is a precursor of things to come, and at worst it's a nice break.

Comments

yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope he dies.

Too little too late

[albn]

They can give restaining orders all day long, but the spyware, adware and other crap is still on many boxes still generating ads for him.

"Spamford" Wallace has promised to stop before...

[martinbogo]

Most likely, he's working out a way to offshore the whole operation into a shell corporation in the Bahamas, and will (again) laugh his way to the bank.

Infecting the net with spyware, choking the backbones with spam. Making his money in the sleazebag way he always does.

This doesn't change anything.

obvious next step

[ChipMonk]

Don't settle the suit. Drag it on forever.

yeah, right

[elmegil]

at worst it's a nice break.

Because we know there's no way he's passed off his lists and primary business to someone else, a partner or whatever, so that the revenue stream just gets transferred away from him while he's under investigation.

A Friendly Reminder

[Lead Butthead]

a. Spammers lie.
b. See "a."

Conclusion: Stop spamming as in stop spamming from US?

Re:"Spamford" Wallace has promised to stop before.

[Anonymous Coward]

remember, this is the same dude who invented the junk fax, who was one of the first into spam, and now proven to be into sinister bots. death is too good for him.

I think you're overreacting just a tad. Maybe the slashdot hive mind thinks it's alright, but I don't see how you could ever equate mass unsolicited e-mail being worth someone, anyone's, life.

I know I'll get modded down (AC, Karma is preciousss), but speaking as someone who was recently robbed, sure, I want financial restitution (I liked the first part of your post), but I don't think the hooligans who did it should pay with their life; and trust me, the burglary bugged me a lot more than the hundreds of spam I got that day.

Re:Spam King???

[Anonymous Coward]

Well how did he become spam king then?

Someone else will take up the slack

[Anonymous Coward]

...and offer to "Enrage Your Pennies!"

Re:Interesting

[Theatetus]

(couldn't resist, given that last line. The why not is included in the "dumb 'form letter'")

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) 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
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) 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
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) 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
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(X) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth/overhead 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
(X) 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
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) 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

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where
you live and burn your house down!

Now, more specifically, you said:

"Step 1 is to make all emails tracable to the server (or at least to the ISP) they came from. This can be done by assigning each legitimate email server (or group of servers from one ISP/company) a Public and Private key pair."

We already do this: we can tell exactly what IP address (and therefore, what ISP) an email originated from. All the public-private key pair idea adds to this is:
1. additional server and network overhead
2. an additional point of ema

Re:Interesting tactics

[Lord_Dweomer]

Yeah....but when you think about it, lots of advertising can be effective when you break advertising law.

I mean, who wouldn't buy a product that claimed to give you immortality, a 10" penis, the ability to sleep with a girl just by looking at her, and the ability to lose as much weight as you want by just eating junkfood. Thats why advertising law exists in the first place.

Re:I don't get it...

[hughk]

A lot of that software is pirated. It will work but may have upgrade issues. A proportion may be OEM, but a large number is just pirated.