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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."
Except no politician ever reads his own mail. They have secretaries to filter it for them, so they've no idea about the scope of the spam problem.
Well, until recently spamming, in itself, has been quite legal. You could only get someone convicted, if they spammed to advertise something illegal.
Since the various anti-spamming laws have come to effect the problem has been lack of enforcement.
The only real deterrent so far has been civil suits filed by ISPs such as Microsoft (Hotmail and MSN), Earthlink and AOL to name to most active litigators of spammers. The civil suits have been very effective, but do not usually land the perps in prison (other than that Buffalo spammer who was dumb enough to use stolen credit cards to pay for the Earthlink accounts he spammed from).
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Actually, almost a third of the people on death row are white. I can't say anything about their financial status, though.
> Does anyone else think that Dewey Coffman must look like Eustis on 'Courage the Cowardly Dog'?
/.?
They had him on the news last night (in Austin) and he looked like your average
computer geek. Perhaps he'll post on
They also showed the spammers 400k+ house and beamer parked out front.
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
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.
The ultimate source is the US because that's where the financial backers of these companies are but why do you think they find it so appealing to go offshore through zombie boxes? They know the governments over there will do nothing to stop it.
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.
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