Slashdot Mirror
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. "
Wow - Microsoft/Gates usually gets a bad rap on /., but
kudos to them for going after the
scumbags
of the Internet. Another group I find annoying is the folks
who do
referrer
log spamming. Even though I don't publish those log stats (so their
efforts are to naught), they continue to send their stupid traffic
and it's a bit annoying to see in the web log analysis.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Don't you realize that every time you say something nice about Microsoft, Bill and Melinda dine on one of those Indian babies they've "saved" from HIV? How to serve man, indeed!
In all seriousness, the spam epidemic is actually caused by a relatively tiny number of people, so it would seem that this is a workable strategy - but the cause will just be taken up by people outside of our jurisdiction (Russians, mostly.)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Strange: 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.
I'm surprised ISP's aren't filing hundreds of lawsuits. They claim their servers are so overworked by all the spam, but they aren't doing anything effective about it (legally or technically).
In any battle, technology is only a small bit of it. Policy is an area that is far more important than technology in most situations, even when you don't know it. Would you rather they sit on their hands and let the spammers continue to ruin the internet?
I don't see you taking an active step to stop spammers other than maybe a little filtering and deletion here and there.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
That means that spammers have continued to be able to fake the headers out, and it makes it harder to filter off the spam (particularly on the send side of email- in other words, stopping spam enter the internet in the first place).
So, Microsoft have taken the decision to fund lawyers, rather than fund technology that is likely to massively reduce spam; Microsoft have sided with a bunch of lawyers.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"If they become the unofficial police of the internet, they will be first in line to be the official ones, when government (with a little help from microsoft) decides that such a body should exist.
Open Source servers don't implement crypto-signed email headers, so spammers continue to use those servers to send spam.
/. culture was that anti-MS.
And you manage to blame this Open Source failure on Microsoft?
I didn't know the
Spammers need bandwith for sending out spam. So, what if we slashdot 'em? Just post a link on top of page saying "Get a spammer today". I bet it would be a huge success...
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
Why do you ask?
Okkkaaaaayyyyyy.... Do you have ANY evidence that such has resulted in ANY reduction of spam?
From what I've seen, spam levels haven't dropped at all.
So why do you believe that this approach is effective?How many cracked Linux boxes do you think the spammers use? None? Well, it would seem that the OSS community is dealing with the problem at the technological root.Again you go with your ASSUMPTION that lawsuits will result in less spam.
That's the THIRD time you've hit that ASSUMPTION yet you have not provided any EVIDENCE that supports it.Why do you Microsofties hang out here?
If the best you can do is, "Bill does some good things with the money he made from illegally leveraging his monopoly", then you've lost from the beginning.
When you're worth $50Billion, it's easy to put a few million on some pet causes. And the gullible hero-worshipers will eat it up.
Yay! Bill is taking some spammers to COURT!
But Bill is NOT working with the Open Source community to implement PATENT-FREE systems to improve email.
And THAT is the deciding factor. Bill makes a LOT of money from illegally leveraging the desktop monopoly.
Bill sells a LOT of crap software that is completely insecure by default (and makes a LOT of money from it).
But you think that other people don't understand because they still dislike him even though he is willing to take a tiny percentage of his money to do some nice things (as long as those nice things in no way, shape or form could ever harm his illegally leveraged monopoly).
So, would YOU feel sorry for those spammers if THEY were giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight hunger or disease?
Would you support their continued spamming efforts?
If you say "no", then you're a hypocrite.
Robbing banks is VERY lucrative.
Yet your corner bank isn't robbed every day (or week or month or year).
There might be strong incentive to send spam and make lots of money, but the spam still has to go out on technological avenues. All you have to do is to identify those and limit their effectiveness.
#1. Zombies.
#2. Open Relays.
#3. Individual email accounts (30 day AOL free!)
#4. Sites owned by the spammer.
If you look at it that way, you'll see why MULTIPLE measures are needed. What will work against zombies will NOT work against Individual email accounts.
If you deal with the tech, then the incentive won't matter because there won't be any way to implement it.
Since this is about Microsoft's involvment, I'll focus on what they could do.
#1. Zombies. Microsoft announces a partnership with the ISP's and those ISP's block outgoing port 25 on their home connections. Microsoft offsets the cost of this with a couple $$Million$$ to each ISP for hardware upgrades and support calls. Anyone who needs port 25 access (people who work from home and don't have systems setup to handle it) can call and have enabled for their address.
#2. Open Relays. Microsoft forms a partnership with spamhaus, spamcop, etc to mirror the open relay databases of those people. Since Microsoft also has Hotmail and MSN, Microsoft is in a great position to identify new open relays and add them to the list as they are abused.
#3. Individual email accounts. Not much that Microsoft needs to do here. All the ISP's need to do is to limit the outgoing email to 10 unique connections per minute.
#4. Spammer sites. Again, Microsoft helps by hosting a mirror of the blacklists.
There, the spam problem is down to a tiny fraction of what it was. The spammers might still WANT to send spam, but HOW are they going to do it?
What did I say in my original post?
Yet your corner bank isn't robbed every day (or week or month or year). Gee, do you suppose that SECURITY can counter INCENTIVE?
Which was the ENTIRE point of my original post.So TECHNOLOGICAL solutions (the machine that dispenses the cash) are implemented to counteract the INCENTIVE.
Again, that was the entire point of my original post.It doesn't matter WHERE it is stored.
What matters is the SECURITY.
If a jewelery thief has to rob the storage site instead of the store, so what? The INCENTIVE is still there.
But the SECURITY measures mean that almost every attempt will fail, no matter what the INCENTIVE is.
Now, to bring this back around to the ORIGINAL article, filing LAWSUITS will NOT stop spammers the same way jail time does NOT stop robbers.
Lawsuits and jail time are not enough to counter the incentive of lots of easy money.
It takes well-designed and well-implemented SECURITY measures.
I think you stopped at the first line of my original post.