Slashdot Mirror
NY Times On Spam Zombies
A discreetly valorous slashdotter writes "The NY Times is featuring a story about the growing armies of spam zombies. It focuses on New Jersey teen spammer Jasmine Singh. Choice quote: 'Hacking in its purest form is not about compensation or about wrecking a Web site. Hacking in its pure form is to show what you can do.'"
"A discreetly valorous slashdotter writes"
From dictionary.com: valorous - Marked by or possessing great personal bravery; valiant
From the same: discreetly - Marked by, exercising, or showing prudence and wise self-restraint in speech and behavior; circumspect.
Meaning an anonymous coward?
Don't you love sales/marketing speak?
Hacking in its purest form is showing how you can go to jail. :-)
Username: loser1234
Password: loser123
In one recent case, a small British online payment processing company, Protx, was shut down after being bombarded in a zombie attack and warned that problems would continue unless a $10,000 payment was made, the company said. It is not known whether the authorities ever arrested anyone in that case.
Where would they send the money? This is like a kidnapping scheme. There is far too much involved when you actually want something back from the person you commit the crime against. You would think they would be easier to catch.
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
Would Slashdot please quit posting stories
that you have to register for to read.
Thank You.
Cracking is about breaking into a system. It might require some hacking, but it can also be done by script kiddies.
Okay, so this teen treats crackery like it was a sport. To show his or her proverbial "balls", as it were. This would be a prefect opportunity for some older, social-concious geeks to get together and set up a crackery league for these youth. Let them perform their crackery against each other. Each youth could set up a system, and then they would go head-to-head to crack the other youth's system. Indeed, it would be an intellectual junior soccer- or baseball-style league.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I think everyone is better off when ISPs stay out of the business of controlling customers based upon the type of traffic they're sending or even worse what type of equipment they have. Consider the following two scenarios:
SnoopyISP has a 'we can shut you down based upon the traffic you send' policy. After doing so, they could be set upon to offer this service to RIAA, MPAA, etc, etc. After all, they can't say they can't/won't do it.
SnoopyISP says, "sorry, we don't let anyone who isn't running XP with our approved set of firewall apps running on it.", "But sir, I run linux, no worms here!", "Linux? Isn't that the hacker os? Sorry, we need to be sure that spam zombies don't attack. Therefore you must run UltraFireSoft Anti Hack Pro which we provide for free." "Do they have a Linux version? BSD? OSX? etc?" "Sorry, no, only windows XP. Oh and you need to have their auto-update feature turned on at all times--just to be safe."
I'll take a net where I can pay for network connectivity and get that, and I can pay for email filtering, and get that. I most certainy and emphatically DO NOT want to create inroads (beyond such that may already exist) into ISPs doing traffic or configuration based filtering/management of customers.
There's a place called "too far". I can't seem to find it.
'crackery' again.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm afraid you're kinda screwed on this point. Slashdot is a news aggregator. This story is effectively a dupe of one that came before, but the "news" is that it's the New York Times publishing it, which has a far more important readership than PC World.
In other words, the news isn't that there are zombies, but that a very important mainstream newspaper is telling people that there are zombies, and lots of 'em. You can't get this story from any other source, because the source is the story.
And because the New York Times is so important, they get to charge for content. In this case the charge is cheap: you just let them know who you are, so that they can better sell ad space. That's not free, but it's pretty cheap.
So basically I doubt Slashdot is ever going to "quit posting stories taht you have to register for to read", because that's where the good news is. If you'd like to establish an open source news gathering organization and make it available for free without registration, feel free.
That's news "gathering" like the Times, not "aggregating", like Slashdot. News gathering is usually considered pretty expensive. You have to have a lot of reporters, and editors. And it takes time to establish the reputation that the Times has. And like software, news depends on trust.
But hey, news, like software, is free to distribute once it's created, so maybe the open source model will apply. Go for it.
Alternatively, stop bitching about what people are giving you for free (Slashdot summaries) or cheap (New York Times articles for the price of some trivial and easily lied about demographics). Your choice.
Sarflicks! I couldn't agree with you mosby! Why haggleby when the low-rider don't know blatz about the snoozer?
Next: NYTimes advises that zombie-spammers can be dealt with by "removing the head or destroying the brain".