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Russia's Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered
Karellen !-P writes "Vardan Kushnir, a notorious russian spammer who headed the English learning centers, the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head."
I remember reading about how Steve Jobs motivated the original Mac team to speed up the boot. "Millions of people will boot their Macs every day; if you can shave 30 seconds off that boot time, it's the equivalent of three human lives every day". If that concept is true (debatable, but stick with me) then spammers, in the aggregate, are killing dozens or even hundreds of people a day ... a few seconds here and a few seconds there. So, in this respect, what goes around comes around.
Howard M. Lewis Ship -- Independent J2EE / Open-Source Java Consultant -- Creator, Apache Tapestry and HiveMind
I have a feeling that this has less to do with his spamming efforts and more to do with the mafia. From what I understand, a lot of spammers, script kiddies, and crackers in Russia have connections to the mob. The reason for this is that the mafia tends to use cyber-warfare (such as DDOSes) for blackmail, and spam for revenue generation. Apparently the spam networks are quite sophisticated, with one person finding and validating addresses then selling them to the highest bidder.
In other words, things may be more complex then they seem...
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Any chance there's some sort of Russian Spam mob going on?
There's zero chance that there's not a relationship between Russian-based spam and their thriving organized crime culture. Those guys are completely in bed with each other, which also means that when you make a mis-step, you get your skull beaten with whatever is the Russian equivalent of a baseball bat. Do they play cricket, there, or what? Probably a hockey stick.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Another day on the froniers of capitalism.
... ".
About 10 years ago (and if it's a lot better there now, sorry for outdated information), the NY Times had two articles summing up the new Russia.
One was on business practices, with the comment, "to enforce a contract, you often have to take out a contract".
The other was on a clinic doing heroin detox. The basic system was thugs would patrol the streets, find people doing heroin, club them into submission, drag them to the clinic and chain them to a bed, and then let them dry out cold turkey. The Doctor in charge said, "of course this is not the optimal treatment, but here
Looks like our spammer's fate falls under one of those two categories of "solutions". As others have said, it probably wasn't the spam, it was, "just business".
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
This is retribution and murder
Retribution? Do you know something that the authorities don't?
has fuck all to do with Karma
Karma: According to the Vedas, if we sow goodness, we will reap goodness; if we sow evil, we will reap evil.
If you add up all the hours people spend deleting spam, filtering spam, missing important emails because of spam filters etc, then that's a hell of a lot of time this spammer has taken away from people. You take away somebody's time, you are taking away part of their life. I'd say that's sowing evil, wouldn't you?
This is one less person that can have his day in court
Spamming is legal in Russia.
russian mob is not the same as the italian or other mobs... first of all its top heavy with phd's!!! engineers, programmers, chemists, etc... what the hell do you think happens when you have a disenfranchised highly intelligent group? duh.. its one thign to disenfranchise the poor and stupid.. antoher to do it to the people that are smart... no they would beat the shit out of him and leave him as a message... no reason to hide it, or anythign... its out in the open.. and the person who was to get the message surely got it.. probably lack of pay off, or threat of cooperation... done deal after that
Last (okay, only) time I was in the Soviet Union (not long before the end), there was at least McDonalds, Baskin-Robbins, and Pizza Gut (there's no letter 'H' in Cyrillic).
-- Alastair
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
I seriously doubt this guy was killed just for spamming, but let's assume he was for discussion. While on the surface it may seem that the punishment (death) far exceeds the crime (spamming) let's do a little math.
t ml)
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Say I spend 10 seconds managing my spam every 2-3 days. That's 28 seconds a week. No big deal right?
Say I've been doing it for the last 5 years and will continue to for the next 55.
(5 + 55) * 52 weeks * 28 seconds a week = 87,360 seconds (24.266~ hours). Still not that bad, just one day.
Someone who lives 80 years only gets 700,800 hours to live.
That means spammers only have to annoy 28,879 people ( 700,800 / 24.266~ = 28,879 ) before they've wasted an entire (long) human lifetime worth of time. Now I know it's a bit of a stretch to equate a human lifetime worth of time to the life of an actual human being, but I begin to wonder. My time is very valuable to me and I'd rather not waste a single second of it deleting unwanted advertisements from my inbox.
But let's take it a little further. According to this there are 6,454,864,470 people on earth at the time of this writing. Say spammers only annoy 5% of them (a low estimate I would guess) for their entire lives. That's still 322,743,223 people who lost a day's time to spam.
24.266 hours per person * 322,743,223 people = 7831902223.6 hours wasted.
That's 11,175.66 human lifetimes!
If you want to equate those to actual deaths here are some comparisons:
"British Medial Journal indicating that passive smoking kills over 11,000 people in UK." (http://www.sdlp.ie/pr2march2005.shtm).
"To take prostate cancer as an example, although it kills over 11,000 men a year..." (http://www.icr.ac.uk/press/releases/cancerchip.h
"Gun violence kills over 11,000 Americans every year..." (http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2002/1
These were extremely low estimates, the world's population is growing, and the amount of spam is growing.
Still think the punishment didn't fit the crime? I'm not sure anymore myself.
Question everything
Once upon a time I had connections in the Russian mafia.
They don't generally make people mysteriously disappear.
They do, however, make examples of people by messing them up in a most brutal and bloody fasion.
I'm not saying this was a mob hit, but I will assure you that it isn't surely 'not a mob hit' (if that makes sense.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer