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Gates' Resolve in Bringing Spammers to Justice
An anonymous reader writes "It didn't seem to me like any single company had the stomach to keep after the scum that are ruining the Net for the rest of us. Unless that company is Microsoft. Since the beginning of 2003, Microsoft has filed 96 lawsuits against spammers, and 119 lawsuits against phishers. By any measure, 215 lawsuits constitutes a legal juggernaut. "
All the big ISPs have been after spammers for quite a while now. I believe that AOL is owed a few million by that bankrupt spammer who featured in another /. story quite recently.
You may be talking about this:
He's still got time, then.
Go ahead and mod me down for Trol or Offtopic, but the economist in me likes to point out the following correction to the parent.
The optimal strategy will be to persue both strategies till they yield the same rate of additional spam reduction per cost in each pursuit.
Otherwise, mod parent up!
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
for those who think that Win systems are zombied more frequently simply because there are more of them
Any OS can be zombied if it allows users to
a) install software
b) run software
c) run software that communicates on the network
It happens to Windows more frequently because
a) it's less secure (that's getting better)
b) there are more users, and hence more users who don't know better than to run untrusted code
c) due to a) and b) there are more people writing malware for it
d) users of other OSes, on the whole, are less likely to fall for trojans and social engineering (as it requires effort and reasonably advanced knowledge of computers to even be using an other OS)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
SBC will cut you off if you're infected. I used to work a store that sells software and once had a guy come in for Anti-Virus. He was all pissed off because SBC cut him off. They had given him a five day warning but "he was to busy" to fix his box.
He couln't understand why it mattered to SBC if he was infected or not. Most people (/. users are the obvious exception) have no clue what viruses do. They have no idea that their computer can be pwned and turned into a spambot. They think all viruses are written by mal-adjusted teenagers who are only out to vandalize the e-world, not by people with an actual profit motive.
After I explained how his computer was now sending massive amounts of spam he started to realise why SBC cut him off, and why it was important for him to use AV. He had thought he was only hurting himself and had no idea that he was hurting everyone.
I largely blame MS (and also Apple to a lesser extent) for this. They have convinced people that computers are easy to use and you don't actually need to know what you are doing. That has helped them sell computers to all the l-users and those are the people who allow themselves to get infected, simply because of what they don't know (and have been told they don't need to know). At least Apple has a better default security policy (although my Mom's mac came with the main account (a root account) set to auto login with no password, and not much of an obvious warning that that wasn't such a good idea. There was a warning in the help files, but who reads those unless they have a problem?)
Tommy
Open Source for Open Minds
#5. The chance of getting caught. Just try this little experiment. Call you local police station (not via 911 or any emergency number) and do the following test:
1. Tell them you are a bank and are being robbed
2. Tell them you are an individual and are being robbed
3. tell them you are a person and are being scammed
4. Tell them you are a person and are being spammed
I am sure that with the last one most of the time you are asked to get lost. When number 3 and 4 come together, it mostly ends with "Sorry, they are in another city/state/country/mindset.
It should be governement who should be going after the spammers, not companies or individuals, Now in the worst case what can happen is that they say: OK, we will not spam hotmail/msn anymore. Settle out of count and go on with business.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Neither do I. Hell, I've done it on occasion.
but the situation is IMHO a bit different when there are multiple machines doing automated referer spamming at a rate of, say 400 requests per minute.
And how! Got hit with one of those last week. Made the logs useless until I grumbled and hacked up something to cut them out of the saved logs. And all this on the faint hopes that you have an automated stats program running that will put their crap online, link-back style.
Those slimeballs are just like the ones who hit cgi-bin a hundred times hunting for exploitable message board and e-mail scripts and other spammers. They steal the resources on zombie machines and use them to flood legitimate users with crap, costing others hundreds of dollars to make themselves a few bucks.
If only we could hunt these people down and leave them lynched outside their homes with a placard reading "SPAMMER" attached to their chest. With nails. Before the lynching.:\