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Texas Goes After Student Spammer
A number of people wrote in with this story: "Count Texas in the growing list of states fighting spammers with CAN-SPAM. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed the lawsuits today, charging a University of Texas student (and a cohort in California) with sending out millions of unsolicited commercial emails under the pseudonyms PayPerAction and Leadplex, among others. Spamhaus rates PayPerAction the #4 spammers in the world."
They still have the death penalty in Texas, right?
Having done so much with so little for so long, I now can do anything with nothing at all.
The answer seems simple; get politicians' email addresses on spammers' lists. Once they feel our pain, they'll do something.
Probably something stupid.
I'd like to know what this kid's major was. And, "Ryan Pitylak?" I'm definately lacking pity.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
probably rates as one of the least of yOUR concerns as a planet/population in decline. additional defocus from what the 'real crooks' are up to, which is murder & mayhem for profit.
"According to watchdog group SpamHaus, PayPerAction is the fourth-largest spam operation in the world."
Only fourth? The boy can't be a native Texan, then. Must be a Yankee immigrant.
(If you can't tell the difference between humor, flamebait, and troll, don't mod this.)
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Is it just me, or does the CAN-SPAM act sound like something that would allow people to send out spam. Talk about picking a bad name for a good thing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
do you see the irony that this guy really may end up having to pay per action?
There are two ways to see if you've been sent illegal spam: Check for misleading subject lines that are intended to trick people into opening them. Look for a Web page to submit contact information.
Does all this damn V 1 A G R A email count as misleading? I think every spam message I get has some way to try and trick my filters.
Spam isn't all that difficult to track back, why is it taking so long for groups like this (#4 in the world) to get shut down? Is the slowdown our legal system and building the case?
"There are two ways to see if you've been sent illegal spam:
Check for misleading subject lines that are intended to trick people into opening them.
Look for a Web page to submit contact information.
This is where spam operators make their money.
A consumer submits contact information to that Web site."
Gawd, is there a group anywhere with a greater ignorance level than the "mainstream" media? (Be nice...)
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Maybe .ca by your homepage, but to 'can' something in US English vernacular means to throw it out or get rid of it. Not to be confused with packaging it up for distribution, as I'm guessing you're thinking.
Why would he do that? does he not have anything better to do?
Or was he one of those enterprising minds who wanted to earn more than his dad by the age of 20?
I know the world exists because I exist.
not to be ignored, but allowed deserved attention towards positive outcome.
I bet he now regrets sending out spam for penis enlargement!
Actually, almost a third of the people on death row are white. I can't say anything about their financial status, though.
If you're having serious problems with spammers rumplestiltskinning (rcpt dictionary attacks), sendmail-8.13.x allows you to limit the number of concurrent connections per IP address, limit the number of connections per minute per IP address, and slow down the flow of 'rcpt to:' commends by calling sleep(1); after a threshold number configured in your mc file.
a ng/2003-January/012863.html
If that's not enough, and it wasn't for me, this one line hack to sendmail posted to the mimedefang list will hang up on the fuckers after hitting your badrcptmax threshold. Totally out of RFC spec, but when did spammers play by the rules? You'll want a script to cull through your mail logs to firewall off or blackhole route IPs which attack you in this manner too, pretty trivial.
http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/pipermail/mimedef
Finally, I'd like to sing the praises of milter-spamc combined with the spamassassin daemon. It's written in c, very lightweight, and it offers a configuration option to deny messages tagged as spam durring the smtp transation with a 551 notification (actually, it offers a series of 44x and 55x notifications; see the docs). You can also configure it to accept the message and just tag it with X-Spam headers per normal, but giving the spammers notice that the message was even accepted just makes me happy in so many ways. And don't forget to RBL block the fuckers too. --M
According to some articles published in August, he lives in this $450K house. Notice how the home is in trust for himself. Probably hoping to keep it when his scam falls apart. According to the UT Directory he lives near campus, but that looks like that's just a P.O. box. The e-mail address in the UT directory goes to payperauction.com.
For exim >= 4.12 just drop this into your DATA ACL:
The other bits are similarly easy :)
I wonder if the student used his student accounts and/or UT's bandwidth the propagate his spam? If so, that's a DOUBLE whammy!! The state could have his proverbial ass for misuse if they can't get him on the spam charges.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Castration for salvation!
A few years ago he wanted to start some book exchange site and wanted me to write a script to get all of the UT emails and spam them. I refused, saying that spam is evil and that there are better ways to do things.
:)
Glad I did
Looks like they are underrepresented on death row, actually.
It's been done. He lives in Deep Eddy - an trendy, expensive part of Austin in a house that is appraised at $450k (which is maximum value a house can be appraised at in that neighborhood - it actually worth quite a lot more). He also had (at least at one point) a shiny new Jag in the driveway.
Ever think that maybe people from more poverty stricken backgrounds would end up on death row more....
And before the usual trolls roll in to claim that most of the spam is from China and whatever:
Top 10 Spammer Countries
If you're too lazy to look, the US is 1st with over 3 times the score of the 2nd place, which is indeed China.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
We have a tendency to fry spammers, they rank right in there with them cattle rustlers.
That's quite the issue, not race in fact. Black people committing more crimes per capita including homicides may be a result of poverty, but then nobody should be surprised that they end up on death row more often. Common sense would allow you to understand this.
Interesting article - my own website (based on WordPress) used to recieve large amounts of comment spam. I'm not getting much of that any more (yippee!!!).
And the adverts: Texas Hold-Ems. (and casino's, Rolexes, C!4Ii5 etc, but mostly Texas Hold-Ems).
Shame really, as I visited Texas in 2003 and really liked the people there (still do of course, just not this spamming $£%&*!
Wouldn't it be easier if we all just told his fellow college students who he is & what he looks like. College students are well known for having fewer inhibitions about expressing how they feel.
Not in Texas, the population here is about 50% white, 35% Hispanic, 10% Black, 5% all others. In the biggest cities of Houston and San Antonio Hispanics are more than 50%.
Plus, crime statistics in the USA have been known not to follow the population ethnic mix for a long time.
Not race?
Then you just need to compare conviction rates as a percentage of cases brought to trial. Studies have shown that arrest rates are higher for blacks, but that the conviction rate is much lower indicating bias in police arrests. On murder cases that actually go to trial, the chances for a black getting the death penalty vs a white are higher, indicating bias in the justice system.
example
example2
Isn't PayPerAction a paid political action committee in the State of Texas registered as a Republican? Something smells here....
Not in Texas, the population here is about 50% white, 35% Hispanic, 10% Black, 5% all others.
I don't live in Texas, I was just going by the latest census bureau (2000) info found here . I guess the data is outdated.
Yes, that data is outdated, things are changing rapidly. By about 2015-2020, Hispanics will be the majority in TX. I think that point will happen sooner than predicted.
Deep Eddy is in Dallas - did you mean Tarrytown maybe?
Well, you can look up his info on the UT student dir and get the wrong address, or look it up on the Travis County Property vlaue website and get
:)
1005 POSSUM TROT
Austin, TX
My WordPress blog used to get the same sort of spam (advertising the same crap, nonetheless) until I installed the AuthImage plugin. It's stopped the spam completely without requiring me to keep a blacklist updated or forcing my friends to create accounts just to leave comments. It isn't a perfect solution (it's not accessible to blind visitors), but since virtually no one other than sighted friends reads my site, it works for me.
All make way for the evil Count Texas! His minions shall cover the Earth with darkness and shape mountains in his image! His weapons of mass destruction shall burn the plains and boil the seas! His armies shall smight all the enemies foolish enough to stand in his way and all who publicly disagree with him shall know his wrath!
Your dog was alive, at least. I've been offered citibank credit cards at nonexistent addresses (apparent clerical error mixed two former addresses), and to misspellings of variations of my name that only existed on citibank cards . . .
But the best I've seen was about 1990, when my grandmother received a preapproved gold card offer for her father--who had died 50 years earlier (but had resided at that adress), and presumably never should have been in a comptuter database.
hawk
In the case of of copyright infringement, the harm is minimal, if any at all. It is possible that a large content producre loses a sale form it, however pelase remember that not every illegal copy is one that the person would have bought anyhow. So there is minimal monitary harm to a single entity. I see that as being something that warrants a small (like few hundred) dollar fine, not the threat of a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
In the case of spam the harm is vast and widespread. Spam costs a lot of money. It costs in bandwidth and server resrouces it uses, applications and appliances to block it, and lost employee time to deal with it. The monitary harm is quite large, and effects many people.
There is also intent. In the case of copyright infringment, the intent is usually to get content that you cannot otherwise afford, or to sample content you might wish to purchase. With spam, the intent is to make tons of money at the expense fo others, generally fraduantly.
So now we're back to ignoring poverty as a factor? Make up your mind, idiot.
clicky
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
There's a Deep Eddy in Austin, too.
You are probably referring to 'Deep Ellum' in Dallas. Or maybe you are not.
We've known Leadplex were spammers since day one.
All these shady guys used to be walking in and out of Leadplex all day, it looked more like a drug ring than an actual business. I work over at Simpler-Webb and smoked a lot of cigarettes with the spammer guys. Most of them aren't intrinsically bad, but that Ryan guy (i'm assuming it was him) acted REALLY shady all the time. I went over to their company one day just 'looking for someone' and when he came to the door he seemed pretty freaked out someone he didnt know was coming to his office. For a while we thought it was a porn studio because they had so many fine girls going in and out of there all day, hell it might've been porn as well. Who knows. A week or so ago we say them moving a lot of boxes out, and a couple of days ago a camera crew showed up trying to get the spammers to come out and this was the first time we had ever seen the lights off in their office. Definetly shady stuff, hard to believe we work DIRECTLY across the hall from the worlds #4 spammers.
All in all, glad to see these guys getting put away, I need less spam in my mailbox for sure.
~~par
Seems to me like he needs to look into getting a soap holder
not sure if this is current, but was current as of August 2004.
Name Ryan Pitylak
Ryan Samuel Pitylak
Title Junior, Advertising (upper division)
College/Department College of Communication
Home Phone +1 512-320-9930
Home Address 2002a Guadalupe St # 290
Austin, TX 78705-5609-02
He lives at:
1005 POSSUM TROT
Austin, Tx
Ryan Samuel Pitylak
DOB 05/22/1982
TX Drivers License No. 2119216
Lives at
1005 Possum Trot
Austin, TX 78703
Conviction rates for what accused crimes? I think the breakdown is important. If, hypothetically, for some cultural reason one group of people tended to put up more resistance to police actions, the result could be more arrests, less convictions for that group.
For example, let's say a white person gets pulled over for speeding. The speeder apologizes, and gets a ticket, goes on their way. A latino driver gets pulled over for speeding, and, feeling threatened, acts belligerent. The confrontation escalates until the cop arrests the uncooperative driver. Taken to trial, the charge is only speeding, and the driver gets off for whatever reason. Just comparing race and arrests is not sufficiently fine grained enough to get meaningful interpretations.
Same for death penalty, unless you review the details of the crimes. If a white person killed someone by handgun but a black person killed someone with a machete, the horrific nature of the killing might get them the death penalty where the white person did not. I really don't know, I'm playing devil's advocate here.
This is the spammer, courtesy of UT's x500 server:
[x500/128.83.126.100]
UT Finger Service...
1 exact common name match found for "Ryan Samuel Pitylak":
"1531548460 + cn=Ryan Samuel Pitylak, College of Liberal Arts"
Also Known As:
Ryan Pitylak
Ryan Samuel Pitylak
Title:
Junior, Philosophy
Home Address:
2002a Guadalupe St # 290
Austin, TX 78705-5609-02
Home Phone:
+1 512-320-9930
User ID:
1531548460
E-Mail:
ryan@payperaction.com
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/14/1 328219
Spamming is rude, and there's too much of it out there, and the Internet makes it hard to treat rude people appropriately so lots of people think that laws might be a useful tool, especially since the law forbids the public to use other potentially useful tools such as wirecutters, 2x4s, and small nuclear weapons. The drug prohibition laws are evil and have immensely bad effects on society. The DMCA is greedy, and it's so totally overblown that it's obvious that it's authors were not only clueless about the effects of the power they were throwing around but also simply don't care, but unlike the drug wars, it still interferes with people's productivity, creativity, and access to shiny toys but doesn't lead to dead bodies on the streets.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
typing
drinking coffee
petting my dog
how'd you manage all three at once?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!