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.
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
...probably just got tired of getting spam and 419ers in his Hotmail inbox / Outlook Express. So instead of developing better filters, he decided to take them out.
Someone might as well invite BillG to Gmail already.
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.
.
You may be talking about this:
He's still got time, then.
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!"Funny you say that, I've started responding to so-called spam recently.
I now have a 14" long penis, a £500,000 mortgage (on income of a twentieth of that!), more software than I know what to do with and some very nice pictures of Brintey Spears (well, that's who they said she was, but I'm sure she doesn't spell her name like that...).
I get medicines at exceptionally low prices (though I'm a bit concerned about the side effects I've been having from that the last batch of aspirin), and my printer is unlikely to run out of ink until 2009. Provided it doesn't explode like my last one did when I put those special chinese cartridges in. Damn cheap printers.
Of course, none of this comes cheap. But when a nice man in Nigeria has promised you 25% of $20,000,000, you can afford to splash out now and then...
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.
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.
The IETF standard for crypto-signed email headers was substantially derailed by Microsoft not wanting to 'play nicely' with the extremely large proportion of the email servers out there that run on open source.
So, Microsoft imposed licensing requirements that the open source community couldn't meet. Yeah, to that extent, I blame Microsoft. That's not an Open Source failure, it's a deliberate licensing decision by Microsoft to write the license that way; even after it was clear what the effect would be- ultimately to help spammers.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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
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.
This is
My Tech Posts on Twitter
By any measure, 215 lawsuits constitutes a legal juggernaut.
I guess you've never heard of a little group known as the RIAA.
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?