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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.
"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.
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.
Ah, another "we can't do more than one thing at a time" post. If we can seek to defend trees and whales and hungry people (and anything else "in decline," as you put it), all at the same time, why is defending the uncluttered use of the internet not viable? The rapid exchange of information, un-bogged-down by crap like spam, is a vital part of the productivity and efficiency that allows us the free time and resources to take care of "things in decline."
Look! I'm typing, drinking coffee, watching news about landing on Titan, reading slashdot, petting my dog, and using the internet instead of burning gas driving to an office all at the same time. Wreck the net, and I'm back on the road.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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?
Yes, you're posting on it.
I meta-mod all positive moderation Unfair, because it's abuse of the system.
Theft is not fatal either, let's ignore that too.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I *said* be nice....
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Whatever made him think it was a "good thing" though - I've no idea. With the opt-out rule rather than the opt-in rule, it may as well be the "you can spam" act (as many before me have suggested).
Sure, why not. Or to a human with an equally low amount of insight. Either way, it was an opportunity to make a point that actually matters a wee bit. So, I did. There actually are plenty of people who post here in that vein ("why chase after poor college kids when there are hungry college kids in Asia?"), so, knowing that similarly silly people would read that post (synthesized or otherwise), thought I'd chime in. Silly me. But then, look! I got modded up.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
not to be ignored, but allowed deserved attention towards positive outcome.
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
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...
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.
when the 12yr old is bombarded with p0rn spam i hear you. i have had a personal vendetta against spammers since my sister started geting blasted with porn and "enlarge your dick" spam. ayone got some cruise missles i can launch at spammers houses?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
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 $£%&*!
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
Well, see, that's just how productivity-boosting the internet is.
Actually, it involves serial and pre-emptive multi-tasking. I'm not massively parallel. Yet.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.