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Another Major Spammer Busted
Iphtashu Fitz writes "25 year old Christopher William Smith, considered one of the worlds biggest spammers by the Spamhaus Project, is now sitting in a jail without bond. Smith allegedly had a doctor issue 72,000 prescriptions in the space of one year in conjunction with orders obtained through spamming. The doctor, Philip Mach, had a license to practice medicine in New Jersey but he provided prescriptions to people throughout the United States without ever evaluating them, both of which are big no-no's. Federal authorities have already seized over $3 million in cash, luxury cars, and houses."
Smith allegedly had a doctor issue 72,000 prescriptions in the space of one year
Which just goes to prove to be a really big drug dealer you need a computer and connections, not just to hang out in your Accura in McDonald's parking lot late at night.
* Nelson Muntz appears in this posting courtesy Twentieth Century Fox and Matt Groening.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Holy Crap! FTA: Prosecutors allege Smith had Mach issue about 72,000 prescriptions from July 2004 to about May 2005.
Now, I freely admit that I don't have a clue about how prescriptions are handled, but isn't 72,000 prescriptions just a little much? Would't someone have gotten a touch suspicious that this guy was writing them out at a rate of 1 prescription every 7 seconds? Or is there not enough infrastructure to be able to tell how many a doctor has written?
It obviously had to be done electronically (Or else he would have had to write an awful lot). How does that work? I've only ever had prescriptions that were hand written out by the doctor.
I guess I'm just amazed that it took them that long to realize something was wrong.
A man with a gun is called a citizen. A man without a gun is called a subject.
The doctor, Philip Mach, had a license to practice medicine in New Jersey but he provided prescriptions to people throughout the United States without ever evaluating them, both of which are big no-no's.
...Am I missing something here? What else is a big no-no?
He was giving out prescriptions without a proper medical exam? That's not a good idea. But...wait...he was practicing medicine in New Jersey? How CRIMINAL!
As much as I approve of crimes like this... I just don't get why they don't know when to stop.
If you've made 3 million... walk away with what ya have. It's not worth pursuing another 3 million to risk losing it ALL.
Greed.
Ah well, no respect to dumb greedy criminals.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Chinese Websites Used As Launchpads For Cracking
Piracy Not To Blame In Decline of Moviegoers
Another Major Spammer Busted
Who gave those in charge a clue? It seems we're starting to see a paradigm shift... people who really abuse network resources are getting caught!
FLR
The doctor, Philip Mach, 1: had a license to practice medicine in New Jersey but he 2: provided prescriptions to people throughout the United States without ever evaluating them, both of which are big no-no's.
So, it's against the law to practice medicine in New Jersey? Wow, the things you learn on Slashdot.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Is smack every one of the 72000 people who bought perscriptions from this guy. I don't think we'll ever really get rid of spammers until it's not profitable for them anymore. The best way to do that is to not buy anything from them.
Are most spammers spamming for their own business like this guy did
I was under the impression that most of the spammers were "for hire" by marketing firms, companies, mafias, etc.
is using an apostrophe to make a plural. Maybe we can harness the awesome power of the spammers to send out remedial spelling emails?
PUTTING As IN DEFINITELY? Es IN RIDICULOUS? WE CAN HELP!
I guess my viagra and ciliax orders are going to be delayed.
Do you have ESP?
No, i'm talking to me PERSONALLY.
I'm not including what goes to other addresses than me at the domains I host.
Shadus
It's as if a thousand annoying voices screamed "C1ALIS" in unison, and were then silenced.
It's not butchered, it's creatively adjusted!
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Burn, you son-of-a-b*tch.
Prescription drug abuse/diversion is a major problem... I get hit with drug seekers in my ER every single day. Some of these people have legitimate chronic pain conditions and need to be under the care of a pain specialist, while others are simply using narcotics to treat their psychological pain (or just gathering "party supplies" for the weekend). Some of these people self-medicate and push their vicodin/lortab dose until they get acetaminophen toxic... bad way to end up on the liver transplant list.
And before somebody says it, no, I don't think drug legalization is the answer.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
- Crow T. Trollbot
Print adds in my mailbox are 100 times worse than electronic spam... At least the only resources being pissed away by e-spam are electricity, network bandwidth, and time.
Snail Spam wastes trees, oil, electricity, & time and ultimately only serves to keep the postal service in business and keeping landfills a growth market. I somehow manage to recieve 5 times more physical spam than electronic spam in my personal mailboxes.
I hate both, but if I had to choose which one to erradicate, it would be the physical variety.
Now that all those old computer geeks can't get their viagra and other drugs, they'll stop downloading all that pr0n and when they remember that computers aren't just for 'getting off' anymore, we can expect to see a whole range of new and serious uses for the computer, and faster downloading times for everything else! ;^)
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Too much vertical integration.
If he'd just stuck to the marketing side..
He'd still be living large...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Read TFA! They were NOT busted for spam! They were drug dealers, caught illegally selling narcotics. Spam was how they advertised, but they are getting NO punishment for it.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Now where am I going to get my viagra and... um.. enhancement prescriptions...
Spammers aren't the problem. They are just a symptom. Email is a broken standard. We need to create a system that cannot be taken advantage of.
We could even just add a bit onto the current email systems. Have clients either sign outgoing messages with a GnuPG key, or encrypt messages with the recipient's public key. All mail that isn't signed by a friend or encrypted to the recipient is trashed.
Spammers wouldn't have an accepted sig, and they sure wouldn't have the time to encrypt each message to each address.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
"Hey, it;s bad enough down here!"
- Satan
It's the illegal prescriptions.
He sold $20,000,000 of hydrocodone in less than a year. I think the bigger question is how the hell he could sell that much of a tightly controlled narcotic before getting busted.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
That's your own choice. I hate spammers, too, but I've chosen to do something about it; you can, too. Trust me - you can dislike them just as much while getting 2-3 spams per day instead of 2500.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
And yet, the drug maker that supplied all these over priced pills to a single doctor in such a short time gets what? Fined? Prosecuted? No, they get richer! I love the US medical industry.
"What I need is an exact list of specific unknown problems we might encounter."
You know that they have half their cash in overseas accounts.
Antibiotics aren't addictive, but they are abused. There is credible evidence that the overuse in antibiotics has led to an increase in aggresive ear infections in children. I agree that an intelligent person can and should be able to treat themselves. But come on, can anyone call a person who responds to spam intelligent?
Here's a little trick to stop spam that I literally discovered yesterday: take your mail server down for a while. Seriously. (Of course, this assumes that you have your own mail server, but I'm guessing a significant number of /.ers do.) Mine was unreachable yesterday because I forgot to renew my domain (heh, oops). Today I only recieved one piece of spam, and I'm sure that anything meaningful that didn't make it through yesterday got bounced back and will be resent. I dunno if it will last, but hey, its worth a shot.
I also remember hearing on TWiT that some guy has blocked all HTML e-mail outside of his whitelist to avoid spam, and it works. Seems a little too harsh though.
Oh I didn't say i actually *read* them. With greylisting, content filtering, uri blacklisting, baysian filter on server and client, i see 1-2 a day now. It's just annoying that I should *need* to do all that to keep my self sane.
Shadus
It seems that the market is losing some of its biggest players. With the immense amount of money to be made spamming, now seems to be the best time to get into the business!
What is your penile percentile?
It amazes that someone would write these perscriptions in their own name. Come on, you now that stuff is tracked, although rather losely as it turns out, your going to caught. I've said it before and I'll say it again, dumbass...
In May, a federal judge shut down Xpress Pharmacy and appointed a receiver to take control of the business' assets. Federal authorities seized $1.8 million in luxury cars, two homes and $1.3 million in cash.
Figures, they had to wait till it was profitable.
Now what are all those HydroCodine Junkies gonna do? Head straight to Crack and Crystal Meth. Ahhh, Justice.
The indictment contains various counts of conspiracy to dispense controlled substances, wire fraud, money laundering, distributing controlled substances and introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce.
I'm all for prison-raping the spammers, but if they don't charge him with any spam offenses, then we're all jumping on the War on Drugs Bandwagon. Count me out.
Make it a crime to repeatedly use my computer equipment for unsolicited Advertisements. Fine them at an advertiser rates. 5 cents a email. Charge him with this crime & let the bunkmates line up.
The doctor faces what charges?
The U.S. Attorney's Office said Mach was represented by Bruce Levy of New Jersey. A call to his office was not immediately returned Wednesday.
Oh.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
So, let me get this straight: you actually get something when you respond to spam email? Like, a prescription?
NMG
All of Dr. Philip Mach's patients can now contact Dr. Nick Riveria of Springfield for further assistance, thank you.
It never ceases to amaze me that people (users) continue to do business this way.
People wonder why the spamming never ends, it's because 72,000 perscriptions were bought through an email ad.
Spamming really does work, it's cheap, and highly effective as evidenced by the above numbers.
I had between 16,000 and 17,000 spam messages last year (~45/day). So far this year I've had about 6,200 (~26/day). In the last week I seem to have been getting 80-110/day, which is a massive increase over the rest of the year.
Anybody else seen a massive increase?
Nod, try greylisting, that helps a ton too. Most spammers don't use real mail servers that comply with the rfc's... so generally if you missed the mail on the first run you're not going to get it.
There was an excellent piece on slashdot a while back about spamfiltering... infact here's a link to it: http://acme.com/mail_filtering/ killer stuff there on prevention. He gets a level of spam that would put me outta my mind.
Shadus
I didn't use antibiotics *at all* for like 7 years before this nasty little health episode. But, trust me, when the choice is between having neuro symptoms, joint pains, etc for either the rest of your life or half a decade of so (depending on which Dr. you ask) and taking antibiotics, I'll take the antibiotics hands-down.
Antibiotics aren't addictive, but they are abused.
Can't argue with that one.
Cheers, -b.
Can anyone else figure out why doctors, who are trained mostly to follow the money, are the gatekeepers on otherwise illegal drug trafficking?
--
make install -not war
The Clue Train is moving through town. Once it passes, things will be back to normal.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
. . . that had been using Geocities front door sites. Those were fun -- hammer the Geocities site every hour to deplete the bandwidth so potential suckers get 503d, then hammer the site the Geocities front points to. That one-two punch should keep the site from being reachable and generate some nice bandwidth bills for Spammy.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Wow! I think the 72000 prescriptions disturbs and riles me up more than the spam. We're talking about one greedy twisted doctor here. I only wonder how many more like this are out there yet to be caught. I wonder if this guy was any good with his patients or really just in medicine for the money, which I guess obviously just wasn't enough!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I guess this is shown not to work... 1. Send out lots of spam. 2. Get NJ doctor to write phony perscriptions. 3. ...
4. Profit!
(I had to do it)
Looks like you didn't RTAs. Summing all the articles we get.... let me count.... 2 people busted! Don't look that much of a paradigm shift.
I would like to offer him some herbal rectal relief medications at a very reasonable price, no prescription needed!
Other than the naughty bit about paying his pet doctor $7 for each non-exam script, this was a stand-up guy. He did exactly what he claimed he would. How many so-called spammers out there can say that? This guy had _thousands_ of satisified, repeat customers. Nobody was getting ripped off, in fact I'd wager the majority of the scripts that were filled were cheaper to the customer than if they went to Walgreens/Target/whatever and had it filled. This guy SAVED the health industry millions and he's demonized for fraud. Fraud? In what way? How did he defraud customers? Didn't he supply them with exactly what they were ordering at a fraction of the usual cost? Spamming? How is he different than Ford or GM putting their commercials on every 6 minutes during your prime time show? --- It wouldn't take much to turn this guy into a modern day Robin Hood. You all act like he's satan incarnate, in reality it's nothing but a very successful businessman with an overly invasive advertising scheme (but no spyware or adware!) who gave his customers exactly what they wanted at a price both parties were happy with. How many other businesses can match that?
Print ads cost the sender a significant amount of money per item mailed, so they're much more likely to listen to people who don't want their garbage. Not only that but they're the ones who foot the bill for the delivery of the junk mail.
Not exactly. Print ad delivery is subsidized by the first class mail and used by the postal service to feed their bloated government entity. I wouldn't care about that if the post office was a private company designed to make money, but as a government agency, it's not right that they create a market for themselves.
Spam costs the spammer pretty much the same amount of money whether they send out one thousand or one billion e-mails.
And it costs me nothing to delete the spam. I spend much more time shredding my snail mail spam so someone doesn't create a fraudulent credit card than I do dealing with spam.
AOL has publicly stated that something on the order of 25% of their monthly subscription fees go directly to cover the cost of their spam fighting.
Hmmm... and you believe this? I bet if there was no spam AOL would just reduce their subscription fee by 25%. Amazing that their dial-up plan is $23/month while competitors like earthlink and netzero offer plans under $15. Is Earthlink immune to spam? Does NetZero not deliver email? AOL's statement is a marketing ploy designed to justify their monthly fees, I doubt it's based in reality.
Find coupons in Greeley
But only morons use HTML and if you want to have those advertising stuff companies call "newsletters", you can always allow it for them. Or are you that addicted to consuming that crap?
And please, don't come with that "but my good friends all use HTML in their emails". If your friends are mentally stuck in kindergarten and need pretty colors to prolong their attention span to read/write a whole email, then... suffer.
Yeah, but a good portion of electricity is produced thanks to other spent natural resources...
I wonder if anyone has tallied how much energy is wasted by spam?
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
25 year old, hm... 3 million dollars worth of stuff is pretty nice at 25. The only problem is... when you go to hit on a girl... what do you say you do? SPAM? Hey baby... I'm a spammer. Wanna SPAM? You know baby, I could make a couple of calls and all that spam in your inbox would be gone?
HEY, there's an idea, do you think these people know how to protect THEMSELVES from SPAM???? WOA!! I'm a freakin genius. I'm sure this guy's girlfriend isn't getting Viagra adds, how do they do it? Maybe we can just use their methods against themselves.
I rock so hard.
Please mod parent up. She's a girl. We want to be really, really nice to her so she'll stick around.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
I feel a great disturbance in the Force, something like to voices of 72,000 penises screaming in horror and then suddently going flabby.
Yes, but how can you know what's best for you? What's really needed here is someone who "knows best" to tell you what to do. Then you know what's in your best interest because someone else told you what it is!
If you ask the doctors they'll probably confirm -- people can't be trusted to take care of themselves and doctors are required to tell them what is the right thing.
They went after this company because they were able to buy perscription drugs with out a prescription. Which is againts the law.. Being that he was a spammer as well just puts some icing on the cake.
But, honestly, wouldn't it be better if people could get *pure* drugs to get high on rather than resorting to using toxic-ass shite like homemade crystal meth?
No, absolutely not. Not at all, whatsoever, no matter what. Please, shut up.
And what's so bad about the meth guys burning themselves out, anyway? It's nice and Darwinian.
Someone keeps stealing my 'omg hax' :(
My website gets around 30 hits a minute (from seperate IPs) with fake referrer spam for sites selling prescription drugs. Anything with a drug name in the referrer, Phentermine, Xanax etc, gets an http 302 redirect to dea.gov; the original referrer isn't replaced. Who knows, maybe no one there ever looks at the logs, but if they do there's a few sites they might be interested in.
Don't you think all those spammers are commissioned by Satan in first place?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Back during Prohibition, a number of gangsters were sent to prison for tax evasion. The Feds couldn't get any evidence about the really bad things like extortion, robbery and murder, so they used what they could get. This is just more of the same thing, and a great idea. Professional spammers are likely to be breaking a number of laws, so investigate them and charge them with whatever you can find. Selling drugs, tax evasion, fraud, whatever.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
That is completely backwards.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
A couple of facts here. 1. Each class of mail service is supposed to pay for itself. 2. The USPS is not a government agency. It is really a quasi government agency.
Fight Spammers!
Nothing, except when a meth lab blows up and takes a few neighboring houses with it. Or when a meth lab leaks toxic chemicals and cancer cases in the neighborhood skyrocket.
Much better to produce this stuff in a well controlled environment.
-b.
Except that for print advertising, the SENDER pays the bulk of the costs (in the form of postage) wheras with electronic spam, the RECEIVER pays the cost (in terms of mail storage space and processing) --- therefore junk-snail-mail tends to be somewhat self-regulating, wheras junk email is not.
He was busted for something else right? Something related to illegal drug activity, wire fraud, money laundering...? Stuff like that?
So far, all this does is make "illegal" activities proliferated by spam something that will get you busted....
Hrm... okay so this WILL make a dent in the war on spam. But I would still like to see more people jailed for the activity of spamming rather than for more common reasons.
1. trevordactyl
2. 1st moderator who modded that comment up
3. 2nd moderator who modded that comment up
4. 3rd moderator who modded that comment up
5. 4th moderator who modded that comment up
Yeah both dudes did it the illegal way, but once again, it proves that spamming works!
Wow! I made my first cool mil! Maybe I should quit while I'm ahead!
Another million later...
Wow! TWO million!! I must really be pushing my luck. Maybe just one more...
THREE MILLION! Geeze if I quite two million ago, I'd be kicking myself! What a jerk I was...
Turns out that Cockiness and Downfall usually go hand in hand.
Do everyone a favor and out him. If we know who he is and how to identify his spammer and the companies he spams for, then a bunch of us can sue him into bankruptcy.
Fight Spammers!
That's not true. That would be illegal. There are often rebates associated with prescriptions, but those almost always go to the managed care organizations, there are also admin fees and other reimbursements that the pharmaceuticals offer to wholesalers, group purchasing organizations, etc, but there are no kickbacks. Your physician was either pulling your leg or distorting the truth.
Much better to produce this stuff in a well controlled environment.
Why sanction the production of this stuff at all? It is a danger to society and should be treated as such. Your proposal to safely produce a substance, which, quite honestly, is more than capable of wrecking a human life, is absurd. Would you also then recommend that software pirates practice their craft in governmentally instituted warehouses, rather than physically steal CDs and DVDs from neighbors to pirate? Yes, the "solution" removes the incidental suffering, but in the process it condones the crime itself. I will not pay that price.
Sarcasm, I ass-u-me. If not, then:
* I was bitten by a tick a few weeks before the symptoms appeared;
* Had constant headaches and felt like I had the flu all the time
* Unexplained muscle pains
* Joint pains/swelling
* Twitching
* Prostate cramps/my penis went numb for a few days. Felt like I was about to piss my pants all the time. Fun!
* Many more symptoms
* My doctor insisted that I was 100% healthy
* The symptoms subsided during a 10-day course of antibiotics for a sinus infection. Came back slowly over a month.
* My doctor still insisted I was totally ok. He said that the antibiotics couldn't have possibly fixed my joint pains. Even if it weren't Lyme, hadn't he heard of "reactive arthritis." Fortunately I was able to arrange for my own antibiotics until I was able to see a doctor who wasn't a fucking moron. That other doctor ran some more blood tests and agreed with me.
Sadly, she's not covered by my ins., but she's worth going to since she isn't clueless.
-b.
Another vote for greylisting. Works a treat.
Carousel is a lie!
I can't imagine how they got away with this for so long. 72,000 prescriptions, most for Dilaudid/hydrocordone? Whenever a doctor writes an Rx for a controlled substance he/she needs to specify his DEA number. Don't you think this would have been flagged pretty quickly? 200 prescriptions a day for controlled substances from one doc?
Spam doesn't cost just Elec., Bandwidth and time.
I am a sysadmin for a world wide company and having to filter out spam can drastically slow down the flow of email.
This is costing my company countless man hours of productivity lost.
Lost Productivity = $$$$$
Lost $$$$ = smaller bonus poool
eSpam costs me way more than Snail mail.
Software piracy is different, because it deprives the authors of profits. Occasional use of drugs (provided that it is in fact occasional) deprives no one of anything. The "war on drugs" should stop. The money that's saved from enforcement should go towards treatment of those who are unlucky enough/biologically predisposed to becoming dangerously addicted to drugs.
-b.
Too much vertical integration.
If he'd just stuck to the marketing side..
Indeed. Did you notice they didn't bust him for SPAMMING? They busted him for running an illegal enterprise that he happened to be advertising via spam. If he'd been doing something purely legal (however shady) this bust wouldn't have come down.
Granted people who spam tend to be the sort of psychopath who will break other rules, and thus are likely to have something else you can bust them on. But you can't count on any given spammer doing that.
Meanwhile this appears to be a bust that was driven by a department investigating the PARTICULAR form of illegal activity on which his business was based. So this bust gives me no warm-fuzzies that there will be a coordinated attack on other spammers who are pushing other illegal activities that would be handled by other departments - even departments within the same agency. Yes it's nice that this one got shut down. But don't hold your breath waiting for spam to taper off to a dull roar of newbies as the offenders are frogmarched off to prison.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Millions in cash?
Luxury cars?
Houses?
I'm getting into this spamming game. Seriously, how do you go about spamming? I probably won't get caught as I live in a corrupt country. Seems like easy money, just set the computer to send spams, and rake in the cash. Has to be better than a day job!
So a few people have e-mails they don't want, there's nothing wrong with that. I get all sorts I don't want, like adverts on TV, but TV advertisers don't go to jail.
That's a pretty good article that you referenced!
The only change I would do is to swap lines 6 & 7, why should you do an FQDN check against a hostname that cannot be valid?
6 reject_non_fqdn_hostname,
7 reject_invalid_hostname,
The redistribution programs are exactly what made America the most powerful country on Earth. If you don't like the way Amnerica is run, leave. It would increase the average IQ.
Vote Quimby!
they get what they want at a chaeaper price.
If I was going to buy a car, and Bobs car dealership(whatever) spammed me saying I could get a new car at half price, I would go there.
Of course, My main accounts don't get spam, so I would be out of luck.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Depends upon the state, really. In Illinois, our illustrious governor is trying to use mail-order drug fullfillment from Canada to reduce the state expenditure on Medicaid. Just one little problem... Illinois law requires that any prescription drug be handed to the patient by a registered pharmacist which kind of excludes the average postal or parcel delivery person...
So, yes, the pharmacies shipping stuff to Illinois are legally allowed to do that, but anyone who delivers the package without the right paperwork hanging on their wall is violating drug laws...
Sadly, she's not covered by my ins., but she's worth going to since she isn't clueless.
I'm not one to encourage lawsuits generally but given the severity of the lapse it might be worthwhile looking into suing for malpractice. If nothing else it could (hopefully) either 1. Cause the doctor to start being more careful or 2. Get him out of the business so he doesn't end up killing someone.At the least I'd report him to your insurance company. They might not care, but then again they might and might do something about it.
IF the good doctor you went to can confirm you had Lyume disease. I would report the of Doctor to the AMA and to your insurance company.
You might want to consider wether or not you want tot talk to a lawyer. To get your money from the 'Bad' doctor, and as an added insentive for your insurer to drop him and get someone competant.
The lawyer might want to see of he can follow up with your complaint to the AMA.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Congratulations. I unofficially nominate your post for the "stupidest posts on /." award.
I suppose you'd tell gunshot victims to buy a bulletproof vest if they don't like getting shot.
You mention a revolution in "the 10-30 years" but fail to specify what period of time this "10-30 years" is covering. Is it the "next" 10-30 years, or the 10-30 year period at the beginning of the next millenium?
If you seriously think that arresting doctors who prescribe drugs illegally is the sign of a police state, than perhaps you ought to find one of these doctors and get him to prescribe you some Haldol.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
The doctor, 1) Philip Mach, had a license to practice medicine 2) in New Jersey but he provided prescriptions to people throughout the United States without ever evaluating them, both of which are big no-no's.
Clearly the things I have highlighted are the issues. With a last name like "Mach," he has to have a cool first name. Philip doesn't cut it. Living in New Jersey is equally bad. Lets make some corrections:
The doctor, 1) Steelgrip Mach, had a license to practice medicine 2) in the top of his floating fortress but he provided prescriptions to people throughout the United States without ever evaluating them, both of which are big no-no's.
Much better, but it could still use a bit of work. One more time:
The ninja, Mach Steelgrip had a license to kill from the top of his floating fortress of solitude but he provided wanton destruction to people throughout the United States without ever evaluating them. This is unforgivable. The death of my parents shall be avenged.
That's a lot cooler. Lets go with that as the headline.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Thanks! It kind of wrote itself.
why should you do an FQDN check against a hostname that cannot be valid?
The FQDN test doesn't actually use DNS; it just verifies that the address is in the form ([:dnschar:]+)(\.[:dnschar:]+)+ (translation: at least two words separated by a dot).
The invalid hostname check looks for non-valid characters in the string, ruling out things like foo$$bar.com.
Both are lightweight internal functions, and neither really rejects much more than the other, so it doesn't really matter which order they appear in.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"Wow, did you go to Upstairs Hollywood Medical College too?"
It had to be said
- Sig
It's already illegal to produce/grow drugs like meth, cocaine, weed, etc... But as you see the war on drugs has not stopped it. Go to msnbc and search on meth. The number of small labs around the country is skyrocketing. The chemicals and processes they use to make the stuff is dangerous. And laws have not and WILL NOT stop it from being produced. Proabition(sp?) causes more crime and creates dangerous black markets. If people think they can get it have way legit with a perscription they will.
If you can find a way to make people not want to take unnecessary drugs I'll sign you up for the nobel peace prize. Your paying the price now for socialized medicine, If you had to pay for your own treatment, and Captian Crackhead couldnt so they die, there would be a much lower demand for dangerous andpowerful drugs.
The drug compaines want people addicted to pills, its good for profits, it boosts stock prices.
sadly, while browsing these links with the latest mozilla firefox with popups disabled, nearly a dozen popups appeared.
*sigh*
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
They should fine each person who answers illegal ads, too. If a spammer sends out 1,000,000 junk mails for almost no cost and one ass clown answers, it makes it worth his trouble. It's like prostitution or drug dealing: both buyer and seller should be busted.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Wow... 5 times more PHYSICAL spam than electronic spam?
Either you get a TON of junk mail or you don't get very much spam.
If people are getting good deals from spam, what makes you think they want it stopped?
I've sad this before, oust side of people in the IT business, very few people mind spam.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So Smith went to the Dominican Republic and tried to restart spamming from there. On June 28th, a judge issued an arrest warrant for him. When he returned to the US, he was arrested, but released on bail, with home monitoring.
The prosecution then asked for a six-month criminal contempt sentence for trying to violate the injunction and fleeing prosecution. Smith had a court date for that in July, and lost. So now he's in jail for six months.
This is somebody who just didn't get it when the court ordered him to stop.
This is just the first phase. The felony case is just getting underway.
Two things you can do - one of them probably illegal, the other not (yet):
- Save your junk mail, and periodically stuff USPS collection boxes to overflowing. If enough people do it, eventually they'll get the point.
- Stuff prepaid business reply envelopes with other businesses' junk mail and send 'em in.
The dr. is a friend of the family, so suing him would involve further complications. To his credit, I *did* test negative when he gave me the CDC-recommended ELISA test. My other blood work was also normal.
There is, however, much debate about the efficacy of the ELISA test for Lyme. Some people don't produce detectable levels of antibodies for some reason, and the test looks for antibodies not the organism itself.
I ended up getting back an "equivocal" Western Blot test from the other doc, along with some other blood work that was suggestive of a chronic infection. I also had the classical symptoms of Lyme, a history of the rash, a history of tick bites. Moreover, I'm responding to antibiotics *quite* well.
So, the case is far from clear-cut. I could in theory have some *other* bacterial infection that happens to respond to the same antibiotics used to treat Lyme. However, Occam's Razor and all that...
Anyway, I'm not going to sue. Yes, I felt like warmed-over shit for three additional months due to that Dr. not listening. However, I'm more interested in developing my business and getting on with life than spending time in a courtroom. I have my body back (well, at least part of the time for now) - I'm not gonna waste time with a drawn-out lawsuit. I will, however, discourage family and friends from going to that doc - it's the least I can do.
-b.
haha you approve of crimes like this? I think you ment to say, "As much as I disprove of crimes like this..."
Okay, great. Now that just means things'll be quiet for a couple months, and then it will be business as normal. If we really want to stop future spam, here's what we can don:
Now you've eliminated the customer base of spam messages. With no customers, spamming won't be profitable ($3 Million?!?!). If it's not profitable, it'll stop.
Tah-dah.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Only becasue you coose to filter it.
Which wouldn't be neccessary if your users operate that maigic box that sits in front of them all day long.
Basically, you the first line against your companies computer dumb shits..i.e. a baby sitter.
It would also cost more money if you hired 5 guys to sift through every piece of physical mail you get, just in case.
"I am a sysadmin for a world wide company and having to filter out spam can drastically slow down the flow of email."
oh really? what is dratic? I have workin IT for some very, very large organizatins, and I've never seen filtering slow dow delivery by more then a few minutes. A few minutes doesn't really mean jack.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Try to get your own domain and see what mess is send to random addresses at that domain. For instance fake addresses of origin.
This gets especially bad if you have a catch_all actived, but also info@, webmaster@, sales@ etc. are heavily bombarded.
very energy efficient to send back all the leaflets to their origin 8-|
well ok recycled paper is slightly better but it is hardly ever 100% recycled.
I don't know how much email you receive in your very large organization, but when you attempt to filter over a billion(conservative estimate) emails a day it can cause major delays.
A spammer, doctor, and two federal authorities walk into a bar ...
But seriously, I put the doctor more at fault with this one. What the heck was he thinking? Another great victory. Let's keep them rolling, now.
- Adam
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
With that link to prove your point, you cannot call that argument bullshit, Anon!
If a shady guy in a dark coat sitting on the sidewalk did the same, would it be less evil? We don't have to demonify this guy because he's a drug deal... selling prescription drugs illegally is not much different from selling crack or heroin.
After the wisdom teeth came out they gave me a week's worth of percodan: I couldn't tell the difference on or off so after about three days I stopped taking them, got the shakes real bad but other than that didn't feel that the percodans weren't really sugar pills. Vicoden after a root canal and the occasional flu/cold season robitussen with codeine (which up until just a few years ago could be bought without an Rx) didn't make me feel any differently.
Compare this with some people I've known who are knocked flat for hours with a single benadryl.
Maybe I should have been trying the v!c0d3n since vicoden obviously doesn't work...
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
"I also remember hearing on TWiT that some guy has blocked all HTML e-mail outside of his whitelist to avoid spam"
What did he need the whitelist for?
hydrocodone is Schedule II.
Vicodin, etc., adds acetaminophen (APAP), which dilutes the hydrocodone, and this formulation is on Schedule III.
It is much harder to sell Schedule II stuff on the Net - the law requires handwritten prescriptions in triplicate.
Of course, the druggies have figured out how to get rid of the APAP with kitchen chemistry.
Most of the energy used to move spam would have been spent anyways. Those machine aren't turned off between emails.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There is a very real cost to spam (energy, additional server hardware, administration costs), and that doesn't even consider the man-YEARS that are spent each day by the people of the world deleting spam.
Needless to say, when 200 million people per day worldwide (random number, probably conservative) have to spend even 10 seconds per day recognizing and deleting spam, that's 2 billion seconds of wasted time on a worldwide basis per DAY. 2 billion seconds is 63 wasted man YEARS per day. I'm going to say that 10 seconds per day is awfully low (considering email comes in all day and if you have to stop what you're doing, check the email that just came in and see it's spam, and then resume what you were doing) and call it 60 seconds per day easy. That means the world is wasting at least 12 billion seconds (3.33 million hours) per day on "just pressing delete". Now if you conservatively say that the average receiver is worth even just $10/hour, the world is losing $33 million dollars per DAY on "just pressing delete."
Think that's not "real" money? If so, you've obviously never employed anyone.
If they get sent to a Federal PMITA prison for something, do we care exactly why they get to spend the next decade whimpering? Who knows, maybe one of them will get a former customer as a cell mate. "Aren't you lucky I stocked up on that discount Viagra?"
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Electronic is MUCH worse to me. Stuff sent in mail tends to.. oh I don't know... be spelled correctly?
There's no place like ~/
3 million bucks? I never realized that Spam was such a lucrative business. So I have crushed viagra for only 10 bucks. Click here to purchase!
Over the past few months I've come to believe that the largest groups of stupid people on Slashdot are far and away the hardcore zealot libertarians. They wouldn't be so annoying except that there are so freakin' many of them.
Not exactly. Print ad delivery is subsidized by the first class mail and used by the postal service to feed their bloated government entity. I wouldn't care about that if the post office was a private company designed to make money, but as a government agency, it's not right that they create a market for themselves.
Nope.
Fees for one form of delivery are not used to "subsidize" another unless you pervert the word to mean the buildings, trucks, employees, etc. are shared between classes of delivery.
The USPS is not funded through taxation. It is entirely within the chartering documents and intent of the Post Office that they make a profit. Without profit, there is no way to grow and expand.
Whoever modded your comment to 5 probably didn't realize how inaccurate your foudnational statements are.
But almost every snail mail spam is for a product available in my area and of some potential use to me, the e-mail spam is the opposite - my 5 year old does not need penis enlargers or viagra adds in her e-mail and I am sick of recieving offers to my .au address that do not ship outside USA. If the spammer has to pay the costs of sending the mail they at least try to target the mail to an appropriate audience.
Fees for one form of delivery are not used to "subsidize" another unless you pervert the word to mean the buildings, trucks, employees, etc. are shared between classes of delivery.
You are correct, subsidize was a in incorrect term. It would be more correct to say that first class mail generates the revenue needed to allow the post office to offer lower rates to companies doing mass mailings. There is little advantage to a bulk mailing, all mail has to be processed, and is delivered to different locations, so the cost per piece is not significantly cheaper if you send more.
The USPS is not funded through taxation.
Correct, well at least mostly. I believe there have been times when the government did have to cashflow the USPS, but it's because the same government took the money away from them to start with.
It is entirely within the chartering documents and intent of the Post Office that they make a profit.
Interesting. I will have to look up the chartering documents and verify this.
Without profit, there is no way to grow and expand.
My problem is that I don't believe, as a government entity (agency, independant corporation, whatever) it should need to grow and expand. It's a self propagating system, it uses the infrastructure setup to offer lower prices for bulk mailings which results in higher mail volume requring more equipment and infrastructure. If only first class letters were delivered they could cut their carrier staff significantly, lowering costs and still maintaining solvency.
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-- RLJ
Drugs? It's a hard problem. We figured out how to make a pretty reasonably functioning society as long as people keep some values within a certain range. People go to work and produce goods for society, and they get a share of all the goods everyone else produced. They don't break the system, because most things that do that are illegal and we've made doing illegal things come with a risk of unpleasant punishment.
Now, if you get someone addicted to something, and they want it badly enough, then their values deviate from that comfortable normal level, and they're harder to put in their box and keep a productive member of society. They might even hurt society. So we do what we can to keep people from getting addicted to things.
Turns out that there are a lot of potential drug users, and that it's easier to target a smaller number of drug providers, and their sources. So, because a construction worker in New Jersey might be less productive if she was using drugs, we arrange to firebomb crops of poor folks in Central American countries. It's a heck of a twisted path to follow, but at each step, we don't have any really great alternatives.
Oh, and because those drug pushers and users in jail represent a big chunk of votes, we keep convicted felons from voting. Helps ensure the stability of the system.
What would you propose be done differently, though? Just let everyone do whatever drugs they wanted? You have to deal with people going through an expensive-to-society upbringing and then not being productive as an adult -- universalize that, and you're looking at potential trouble. What about, for addictive drugs, someone who is out of money and can't afford to buy any more -- maybe he normally wouldn't steal something to purchase more drugs, but he's got a very strong motivation to obtain more money quickly. Target only drug sellers, not drug users, or visa versa? Probably not going to improve effectiveness at all.
There just aren't any great, fix-everything-at-once solutions. I mean, yes, the War on Drugs sucks. Everyone can identify that fact pretty quickly. The problem is that recognizing that does not mean that you should advocate that we get rid of it -- there's a problem that has to be solved, and the question becomes how to solve it.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I can see that providing scripts without "evaluating" them is a no-no, but apparently both of these things are "no-no's" - having a license to practice medicine in New Jersey is illegal??
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
I use the Mail program on my Mac to bounce back any spam I get. Of course, I get barely any to begin with (I very, very rarely give out my address), but it does keep it down to about 1 message a week, and it makes sure that the spammers don't know I exist.
Though since the mail daemon would be able to act immediately if the mail server went down, I suppose that could avoid any sort of script that tried looking at the difference between when the spam was sent and the returning message sent. Not that I even know such a script exists, or am any expert on the matter.
Someone disagrees with your bizarre, puritan view of the world? Should we perhaps mandate that all alcohol drunk should be distilled in homemade stills so that everyone that wants to drink ethanol also has to drink methanol as well?
It's not about whether meth users burn themselves out is whether as a society we want to put resources into MAKING them burn out. Remember, it costs resources to enforce drug laws. It requires no resources to not have a law. It's YOU who should be defending your position, not him.
Only someone who knows nothing about our legal tradition, as well as a childish world view would think that something not having a law against it means that it's a good thing to do, that it's condoned by anyone.
having a license to practice medicine in New Jersey is illegal??
I'd guess that having a license to practice medicine in New Jersey and using it to treat patients outside of New Jersey is illegal. Parse it this way:
Would you also then recommend that software pirates practice their craft in governmentally instituted warehouses
Yes. It would be called "compulsory licensing".
if I had to choose which one to erradicate, it would be the physical variety.
Just tell the post office you want to discontinue your mail service. If that doesn't work just get a fireplace and enjoy an endless supply of free fuel delivered to your door!
(Oh, and be wary of the fumes from the pretty catalogs...)
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
From TFA: "more than a dozen federal charges "
Woot he doesn't get busted for merely spamming and goes to white collar resort prision. He's going to federal pond me in the ass prision!
I wonder what they do to spammers in prision...
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
HTML email from *anybody* is the top entry on my blacklist. Surely everyone knows its the spawn of the devil?
Ahhh, I assumed the FQDN check actually used DNS...that's what I get for assuming. :-)
Since you seem to be the original author, congratulations, it's a well written and easily followed piece.
Thanks for replying!
The cost of spam is much more than than the time hitting "delete".
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Some people might LIKE adverts in their e-mail, who are you to tell them they're wrong?
Oh, damn, they must have internet access in that jail. He's posting on Slashdot already. Hide your inboxes!
First off, that's moronic. If people want spam, they'll OPT IN.
Those of us who don't want to watch adverts, can quit listening to the bloody radio. Those of us who don't want to be subjected to TV ads can quit watching TV. This is because the ads on the traditional media are what supports it, so they don't/can't make you watch the ads if you don't partake of their service.
The problem with spam is that spam doesn't support or pay for the e-mail system. Just the opposite. It increases the costs of operation of every firm that handles e-mail, thus we shouldn't be expected to forego e-mail to be left alone by these sick, deplorable bastards, any more than we should combat drunk drivers by having everyone else quit using sidewalks and roads--we can't just quit using e-mail, so we can't get away from spam!!
Buying from a spammer is exactly like flagging down a drunk driver as he drives at 80MPH down the sidewalk, and paying him money, saying "Thanks for the service you provide. Here's the income you need to keep doing it."
eom
I once had novocaine not work at the dentist, and he said sometimes the stuff doesn't work if you haven't eaten, and sent me out to go have lunch and come back in the afternoon; after awkwardly negotiating lunch with a numb mouth (:-) I came back and the stuff worked fine.
Some of my friends find codeine makes them hallucinate or feel really bad. The one time I took Percocet I felt awful, though it was just after a root canal which makes it a bit hard to compare. Codeine doesn't bother me, and generally helps pain. Think I'll go take one.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you're trying to buy Rush Limbaugh quantities of painkillers, and the first bottle or two from Spamboy arrive (and the price is reasonable compared to other available sources), you're probably going to buy a lot from the same source - much easier than shopping around, and the fact that Spamboy is clearly running a sleazy operation means that he's not going to check the quantities you're buying as carefully as your neighborhood pharmacist would.
Also, if his price is reasonable *enough*, some of his customers are probably buying wholesale quantities from him and retailing to their own customers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Tylenol's going to do a lot more damage if you're taking it at Vicodin-abuser levels rather than overdose levels, trashing your liver and kidneys. Aspirin can rot out your stomach and give you ulcers and such, but it's an acute problem that gets your attention more directly. (On the other hand, I suppose if you're taking opiate painkillers, you might not notice the stomach pain as quickly.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Does anyone know the setup they were using? I would imagine that since Vicodin is a schedule III medication the doctor just "called it in" to the pharmacy. But, in this case, the doctor and the pharmacy were probably in the same office, so I would imagine that the individuals answering calls simply took the order, listing him as the prescribing doctor, and he just approved it with a "click". The same goes for web orders. I find it highly doubtful that he either a) wrote out 72,000 actual prescriptions, and that b) he actually spoke to any, if at all, of the patients over the phone. It seems that this literally was a pill-pushing business, and the fact that they could fill it under a doctor's name to make it somewhat legal is incidental.
I have 5 personal domains and host several others, I'm well aware.
Shadus