Slashdot Mirror
FBI Raids Home of Spam King Alan Ralsky
wstearns writes "The Detroit News is reporting that the FBI has raided Alan Ralsky's home. In the raid, the FBI took computers and financial records, effectively shutting him down. Mr. Ralsky has been frequently covered here."
This is an excellent opportunity to show your support that we STRONGLY support their action and efforts!
We do?
I couldn't care less. I hardly get any spam at all. I use spamassassin on my server and junkmatcher on my client. I'm sure I won't notice a difference at all with this douche.
The FBI surely has more important things to be doing, like going after corporate white collar criminals (Enron or Worldcom, anyone?) or Karl Rove or actual violent criminals.. Spam may be a nuisance, but it never killed anyone.
Wow.
That is the goofiest thing I've ever heard.
It's not even worth a rebuttal.
You practically took the words right out of my mouth. If you don't like it, filter it. Problem solved. I've started using dspam and what I really like about it is that the emails that you train it to filter don't actually have to be spam, they can simply be any email that you don't want, whether it's v1agra spams or annoying jokes from your aunt. Because it's a purely statistical filter, it doesn't care what you feed it, it just filters according to your preferences.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
My original comment was rapidly moderated up to +5 Interesting and spawned a lot of replies. Then it sank to "1,Interesting". Looking at the moderation screen for the article, apparently it has now been moderated 0 times.
And I thought capricious editors were only for the paranoid. Thanks, guys.
Was he notified before the raid? Did he get a chance to be heard and to oppose the raid before it happened?
Notified of a raid? Are you new?
Maybe you're thinking of subpoenas.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
No, I don't get lots of spam. Most of it is denied at the SMTP protocol level and is never even written to disk. Most of the rest is filtered out based on content and /dev/null'd before it reaches the mailbox delivery step. The client side filter is then left to handle the very small quantity of mail that is difficult to discern with more general measures and makes it past the SMTP and MDA level and is of course then downloaded by the useragent for fine-tuning of the local filter.
Taking a guy's belongings and sticking him in prison (like most people suggest should be done) isn't really a justified response for wasiting a few kilobytes of bandwidth on my server every day. And it most certainly isn't worth granting government that "exception" they need to start prodding their way around. Today it's spammers. Tomorrow, it's anyone else they just happen not to like.
Oh wait, indymedia... the new obscenity strike force... nevermind. Too late.
I hate spam as much as the next person, but why is that SPAM causes an uproar while the junk mail I get in the mailbox outside my house continues to pile up?
I mean from a 'green' point of view, isn't spam much better than actually cutting down trees for this garbage? I can just hit delete to get rid of the spam.
You have made that communications channel available to the spammer. You are practically asking them to send mail to you. People like you find it convenient to ignore the technical realities of the email system. Since you A) want to participate in the email system and B) don't want to receive mail from spammers you find that your only solution is to look to the law for help. I'm sure eventually the world will come to terms with spam, just like they have with snail mail. Oh no! Wegmans is STEALING YOUR TIME and EFFORT by making you pick their ads out of your mailbox and recylce them! I'm sure that's not your reaction to junk snail mail. Why is it with email?