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?
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.
>Where would they send the money?
A Western Union office in Belarus, in one recent case. Once Western Union hands over the cash the transaction is irreversible and the victim's only recourse is local law enforcement. Extortionists can pick whatever country has the most cheaply bribable cops. And sometimes cops will ignore foreigners for free.
'crackery' again.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There are a crapload of people who for over 20 years have been using the term "hacker" in conjunction with words like "phreaker," which were the terms used by everyone in the 80s BBS scene. When people like you tell them "the word you've been using for two decades doesn't actually mean that," they will pat you on your cute little head and say "ok, whatever, run along now." Because ya know what? You don't own the word or its meaning. If I start calling my car a puppy and act condescending when people correct me then I'm an asshole, but if I've been using 'hacker' along with a huge community of others to self-identify for over 20 years then that's another story.
The long and short of it is you don't control the word and it escaped your definition a long time ago. The word spawned another meaning a LONG time ago and although you might not like it you're powerless to make it go away. That's how language works.
I'm sorry it annoys you, but thems the brakes, kiddo.
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".