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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. "
How exactly would you suggest that they improve their software to prevent spam and phishing?
Sometimes a little stick can be a good thing...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Reducing Spam makes people use MS computers (and Exchange) more (as opposed to the alternatives).
:)
- Investing in spam filter technology reduces spam.
- Sueing spammers also reduces spam.
The optimal strategy will be to persue both strategies till they yield the same rate of spam reduction.
And that rate should be determined by whatever they think they earn on spam reduction.
My bet is that someone at MS has done the math.
And it keeps their lawyers sharp, who knows how and when that will come in handy
Can Slashdot ever accept the fact that Microsoft can do some good? I'd be willing to bet that 30% of the comments on this article will be "OMG MICRO$OFT IS GOOD?!". Accept the fact that they really can do good things and shut with the Microsoft bashing.
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Sure, there will be spammers who think they can evade folks like Kornblum, Spitzer, and Abbott. But for every one of them, there will be others who--when they see what happened to Scott Richter as a result of Gates' resolve--hopefully will realize that spamming and phishing are bad career choices.
So the 'script kiddie spammers' drop out and the smart spammers take over, making even more money. It's supply and demand, and apparently there is demand for SPAM from this small-penised, high-mortgage, porn-searching world.
The next step is improving their software and improving the security on their platform. Just keeping regular security updates is good. Hopefully they will continue with their Anti-Spyware tool which isn't bad.
However, while WinXP is so insecure that BargainBuddies and istBar can hijack my family's browsers, I shall not switch from FreeBSD, and I shall continue recommending switching to Macs as the only reliable cure for spyware for non-geeks.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I know it's very hard for some of you people to get over your silly fanboy-ish attitude, but when MS does something good, why not praise them. Yes, they have bad business practices. Doesn't mean you have have crap on their image every single time.
This is somewhat like P2P. They might not be able to get whomever is joining these spamming companies for work, but it would certainly discourage people from getting jobs in these places. I think just that would prove a significant blow to these places.
My two cents.
Do notice that MS isn't suing virus writers. In fact, didn't they just forgive a huge amount against a virus writer in exchange of community service??
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
"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."
For your information, the scum that is ruining the Net for the rest of us is... Microsoft!
I'd rather see twice as much spam in my inbox as I'd see Microsoft to continue abusing it's monopolistic powers to break every computer related standard known to man...
What good is a filter really? Filters don't prevent the spam from clogging the network. Then you've got to waste cycles analyzing all the mail. And of course there are the problems associated with false positives. Seems to me a better solution is to try to discourage people from sending it in the first place.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
All joking aside, we have long considered Micro$oft an evil corporation. Sure on the side Bill Gate$ donates a lot of money, mostly to create little Micro$oft $chools that will plaster the logo all over the place and burn it into little growing consumers heads.
With all the evil they have done, is there any way that they could do enough good for the evil to be forgotten, or at least to break even thus making them a "Corporation" not an "Evil Corporation"?
Sure this is a start, but it is done more to protect themselves and their products than it is to better the lives of consumers. Suing spammers is just a way to hopefully get hotmail back to a point where you can actually use it.
This sig has been removed pending an investigation.
Why does no one (big company or university) sue the ISPs that let own3d boxez and zombies connect and stay connected? if the ISPs looked for the zombis and told those users how to be good "netizens", and offered a CD of EASY TO USE removal software, the spam problem would disappear over night, without bots, no one could send 100,000,000 emails per day.
What is it you suggest they do?
Make their OS secure, so that spammers can't control massive botnets to spam from.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
While it may be de rigueur here on /. to bash Microsoft, sometimes one has to put the tinfoil hat away and commend them for doing something good.
Sure, you can pull out some commercial motive behind this act, but hey, so what? When they annouce their fantastic new anti spam OS, we can bash them here, but if these lawsuits do help in reducing Spam, then hooray for MS!
Apropos, I remember reading that billg@microsoft.com gets one million messages every day, 98% of which is Spam. I suppose he just got plain old PISSED OFF!!
Preventing zombie machines, maybe?
Sure... but let's take XP SP2. How do they get everyone to update to SP2 which solves a great deal of the problems? Suggestions? (Not including mandatory updates which the Slashdot crowd would rip them a new one for too.)
Life's not quite a simple as you make out. (Yes, it is MS's fault for the insecure OS in the first place)
This is the point , Gates is throwing Millions to stop these spammers yet what is MS doing to plug the holes that are creating these zombie nets.Sure they are patching , but when the average windows user is running as an Admin with a browser with holes the size of a small country ,disaster is soon to follow . .auto mounting CDs and DVDs playing with a single click large button on the desktop .
I have infact (due to these people not having the funds to buy a new computer or the will, familly mainly) installed a rather nice custom debian install on several peoples computers , a bit of tweaking to KDE and it can be incredibly easy to use if all you require is Email , HTML , small time office work
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Why don't we rewind time and tell Microsoft "don't sue spammers/phishers because we just want to see how much spam we'd get" and then compare? The point is that you can't qualitatively determine how successful Microsoft is. If there's one company that has the capital to chase spammers/phishers and one that's in their best interest, it's Microsoft. They're doing more about it than you are so stop being a moron.
Don't run Windows under an administrative context and that wouldn't happen. It'd be the same thing as letting your kids go browsing for a couple hours under root and when you come back you find you have dancing bonzai buddies all over your desktop and some mysterious new daemon called "Keyword search helper"-- and if Linux ever achieves a large desktop share, don't think that those type of programs won't be created.
Where are the supposed "good guys"?
I realize the OSS community is doing things with their software to try and defeat spammers and phishers, but let's face it, legal action is the only real course of action to stop these guys (or at least whittle down their numbers).
Phishers and spammers will always find ways around filters, no matter what intelligence is brought to bear with new algorithms. New mail protocols would help, but we are hopelessly mired in a standard that will take a miracle to topple at this point (perhaps some new multi-media e-mail standard?). People won't buy into an e-mail system other than SMTP/POP unless it brings something significant to the table, and is as simple and easy to use.
The OSS community has for-profit companies out there... why aren't they flexing their muscle to help stop these scammers? Microsoft is at least doing something... and it demonstrates exactly what a big corporation like that can do when that lkind of capital is directed at doing something worthwhile.
I think in the fervor to attack the supposed "evil monolith" people here tag as "Micro$oft", they forget exactly how much Gates, his company, and his employees donate to good causes around the world.
1. Change your email address.
2. Never give it away except to established websites (Amazon, etc) that require it and to friends/family.
I abandoned my old college 20-spam-a-day email address after graduating. Since switching and then following these two policies, I have received only 1 spam message in the past 7 months.
no argument its a good start , however it would be nice if they would
.. .couples this with some basic computer security knowlidge(dont open LOVEYOU.jpg.VIRUS.WORM) and i assure you it would reduce spam far more in one year than 10 years of legal action
1: make sure active X is patched to make it far more secure.(killing it would be nice , but wont hapen for a while due to a hell of alot of websites using controlls)
2: make sure each user knows that they should not be running as an admin all the time and allow them an easy way to become and admin for installs etc
3: a large list of phising techniques and how they spoof browsers is easily avaliable and could be use to create a few fixes (all browser makers should do this).
In my mind the only way to stop spam properly is education , people need to learn to not accept it and not to buy from it
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
How do you propose to prevent me from installing a trojan that covertly turns my PC into a spam zombie?
In other words, how do you intend to stop me from installing something (a porn dialer, screensaver, shareware app, or whatever) that, as well as its legitimate function, makes my PC part of a botnet, without preventing me from installing software at all?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
/. where no Microsoft action (good or bad) goes unpunished.
If they sued them, people would yell David and Goliath. If they let them go, people say they're not helping the community.
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Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to stop absolutely all zombie nets. Even with a 'secure' OS, there's always going to be some idiot who'll happily type his/her root password into a trojan. The zombie problem really lies with the ISPs cutting them off, not Microsoft.
... as long as spammers believe that there is money to be made by spamming. And that means that spamming will continue as long as email is so cheap to send and as long as there are sufficiently many dimwits who respond to spam. And there doesn't have to be very many such dimwits. You can sue as many spammers as you like; as long as there is money to be made, new spammers will appear in their place. The only irreplaceable part of the equation is the low cost of email compared to the money to be made even from a very low response rate.
I don't know what the typical response rates for spam are, but even if one in a thousand or ten thousand recipients is an idiot who answers the spam and sends money, or even one in a million, then it's worth it to spam, because the cost of sending a thousand or ten thousand or even a million emails is nearly nothing. At any rate, it can easily be much less than what spammers charge for their product.
One conceivable alternative is to make it more expensive to send email. If there were some way to establish "postage" for email, then even infintesimal costs for sending email, say 1/100th of a cent per email, would probably be effective, because then spammers would lose money by sending a million spams. But I can't see how such a system could be enforced, and I doubt that most people would go along with it, even if the costs for normal email use is very low.
I also doubt that any amount of education or cajoling could reduce that rate of idiots in the general public to less than one in a thousand, certainly not less than one in a million. Putting all these thoughts together, I come to the depressing conclusion that we will never, ever be able to make spam go away, no matter what we do.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
I prefer to see it laying in education . I do agree though that ISPs taking some action is perhaps the best short term soloution , But the only real long term soloution is Educating the masses about some basics .
!: dont run root/admin unless you need to
!: dont buy from spam
!: Dont click yes without reading
Now one of the many reason Unix bases OSs are more secure is that as i see it the average users will have more education in the IT field(before or after , as it will always require some reading) so are less likely to fall for daft emails with attachments or stupid pops ups with "click yes" from odd websites.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
So you would rather have a secure OS and have those spam basterds conducting another kind of shady business unpunished than have a unsecure OS and a world with less evil?
If any one company out there has the install base to actually do something technical about spam, it's Microsoft, yet they'd rather sue than improve their product.
:}
Do you mean they should implement a new SMTP standard on their servers? Break from current standards in the way Outlook handles e-mail? I'm sure the slashdot crowd would just love that!
"3: a large list of phising techniques and how they spoof browsers is easily avaliable and could be use to create a few fixes (all browser makers should do this). .."
A better way would be to turn OFF HTML in email by default. Most of the phishing scams as well as spams I have recieved have goofy lines of trash text to fool the spam checkers. I always thought it was stupid to use HTML email anyway.
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
I'm glad to see that somebody is going after these theives. Now, if only law enforcement agencies would press criminal charges against them, and help ordinary people out the way they do for corporations, we'd be all set.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
1> Load a _secure_ version of Windows. No RPC, no running services, default firewall with both inbound and outbound traffic blocked, proper ACLs applied to the filesystem.
2> Disable HTML email completely. Remove the ability to send/recieve HTML email from Outlook and Outlook Express.
3> Secure IE and make it standards complaint. Securing IE includes removing ActiveX.
Do this in the next SP for Win2K and XP as well.
That will remove a lot of the holes exploited by spammers to get zombies from which to spam/phish.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
ActiveX is insecure by design. They have done about all they can do, without remaking it in a different language (like Java) with a real security model.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Spam is caused by the people who buy the spammed stuff.
If there was no money in it, they wouldn't bother doing it.
Usually the damages awarded are beyond the paying capacity of the spammers and phishers.
Microsoft will never see any money from this Scum bags.
With the legal costs involved Microsoft is losing money.
And leave it to some people to term all good actions as PR moves.
1. To the general public it looks as if they are solving the issue, where we know here that most spam is send by proxy on Wintendo machines.
2. By solving it this way they do not have to solve the technical unsafety.
3. If they win they make money out of the spammers.
Now if I were Microsoft, I would just start suing everybody. As long as you see that the case will be more expensive then what they can afford, people will settle out of court. Where you took Joe "the bonecracker" Seipacchetti to meetings to 'convince' people of the advantages of insurence, you now just take a lawer with you, take their money and don't even bother about delivering anything.
As long as 'suing till they are broke' is possible, I fail to see justice. Sorry. No matter how much I hate spam, I hate justice by money even more.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That's like saying burglary is caused by unlocked doors.
Spam is caused by spammers. The fools who buy the products provide the needed motivation, but ultimately, spam is caused by the guy writing and sending the mail.
They key to solving spam is to move away from it. Email has been out quite a long time, and has greatly helped to increase communication in the world. But as many, including Don Knuth, have stated, it's time for email to die its timely death. There are many more capable tools out there, which serve for faster and more reliable communication, without being subject to the extreme abuse of email. I realize that the odds of people quitting email is low, but all legacy systems fade eventually.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
The problem is the terminally stupid, and the fact that there are more terminally stupid people in the world than anyone can imagine. In the next ten years, most of them will be Windows users unless we are struck by an asteroid.
Panic now, before its too late...
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
You know, if Firefox had 95% of the browser market, those folks would prbably add some goodies and people would start writing Firefox-only sites.
In general, the only people who care about standards are the people who watch while almost everyone else goes off and does what they want to do.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Is Gates going after spammers per se, or going after competition They still sell out their Hotmail and MSN mailing lists to interested advertisers, don't they?
This is just another PR move by MS. It makes them look good to non-geeks while all of us techies know what's really going on. A bunch of lawsuits aren't going to stop the spread of spam of virii. Sure they may punish the big-bad-wolves of the industry, which is a good thing. But the money won from the defendants (if any) of a lawsuit should go to something like the w3c or the ieee for research and implementation of standards that will serve to prevent spam and the like from being the norm anymore.
I would only agree with MS taking the money if it meant that they were going to put it DIRECTLY into security R&D to patch up their holes.
That being said...DAMN THE MAN!!!!
So Bill Gates gave 28.8 billion dollars -- see link at http://www.gatesfoundation.org/AboutUs/ -- for a bit of cheap publicity and PR?
That's a charitable donation to be applauded, regardless of your opinion of Microsoft's policies. But then again, mindless vehemence and flaming is so much easier, isn't it?
All you need is a few lawyers to file these lawsuits and one or two supervise them all. It's anyone's guess how large Microsoft's legal department is, but between in-house counsel/staff and the all attorneys working for law firms hired by Microsoft to represent them in their never ending litigation, I doubt anyone is working overtime.
As for the cost, most likely it's a drop in the bucket when compared to what's already been spent or is being spent on antitrust cases. Whatever the cost, the bankers are used to it, the shareholders are used to it, as so is everyone else. And when one considers the PR value of these lawsuits, I doubt anyone would raise an eyebrow if real money was at stake.
Filters and Lawsuits hit different ends of the spammer market. Lawsuits aren't very useful against the little spammers - it's a whack-a-mole game, where any spammer you bankrupt has two or three more following in his footsteps. They're much more effective against the big spammers - Spamhaus estimates that 200 spammers put out 80% of the spam, and putting any of them out of business can make a big dent - and most of them are based in the US, where you can sue them, even if their infrastructure is mostly in China or Zombieland. The nice thing about whack-a-mole lawsuits is that they're usually easy to win - you don't make any money off of it, because most of them aren't making much money compared to the amount they're costing the Internet as a whole, but if you've got a collection of 200 heads nailed up on your office's front gate, it starts to get their attention.
Exchange, Outlook, and Outlook Express do get spam filter technology added to them - it makes the users happy, and if it implements spam-reporting capabilities well, it can help the ISP side of MS improve their filters. But the main filtering happens at the ISP level, because that's what most customers want.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
I thought it was Microsoft that is ruining the net for the rest of is. Isn't it Microsoft that created the spam industry?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I disagree. Windows is an excellent web development environment and makes it much easier to install stuff (non-free). As a production environment, carefully setting up Linux server is great, but for fast and dirty development without detailed setup questions, Windows takes the cake. Power Users are typically advanced enough to use each OS for its strengths.