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Spammer Bankrupted by Anti-Spammer Suits
www.sorehands.com writes "The well known spammer Scott ("Snotty Scotty") Richter has filed for bankruptcy protection. In a Denver Post article Richter claims to have less than $10 million in assets but more than $50 million in debts including the $49 million that Microsoft is seeking. Microsoft is not the only lawsuit that Richter is defending, as a law suit filed by anti-spammer Dan Balsam and being handled by anti-spam attorney Timothy Walton is still pending. Hopefully, Microsoft will have the automatic stay from the bankruptcy court dissolved so that they can stop Richter from spamming and gather more evidence."
If it was anybody else, he would fight on.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
This time microsoft deserves our support. It's time to go with the lesser of two evils :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Richter
Like it or not, he makes more money than most reading slashdot.
I had this warm, fuzzy feeling all day. I now know why!
If this holds it may begin to show that the profits from spamming are just too risky, and others may not wish to try it. On the other hand, bankruptcy is often just a shield to protect assets. Maybe with a combination of civil and criminal action we will one day see a reduction in spam.
My
to keep him from declaring bankruptcy.
But the commercials you see are paid for by the advertiser. Every person paying for internet access is paying for spam, so if anyone is a socialist, it's the spammer for making sure everyone pays for his ability to send spam.
The general difference between commercials on free tv and spam online is that spam online does not go to pay for the programming or content you are seeing.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Even when lawsuits are successfull, they just go bankrupt. Some may even be intelligent enough to hide some money for later...
As long as stupid people buy their stupid crap, theyll continue. Lawsuits or not.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
[1]
The legality of OptInRealBig.com's e-mail messages hasn't yet been determined by the Washington state court where the Microsoft suit has been handled, Steven Richter said.
[2]
The 5-year-old company, which employed 25 people last year and had 350 clients, will continue to operate under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, he said.
There is no demand for spam. He's not filling a demand. He's sending you mail you don't want, and you can't refuse.
Spam and commercials are not even nearly the same. The only analogy you could make is junk mail, but that isn't nearly as bad as spam, due to the cost of sending mail vs sending an email.
...and 2 million more to go. I won't be removing Spam assassian just yet!
If you hear something, that's my head exploding.
My userid is prime!
Granted it's not like they can get much from him if he's legitimately broke, but I don't believe he can stop MS & others from collecting what the court awarded. The bankruptcy court will dispose of his assets and decide who gets what portions, but what's left he'll still owe once he's out of bankruptcy protection.
IANAL so if I'm mistaken someone please correct me, I'd like to know.
Well, let's see... ads on free tv pay for free tv... spam on the internet pays for the lifestyle of scum sucking garbage... Sounds like a seriously flawed analogy to me...
I finally found something that Microsoft did and I really liked.
Now the target is to prevent him rising from the ashes and restart spamming again.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
That's a retarded argument.
Once you start getting free internet service for putting up with spam, come see me.
That's not even mentioning the tons of other issues surrounding the shady tactics used by spammers. Sender address spoofing, compromising MTAs so they can use them to spam, sending porn advertisements to childrens email addresses just to name a few.
Legitimate business you say? Where?
The spam I don't have an issue with is from websites I actually use or have bought products from, that use real addresses that I can opt out of when I no longer wish to see their specials.
Which way will this saga play out? Will it turn out that Spammer Boy is a hydra, and that his demise, like killing of the head of a drug cartel, will spawn a series of replacements who, in true criminal fashion would start killing each other but because they're spammers they'll annoy each other comparing the size of the IMMENSE ORGASMS ORDER TODAY?
Or will he be more like an evil Obi Won, and if you strike him down he will become more powerful than you can ever image thanks to FREE HERBAL VIAGRA JUST $39.99 A PILL?
Or will he suffer the True Death as the sunlight strikes him just as the stake enters his heart while his body collaspes into a pile of dust while he screams out MY NAME IS UBENTO FROM NIGERIA AND DURING THE US INVASION OF IRAQ I WAS GIVEN A MILLION DOLLARS THAT YOU CAN HELP ME EXPORT WITH A LOAN OF ONE MILLION DOLLARS?
Or will this post suffer the lameness filter from Slashdot? Only time will tell.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
So if I send one email every day for a year, someone will pay me a dollar? w00t!
See, this is kind of stupid. We shouldn't be suing for money, we should be puttin this guy in JAIL!
If he files for bankruptcy, the government pays his debts, etc..., what's to stop him from doing it again? and again? and again? You get the point. As long as he's free, he's going to be doing this. The only way to stop it is to put him in jail.
I have this really funny quote that I like to put here. Unfortunately, there's this really annoying thing called a char
Hopefully, Microsoft will have the automatic stay from the bankruptcy court dissolved so that they can stop Richter from spamming and gather more evidence.
I can't imagine how MS would accomplish this. Their suit doesn't concern claims that are non-dischargeable, and as a bankrupt, Richter is ADMITTING their claim for damages, so it is dischargeable.
Why the court would permit them to proceed (I'm looking for a legal reason, not wishful thinking) despite the stay, I cannot imagine, but I doubt there are any grounds. Bankruptcy is no fun, of course, so while I imagine that MS can engage in some legal skirmishing, the suit is pretty much over, but Richter will be in bankruptcy, so...
With regards to any injunction, that would have to be resolved before the bankruptcy court. Bankruptcy discharges the debt, not the injunction.
He'll just sell herbal viagra and make all his money back... that's how it works.
I've worked with parts of Microsoft before and strangely enough this article reinforces what I saw, they aren't all bad - oh I know they are the evil empire and everything - but you can't get that much money and geekness together without some good happening. Besides when it comes down to evilness I'll take the big MS over millions of dirty little spammers everyday, at least their damage to my computer is more bad program design then malicious malware.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
I hate when companies make people bancrupt with lawsiuts. I really love to see MS make that poor shmuck bancrupt. Yes, I'm a hypocrite.
Yeah, and look at you wanting a free iPod and FreeGamingSystems.
You are a hypocrite.
Would someone remind me why it should be illegal to send unsolicited email?
I know why it should be illegal to setup a server in Russia to send 500 emails to the same person every day, but I don't see that as unsolicited email, but maybe a end-user denial-of-service attack.
Or a better question is, what is unsolicited email, and when does it become the stuff we hate, SPAM.
"It's the legal fees that are battering the company," said OptInRealBig.com lawyer Steven Richter, father of Scott Richter. He said the company faces lawsuits from Microsoft and other parties in Colorado, California and Utah. "OptIn is profitable but for these lawsuits."
Wow, the kettle doesn't fall far from the black pot tree now does it?
Contact us via e-mail: info@optinbig.com
or phone: (303) 464-8164
OptInRealBig.com, LLC
1333 W 120th Ave Suite 101
Westminster, CO 80234
As the whole has been pounded pretty heavily, it becomes apparent protections need to be in place on what used to be open bandwidth. Much as with radio, restrictions on use actually create more opportunities than are eliminated -- stopping P2P would mean broad new choices in applications, games and media, stopping hackers would mean better online shopping, and stopping spam would ironically make communication easier and more popular.
Soon we will be using smart cards to get online and perform transactions. It looks like they'll be in our computers now via DRM but maybe that'll help us find a meaningful solution (spam or pirate and your $400 motherboard becomes useless for getting on the Internet.)
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I know many here will be cheering, after all it's an evil spammer, but does this strike anyone else as being scary? Yes he's broken laws and done bad things, we suppose, but does he really deserve to owe $49 million? And how much of that is from legal costs rather than straight fines? If he did wrong and has been convicted he deserves to be punished, but the legal system as it stands can bankrupt an innocent all too easily.
I am trolling
Can the same laws shut down those assholes (Walmart, Albertsons, etc)?
For awhile I was working in the postal technology business and it turns out that junk mail is useful! If it weren't for all that garbage than the economics of scale would make the cost to mail your bills/letters/cards go up. Junk mail keeps mail prices low for the average joe since the infrastructure is held together by all the money spent on junk mail.
.plan!! what plan?
? i pay for my email server . ,the spammers dont pay me so down to0ples that logic . . ,its an abusive trade tactic vs our rights argument.
yet i get spam
I also pay for my internet conection, I dont mind ads on websites if the ads are non intrusive(i dont install shockwave on my reqular browser and use adblock for the worst offenders)
This is not a Left wing vs wing argument
However i dont like the fact that a lawsuit alone can bankrupt people , this is open for abuse .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
here's the link, for all you lazy clickers
Scotty2Hottie.
If he's making so much money, why is he filing for bankruptcy? He's only got 25 employees and a monster bandwidth bill, but I still can't see him spending $15M a year (what he claims to make) on operating costs. A few mil for the bandwidth, some salaries, and a lease (plus other small costs). This guy is slick.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
does your penis feel bigger?
INSIGHTFUL MOD 5+ ...
dead on !!
Although it's tempting to cheer as Mr Richter is beaten down by the weight of Microsoft's legal muscle, I have severe misgivings about this.
First, corporations should not be attempting to lay down the law. The legality or not of spamming is for the State to decide, and there should be criminal prosecution of those who break the law.
When corporations can turn the law to their advantage, they will inevitably attack the real threats to their business - competitors.
Second, criminalising spam (or bankrupting spammers through civil suits) will only drive spammers to work outside the reach of the US courts. While US spammers can reasonably be expected to evolve over time to collaborate with their host society, foreign spammers don't have any incentive to (e.g.) refuse to promote child snuff porn.
Lastly, spam is a problem that will, eventually, go away by itself. Yes, I actually think this. There will come a time when people say, "of course you could send a million unwanted emails, but who would be so stupid?"
Spam is unsolvable by technical means, and it's unsolvable by legal suits, civil or criminal. It will disappear when the Internet has matured to the point where business is more than a one-shot affair, and tit-for-tat becomes the rule, not the exception.
So when the school bully picks on someone you don't like, don't cheer. Next time it'll be you.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
I agree with the other reply to your comment: please stop putting in that "Want a free iPod?" advert in your posts. It is distracting and I believe most slashdot readers do not appreciate it.
5 less emails per day to my "paid to read" email account.
When I said don't feed the trolls (tt), I meant the *other* trolls, not ME!
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
Perhaps you didn't notice the new credit legislation that was passed recently. While it's harder to avoid debt owed to credit card companies, it's much EASIER to avoid debt resulting from court judgements, and should he have a giant multi-million dollar mansion as one of his assets, it's likely protected.
Thank God our representatives were so thoughtful to provide finacial protection for criminals who became rich through stealing from others, while making life that much harder for people who actually produce something for a living.
Let's say that I run a personal mail server on my headless Linux box in the closet, which handles my personal mail, mail for my small home based business, and a few accounts for friends.
With scum like Mr. Richter and his ilk running around spamming people, my mail server incurs an additional load, in the form of increased bandwidth of useless messages pouring into it, which require me to upgrade my hardware and/or storage space to cope with it and still maintain some reasonable modicum of speed and reliability.
The spam also causes me to expend time and energy fighting it, setting up filtering software, tweaking it, etc.
Who pays for these upgrades that the spam forces me to have to put in place? Not the spammers. Me and my wallet.
If there were no spam, I could run the system on some old 386 I have in the basement, and not have to worry that it'll drown in an unwanted assault of traffic that has nothing to do with, and no value for, my customers, my business, my friends, or me.
Now, if the above illustration was for a small time mail server, imagine how much bigger the costs are to an ISP, or an upstream backbone provider. MUCH higher. And you wonder why people are fighting spam?
Spam costs little (or in most cases, nothing) for the spammer to send, but it costs people money to deal with it.
My name is Scott Richter, but you can call me Snotty Scotty. My company has come under attack from an evil empire and I was forced to flee for my life. I have $10 million in assets I wish to hide. If you let me sign over these assets to you I will be forever in your debt. I will glady split half of this sum with you once I have fled to the tropical paradise of Canada.
If you agree please send a registered letter with your name, address, e-mail address, social security number and bank routing number to:
Prisoner #773849
San Quentin Prison
San Quentin, CA 94964
Please hurry, they let me out to the exercise yard soon, and I feel my other assets will soon be raided.
In Richter's case, if he had just kept his mouth shut occasionally, he probably wouldn't have become such a target. Instead he flaunted his disregard for other folk's opinions and built an incredibly high precipice to throw himself off.
Unfortunately though, it's not he'll be selling pencils on the street corner any time soon. As many others have already mentioned, he's most likely got a large chunk of change squirrelled away in a few Cayman accounts that'll keep high on Margarita's for years to come.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Dear Scott Richter,
My name is Dr Ahmed Abdalla director and board member, Transparency International, Kenya. I got your email address from the web directory so I decided to contact you.
We are interested in diverting some funds currently floating in the suspense account of the federal pay office to your account as soon as possible.
Source of the funds are:
During the Arap Moi's government, government's officials awarded contracts to their own companies, these contracts were grossly over invoiced. Now the present government set up contract review panel to settle those owed outstanding amount. My colleagues and I have identified a huge amount totaling US$870m (Eight hundred and seventy million us dollars) overseas.
We would want US$43.8m (Forty three million Eight Hundred Thousand) dollars out this money oversea transferred to your account because we are not eligible to operate foreign account, and I have been mandated to search for a partner abroad. We really want this transfer made as soon as possible before the government, who have started refunding money from Moi's foreign accounts track this money. We will be offering 20% for your assistance. If you would want to proceed with this transaction please reply with your name and phone number and if you do not accept my offer please treat with utmost confidentiality.
Best Regards,
Dr Ahmed Abdall
Correct me if I am wrong but in Bankruptcy protection you do not need to pay your bills but your suppliers must still continue to offer you service. I think you get 90 day or something like for a grace period towards your creditors.
Might be a smart move by the spammer to continue operations without having to continue to pay the operationial costs. In the mean time the spammer can set plans down to move their operations outside the US.
filing means he's let off the excess debt? he still loses his $10 million in assets? he has to sell his mansion etc.?
It seems to me that someone could really get around bankruptcy by simply renting everything.
All the hardware/bandwidth could be rented from a hosting company.
A very nice apartment or home fully furnished could easily be rented.
He could lease some very nice vehicles.
He could give large amounts of money to friends that will support him in the event that he gets shut down.
It seems that you could literally get away with only having enough cash on hand to live off for a few months at a time and give the rest away and live a very comfortable lifestyle since the cash flow per month would be so large.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Filing for bankruptcy is the next logical step when you're under debt, being sued and are liable to lose, irrespective of whether the lawsuit has anything to do with criminal or civil implications. Why does it come as a huge suprise to so many of us ?
Your fake sig is spam for a pyramid scheme . so i dont think you should be one to be commenting on greed or spam really.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
for Microsoft.... ?
*gasp*
I see where you're coming from and I'm not criticising your motives, but the possible implications for freedom of such a solution scare me.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
the banks help you out, especially since everything you sank into your retirement plans, Social Security, and your house are NOT going to be taken away.
So, it's not really that bad, he still made out like a bandit.
Sigh.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
bankrupt them all and ban them from using the net not becouse their a security risk but becouse spammers are the vermin of the internet treat them with the respect they show us and never let them dream of doing it again
I Predict A Riot
Microsoft officials called the filing a victory. "Microsoft and the state of New York said we would drive him into bankruptcy, and together we have," said Aaron Kornblum, Microsoft's Internet safety enforcement attorney. "The kind of spam Mr. Richter was sending was not only annoying, it was illegal, and the law sets out penalties for this kind of illegal activity."
It sounds like Microsoft took the law into its own hands. They saw that the government couldn't/wouldn't do anything about him, so MS blasted him with lawsuits until he succumbed.
Isn't this the kind of justice most of us Slashdotters don't like? After all, many of us have complained about the RIAA suing someone, and that person has to settle out of court because they can't afford to fight. Isn't this the same thing?
My userid is prime!
Easy said after the facts. The same situation happens all the time to gamblers in casinos.
:("
- "I was $x over, then I started losing and finished under
- "You should have stopped when you were $x over!!"
The problem is that there's no way to know the value of x beforehand.
How much would you bet that Richter hid quite a bit of his money?
Fight Spammers!
...this guy, bankrupt as he claims to be, has more than I will ever make many times over.
Crouching lawsuit, hidden assets
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Proper netiquitte is the bedrock of a civil virtual society, goat-fuckers!
"It's the legal fees that are battering the company," said OptInRealBig.com lawyer Steven Richter
Spammer or no, I don't like the principle that if you run out of money to defend yourself, you lose.
I'm a supporter of the working man, too. Help me do my part in supporting capitalism by giving me your email address.
spam news from someone called, "sorehands.com", insert your own masturbation joke here.
Monstar L
Now I hope there is a good way to stop all the microsoft, apple,real player, itunes etc.. spam that they indirectly signed me up to.
The parent is a perfect example of why spam propigates . first notice his fake sig now . Notice he gets moded up anyway , as alot of people dont care about it or know its spam . Second he wont sucumb to requests to stop the spam as he loses nothing from havin it. Third he will make money out of the ignorant and annoy the enlightend Spam in a nutshell
Free iPods are a scam.
.. unfortunately, their mail asking for it was rejected by the spam filter.
.... Hell is about to freeze over if we're cheering for the evil empire.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I always have the Spam Vampire script running on one machine that I don't pay for bandwith on. The whole point of the script is to run up their bandwidth bills without doing a DOS attack on the site. I'd like to think that I've helped contribute my own little part. I end up eating up about 10 gig of bandwidth a day.
I don't respond to AC's.
Uh, who doesn't have a fucking idea of what he's talking about? Please elaborate on how being a private company has anything to do with constitutional obligations?
The REAL solution to spam is to first have fuzzy-thinkers like yourself actually understand where this shit is coming from, the strain that it puts on networks and on network admins before it ever hits your fucking mailbox.
It doesn't put any strain on network admins. I have my own mailserver running on a public IP. When "ron.slashdot@[mydomain].com" got spam, I started using "ron.slashdot2@[mydomain].com" -- and I informed everyone I cared about who had used that address about my "real" address (firstname_lastname@mydomain.com). I have been a heavy email user since the 80s; and have many gigabytes of email archived - but never once had a major problem with emails that I didn't submit to a spammer.
Are you in debt?!?
GE_T OU*T OF DEB?T FAST
with our fool.proof pla-n
banana charlie sprocket
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
First, the "socialist" mindset usually applies to social services and policies, not technology uses. Second, you specifically state this is a LEGITIMATE business route. That is the main controversy - is it legitimate? If I siphoned gasoline out of your car in your driveway at night, it would obviously be theft. If I steal your internet bandwidth through the use of spyware/malware/viruses to send my Legitimate business email, is it the same? I think the primary issues are the methods which the spammers use. If they only sent messages from their own servers through bandwidth they paid for, it would be exactly the same as snail-mail junkmail. I've read some estimates that 90% of all spam is sent through such illegal means (I have no ability to confirm such estimates). If this is true, we can differentiate between legal and illegal spam. Then, and only then can we discuss the merits of the "legitimate" advertising email business model.
He makes money from doing something illegal. Drug dealers probably make more money than me, too, but that's not a good thing.
Plus, as pointed out, at least I'm pretty sure that my money-making method (i.e. working at a so-called legitimate job) will sustain me through the rest of my life. His money-making method will get him sued into bankrupcy (case in point) and perhaps even thrown in jail.
Yeah, I like my way better, too.
Please elaborate on how being a private company has anything to do with constitutional obligations?
If the supreme court rules that ads are expressions of speech, then the government cannot make laws forbidding people from sending ads, because it would infringe on their right to express themselves in the form of ads.
Even in that case, a company could just shitcan all the spam, since they're not the US Government and can ignore the first amendment all they want.
It doesn't put any strain on network admins.
Oh wow, Mr. "I run a webserver with one active email address", clearly you're an expert in all things email, since obviously an ISP server hosting thousands of email addresses would NEVER have to deal with more spam than you.
Even with the (what, 20? 30?) disabled email addresses bouncing spam back, your pathetic little server is nothing compared to what the likes of what AOL or hotmail (or even smaller ISPs with a few thousand customers) have to deal with.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Thats YOUR personal email. If you run a server that manages mail for lots of regular users, THERE IS GOING TO BE SPAM. Its not easy on the server, its a waste of bandwidth. He's got to pay for that bandwidth being wasted. Please get a clue.
It is pretty much unargued something is spam when it is for commercial purposes, the headers provide misleading information such as inaccurate/mispelled Subject: and/or From: fields, and while you've tried to find one the sender doesn't provide a working and effective means to say "Stop Bugging Me!!!"
There's arguement as to whether political or religious messages can be Spam; and whether it is automatically Spam if you haven't asked for it, or only becomes Spam once you try to tell the sender to stop. For political/religious messages, the US 1st Amendment gives such senders more protection here, and the rates of response versus revulsion will probably limit the use for such (as Dean demonstrated by mistake). For the latter, I'd say such situations are why the law can make distinctions between civil offenses, misdemeanors, and felonies when defining something as a crime.
I think it would do wonders for our country if misspellings in commercial messages were made a crime. =)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
It doesn't put any strain on network admins.
Did you even read his message at all?
I got a call last night that our mail server was really slow. Logged in to see that the load average is skyrocketing from spamd, and there are several thousand undelievered messages building up in the queue. We were in the process of getting a dictionary on a couple of domains, and spamassasin couldn't scan them as fast as they were coming in. I think last night it was about 400,000 messages.
Over the past few months, this has become more and more common, and now we're looking at putting another system in front of that for the sole purpose of scanning email. This costs us time figuring out how to deal with it (and dealing with it on a temporary basis to keep the server up), in the hardware we're going to have to buy, money to be spent to colocate another system, bandwidth costs, and the time to set it all up, and keep it running in the future.
How exactly do you figure there's no strain on the network admins?
Speak before you think
Before the ink was dry, Capital One started sending me love letters every single day. I finally relented and let them give me a platunum Visa.
I should have declared before they took the house.
Same thing we had last night on a nonprofit server I keep an eye on as a volunteer job, Until I manually added every address that it was coming from to the access denied lists it was choking the box from spamassassin, even then it still kept the mail server occupied sending out hundreds of thousands of connection refused messages. [I don't have firewall access for the box's network].
While I agree its a scheme, its not a scam. A scam involves someone lying. They're not lying. However, I do agree it is a pyramid scheme.
If he's looking for sympathy, it's in the dictionary, between shit and syphilis.
Even in that case, a company could just shitcan all the spam, since they're not the US Government and can ignore the first amendment all they want.
I wouldn't say they can ignore the first amendment, but blocking spam fits in to the fact that while the first amendment lets you talk all you want, no one is forced to listen.
Spamming an email server is the equivalent of calling the company's secretary and demanding she take down messages for thousands of random people, and if you happen to mention the name of someone who works there, she has to give them the message.
That dog won't hunt, Monsignor.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Slashdot is the place for you.
No wonder the weather warmed up today
I get modded down to troll or flamebate while the rest of slashdot celebrates Microsoft.
This is what I was referring to. If this isn't referring to the Constitution, then I'd love to hear why you think commercial mail services ought to deliver every bit of zombie-generated fraudulent advertising to the end-user:
Wow, you are really quite clueless. I'm guessing by your comment that you don't actually know anything at all about administrating large mail systems, and are just some goofy little hobbiest without a very small presence on the Internet.
We administer over a thousand email addresses for over a hundred domains. We are hit every day with a minimum of 900,000 distributed dictionary attacks, where common addresses like jsmith@ and magic@ are nailed from thousands of zombies all over the world. Now, 99% of these will get rejected out of hand because we don't actually have a jsmith@ or magic@, but each connection is a drag on the resources of the server, and if you get enough of them in a row, they can become a DoS attack.
Our mail server was being brought to its knees by these attacks. There were periods when it would cease to respond on port 25 for up to fifteen minutes at a time, not only blocking incoming mail, but preventing our customers from sending it out. They got all sorts of charming timeout messages, and we lost a few customers who went to other services (read: spam cost us $$$). What's more, because we are billed on the 95th percentile, these attacks were topping out our bandwidth limit and we were paying several hundred dollars a month for about three months (read: spam cost us big $$$).
I finally got smart, installed Linux and Postfix on one of our old boxes and made that server our MX record, and essentially hid the main mail server. Last month I put a second Postfix box online to handle the traffic. The Linux boxes filter out something like 97% of all the incoming mail attempts, almost all of which are either virus-infected or zombie-generated spam messages. As I said, each joe job or distributed dictioanary attack takes up an enormous amount of resources. Here's a sample of the addresses being puked at us for each domain:
homogeneization5@,brannigan@,ckwt111@,tacheometer9 11@,sunspot1111@,
tzi-dar111@,boogey911@,fitzsimmon111@,
skewering911@,ldiscs5@,tztl911@,lacemaker111@,
tzub5@,tunr111@
This is just a sampling from the last 60 or 70 seconds of one of my Postfix boxes, and this is a pretty light load. Now, hopefully, you may at least have some vague understanding of the kind of crap that's being puked at mail servers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yea, I got real tired of the spam crap coming in as well, and in my little mail server, my kids have email addresses.
Perhaps I'm a little bit naive about all this, but I put in a number of black hole lists in my mail server config, and have found that with few exceptions, all ham mail is getting through, and the spam is getting disconnected without the relatively high resource cost of spam scanning (I got a really small mail server).
I could see where this would be a bit more difficult in a larger installation, but I'm sure an automatic white listing process could also be implemented (if only the sender were smart enough to understand what the reject message was telling him)
"Hopefully, Microsoft will have the automatic stay from the bankruptcy court dissolved so that they can stop Richter from spamming and gather more evidence.""
s html?tid=212&tid=123&tid=155
You think that causes your head to explode? Just see the "/." position on the law.
http://games.slashdot.org/games/05/03/27/2119206.
"and I informed everyone I cared about who had used that address about my "real" address (firstname_lastname@mydomain.com). I have been a heavy email user since the 80s; and have many gigabytes of email archived - but never once had a major problem with emails that I didn't submit to a spammer." The problem is when, for business and sales purposes, there are thousands of people who email you once or twice a year. You don't want to constantly be sending them email address changes and you don't want to stop watching the address they have, because that's business you'll be losing. So you have to wade through the spam on the "public" address because... you deal with the public!
It doesn't put any strain on network admins.
Hooboy are you one ignorant lamer. Whoopee, you have ONE email address and ignore spam sent to others. Even the sack that holds the hammers has more smarts than you do.
Hey l4m3r. I have a home computer with its own domain name and fewer than a half dozen valid email addresses. It gets hit with between 30,000 and 120,000 spams to bogus email addresses every day. I have had that domain since usenet days. I am not about to change my fucking email address because of spammers. Not only would it not solve the problem, it would just create more problems trying to get people to use it.
I'd gladly strangle the sunzabitches who generate that spam. Every single one of them is pure unadulterated spam, to accounts that have never ever existed. Sometimes I analyze the stuff, and some accounts get dozens of copies of the same message, as if that will somehow get more results.
And that computer is on dialup because I can't get any better without going to satellite. You want to rethink that nonsense about no strain?
Stick your head out of your mom's basement door. You might find a real world out there. And it wouldn't put any strain on your well being.
Infuriate left and right
We were in the process of getting a dictionary on a couple of domains, and spamassasin couldn't scan them as fast as they were coming in. I think last night it was about 400,000 messages.
/etc/hosts.deny can be your friend.
What about tarpitting the IP? Basically, put a process in place to watch the maillog for "threshhold number" of undeliverables originating from some IP/subnet/whatever and put that IP/subnet/whatever in a block-list for some specified amount of time. This way, you can block the connection before it ever gets to your SMTP server. It might help without the need for boundary mail servers to do the same thing.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
Since he's obviously rich, he can afford a lawyer to setup a trust. Dump all the stuff into the trust, change the ownership of the trust to a family member. What is the bankruptcy court going to seize? This is a common loophole used by millionaires.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
So no death penality for spammers? That's rather disappointing. If the plantiffs' landsharks are smart, they go after the company officers' personal assets.
"The Enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less."
It's easier to fight and get rid of the spammers than it is to get rid of stupid people.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
Sorry, I back what you are saying but you lost me at the insults. It's people like you who rather than educate people, simply just put them down, and make them feell, well if I'm so stupid, I might as well just tune out and never learn the truth. Quit demeaning people because they aren't blessed with the holier than thou insight that you are.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Will they use it for the good? Will they make an OS that stops spammers installing proxies on their OS?
Or will they just go on and use it as 'proof' how they are in 'battle' with the bad boys of the Internet?
Will that money go to marketing or research? As much as I like spam to be gone, I hate it that a company that is responsible for at least part of the spam problem gets such a huge amount of money. What I see is that most of the spam in the world is going trough 0wned machines running as proxies.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
First they censored the spammers, but I was not a spammer so I did not stand up.
Stopping spammers isn't about censorship.
Consider:
- You start yelling at me.
- I tell you to stop,
- You yell louder,
- I plug my ears
- You get a megaphone
- I lock myself inside my house
- You get a full sized sound system
- I brick up the windows
- You get a stadium -rated sound system
- You blow out the neighbour's windows with the sound system
- You get arrested for destruction of property
- You claim first-ammendment rights.
- You get laughted out of court
This is essentially an analogy of the spamming industry.It doesn't matter what you're saying. Content is irrelevant -- even the fact that communication is (supposedly) occuring (( given that the target recipient does not want to hear you, the existence of communication is questionable )). When it gets annoying, destructive and even expensive for the people who have to deal with your actions, it's just illegal.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
In a Denver Post article Richter claims to have less than $10 million in assets but more than $50 million in debts including the $49 million that Microsoft is seeking.
$50 million - $49 million = $1 million debt. Doesn't that mean that pending the MS lawsuit, he still has a wad totalling up to $9 million?
Seems far from "bankrupt" to me...
As annoying as I find spam, I find snail mail junk mail MUCH more annoying. Instead of just hitting 'delete', I have to physically through it away. It wastes trees and ink, and it fills my garbage bag and mail box. When I get new junk mail I usually try to call the company and get myself off of their list, but there is often no number. For example, credit card companies usaully have one automated number for people who want to get the card, and another automated number for existing customers, but no number to get your name off of the list. Why isn't there a CAN-JUNK act, that insists junk mail have an unsubscribe phone #?
We need to help the poor guy out. He obviously cannot afford to pay regular prices for anything any more. I think we need to send him some catalogues so he can purchase items from the discount companies... Lots of catalogues.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
After this guys emerges from bankruptcy protection, can I look forward to a steady stream of "recovering from bankruptcy" spams to go along with my "refinance your house" spams?
Dear Sir,
I am a consultant operating in West Africa named Scott Richter. I am being persued by evil slashdotters who do not like my wonderful products and messages. For this reason I cannot move money in my name through normal banking channels. I think the only way to succeed is to seek help from a foreigner....
Table-ized A.I.
Up yours, spammer scum!
He won't, of course, stop spamming, because he's a career spammer, a sociopath and a conman. Scamming people is the only thing he CAN do, so he will continue doing it.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
So, no. You don't have full control over whether or not you get spam. Even if you're careful about who gets to know your address.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
Oh, so that's what's happening when they get past "A" in their dictionary. We're getting spammed by the same Spammers for months, and they always start at "A", and after tens of thousands of addresses they tried, they change from loans back to viagra (again), and start back at "A". Today it's "(great|mega|giga|Cool)(Ppharmaacy|drugs|meds)", and they have just gotten to "a1":
1 6165 ...
a1100428
a_1205
a12981ay
a1388
a13peanut
a
a164
a1n2n0e3
a2769339
a2793
a286to586
And it's not like we wouldn't have RBLs and other fancy stuff, there are just too many zombies out there.
Yeah but, with all of his Spamming connections, I'm pretty sure he will be able to find a few Nigerian relatives that have enough money to cover any lawsuit.
Currently PostGrey is working well for me. At some point I'm probably going to stop accepting mail from domains that don't have SPF records. Eventually I may have to refuse all mail that's not encrypted to my personal PGP key. I expect that Joe Average User would give up and leave rather than try to figure out how to take the drastic measures himself. As useful as the Internet is, I think we're going to start seeing people leaving in greater numbers as things go downhill.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So he filed for bankruptcy...this could just be a ploy to end the lawsuit without losing any real money. If his cash and property were 1) not sufficiently garnished or attached, or he was able to transfer them overseas or to another person, he could easily file for bankruptcy, tell Microsoft to get in line as a creditor if they wish to continue the suit, and carry on in his "wife's" or "brother's" yacht, business, and private jet, continuing to send out spam through a new company all the while.
Vote for Kodos.
Why settle for a lesser evil?
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
Similar case here, 98% of spam gets swallowed up by RBL's and Exim's no-tolerance aproach to protocol violations (eg sending the data without waiting for the ok). Though my logs show only direct attemts at legitimate email inboxes.
My guess is that they only target big organisations with dictionary attacks, so it's a problem the enthusiast won't encounter often at all.
There is a slight difference between a huge corperation syphoning millions of dollars into their own pockets, destroying free enterprise, buggering the consumer with second-rate merchendise, etc, and a /.er that wants a 100-300 dollar system for the price of a month of blockbuster rentals...
Now, if the parent was against corperate greed in his/her writings, but was doing the same thing with his/her own corperation, then they are a hypocrite.
Allow me to make a better example:
The Free(X).com sites are nothing more than a loosly knit pyramid scheme, and show how truely America has fallen into shallow consumerism, while maintaining our penny-pinching attitudes...
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
I would have to add to this. I don't give my email address away to spammers. Rather than mailto links on my primary site I instead have a CGI script which sends me mail. Whenever I sign up for a new site, I use an alias.
But my primary account is still getting an increasing amount of spam now. Why? Because a 'friend' sent me a farking e-card or special 'offer'. Yeah, thanks for the cute card... no I don't feel better 'cause not only do I have my other issues, but I've been added to some spammer's email list.
Grandparent is a moron and a troll... in the world of SPAM everyone is a victim except the spammers and their associates.
The problem was that the greylisting was delaying some legitimate mail. To my mind it wasn't a big deal if a message got delayed by twenty or thirty minutes, but a whole generation of users have been raised on this bizarre notion that email is a form of instantaneous communications, and that when the message doesn't hit the other mailbox in less than 60 seconds, there's something desparately wrong (you should see the calls that come in when Hotmail is having one of its irregularly scheduled problems).
I tried to explain this to the customers, but they wouldn't buy it. In the end I disabled Postgrey, which I thought was a real pity.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Actually, the /. blurb is wrong, too. Microsoft is seeking $46M, says the article, not $49M. So he has $4M in real debt, and "under $10M in assets", which could mean $9.9M, or it could mean he just raided the piggy bank in the empty office so he could get 7-layer burrito.
That said, given the "now the case moves to Denver", I'm going to guess that the bankruptcy filing has more to do with him wanting to relocate the case to Denver - since they're in Colorado - than it does with them being actually out of money. Obviously, all those spam dollars buy good lawyers.
I have always contended that the notion that spammers make tons of money is overblown hype. The fact that this company's attorney is the father of the owner is a classic example. If they were really making money they wouldn't be hiring the CEO's dad to do this stuff. And if the CEO's dad is milking the company into bankruptcy, then there is some kind of poetic justice and consistency in the family that almost brings a tear to my eye.
Greylisting is a popular method, though we had problems with our customers not being understanding about the odd message of theirs getting held up. When you're talking about tens of thousands of zombies, tarpitting and block-lists can become itself a huge resource hog. We tried a number of solutions, and basically just set up some Postfix boxes. It's a testament to Linux's TCP/IP implementation that a Pentium Classic-MMX 233mhz with 128mb of RAM and a Pentium II 266mhz with 128mb RAM can withstand the onslaughts. Mind you, they don't do anything else other than stop the bad crap and pass the rest on to our actual mail server.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I had something like that for a while, every so often a script would analyze my logs and if I had a lot of attempts from a given IP I would block the IP. If I even more attempts from a subnet I'd block the subnet, and so on.
I've found though that the RBLs seem to do very well for the massive spam houses and I don't need to do much else on my end.
Sig is on vacation
>I wouldn't say they can ignore the first amendment,
They can.
Really.
It only applies to the federal gvoernment (and to the states through the XIVth).
hawk
those legal fees are nothing compared to the size of the judgments that result when you somehow keep your lawyers and still lose . . .
hawk
I am a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice. If you need that, consult an attorney in your area.
Corporations or any other employer are liabile for the actions of their employees--but so are the employees. Generally, it's not worth going after the employees.
If you commit torts, the fact that you work for a corporation you own isn't going to protect you.
hawk, esq
...Microsoft sues you and Slashdot supports them!
Good Microsoft versus bad little guy...
Does not compute!
I am an attorney, but this is not legal advise. If you need that, get it from an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
Nearly everything this AC wrote is just plain nonsense.
Curiously, the only debts that aren't presently dischargeable in bankruptcy are fines imposed for crimes, child support awards and...guess what...student loans
No. Those aren't the only ones. Certain taxes (time dependent), fraud, luxury goods or large borrowing within 60 days of filing (presumptively), omitted debts, willfully injury, fiduciary violations, death from dui, and a few others. (see 11 USC 523).
Spam probably falls into the "willful injury" category.
You can thank the GOP for the latter in 1995.
No, you made that up, too. They may have been tightened over abuses at that point, but they weren't generally dischargeable until several years after payment was first due. *That* happened due to the MDs leaving med school and filing.
Punitive damages awarded for mass torts are dischargeable in Chapter 11 for the big boys,
No, that's not true, either. Those are nondischargeable. While it would be *possible* to do a Chapter 11 that left those unpaid, it would *require* that the creditors, including the victims, receive at least as much as they would in a liquidation, and would result in the owners/shareholders losing their *entire* stake in the business.
So aside from having the law and facts entirely wrong, I suppose you may have a point.
hawk, esq.
As has been said though, the big problem at the frontend is not big spam houses with identifiable IP blocks, but the ten thousand zombies that nailed the server's ass to the wall between 6pm and 8:30pm, with little address duplication during that period.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So it's really a way to avoid the $49M MS lawsuit liability, and protect the $10M he's got. Not exactly bankrupt. Why didn't we see tons of spam this Winter opposing the new "bankruptcy is no defense" laws from Congress?
--
make install -not war
I don't really have a problem with people giving up their personal info and buying crap they don't need in the hopes of getting a free whatever.
What annoys me is the referral system, which means that people keep needing to get more people to sign up (to support the bottom of the pyrmid). People have trouble finding 5 people or whatver who haven't signed up, so they start spamming message boards, putting in their sigs, ect. Pretty soon they start posting just so their sig gets posted, and message board quality goes down. This is more annoying on sites that don't have moderation like Slashdot.
My signiture was created in response to this.
I have blog like everyone else
I think a large part of the problem with the RIAA lawsuits is that the damages they seek are often way out of proportion to what the person did - someone downloads a couple songs off Kazzaa, leaves them shared, and gets sued for $20,000 when that is far out of line with the actual damages, if any, that their behavior caused.
The RIAA lawsuits for a while were also being filed with warrants where the RIAA didn't actually have to get all the info normally needed in a warrant before proceeding, which was one of the complaints. I think this eventually got shut down. I don't remember the details, and IANAL, but there was a significant legal issue with how the RIAA was suing.
Spam, on the other hand, causes real costs in terms of bandwidth use, sysadmin time, and the cost of antispam software and hardware to block spam.
It also doesn't hurt that the RIAA has a tendancy to pick on 13 year old girls, not antisocial men like Scott Richter.
I have blog like everyone else
Either the person who modded this has no idea what "troll" is, or this is a pretty blatant abuse of mod points.
"Since when is it "taking the law into your own hands" to ask the government to enforce the law?"
Going for the naive defense are we? The RIAA and MPAA (along with other content providers) do "ask the government to enforce the law". However if you've been reading at any level lower that (+10)? Then you'd notice that the "government" is seen as an illegal arm of the content providers when it does so. Or they're "picking on the little guy". So yes, there is hypocrisy around here, and the most galling is when people "pretend" that it doesn't happen. Or point to the other guy and say "Not I, it was him".
I had an article published at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/is sue_02/focus_spam_postfix that might help you with the setup part.
I used a cast-off Pentium 233 box running FreeBSD and Postfix to build a frontline spam filter to protect my company's Exchange server. Then, we published MX records pointing to the Exchange server with the FreeBSD server as a secondary MX, and then blocked incoming port 25 connections to the Exchange server. In case of emergency, we can simply unblock that port and resume sending an unfiltered feed to the main server.
Good luck!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Is he filing for personal bankrupcy or for his company? If it's the company, will they be able to seize his personal assets? I guess that would vary depending on how the company is set up.
The Creation of Spam Sig Opt Out
I've spent lots of time, maybe too much, pondering the phenomena of the free iPod sig. At 4:13 pm on Saturday, March 19th I had a moment of clarity that put things in perspective. People with free iPod sigs are useless. This was a startling discovery. I had previously been aware that they are both annoying and spammers, but it had never occurred to me that they would also be useless.
Allow me to explain for the non-pyramid scheme spamming users who still read this site. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who upon seeing a "'free' iPod" sig gets as angry as when I see a homeless person who is obviously able to work harassing cars and washing windshields in a busy intersection for liquor money. These people, spammers and beggars are the scum of the earth. They smear your windshield with their dirty halfassed non-attempt at cleaning and put out their grubby palm for a handout all at the same time.
People with free iPod sigs are the windshield washers of slashdot. They put up useless groupthink compliant babbleings or piss-poor mirrors to slashdotted sites to ingratiate themselves with equally stupid moderators. Their hope is to get modded up and fool some equally pathetic other user into joining their spammer pyramid scheme. But pyramid scheme participants have something in common with black market human brains. They are pretty stupid. Intelligent people are smart enough to work a real job to pay for their toys or at least know that it is not appropriate to spam on a site where every 5th story is about the scourge of spamming. As a general rule smart people don't join pyramid schemes.
Here-in lies the largest problem with free iPod spammers: they are stupid. They post stupid things. They add nothing to the discussion. With their every useless spam sig post this site slides further and further into the toilet. Of course not having a spam sig is by no stretch of the imagination the sign of an intelligent, valuble poster, but having a spam sig is almost always the sign of an utter retard. I could post examples but I think just causal browsing of slashdot is enough to demonstrate that what I have said is true. To drive the point home though, check out http://developers.slashdot.org/. Notice how in the stories that didn't make it to the home page there is not_a_single_spam_sig. not one. I rest my case.
How do we fight the scourge of 'free iPod' spammers? In the past I have gone through the site methodically replying to free iPod spammers as AC, reminding them that spammers suck. I frequently included my own fake sig which read like:
--
Free iPod sigs are spam. You are a retard.
This approach was somewhat satisfying and kind of effective. The downside is that my IP address is now banned from posting anonymously, and will probably be banned from posting logged in soon. In the time I have had to sit by and watch as retard spammers ruin this site I have had the opportunity to think of another way: my Final Solution. I have created this account, Spam Sig Opt Out, for use as a filter against the increasing torrent of spammers that this site has attracted. To use this filter, simply add Spam Sig Opt Out as a 'friend' and set the 'foes of friends' modifier to -6 in your preferences. Feel free to report users with spam sigs in my journal. With every addition this site gets more readable. It may be too late to save this site from the spammers, but that doesn't mean we have to read their garbage.
list of spammers
Technically you're correct (the best kind of correct!):
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"
All it says is that "congress shall make no law". So you're right in no way does it apply to any action a company could take, since companies are not congress, and they cannot make law.
$8.95/mo web hosting
That's not just technically correct, but correct in substance, too :)
.
It's all about government intrusion . .
hawk
I would stop working and live off the interest. That's why spammers are stupid. They don't know when to stop
true it can be done its more a case of the time and expense
whilst the cost in terms of time and money may vary you really can't deny that it is there.
homogeneization5@
Hey! That's me! Where's my v1agr/\ - I ordered three weeks ago!?!?
Once you start getting free internet service for putting up with spam, come see me.
...that use real addresses that I can opt out of when I no longer wish to see their specials.
Ever hear of juno? I don't know if they still exist, but that's precisely how they gave away their service. I put up with their ads on the pages and a little spam. That's what hotmail or yahoo is for.
By then your info has been sold to every other spammer on the block. I hope you don't believe their "privacy" policy.
What?
Good.
I'm probably going to be modded seriously down for being a troll on this one, but I think that GPG/PGP is the answer to most of our problems with email.
If someone wants to send you an email, they encode it with their private key. If you know them, you'll have given them a low trust level, at least. That's effectively a whitelist. All the zero-trust email is automatically low-priority. If you're expecting an important email, you would normally get a phone call or something to let you know it's coming, so you can retrieve the guy's key and give it elevated trust.
What needs to happen is PGP/GPG getting a higher level of familiarity, easy to install (i like the Thunderbird client's way of doing it, but I use evolution still...) and a simple document educating people on trustlevels.
We're not going to stop direct-mail and spam. All we can do is make it less visible, or rather make our important mail more visible, so that it can rise above the rest.
Just please, use Mime encoded messages, keys over text sucks big time. =) Oh yeah, and someone fix OE's problem with MIME, please!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The CEO's dad is simply taking as much money as they can before the company files bankruptcy. No one will be able to touch that money, so it's money saved.
Did PostGrey let you whitelist mail servers, or were your customers too widespread for that to help?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
When I get tired of commercials, I turn off the TV. Guess what? they just go to the great big /dev/null of the cable tv world. However, I am NOT in a position to turn off my mail server. And sadly, it costs considerable time and money to send spam to /dev/null.
With corporate bankruptcy, as opposed to strictly personal bankruptcy, not only is there no bankrupt human starving on the streets, but the "Chapter 11" process recognizes that often the creditors can get more of their money back if the company is allowed to operate for a while, as opposed to liquidating its assets for whatever they can be sold for.
In this case, of course, Chapter 11 is a *Bad* *Thing*, because everything that OptInRealBig was doing was evil, so allowing it to operate longer to pay off some of its debts means allowing it to continue doing evil. And it sounds like Scotty Richter, being evil but not stupid, designed the corporate structure so that just because it goes bankrupt, that doesn't mean he loses his personal assets, it just means he's not being paid dividends on his stock (though during the Chapter 11 period he's probably still getting a salary.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This means that as long as they're in Chapter 11, they'll be continuing to spam, and they'll probably be continuing to pay Scotty a salary (unless they fire him, which is unlikely.) This isn't Scotty personally going bankrupt, it's just his corporation. It might or might not emerge from bankruptcy, but if it doesn't, you're probably right that he'll come up with some new sleazy business rather than doing something legitimate.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In a Denver Post article Richter claims to have less than $10 million in assets but more than $50 million in debts including the $49 million that Microsoft is seeking.
And yet, in a Denver Rocky Mountain News article, Steven Richter, Scott Richter's father and the company's attorney, claimed the company has debts of under $250,000 and assets exceeding $1,000,000, saying "The company is extremely viable and healthy.... It's continuing to grow."
Uh...duh!?!?
In fact, the spam makes the material you are viewing more expensive, by increasing everybody's bandwidth costs.
I've found that a good way to cut down on zombie-hits without having to manually add them, has been to use a Dial-up/Dynamic IP blocklist. No one should be sending mail direct-to-MX anymore, and if they're running an incoming mailserver on a dynamic IP (or worse: dial-up. Yes, I've seen it done...) they have bigger problems anyway.
"That wouldn't, however, solve the problem of cards being issued to people who weren't credit worthy. There would have to be some other method of solving that problem."
More prying. Collect more information. That'll be the "easy" answer, to an "easy" creation.
You can go after foriegn spammers. Take a look at Global Web Promotions. They are located in Australia, but I was able to sue them in California because the harm was caused here. When you send your spam, you are subject to the jurisdiction and laws of where you send the spam.
The FTC also went after them (after seeing my suit), and froze their assets in Canada.
Fight Spammers!
So let me get this straight... Dad is representing him, and dad says he charged his son so much he had to go into bankruptcy.
Gee, thanks dad!
At this point in time, I'm trying to decide who is more evil: a lawyer or a spammer. (the answer of course is both; the original spammers, Cantor and Siegel, spammed to advertise their law firm.)
It doesn't put any strain on network admins. I have my own mailserver running on a public IP. When "ron.slashdot@[mydomain].com" got spam, I started using "ron.slashdot2@[mydomain].com" -- and I informed everyone I cared about who had used that address about my "real" address (firstname_lastname@mydomain.com). I have been a heavy email user since the 80s; and have many gigabytes of email archived - but never once had a major problem with emails that I didn't submit to a spammer.
Apart from the facts that many other people have pointed out about heavy loads on ISP mailservers (I happen to run one as well), there's also the issue of addresses that cannot be changed or where a change is pointless.
I'm talking about support mailboxes and the technical addresses used in domain and network registrations (i.e. RIPE, ARIN etc.). They have to be listed (policy) and spammers grab them greedily. They also spam abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses on every domain they can find (which also need to exist and work).
I get upwards of 10-15 spams per domain in the central postmaster mailbox alone! Sure, SpamAssassin kills most of these on sight but still a lot gets through and need to be deleted manually.
This leads me to another question that all postmasters must have asked themselves: Why does spammers almost always use at least one completely bogus address? - Often in connection with a dictionary attack, we see our queue getting filled with undeliverable bounces. I've already killed all doublebounces through the configuration so if only they would use a sender like bitbucket@ or noreply@ on the domain they're attacking (many sysadmins use these as senders for stuff they never want to see bounces from), we wouldn't get our queues filled with blocking bouncing junk that'll only sit there unseen until it expires from the queue. The spammers must realize that blocking a mailsystem isn't in their interest as it'll also block their junk.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Gas is expensive... horses are cheap. Drawing and quartering is definitely the way to go.
If if have been been found guilty and go bancrupt then it's called "punshment".
In a propper legal systen he should have the right and ability to defent himself to the end and then go bancrupt as he deserves!
Martin
Bankruptcy's obviously a dodge here, so it'd be good if more people get to go spank them and shut them down. Since I'm assuming he'll keep spamming, it shouldn't be a problem to get more people annoyed at him.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The original poster sounded like he had just put out small fire in his garden and then used this to justify telling professional fire-fighters that fires aren't really a problem. They just need a bucket of water.
Considering the tone as well of the original, I thought the response was quite an education one.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
The solution to his problems is obvious, just reply to all that spam that says "get ouf of debt now" and then he can start spamming again in no time.
You should replace the Linux box with OpenBSD and run pf redirecting to spamd to waste resources of these spammers!
> > money to be spent to colocate another system ...
:)
> mmm, chocolate
I read it that way too
> companies are not congress, and they cannot make law.
Well, the first part is right... The second used to be.
I put in a number of black hole lists in my mail server config, and have found that with few exceptions, all ham mail is getting through, and the spam is getting disconnected without the relatively high resource cost of spam scanning (I got a really small mail server).
I personally don't like RBL's, and we've found that on our server they cause problems (we host about 200 domains). Inevitably, some ISP or system will get blocked, and it causes a problem for one of the domains. The RBL's are mostly irresponsible, and block too much.
A few days ago, we were blocked by SORBS (and couldn't send email to a local ISP). After trying to use their horrible website to find out why (it said we were listed until signing up for an account and logging in, then it said we weren't listed, despite still being blocked), we eventually found out that our entire subnet was blocked. We have about 16 IPs in this subnet, shared with other co-location customers at our provider. The reason the subnet was blocked? There was one system (not ours) that was apparently hacked and sending spam. By the time we notified our provider about the block, they had already found the offending system and disconnected it. I think we're still on SORBS, despite requests from both us and our provider to remove the entry.
We've also had our server specifically blocked because someone submitted a legitimate mailing list message as spam, rather than unsubscribing to the list. Based on that one message, our server was blocked for 24 hours.
I'm not sure why the RBL's do this sort of thing, because I think there's a growing mistrust with using them. It's a great idea, but they're making a mess of it.
Speak before you think
Hmm. I hadn't considered, or known of this issue. Perhaps something like spamd is more appropriate.
Perhaps I should have realized something like this was going on with SORBS. I have a friend of mine that is also running a Linux mail server on Comcast and like the idea of directly passing private email between our server, but no matter how he tried to get unlisted from SORBS, it wouldn't de-list him, so I just white listed him in my configuration.
I seems to me that RBLs are one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox in dealing with spam, however, I agree that the need to be managed better with some sort of consistent policies. Probably will never happen. Too bad.
The very fixed IP of one of my MXs ended up on a Dialup List. They were cool about removing it thought...
C'mon guys. Spam is not a problem if you don't give your email addresses to spammers - and better, have a few email addresses to use when you don't trust someone.
Hi hi: this one statement is so gently naive. Smile...
We are hit every day with a minimum of 900,000 distributed dictionary attacks,
Hum.. the harsh reality. Made me think of the following:
Was posted a while ago... but IMO worth new mention.
No one is claiming this would be the definitive-all-purpose-magic-solution to spam but the scenario described at ISACS looked very interesting to me.
Basically it's an application of CAPTCHA to spam filtering. Any "unknown" sender is sent back with a randomly generated picture. This pics is never the same, is not based on text only. Once the test is passed, it is not submitted any more. Nothing too new here. The originality of the solution lies in the picture generation. In short, ask a computer to recognise a letter: easy. Ask a computer to recognise a banana: harder. Ask a computer to recognise several non letter symboles: hard enough to be not feasible by standard CPU power.
There are drawbacks with the described scenario: many email addresses, how about lists etc. But seams worth consideration.
Hope to see it deployed here and there for observing real usage.
Z.
I never said it didn't. That doesn't stop some people from arguing the position... persuasively enough to convince our congresscritters to tailor the law thusly. Regardless of whether both types are wrong, I'd also agree (as the marketroids claim) there is a difference between bothering someone you doubt will be interested but hasn't said "no" yet, and bothering someone who already has said or is trying to say "no" -- but you've got your fingers in your ears to keep from hearing them say it. The marketroids may say it's the difference between right and wrong, I say it's the difference between nuisances and assholes, but there is a difference.
If it is unsolicited and sent in bulk it is spam.
Not everyone agrees that everything thus described is Spam. Furthermore, the absense of definitions for "bulk" and "unsolicited" in that would make any legal beagle's ears perk up... along with those of most marketroids, too. Anything that meets the criteria I gave will be agreed as being spam by anyone who recognizes the existance of the category. There may be other things that are Spam, but their inclusion is not universally undebated.
Religious spam is more worrying in someways, because the irrational nature of the people sending it - just ask the senders what my boss did "who would Jesus spam?".
Inadequately helpful against biblical scholars.
Other citations are easy to find. Not to mention your question doesn't help for the stuff coming from the Young Men's Reformed Cultist of the Ichor God Bel-Shamharoth Association. =)More important from the perspective of making Spam illegal, religous speech-- in whatever form-- is given a higher degree of protection under US Law than ordinary speech, due to having a double whammy of first amendment protection. Since having any Spam be constitutionally protected weakens attempts to ban it (short of constitutional amendment), sensible people adjust the definition of Spam accordingly.
There are responsible mass-mailers out there. I've told my spam filter to let through the Circuit City email circulars, because I find their ads relevant to my job. (Not that I buy from there often....) Similarly, I let Omaha Steaks send me junk mail, even though I never have bought anything from them... but it's nice to dream I could afford to regularly do a hunk of my grocery shopping with them.
The responsible mailers want everyone to hear from them, but are happy to go away if you tell them to. Target doesn't want to bother people 90 miles from their closest store, because they might loose a customer before they even get a store near them... and the bulk of business is still firmly brick-and-mortar anchored. If we could drive out the scum who are just looking for short-term sucker business, rather than long term regular customers, the problem would be reasonably solvable with POP-server or Client-based blacklists, selection depending on the relative affordability of server processor power versus client side bandwidth. Alas, there's still too many suckers out there, and double that number trying to take 'em.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Well taken, he did after all educate. I merely intended to point out he could do so with about being a total ass :)
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
I've prossibly become too tolerant of the 'emotional' sys admin over the years. I've certainly had to deal with some beauties.
One of them, if you were going to do something to impair the network, you may as well get just caught naked with his daughter. The reaction would be the same anyway.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
If what you want is no rules, then you have no rules. If I want to build a jail and toss you in it for sending me and my friends spam, then so be it. You said no rules, so it's allowed. Deal with it.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Ron, eh? Would that be Ron Millette, by chance?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban