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Spam is Dead
Vainglorious Coward writes "Two years on from Bill Gates' promise to eradicate spam, an article in The Observer claims that spam has passed its peak and is now declining. Is it just me that hasn't noticed this?" I got almost a third more spam in 05 than 04. I guess I exist outside the bell curve on this one.
As soon as 2006 hit, my gmail account started getting spam. I have gotten 7 today alone. Argh.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
first post (I hope)
Good luck on that one bill
Gates and co. would have to have an effective monopoly on email traffic for that to work. (Which might have been conceivable before the advent of Gmail, by the way.)
My spam peaked early 2004 with about 30,000 mails per stuffing not only my inbox, but also my DSL connection. I had a "catch all" option on several dozen domains and most of the spam I received was addressed to non existing mail boxes. Due to my local spam filters very efficient handling of the problem I only started to worry about the situation when downloading all the spam started to take hours and my provider complained about the daily traffic.
The problem with the non existent mail addresses became a large one sometimes in 2003, when enough people had some kind of spam filtering that deflected most of the usual spam. I guess that sometime in 2004 even the last catch all rules have been disabled, so that today simply guessing email addresses will gain nothing for the spammer.
So maybe spam has not really peaked, but there are simply different waves of spam techniques. Some of them rely on mass, others on tricking the filters. We may simply be in a "smart spam phase". A lot of the spam that reaches me today shows the message as a picture instead of text and I have not yet figured out why thunderbird will display those pictures, since I disabled this.
But the article is right in spam becoming something like a background noise. I still have to manually mark about 100 mails per day as spam, but I got very fast in recognizing it and it only takes a few seconds. I'm always astonished if I meet friends whose email address have not been public for more than a decade and who are very annoyed if one or to mails per week pass their spam filter. To me it is like complaining about banner ads. It's just an unavoidable part of the internet ecosystem, like mosquitos.
Chriss
--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
millions of anti MS remarks here.
As it stands, this is simply an opinion piece, and is labeled as such on the Observer's website. Apart from a loose reference to remembered statistics on the website of a company that sells spam-filtering software, there's nothing in the way of solid evidence to support this guy's claims. What's more, he asserts that things like phishing mails and penny stock solicitations somehow fall outside the realm of "spam". He further goes on to claim that the "new wave" of spam won't actually last, because things like penny-stock spam "rely on credulousness"; he basically asserts that common sense will prevail against the "new" spam where it failed previously. I seriously doubt that the same caliber of individual who falls for the Nigerian e-mail scam will somehow be immune to the siren call of the "penny stock" scam--which, incidentally, has been around for years.
While the author has some valid points, I think he's drawing conclusions on bad assumptions and gut reactions, not hard data.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
In the past 72 hours I've got over 300 spam which got past my ISP's spam filters. 98 yesterday alone. When I clean out the spam trap for my mail account it still has thousands piled up in there I need to erase.
Nostadamii these people ain't. A little logic may explain the diminishing amount of spam by their measure, such as changing behaviour on the internet. I find much of it is directly linked to postings on USENET groups, some of which have seen floods of cross-posting trolls. Some newsgroups seem to be dying out, others are flourishing. I expect the spam is quite targeted, as some is obviously tied to the newsgroups I've posted on.
virii, virii, virii! muah ha ha ha haaaa!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've had an e-mail address for over 15 years. My spam in the past 2 months is less than I had 10 years ago.
I post my main address unobfuscated on
I gave up hosting my own e-mail late last year. I moved all my employees and family to gmail. I'm saving $4000 annually in labor and maybe $4000 in hardware, software and bandwidth.
With giving up my corporate domain name address I'm giving up headaches and spam.
Try it, you'll love it.
I get less spam now than I used to, but I assume that is because my ISP filters a lot of it.
I report all of it to SpamCop.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
except an endless stream of adverts for the same ol' same ol' tacky world of finance, medications, beggars blah blah blah
its so predictable, yet not (or we would of eliminated it)
Anyone with a comment-enabled blog knows that e-mail spam is small worry compared to comment spam, Splogs and the like. Wikis and the like are vulnerable to spambots as well.
For marketing purposes no one receives 'spam' anymore, now they receive 'supper surprise funmail!' it tests much better focus groups.
I view less spam thanks to the wonderful filters infront of my email client.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Maybe if you don't consider phish to be a kind of spam. That accounts for 90% of what gets past my filters these days. (And I suspect that that's because of the distribution of message types, rather than a problem with the filters.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There's lots of factors.
At work, I get very little spam. My company's filter, coupled with SpamBayes with a year of training does extremely well. The bigger problem is that I occasional miss e-mails that vanish in the ether.
With my GMail account, about 30% of my e-mail is spam that gets through. I'm hopeful that number will go down with training or Google tweaking their service.
It does seem that the days of getting wildly pornographic images in my work e-mail are long gone. Sniff.
The ONLY way spam will go away is if stupid people stop buying the products advertised in it. If spam pays, they will find a way to send it. That's the bottom line.
http://religiousfreaks.com/You ever try to get live pig parts into a can that small? I think not.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
*checks inbox*
:|
Nope, spam isn't declining for me.
Wtf is a "Penis Launcher" anyway?
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
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The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The spam that *tries* to get to my mailbox has been on an ever increasing curve for years. It did not slow down in 2005, nor in the first part of 2006.
However, the amount that actually makes it to my inbox has dwindled to maybe 1 or 2 a month. Spam filtering technology has outpaced and outperformed the spam sending technology beginning last year (IMHO).
On the other hand, I have not noticed an serious change in the spam algorithms in the last 6-8 months. It may be that there is a sufficient number of unguarded mailboxes so those that have protection aren't worth the effort.
Yet.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
"I guess I exist outside the bell curve on this one."
What? The whole point of a bell curve is that extremes are possible. If you're accepting that spam follows a bell curve then your single data point is competely meaningless. A bell curve isn't a trend that you can follow or not follow - it's a distribution.
The reduction is do to the very effective CANSPAM legislation (snicker).
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
The Postini site that the article cites as showing that spam volume has increased 20% over a few years actually says, on its stats page, "Spam activity has increased over 65% since January, 2002". Additionally, the article author used a single moment to make his predictions, rather than checking out any statistical trend.
Someone big says something big will stop soon.
Something big begins to slow down.
Invalid conclusion: the two are associated.
Useful thought: maybe it would have slowed down by itself.
(I think spam must eventually tail off, because it operates on the basis of effort vs profit; as spam increases, I suspect the value of an individual spam decreases; it's not a stable system. In the end, the volume of spam should therefore level off, entirely without outside intervention.)
"Nobody will ever get more than 64,000 spams."
My gmail spam folder holds 30 days worth of spam. It steadily goes up over time. For a while it was holding about 24,000 but it recently jumped to nearly 26,000. I don't get much spam in my inbox as the gmail spam filters seem to work well (my ten year old email account that I used before gmail is forwarded to my gmail address).
http://www.busyweather.com/
You're totally right, I should have written "piece", not "article".
/me lashes self
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Although Thunderbird catches 95% of the crap in my inbox (I'm up to about 200 junk emails per day) and I've trained it, a few get through. The ones that get though are almost always good-sounding terms jumbled into a "sentence" (sort of like some Slashdot replies). What's the point of that?
Is this designed to poison the filtering? Why bother?
From the article:
Or maybe this one application / website (the only source cited for concluding spam is down) is just letting more spam get through undetected...
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
...well I am taking a different approach.
I am going to buy some "ultra hot" OGX stock and send it to Nigeria so Umbatu can buy some "V|agr@" for "p3n|s ennlarginating". Embrace the evil. Embrace it!
I received less than 10 spam mails a day during the last year, and that is a big improvement over the previous years, i could receive something like 30-50 a day in my hotmail account alone. With my yahoomail account, almost no spam since i susbscribed(~3 years) it stayed the same. So hmm, it has been improved greatly i would say.
Since the latest Exchange Service pack introduced the upgraded spam filter I get, maybe 1 spam email, every few weeks. It seems to catch them all and put it in the junk-email folder. Only one false spam id so far. Spam still comes in, but it never gets in my way... not to mention it doesn't cost me anything extra for the filter so I'm pretty content.
I know you guys are going to flame (like usuall) for saying anything that is pro-ms or suggests they did a decent job, but could we at least reserve the flames to people who have actually set it up and used it? Thanks in advance.
-C
I was getting 2-3 flagged by spamass after passing through the mimedefang stuff before implementing greylisting. Post greylisting I've yet to get a single spam in my spam folder (they never made it to my inbox before, but I still had to deal with them.). I have things configured to flag at 2 points, discard at 7. My bayes filters have about 2 years worth of training on them, and I use RBL scoring too.
Like you I publicly post this address, but only on /. 22.7% of my gmail inbox is spam (20 of 88 messages). However, there are another 1394 in my spam folder.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Think again! Much of what you think is "spam" is actually legitimate. Contrary to popular belief, Nigeria really *is* filled with millionaires. Of all of these, the most prominent seems to be Esenam Ayele.
Why are you all so prejudiced against these great offers? I myself have bought many of these products *nudge nudge* and, although I haven't seen any results yet, I have great faith.
The real crux of this problem is that spam is a social problem. Although many people treat it as a problem that can be solved by purely technical means, in the long run the problem will always be there because:
0. There will always be a criminal element determined to make "a quick buck" without regard for others as long as there are people willing to do business with this criminal element (in this case, the spammers).
1. Many people use the internet who aren't computer specialists, thus are easily fooled by eMails which are designed to imitate messages normally generated by a trusted internet site (usually in an attempt to gain access to confidential information).
2. The up-front costs for the spammers are very low (and quite high for their victims, society, etc.), and there are no serious penalties thus the risks associated with getting caught are minimal (if there are any at all).
3. Marketers stubbornly and vehemently hate (in general) the idea that everyone has a right to "consent." Confirmed opt-in is key because "opt-in" alone isn't enough due to forgery.
There are many ideas for solutions, but unfortunately one of the big challenges societies face today is international differences when it comes to law & order, moral, ethical, and other standards. The internet, by its design, completely ignores international borders, and spammers are enjoying free reign as a result.
So far a combination of DNSBLs (DNS-based Block Lists) and various filters seems to work well for many ISPs, but spammers continue to find ways around these things, hence the fact that it is a social problem.
Education is key, but so far has proven to be impractical. Does anyone have any ideas for solutions (violence works, but is illegal in most civilized nations, so we need to be creative in a different way)?
P.S.: Challenge/Response systems are not the answer because they are, essentially, fighting abuse with abuse.
The Lumber Cartel, local 42 (Canadian branch)
British Columbia, Canada
I think what has happened is that the population has a greater awareness on spam detection and spam removal/blocking/avoidance. Since I closed my HOTMAIL account in 2002 and switched to my own domain, I hardly ever receive SPAM - and if I do, it all gets filtered anyways. Have the people finally become more educated? Perhaps. That, or the masses truly believe in miracle herbs.
The beatings will continue until Morale Improves!
I got an average 2spams/mth last year, and I haven't had any this month yet, so I can't comment.
Are we talking dead as in ``Biggie Smalls is dead" or dead as in ``Paul is Dead"?
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
I got almost a third more spam in 05 than 04. I guess I exist outside the bell curve on this one.
Why? Between GMail's filtering and Thunderbird's filtering, I have to deal with maybe 2 spam emails per week. I "get" plenty of spam. But it's DOA... in my spam folder.
You're only still getting SPAY-UM because you LACK FAITH in the HEALING POWER of the Almighty Bill! BLEY-ESSED be his AH-HOLY NAY-UM! Yeah, he hath only to extend HIS HAND and take your blemishes away from your inbox! Now holds hands and UH-PAR-UYUH, PAR-AY with me brothers and sisters, that in this hour these doubting unbelievers will yet turn their hearts to the ONE TRUE FAITH, that they might be YET SAY-UVED from their hour of darkness!
It's more, but they can't detect it like they use to, so that's why they are claiming that it's declining.
>Linux is not user-friendly.
It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.
Gmail must have not receibe that Bill's memo, because my account not only receives almost 80 spams a day but about 7 o 8 make their way to my incoming folder.
--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
spam has not reduced in traffic, the spam filetering mechanisms are getting smarter, and as people above have mentioned, gmail is really good in this respect.
Year / Amount of SPAM :D
1999 - N
2000 - 2N
2001 - 4N
2002 - 8N
2003 - 16N
2004 - 32N
2005 - 31.999 N <- decline!
I got almost a third more spam in 05 than 04. I guess I exist outside the bell curve on this one.
I'd imagine that'd be true, yes. Probably even worse for cowboyneal@slashdot.org, but CmdrTaco is still pretty high on the list...
spamAssassin and the junk filters in Eudora, Thunderbird all helped to ease the problem but I was still deleting lots of them by hand until I switched to greylisting on my mail server.
Since most of the spam gets sent by minimal smtp on hijacked pcs which just dont know how to queue mail suddenly there was silence.
It takes some whitelisting at first and some kinds of traffic, like listservers take another route, but I could finally dare to open some known for long mail adresses that had turnend into spam sinks for long.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
Spam filters are getting smarter.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
More people should report spam to SpamCop.Net. Even if busy people reported only one spam a week to SpamCop.Net, they would be making a tremendous contribution to this war against spam.
Over the years we've encouraged hundreds of individuals to report spam to SpamCop.Net, and many of them still do so today. Those with more free time (or a need for revenge because of a very strong feeling of hatred towards spammers) report all of it, and those who are busy report whatever they have time to report.
As more ISPs have been using BL.SpamCop.Net to automate the blocking of IPs known as sources of spam (because they obviously agree with SpamCop.Net's criteria), the more effective SpamCop.Net is.
Everyone should ask their ISP if they're using BL.SpamCop.Net to block spam. If the answer is negative, then insist that they look into it and follow up with them later to find out if they acted on it. It's free, easy for a server administrator to implement, and it eliminates the need to maintain your own blacklist.
The Lumber Cartel, local 42 (Canadian branch)
British Columbia, Canada
Probably the main reason for any fall-off in spam is blocking by the likes of hotmail, yahoo and gmail. I would have to assume that the VAST majority of users have email addresses on major hosts such as the aforementioned. Another reason is probably that people tend to give up their spam-filled email addresses in favor of new, pristine ones. I know I certainly have a few addresses in this catagory.
My spam has actually declined from about 100 messages a day to 2-5 messages a day, that inludes the message which get caught by my spam protection. I would estimate that only one or two messages a week get through the Thunderbird protection. Just don't openly publish you address on the web... put up images which include your email, create a little java script which hides all the different parts of your email in different variables... or even putting it online like bla 'at' blup 'dot' com really seems to help.
In 2005 I used to get over 100 spam emails a day, now I'm getting less, probably about 10-20 a day. "I DON'T LIKE SPAM!!" -Monty Python
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
fighting spam, much like "the war on terror" or "the war on drugs" or fighting pedophilia, is mostly a policing activity. that is, it never ends, nor will it ever end, nor should you think it will ever end, if you really understand the nature of the problem
...no: there is no technological fix to ingenious asocial behavior. a bored teenager is always smarter than your protocol, and always more craven then the good intention of those who create the protocols. it's the tragedy of the commons. so those who see email spam going away with a technological fix are missing the larger point: you don't destroy the behavior, you just move it around: IM spam, blog spam, etc
spam/ drugs/ terror/ pedophilia/ etc. will always require personnel and effort to prevent, forever. it's just a cost of civilization. for to not fight these things allows them to proliferate and spread. it's a maintenance issue, just like taking out the trash to the curb every thursday. it's not like you take the trash out one day, and you never have to take it out again. no, trash constantly accumulates, and it always will. if you think terror, or hard drug use (really only hard highly addictive drugs are a problem), or spam, or pedophilia, or other problems like these, is something you can oppose or (even worse) accept, and the problems just go away, you simply don't understand what these problems are really like
every generation, there will be some group of idiots who think bombing the feberal building in oklahoma city or flying airplanes into office towers is a wise move. likewise, every generation some group of a**holes will see smuggling heroin and cocaine as a good business move (it is, but its the social byproducts of the business itself that is the problem). and, every generation, someone will think "hey, i can just send out a million emails." nothing you will ever do will stop such people from constantly being reborn anew in every generation, forever
these thinks, just like spam, must always be fought, for all time. yes, you can change protocols, but there is no technological fix to human ingeniousness and cravenness: someone will always try to game the system for their benefit, despite all of the suffering it creates for the rest of us. a lot of slashdot types would be thinking "technological fix!" "technological fix!"
true wisdom on the issue of spam and other social ills like it are ones of acceptance of the problem, and constant vigilance of the problem, at the same time. it's not like you can accept the behavior as OK, and its not like you can fight it and kill it once and for all. what is needed is more people understanding the true nature of social ills like spam/ terror/ hard drugs/ etc and understanding that, by their nature, they are mundane criminal policing issues like burglary and vandalism: always with us, but always unacceptable, all at the same time
this is wisdom on these issues. beware anyone who says you can accept these things, and the problems go away, or people who say you can fight these things, and kill them once and for all. such people don't know what they are talking about
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You may not be seeing it, but it's still taking up gobs of bandwidth, disk and CPU, and *somebody* has to pay for all that. I think that the costs to transfer, store and process spam outweigh the cost of individuals' time spent reading/deleting it.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
I get more phishing emails than spams these days.
Not that I actually *see* them, since spamassassin hasn't missed one to filter them into my spam box.
On the first few days after the new, my spam mailbox, which usually fills up with ~100 spam emails a day, was only registering 20 or so spam messages. However after a week, the spam started flowing again.
I wonder if some of these spam mailing lists had an arbitrary expiry date set?
Also, although the spam filter is pretty good, it seems to me that more spam is getting through the filter that my ISP provides.
This article advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
(x) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Ever since I started using TMDA (http://tmda.sf.net/ my spam has dropped to almost zero (I probably received 2 spams in 2005). TMDA isn't a perfect solution because valid senders have greater difficulty in getting through, however, since I don't know they are trying to email me, I don't miss the emails :)
:)
Personally, I prefer losing an unknown amount of email rather than manually checking the Bayesian filter to see if there are any false positives. Is that so wrong?
I don't think the spam problem is declining if you include all forms of unsolicited bulk email. Phishing is a real problem now - ask any bank. In the old phrase, it's not just the quantity it's the quality. Half as much spam that is four times as effective in fooling filters and/or fooling users is not a decline in spam. And would I like young members of my family or my mother to get even one spam a day offering the delights of, say, bestiality? Nope. One spam is too many and no jail is big enough for some of these operators.
I think it's necessary to turn the page with all the graphs on it the other way up. These will show an increase in governmental and IT industry self-satisfaction, cheerleading and (some might say reckless) optimism. I guess they've decided to declare the great spam war won and the problem fading. Except it isn't.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
by making spam filters that catch more spam, you are making the spammers send more spam to try to get thru.
:(
catch-22
I have a four letter AOL address - I gave up counting spam a long time ago. Even with two spam filters (one on the AOL side that dumps into an IMAP based folder and one in Thunderbird) I still get between 50 and 100 pieces of spam a day......
https://comerford.net
[Insert your favorite spam here]
(This was an incredibly funny idea, but Slashdot is defending itself!)
I get 4500 spam mails a month filtered through gmail each month since last year. Then again some asshole freshman thought it'd be funny to submit my email address along with my name and my school's telephone number to a few popup ads. Before last year I received 1 or 2 spam mails a day. So from 04-05 my spam mail increased 4500%. No decrease for me.
"these rely on credulousness, which has a finite supply"
I don't know what planet the author of this piece is living on, but around here the place is filled with morons who wouldn't know a phishing scam from a hole in the head.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
Since mid-December 2005 I have caught 4293 spam emails in my gmail spam filter, nearly all of which comes via a redirected email address I have been using since 1999. I know the sensible thing to do is abandon that address and start a fresh one, but I refuse to let the bastards win.
Some of those spammers must've just come back from their holidays at the garbage dump (I just can't bring myself to describe their usual hang-outs -- it would be a complete waste of SlashDot's resources).
The Lumber Cartel, local 42 (Canadian branch)
British Columbia, Canada
...been right in anything else than his financial predictions for MS ?
Why should we trust him in his spam prediction ?
...oh and btw. mr. Gates my hotmail mailbox is beeing spammed with worthless info from MS...
--
Where is \ on a Mac ?
Here's my experience: I bought a CrackBerry this year 'round September through Rogers Wireless. Within FOUR HOURS of getting it set up, I got spam. I had never browsed to any web sites, I had not done anything other than set up my email account. My biggest question was: how could the 'bots harvest my email address that quickly? It really was astounding to me to have basically not used the device and suddenly get spam on it. Outrageous. These guys who claim that spam is declining are either crack addicts or Bush advisors.
It's time for ISP's to start fighting back on behalf of their customers: creating weapons to attack machines that are perpetrating spam and letting the (possibly un-suspecting) owners know that their machines have been co-opted as spam servers. With all the malware tools available, shouldn't we be able to use them to shut down bogus mail servers?
*** Don't be dull.***
Hello, I represent some dead person in Nigeria, and would like to smuggle 6 billion dollars out of the country. Also, I would like to marry you. Please help me. I am a man or a woman, whichever you prefer.
I run a mail server for a medium size tech/sales company. The spam levels have peaked last year and are remaining the same, if not getting worse. 70% to 80% of all incoming mail is spam, before the spam filtering of course. The filtering probably catches better than 9 out of 10 spam messages, but what remains is still a large number of junk messages that need to be dealth with by hand. This seems to the the norm according to my fellow mail admins from other orgs.
The first article tell us more about the Microsoft funds to install computer centers on another countries than spam.
http://www.michel.eti.br
Sorry, somebody had to say it.
-S
"The Spam is dead.... Long live The Spam!"
"Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences." -- Ken Wilber
-Everyone has already enlarged their penis.
-Britany Spears has had a baby, so nobody wants to see her new sex video.
What else am I missing?
If anything, Gates is dragging his users through the "Create-a-sickness-and-present-yourself-as-the-on
50% discounts on all furniture ! Only at Furniture'R Us ! ORDER NOW !
I got 3 Spam in 6 Month, which got filtered by the spam filter.
Ok only after I wrote a little program to protect my network traffic.
See oss-lin.
In America: You kill the spam In Soviet Russia the spam kills you!
Shots: A Populist Parable
I find that spam is still doing a decent job of destroying email, the amount of email that gets picked off by spam filters is incredibly high and oftentimes I've had legitimate messages filtered by spam filters, meaning I have missed out on important information. Due to spam, email is now no longer a reliable means of transportation, which I think is worse than having to delete a few spam messages every day.
Currently my account gets absolutely no spam, I have a second email account I use to sign up for stuff and funnily enough it gets no spam either. Spam filters may be getting rid of most spam but unfortunately sometimes they stop needed messages too. And the truth is so long as one person in a million responds to the spam messages then it's still worth it for the spammers
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: "I am looking for Spam! I am looking for Spam!" As many of those who did not believe in Spam were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost it, then? said one. Did spam lose his way like a child? said another. Or is spam hiding? Is it afraid of us? Has it gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. "Where has Spam gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed it - you and I. We are Spam's murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying Spam? Do we not smell anything yet of Spam's decomposition? Preserved meats too decompose. Spam is dead. Spam remains dead. And we have killed him.
The Internet is Dead!
-- Spam
Oh, wait, wrong kind of Spam.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
... BUT! A new wave of "next gen" spam is surfacing! Help put it to a quick death by downloading our product for only $39.95! Signing up is easy, simply fill in your e-mail address for every field of the following link: www.shitloadofsponsers.com
And you will be dynamically profiled, hooked up with several of our referrers, taken to our order form, and sent updates not only from us, but from our reliable referrers! Join now!
He made that statement Friday, January 23rd, 2004 so he still has 11 days to pull it off. So he can still slack off for ten days and pull an all-nighter of something. (Maybe he could offer each spammer 2 million dollars to go away? For less than billion, problem solved .. right? ;)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It is official; The Observer confirms: *SPAM is dying
...
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *SPAM community when The Observer confirmed that *SPAM market share has dropped yet again,
erm,
No, I'm not up to this one. Somebody else do it.
The whole "if it stops paying, they'll stop doing it" solution is the simplest, most efficient solution I can think of but for the life of me I can't imagine anyone stupid enough to click it. Obviously someone must be, and I know the profit margins are probably astronomical (zero cash outlay to send a few hundred thousand emails and if you get 3 people out of the 300,000 then you're 3 people's cash wealthier) but seriously, how much money do these spammers make.
Wouldn't a better option be a kind of backwards responsibility... if a product is advertised using spam, then the distributor/manufacturer is held responsible. I know it's not very legal, and then there's the problem with people fake-spamming to get competitors in trouble, so it's not a perfect plan.
Long live spam!
MacroHard - Boning you in a big way! (TM)
*cough* *cough* *cough* Gmail *cough*
Darn colds this time of winter.
Ah yes:
I, for one, DO NOT WELCOME our spam overlords. GTFO.
So Gates declared war on spam 2 years ago. Well, he declared war on Windows security problems 5 years ago.
Given this track record, I expect he will next claim that he will eliminate corruption in Congress.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
"Spam Is Dead"
Let me guess, some sort of pun related to the fact that most of the spam comes from zombie pc-s and can't be stopped.
So he's not really getting any less spam at all, it's just getting hit on the head before it gets to his inbox.
I wonder if by "amount" he means "proportion"? With many more users getting on the internet now than "a few years ago" it's not surprising that the proportion of spam may have dropped a little (overall), but I'd be very surprised if there's actually less spam being generated.
In the last three years I think I've received one spam and two eBay phishing e-mails. I run my own mail domain, so when I register an e-mail address for anywhere I use nospam-[their domain]@[my domain]. This makes things very easy to trace and would seem to have some discouraging effect on places selling their address lists. The phishing e-mails were due to a hardware supplier whose customer database had been comprimised, for example.
With Gmail, and I think most of the other webmail services (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), roughly all spam is sent to the spam folder, and I never have to look at it. So how is spam doing any significant "damage" to email? The average person probably wouldn't be annoyed by having a spam filter.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
I get *zero* spam on my gmail account. If you use your email account carefully, you won't get spam. Just as if you use your internet browser carefully, you won't get spyware.
i have gotten so much in 2004 and 2005 that i had to change hosting companies. they said my spam flooded out the mail server, and my current host deactivated my main email address without telling me in advance. it now just goes to blackhole. before i tried sending unrouted mail to :fail: and the bounce backs got me flagged as a spammer. it was a combination of my main email address getting picked up and unrouted mail to my host (once upon a time i used a catch all). all this with spam assassin and whatnot installed at the servers.
darn virtual hosting. if it was a commercial site i would spend money to resolve it (that always works!), since it's just for fun i have to cope.
Is your spam declining? Having a hard time with your output? Have your old victims dumped you for spam blockers? Well look no further. V!@gr@ will have you performing at levels you never thought possible. Order today from the www.BigBigSpam.com, the cheapest source on the net.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
Though back when I was on a "spammed" domain, Thunderbird nailed, I'd estimate, 99.5% of it. One message of spam a week making it to my inbox really didn't bother me.
In fact, I almost feel lonely now. Most of my new messages are forum reply notices or "you've been outbid". I don't wake up with a triple-digit list of new messages, even if only a single one of them wasn't spam.
It comes to knowing how to avoid it. Don't give it out to Vistaprint is a good start. I'm pretty sure they were the company that got me "on the books" for spam lists, as up until getting business cards with them, I got almost no spam. I'm a bit surprised my gmail is safe though, unlike my personal site, gmail isn't exactly unheard of by mass-mailers. I've gotten the odd random one (which doesn't even make to to thunderbird, as gmail filters it out of the inbox automatically), but in effect I've gotten nothing since having to switch emails back around September. It's like reformatting... you just purge out the old crap you didn't need enough to back up. I rather like being out of the loop. No personalized acts of general stupidity.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I remember when I first got my business domain some 6 years ago. I was ok for the first year. Kept it very quiet, only used it for business and I never got a single spam. Then one day I posted on Usenet and forgot to hide my address. I realised seconds after I'd clicked the send button, but it was too late. A few days later I got my first spam
Today: 40
Yesterday: 35
Day before: 45
etc, etc. My Junk folder holds about a months worth on any given day. Before Xmas it dipped from around the 1000 mark to below 900 and held there. First time in ages, and I thought maybe it was finally lessening off. No such luck, its back up again to 1150 now. Arse!
Apple's Mail.app does a great job of filtering. Most of the time I don't notice the junk. But of late more with a specific style format (I won't describe it in here just in case) have been getting past the Junk filter. So I don't think its going down at all.
Email spam probably will die or decrease - its just starting to get old. People will realise that its not worth the hassle. What with spam filters, spam laws and people getting used to hating it, its slowly going to be less appealing to use. On the other hand there are a whole host of new mediums spammers can use - windows holes are a great delivery system for adware, and instant messaging is quite good - especially if a bot can trick someone for a few seconds, enough time to make the hit.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Looking at my prismemail.com stats, my spam peaked in March 04 at 5682 pieces of spam. Things dropped significantly after that down to 1900 pieces in May 04, just two months later.
I've since dropped as low as 700 in a given month (Aug 05), but I have seen a bit of an increase lately.
The closest thing I get to spam is the Borders newsletter, and I signed up for that, and I actually read it. I just don't get spam. PS: I have Gmail, too.
You moved your business to gmail? As far as I know, Google has not come out with a corporate email solution. I hate to second guess your business decisions, but doesn't that sort of violate Google's Terms of Use? You know, the one saying "The Service is made available to you for your personal use only"? And add to that, I don't think Gmail has the security needed for business operations. Screw the fact that it makes you look unprofessional, it makes you look like you don't give a crap about security or business agreements, both of which make you look really bad to your customers.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
I didn't even notice that TFA had ads. My Mozilla AdBlock filters are pretty minimal, too:
*.falkag.net/*
http://adserver./
*.atdmt.com/*
*.indieclick.com/*
http://adsrvr./
*.burstnet.com/*
*.tribalfusion.*
*.doubleclick.net*
*.loanweb.com*
*/ad.asp?*
*/ads/*
*/sponsors.*
*/advertise/*
*/adimage.php?*
*googlesyndication.com*
*personals.yahoo.com*
*/banners/*
http://ads./
*.valueclick.com/*
*.chitika.net/*
*/bannerads/*
*/marketing/*
*.adrevolver.com/*
*&adspace=*
24 filters, and I don't see more than 10 or 15 ads a DAY. I can't beat Yahoo, though, because they store their ads right in with the pictures for news articles and stuff. Keenspot uses the same dirty trick; I can't read some Keenspot comics without having to see Keenspot ads.
My own gmail account remains Free and Clear; I actually got one spam message ever on it, and I've had it for quite awhile now (and get quite a few e-mails and even subscribe to a few yahoo groups via it). And it's not like my e-mail address is that obscure, just my own first name followed by two other letters (and then the @gmail.com, naturally). The same could be said of my ISP e-mail address, or my university e-mail, or my hotmail/msn address, or even better my yahoo mail address which I fling around willy-nilly to sign up for things or whatnot whenver they require an e-mail address. And yet none of those e-mail addresses, all of which (except for my Uni one) I use astonishingly frequently and throw around all over the place, get any spam. Whatsoever. None. Except for that one gmail one (which ruined my perfect record, grr).
Note, also, that I turned off spam protection in hotmail, turned it off in yahoo mail, have none for my ISP one or my Uni one (both would only mark e-mail as spam instead of blocking it anyways, so I would know), and etc. Considering how high the signal-to-noise ration is, the possibility for false-positives understandibly outweighs the miniscule spam concerns I would have.
So what the hell am I doing right that most people seem to be doing wrong?
First off, none of my addresses are entirely intuitive or plain. No numbers even, nothing other than pure letters, but nothing that would show up unmodified in a wordlist or namelist (not even with good ol' "two random letters at the end of the string"). My sister has a gmail address of the same length as mine, but gets literally hundreds of spam messages every single day. The difference is that hers is her last name, while mine is my first name with two letters from my last; so hers is likely to show up in wordlists. That seems to be the kicker.
Meanwhile, my yahoo address seems to attest to the idea that signing up for things online won't get you spam, BUT the things I sign up for are message boards at places like BeyondUnreal.com or the official The Trews webboard or maybe to view some newpaper online (for those amnesiac days that I don't remember about BugMeNot). So nothing particularily sketchy.
In other words, as long as a person is relatively smart about how they handle their e-mail, they should be fine, 'tis my theory. This theory is not without major flaws, though, I'll admit. And furthermore, sometimes a person just wants a specific e-mail address, and it sucks then that it might just doom them to spam.
And further going down the questionable route of using my own personal experience as a scientific study, seeing as I had no spam until that one message, it would look something like this, starting arbitrarily in 2000:
2000 - 0%
2001 - 0%
2002 - 0%
2003 - 0%
2004 - 0%
2005 - 100% OMFG 2005 IS TEH SPAM APOCALYPSE
2006 - 0% (so far...)
So, in other words, I can prove anyone right. Parent? Sure, spam has
increased DRAMATICALLY in the last while. Naysayers? Bah, spam isn't
a problem! Etc. Ah, subjectivity.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I guess I've just been lucky having changed companies several times (and hence email addresses) and in the last 5-6 years always having at least two seperate email addresses. Spam has never been a problem for me so I just don't get all the fuss.
nt
His "Oh, it's not so bad," attitude is unfounded at best and what you might expect from M$ or the DMA as they promote, "legitimate" spam at worst. Spamhaus tells us that there's still a big problem, despite steps that most ISPs have taken. The problem will get worse again as the spammers learn to get around those mostly trivial steps. It won't take much effort to read configuration information on broken Windoze machines and make them point to the ISP's SMTP to send mail like the end user does. In the mean time, the botnet continues spew network clogging spam, and DDOS and we all get to pay the price in slow networks and broken computers. It's not enough to sit smug behind your spam filters while the average user gets creamed. The nasties are strengthened and encouraged by that kind of attitude and they can get still you with a DDoS or Distributed Mailbomb.
Flaws in Microsoft's operating system are what enables the nasties. They have to be corrected or avoided to fix the problem. Until then, the botnet will be both a weapon and profit center at everyone's expense. No, the answer is not "trusted" computing or mail servers that waste your time with MENSA puzzles and collect a penny for Bill. The answer is fixing what's broken. Email works despite it's great abuse by a few idiots.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
God, BSD, and now spam?
spam gone in two year i wish, but then again that prediction is comming from a guy who said 640kb is all the ram u'll ever need.
Hey, if Bill says it's declining, it's $#@^&%#&^ declining.
get with the program
I use Ultrafunk Popcorn, a completely textbased POP client, to vet my mail server before I use Thunderbird (or any other Mime enabled pop client)to bring in the mail. Popcorn loads in a snap. It only dowloads headers, unless told to do otherwise, so I can delete suspicious mails en masse with a few clicks. If I am unsure of something I never fear to open it since Popcorn lacks any of the decoders that transform the ASCII mail into nastyness. Even an open virus will sit there as text as far as I can figure. Anyway, Popcorn only opens the first fifty lines of any mail unless otherwise instructed. It leaves everything on the server, of course, unless deleted. And deleted is really deleted.
I do get spam because I am lazy and still post my real address on things from time to time. I tried Mailwasher (same theory) but I like Popcorn better. It can also be used in an internet cafe. Even more secure under this circumstance than webmail. Download, configure, check mail, delete whole program directory. It is green so no registry shadow. My hosting company uses Brightmail so not a lot gets through in the first place. Spam comes in waves it seems as new counter strategies get developed by the scumbuckets.
BTW I have no connection whatsoever to Ultrafunk, just a happy customer sharing his experience. Unfortunately I just found while creating the link that Popcorn is in eclipse. See the low down here: http://www.ultrafunk.com/
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
And finally, do you really think it's a good idea to use a Latin word which most English speakers, especially on Slashdot, will associate with sex? At least spell it as "cvm", this is for your own good.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
...no: there is no technological fix to ingenious asocial behavior.
Yes there is. It is called a gun.
And its application is a bullet to the head of the anti-social person given by the governmental authorities of the day. The anti-social person can no longer affect society and can no longer by pass any methods intended to keep him in check.
But of course there is a major moral problem with my suggestion and should never be taken as advice.
I'm just stating the theoretical situation in which technology trumps social behavior. Obviously, its an extreme and we don't want to be going around shooting spammers (even though I'm sure some of you want to) but eventually given enough technology you can prevent everything.
Or rather what I am saying is that all social and political problems can be solved with technology. It just depends on your application of the technology and how far you are willing to go with the application. I'll take a bit of annoyance with my freedoms though.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Maybe he just needs some cheap drugs!
I know a site that can hook you up, guaranteed!
Clear, Dark Skies
I'm sure the reporter was judging this based on spam in their inbox regardless of whether a spam filter caught it. I wonder if they even know about spam filters...
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
i belive spam levels are on the rise, i recieve far more now than ever!
I agree that spam is on the decline IF you assume the use of a state-of-the-art filter. Modern filters have basically won the war; they bring spam down from "making email unusable" to the "very minor annoyance" they once used to be.
:)
Of course the amount of spam traffic is higher than ever. But perhaps that will decline as more and more ISPs default to strong filtering, lessening the likelihood for newbies to get scammed, and thus the original motivation for spam.
I would be interested in an analysis of spam types over time... e.g. mortgages vs. Viagara vs. penny stocks vs. replica watches vs. phishing. Maybe that would provide a hint about which industries to invest in
This couldn't be handled at the client's end reliably because that would defeat the whole purpose (not to mention being a target of all those SpyWare vendors) -- in order to prevent bandwidth waste, it would have to be handled by the server.
For this to work, servers would have to indicate the going rate for messages (either by size, number of recipients, number of messages, etc.), and then the sending system would have to either accept it and actually transfer funds before sending the message, or just abort the transaction. The sender could choose how much they want to pay for this "ePostage" before sending it, and then the server could handle it automatically.
The main problems I forsee with such a system are eMail lists (as someone else already pointed out), and automatically generated eMails from other services (free or otherwise) that the user has signed up for. Why should Google AdSense or PayPal or eBay have to pay to notify me that my contact information is invalid, for example (I'm sure a skilled con-artist can see obvious ways to exploit something like this)? And do the users also deserve a share of this income, or just the ISP?
In addition to that, a few technical matters will need to be resolved before anyone can start thinking about even implementing such a system:
0. A new protocol to replace SMTP will be needed (it's not appropriate in my view to add this to SMTP, which is based on a trusted model rather than a costed/financial model). The protocol could be exactly the same as SMTP, but with one additional step inserted immediately after the "HELO/EHLO" stage in order to reduce development overhead for everyone.
1. Automated micropayment transfer protocols will need to be available to these new mail servers, and high-volume servers will need to be set up by the various providers of these financial services. Features will need to be able to handle currency exchange in a simple manner. Dispute procedures will need to be very, VERY well thought out.
2. The potential for criminals to launder large amounts of money by setting high rates or just claiming high volume when it doesn't exist (and both sides indicating this to be correct) in order to facilitate transfers between one another would be of great concern to government and military organizations aiming to impede the funding of so-claimed enemies (e.g., mafia, terrorist groups, trade blocked nations, etc.).
3. Micropayment service providers will likely compete on such things as percentages (e.g., they keep 0.05% of each micropayment to help cover their costs), various service charges (including fees for dispute resolution), usage fees, monthly service fees, etc. Banks are well-known for these types of tactics, and these micropayment providers will likely earn the same notariety.
In the end it will all just end up being very expensive and time-consuming, and I suspect that people will simply abandon it in favour or reverting to SMTP again in order to save money.
It's an interesting pipe dream, but I don't see how it will catch on in our current global economic climate given the current costs of doing business.
The Lumber Cartel, local 42 (Canadian branch)
British Columbia, Canada
Spam has been going down recently. I've noticed it. Problem ain't solved, but it isn't as bad as it once was. I chalk it up to the following:
* A few major spam court cases. Suddenly, there might be a downside to being a spammer.
* Filtering has made spam less effective with fewer people replying.
* People are more use to email and are less likely to respond to spam.
* Last, but not least: There is a self-regulatory process here. When there's too much spam, people, each individual piece of spam becomes less likely to be noticed. What are your chances of selling your junk if 10 other people have packed that mailbox with the same ad? Spammers drop out. This is where we are right now. Unfortunately, this tread won't last. Fewer spams means each piece of spam is more likely to get noticed and generate a response. Fewer spams means more people are starting to use their email. This makes spamming more effective which will attract more spammers.
I predict that we'll go through several waves of spam over the next few years as the amount of spam reaches its "optimal" level.
According to our tax-dollar-paid government agency, CAN SPAM act is working, so SPAM must be on the decline and we should all simply breath a sigh of relief and go about other business, there's nothing more to see or talk about on the subject of SPAM. (Can you smell the sarcasm yet?)
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
...an announcement from Gates:
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
The world should no longer fear emails of mass destruction, the tyrannical rule of spam is over!
Since about Sept. I've received about 50% more spam on my company account and about 10% of that is making its way through the spam filters (had a few this week already). So from that perspective I've seem an increase in spam. But my Yahoo account used to get 150+ a week in spam, that has trickled down to 10 or so. Gmail is the best with almost nothing, just a few and no adult or pron spam.
about 4 years ago I dropped the email address Ringmstr666@hotmail.com. It was getting 200+ spams a day. Shortly before droping that addy I opened another hotmail account that I have been using ever since. My current hotmail addy is on all of my web registrations, forums, posted publicly on numerous forums and pretty well circulated. I get maybe 5 unsolicited spams a day.
I get good spam too. list activity, news letters, tech product offers (that I'm actually interested in), and Joel Spolsky's spam (although those ones I can't quite classify as "good".)
5 with a decent filter on my inbox is nothing to worry about. Spam might not be "dead" but it has been beat back quite significantly.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Simply your e-mail address is one year older in '05 than in '04, which augments its chances of having been harvested.
To check the article's assertion, you should compare the amount of spam received in '04 on an address you started to use on year n with the amount of spam received in '05 on an address you started to use on year n+1.
your 2nd mistake, thinking what he says has any truth to it. IMO, 99% of what he says is self serving trash and has been for the last 10+ years.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Me too. I think that on New Year's Day, at least seven spammers emailed me to wish me a more fulfilling and enlarged new year!
I'm getting 20-30 spams a day that get through the server's filters. About half get through the spam filter on mail.app because of the collection-of-random-words method of masking themselves.
Clear, Dark Skies
just kill everyone
this observation isn't really useful, neither is yours
any government that acts as you suggest will gradually lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people that it governs. and then it's just a matter of time and creativity. sure, it might take a long time and it might involve a lot of suffering but a government that acts as you outline is doomed eventually. like i said, any technology can be overcome by enough committed individuals: where there is a will there is a way. no technology can defeat human creativity. simple logic: if a given technology/ protocol/ system was made by a human, therefore, another human can circumvent it/ surpass it/ destroy it/ render it ineffective.
as a corollary, this is why democracy is the only government that really works: it is the only government that manufactures legitimacy. all other governments, of whatever form, lose legitimacy over time. this is because the will of the people it governs are not periodically consulted. people are naturally distrustful. distrust only grows when people aren't consulted
democracy is messy and ugly and has lots of problems, but in terms of legitimacy and stability, it comes out on top. this observation trumps all of the negatives you can say about democracy, and so democracy comes out as the best form of government in the world, simply because all other forms of government are worse off in the aspects of government that matter the most: legitimacy and stability. a lot of other things matter in terms of making an effective and successful government. but none as much as these two
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Apparently the 183 spam messages in my Gmail box missed the memo.
then why is my gmail inbox chuck full of japanese sex spam?
I am seeing they are using a new form of attack via embedding spyware
on machines that force pop-ups/pop-ins .
Some of this new stuff even disables pop-up blockers, spybot, and
anti-virus software .
Firefox seems to work well against it for now, but they are making
flash and java based critters in the near future is the buzz .
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
you can't solve a problem by just accepting the problem
you simply don't understand the nature of terrorism or drug addiction
the war on terror and the war on drugs has many problems, flawed initiatives, etc. i don't care about the specifics, i'm talking about the principles involved: there will always be malcontents who seek violence, and unconstrained access to highly addictive substances just results in a lot of addicts. those are hard, real problems. the principal of fighting these things is what i care about, not the specifics of the fight. you don't understand the scope of what i am saying if you attack what i am saying. don't ascribe to my words meanings i am not implying
there will always be malcontents who seek violence, and unconstrained access to highly addictive substances just results in a lot of addicts. do you deny either observation? then you don't understand what terrorism/ hard drug use really is
simply put, every single negative you can demonstrate about the war on drugs/ war on terror i accept and acknowledge. except that the negatives of not fighting these things is worse. that's really about the entire argument we can possibly have on the issue
bring up every single problem with the war on drugs/ war on terror you want, if you were smart, you would realize that rationalizing not fighting them doesn't make sense. you really just want to fight them in a different way. then you realize we don't have a disagreement at all, we are just proposing different policies to fight the same war we are on the same side of
except i don't care about policy, i'm talking about the principal involved. so if you think i am supporting gw bush, or you think i think marijuana should be illegal, then you don't understand what i am really saying. i'm not arguing policy, i'm arguing principal. get me now? don't ascribe to my position that i am defending something i am not defending. the principal of waging war on heroin or al qaeda is not the same as defending the actual policies of the bush administration. got me now?
welcome to reality: there is no such thing as route which hurts no one, only the route which hurts less people than the other route. not waging war on hard drugs/ terrorism is a route which actually winds up with more people hurt. if you don't understand that, you have no idea what terrorism or hard drug addiction is
therefore, you wage war on heroin, meth, cocaine (the highly addictive drugs ONLY... marijuana, lsd, nonaddictive drugs: these should be legal), and you wage war on terror (bush invading iraq might be called part of "the war on terror", but again, the specifics of a flawed policiy don't matter to me, it's the PRINCIPAL of opposing terrorism that matters to me: you have to take out the trash, or it just accumulates and stinks up the place)
i'm merely demonstrating to you simple maintenance issues, police issues, involved with maintaining civilization. it's just taking out the trash. it's mundane, and there's no way around these tasks, unless you want your house to gradually fill up with garbage (just remove a problem by not calling it a problem, as you suggest) or do nothing that makes garbage, and therefore not really live (the all-out war that believes you can kill a problem completely without utterly hobbling and impoverishing the existence of good people who have nothing to do with terrorism and hard drugss)
do you understand me now?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Curve breaker!
hi
...since I got server-side SpamAssassin and Thunderbird working for me.
I have no statistics of how many spams I get each year because I don't care to count them. However I can recall how much annoyed I have felt, and I can tell you that I am similarly annoyed with spam this year than last one. The only recent development worth metioning is that local spam houses have popped up here in my country (Costa Rica), but they are not particularly annoying.
Another way to measure it is the compexity of the anti-spam infrastructure. That has centainly increased for me since last year. I manage a dedicated server, and if I had to reinstall all the spam software that I have running today it will take me a lot more time than it would have taken last year. I now not only have spamassassin, but now I have to take measures regarding secondary MX and also now I have an antivirus running. I'm sure it will only get more complicated with time.
I would say I'm behind the bell curve too, until I start thinking about the dozen or so email addresses I have all funneling into my unified inbox. If I broke it down to how much spam per email I'd have to say that I'm at least not doing worse than I have been in the past.
if you are still unfortunate enough to be stuck with Yahoo, the ungodly AOL, or a half dozen other e-mail providers, including MSN that is supposed to get less spam now due to whatever M$ did - find somebody you know that has a GMail account (for those of you who dont know, GMail = Google Mail) and bug the hell out of that person until they send you an invitation email to let you register for a free Gmail account. I've had virtually NO spam using Gmail - I used Yahoo mail before, and yes, it has improved, but I still most of my messages were spam - now with gmail, the only thing that makes it through are automatic responses from /. and site registration responses.
At first I assumed he was only couting spam that made it past the spam blocking softwares, but as it appears his theory is proven based on a different set of assumptions and facts.
His entire article bases on the fact that the % of spams from all emails caught has dropped. This can mean one or more of many things which only follows his theory.
1. Spam has actually decreased
2. Spam has found ways to avoid being detected
3. The volume of email has gone up, with more actual email while spam increased at a slower rate
Honestly, I'd like to see more statistics and figures to decide how spam has changed in these past few years. Just by looking at #s from one company and what percentage they've stopped isn't enough to say much in my opinion.
HD Trailers
If you look at his proposed solutions way back when, they seem quite bizarre now - micropayments / microforfeits of computational time to a problem that has now been largely solved using combined machine/human intelligence eg Bayesian filtering etc.
Bill Gates seems to lack a real understanding of how people think and work. For him technical solutions come so naturally he seems to miss the human side to questions like this. Look how MS were blind to the potentials of networked communication in the mid 90's.
People say that he is a genius. Not just a 'real smart guy' but the likes of newton, da vinci.. Sometimes I wonder if people like that really think completely differently to everyone else, or if they just think they do since other people seem so backward to them, at least in certain areas.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
spam has passed its peak and is now declining.
For me the peak was two weeks ago when I received 30 emails a day from the FBI and the CIA telling me I visit illegal websites.
What if I'm greedy and take all the insurance payments for anyone sending me any email?
Could add up to at least a morning coffee, y'know.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
What CAN-SPAM does do is make it a criminal offense to forge headers. As a result, spam from any "legitimate business" is easily identifiable from the header. So it gets filtered out.
This wasn't what the Direct Marketing Association expected. But that's what happened. As a result, the spams from legitimate businesses don't get delivered, and that class of spam is dying out.
This leaves the people who forge headers. They're now criminals. They've been forced out of legitimate web hosting services onto "bulletproof" web servers in marginal countries. They can't send directly any more, or their connection will be pulled. Most of the open relays have been plugged. They've been reduced to spamming through zombies taken over by viruses. This means they're committing felonies, and jail is a very real possibility.
That's why spam is declining.
Just because you didn't have to click the delete checkbox by each and every spam doesn't mean they are not an irritation. Every piece of spam that goes to your account (inbox or spam) is a load on the server, of course that's google/yahoo's problem now. Don't underestimate the power of entropy, and remember there is a tiny chance legitimate emails are being filtered.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I recently decided to try and stop the sudden increase in spam that I'm getting on Gmail by creating a filter that moved all emails containing "CIALIS" to the trash. Needless to say, it didn't work. I'm not sure what they're doing to make a simple word get past a word filter. Especially against Google who seem to be masters of word recognition. Any ideas?
In the past year or two I have had much less spam.
Now I just get Deviled Ham. (ha ha)
But seriously,
Earthlink does a great job filtering out the spam. I go some days with no spam at all.
At its peak I used to get 50 or more a day...
I've had my current, free netscape address (look above) ever since I was 11 - call it about 5 years. (The mathematically inclined amongst you may be able to guess my age now!) Although a Hotmail account I held briefly got the occaisional spam, I actually never got spammed on my netscape. For a bit over a year now, I've had a secondary college address, which has also received no spam in the year it's been active.
I must have existed outside the bell curve since my pre-teens.
DATABASE WOW WOW
You too? :P
[ http://dp24.biz/blog ]
Once I installed my barracuda networks spam appliance, I don't get any spam.
Intelligent Design
The real questions would be:
1) Are email servers still getting more and more spam? I'd bet that they are, indeed.
2) Are we, the users, getting more and more spam with the implementation of better filtering? My answer to that is no and I still like to use Yahoo. I even use my email address for alot of risky things online and still have managed to train the SPAM filtering on Yahoo to a great degree.
So what do they mean when they say it is getting better? Less spam is ultimately getting to inboxes or less spam is being sent in the first place?
If Microsoft wanted to kill spam, a good start would be for them to run spamcheckers on all their outgoing mail. 80% of my email that SpamAssassin marks with 90% or higher probability of being spam through bayesian analysis is coming from MSN or Hotmail (and I've never seen a false positive).
I've been using the bayes option on spamassassin for the past several years, and I get just about no spam in my inbox. And I get over 500 per day in my spam folder. I get maybe one or two false positives a year, usually business email that I actually wanted. I train on ham and spam regularly with a script. I tweaked the scores of the bayes tests to be more extreme than the default. I don't even think about spam any more.
I think the key is training on personal email, as opposed to doing something systemwide. And with spamassassin, you've got to boost the bayes scores. Here's the important part of my user_prefs:
required_hits 5
# I don't want spamassassin to mistrain my filter!
bayes_auto_learn 0
# I'm going all out with this Bayesian stuff:
score BAYES_00 -2.0
score BAYES_01 -2.0
score BAYES_10 -1.0
score BAYES_20 -1.0
score BAYES_30 -1.0
score BAYES_40 -1.0
score BAYES_44 -1.0
score BAYES_50 5.0
score BAYES_56 5.0
score BAYES_60 5.0
score BAYES_70 5.0
score BAYES_80 6.0
score BAYES_90 6.0
score BAYES_95 7.0
score BAYES_99 7.0
But you 've got to train it a lot first... after that the maintenance is easy. So as far as I'm concerned, spam is solved. Maybe not for everyone, bur for me.
Cheers.
Based upon my logs and those of two other machines that I do mail admin for, I'm not seeing that at all. If anything, there are more infected Winboxen out there than ever before, spewing tons of trash, and it's usually the Russians, Soloway, or some mysterious spammer hosted in a block of Chinese servers, all sending via these compromised Winboxen. If anything, my numbers are down at home, though that's because I can be a bit more restrictive about my firewall rules. Spamassassin is doing a very good job at filtering a large majority of this drek.
Nah, you just live outside of the media bubble.
That's actually a pretty good parallel to the notion that if only some ubertechfix were forcibly applied to every compromised system, all the ills of the internet would magically go away.
As I've sometimes put it, "Enough duct tape silences anyone."
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Spam has become less a piece of mail in my inbox that my filter is trying to block and more about me having to waste (more) time on Friendster or MySpace denying requests from people that are suddenly interested in my hot sex.
Saving the World: One Drink at a Time
We won the war on Spam according to Bill Gates,
Just like we won the war on terrorism, according to John Ashcroft...
-Myke
1) Take Spamassassin
2) Make it work in Japanese
3) ???
4) Profit.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
You're the exception. The problem is that once a spammer figures out that your email address is a live one, it'll be added to more and more lists. So you got 10 last year. That's great but this is only January and I'll bet that by the end of this year you'll have a hell of a lot more than 10.
I didn't get any spam for a long time but they finally snagged my email address and now the only thing that keeps my email usable are the advanced spam filters.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I was checking Spamcop's (my mail provider) parent company Ironport www pages yesterday.
0 5_FINAL.pdf
Spam is dieing as you can see at http://www.ironport.com/toc/toc_spam.html
I think phishing by zombies are in rise.
http://www.antiphishing.org/ report available in pdf http://antiphishing.org/reports/apwg_report_Nov20
BTW if you report spam, reportphishing@antiphishing.org is a good CC: target.
an argument against democracy? please, by all means, attack america, say you hate the usa, what do i care? where did you hear me defend the usa? i'm not talking about the usa, i'm talking about democracy. do you understand the difference?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Spam dead? Could someone explain to me how spam reaching a plateau and slightly declining from that plateau constitutes the death of spam?
Last I checked, a zero value is not the same as a first derivative evaluating to zero.
Slashcode bug # 497457 - unfixed since December 2001 - Go look it up!
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Had to be asked.
--
This sig intentionally left
Can you do both ?
Bayesian filtering, specifically POPFile, has made spam pretty uninteresting to me. I check POPFile's logs about once a week, but it's just not very interesting anymore. I still get several dozen spams a week, but none of it sees my inbox.
This has pretty much been the situation since the late 2004. People said that spammers will find a way past statistical filters, but that hasn't happened yet.
Or rather what I am saying is that all social and political problems can be solved with technology. It just depends on your application of the technology and how far you are willing to go with the application.
Well, I guess if you count destroying the source of the problem through murder or suicide, you're correct. How do you solve any problem with technology? Shoot anyone who thinks the situation is a problem.
While you're technically correct, you've really stretched the definition of "solving the problem" to the point of absurdity and pointlessness. This serves no end other than making it obvious the problem wasn't rigidly defined.
AccountKiller
"Spam is dead!
And no one cares!
I there is a hell!
I'll see you there!"
--Heresy from The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails, sort of.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Dude... the comment was good, and while I don't agree with it, it was interesting. But the reason I'm writing is... well, for the love of Dog, man, learn to use periods!
Mission Accomplished!
________________________________________________
suwain_2
What CAN-SPAM does do is make it a criminal offense to forge headers. As a result, spam from any "legitimate business" is easily identifiable from the header. So it gets filtered out.
This wasn't what the Direct Marketing Association expected. But that's what happened. As a result, the spams from legitimate businesses don't get delivered. Attempts to get around this "problem", like Bonded Spammer, didn't really catch on. So spam is almost useless to legitimate businesses now.
This leaves the people who forge headers. They're now criminals. So they've been forced out of legitimate web hosting services onto "bulletproof" web servers in marginal countries. They can't send directly any more, or their connection will be pulled or IP addresses blocked.
So now they have to find some illegal way to send spam. Which is getting harder. Most of the open relays have been plugged. They've been reduced to spamming through zombies taken over by viruses. This means they're committing serious felonies, and long jail sentences are a very real possibility.
Spam is now a branch of organized crime, not marketing. And it's highly visible organized crime, which makes it vulnerable. It's not that hard to follow the money. We need to push for more law enforcement priority in this area.
That's why spam is declining.
the day I started using Dspam ( http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/dspam/ )
Actually the piece was in the Technology supplement of Thursday's Guardian newpaper. The Observer is a Sunday paper.
Dave...
you haven't noticed because you're not using adequate spam filtering.
this is an illusion though.
80% of the traffic on my email server is spam.
regardless of closed relays, spamassassin and SPF implemented.
it's alot easier to send 500,000 emails than it is to block them.
They're using their grammar skills there.
And this friendly guy in Nairobi gave me a new year gift of a million dollars.
Okay, here's quite a fancy approach to get rid of SPAM, I suppose. I haven't found a way that spammers might get around this one.
First of all, all your email will be pased through a qmail setup. With qmail you can easily create new virtual accounts under your own account. Is your account john@spamkicker.com, you can set up john-iscool@spamkicker.com or john-has_a_bad_day@spamkicker.com etc etc
When John sets up his account under his domain 'spamkicker.com', his initial email address will be john@spamkicker.com
This email address will NOT be used by him personally. This account is the spam-lure. You'll see why...
Now, when John wants to contact his girlfriend Andrea at Hotmail, a new virtual email account is created with her hashed email address in it. The emailaddress will be john-EgFuas@spamkicker.com The EgFuas-part is a hashed index pointing to Andrea's email address inside John's contact list.
Every time Andrea answers an email from John, she'll send it to john-EgFuas@... Qmail sees this rctp address, checks to see if the mail-from is correct (the hash says it's andrea; is it really from her from-address?) and if so, qmail puts this message in John's inbox.
Now, if someone new tries to contact John, he'll email to john@spamkicker.com
Qmail detects this email, and replies immediately with a question that John has set up: "Please go to my website at www.john.spamkicker.com and tell me my dog's name in the subject of your email"
(Of course any other question could also work, like "how much is three plus 3?")
This email is returned to the sender. Once the sender has replied to that correctly, the sender is given a new hash and his original email is put in John's inbox. The address is considered valid.
Spammers don't reply to email. In fact they don't even receive it. So there's no way (or very,very little way) that this scheme for new-contacts would be compromized by spammers.
Now, what if John wants to send out one message to a couple of his friends? Surely he can't use his hashed-email account -which is personalized- for a group of friends?
Indeed, he cannot. But as John is the one who's initiating this, he is also the one who can create virtual accounts for this specific group. He won't even know it of course, cause his email program will create a new hash to which all recipients of this group can answer. Noone else.
If a spammer would catch email addresses off the net, he would also need to fake the sender's email address correctly. This is virtually impossible nowadays; spammers don't harvest these combinations of email addresses.
It looks like a fail-safe system to me. There's only one catch: if someone else sends out a group-message, John will receive it on his personalized account for that person (john-EgFuas for Andrea). Still, if someone else in that group does a group-reply (with all CC's in it), the john-EgFuas account should accept emails from that group too, at least for the time being.
As Andrea has been marked as 'okay' (she's hashed) I think it's fairly safe to accept everybody on her CC-list as temporarily-okay.
But as far as I can think, that's the only catch there is to this system. It can be done virtually transparent to the user (John, Andrea) and it catches all the shit that's send to John by either:
- incorrect recipient to the hashed email address
- no reply to the question-mail for newcomers
Can anybody think of a way to trick this system?
i will agree with the author
i have 2 gmail adresses one public, one private
i forward all emails from the public to the private
and to be honest i only get 1-2 spam messages a week and they all end up straight
away in the spam box
While I generally agree with you, I wouldn't put "spam/ drugs/ terror/ pedophilia" in the same line. There are key differences between spam/terror/pedophelia on one side and drugs on the other: drugs have sellers and customers -- both of them benefit from business in some way, while spam, terror, pedophelia is more like a violence of some sort.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
2003:9,000-10,000 (don't remember exact)
2004:11,000 (don't remember exact)
2005:20,764
I've had an unfiltered account for years (client side filter, but i still keep them for a year.)
Within a month of the can spam law starting I noticed a large increase in spam. I don't know if it was related, but since then its been almost double.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You mean Nairobi, Kenya?
I work there and I get spam so I can share the pain.
:)
I also get the usual "Congrats on exiting a milestone" then 10 managers following him saying "Yeah what he said"
Thats almost worse than spam
I have been system administrating several large scale email servers with around 50,000 users or so in total. During the "spam peak" we would have over 400 spam emails a minute being marked which was around 60% of the total email volume through that period. Now we are seeing around 60 emails a minute with more users and domain names on the system than before. However statistics are not everything. If we look more closely at the stats we see that while we would have an average of 400 emails per minute as spam it would peak up to several thousand a minute at times and sometimes it would be less than 20-30 spam emails a minute. While now we are almost flat lining at around 55-65 spam messages which means its not as big a drop as would have originally expected but it is still a drop. One of the issues we also note is that many of the cable providers are now blocking port 25 which was traditionally a large percentage of the traffic spam on our service.
Why are you throwing your gmail address everywhere and not using some free temporary e-mail aliases ? (Such as spambox, jetable, or your own).
Crude Oil has or is just about peaked. I don't see many companies or governments publicising that statistic much. It seems that the article contradicts the findings anyway. They say that there is a reduction from 80% to 60%, but actually the justification is that there are so many filters in place now. It is a bit like looking at the park, noting that not so much litter is lying around anymore and saying "people are dropping less litter", when actually there are just more litter pickers working in that park. - People may well be dropping more litter.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
It's spam or Spam. Not SPAM.
Spam declining? You've gotta be kidding.
Last October, as I was in the process of fine-tuning my SpamAssassin installation, I took the time to compute some stats to get a better idea of the big picture. The results?
Between November 11, 2004 and October 9, 2005, a bit less than a year, my mailbox had received 95708 confirmed spams.
On the other hand, in the last week of October 2005, I had received an average of 419.42 spams per day. Take that number and scale it to a year: 153193 spams per year. That's 60% more than before!!!
Given, my mailbox might not be a "typical" one, since I've been using the same address for over a decade, and it's all over the place (for example, in several WHOIS records), and I will admit that the spam that actually makes it to my mailbox has declined — the various tools I use to filter my mail keep improving, and I give them a good tune-up once a year or so — but with these numbers, I really don't see how anyone could claim that spam itself is declining... yet. It's the anti-spam tools that are improving. Or maybe spam is getting easier to detect, because "we've seen it all" already? Of those 95708 spams, 97.4% scored above 99% on a Bayesian analysis. Combine this with a few other methods, and I rarely see more than a spam or two in my inbox. And I haven't ever had a single false positive (yes, I check them all... once in a while... which reminds me that I'm overdue...)
Oh, I forgot to mention that those numbers do not include any viruses that have been silently dropped by ClamAV before ever making it to SpamAssassin. Nowadays that includes some phishing spams too.
"Words have meaning, and names have power." -- Lorien
If spam is dead, the the necromancer sending it to my inbox every day is doing an outstanding job.
Well, that answers that question... note to self, never write any self-negating articles.
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
Your post triggered an idea.
:-) /Jowi
The email client, or the recieving server, should trigger an alert if the email-sender is unknown (not in your address list for example) just like IM clients do.
"Incoming email from ted.sells.crack@buyme.ru, but the sender is not on your list. Would you like to or ?"
Think about it as the communication between a DHCP server (lets say a router) and a DHCP client (a PC).
This message would be triggered *before* the email itself is delivered, in other words; the sending server must wait for confirmation from the recieving server before sending the email.
Is this possible?
P.S. Maybe I should patent this idea
Spam is rampant still. My old college account remains active and is forwarded to my gmail account and I get about 20 a day.
Causing Chaos Everywhere,
Nik J.
The strange world of a loner, in a populous city, drowning in society
If anyone is killing spam its Gmail and not my Hotmail account with still 270 and counting messages..
I got almost a third more spam in 05 than 04. I guess I exist outside the bell curve on this one.
Actually, wouldn't this put you in one of the tails of the curve (upper tail), not outside of it? I'm just sayin'.
If you can't just be yourself, then be more like me, ok?
I do maintain an AOL account for nostalgic reasons.
*pause for cries of herecy and such*
Anyway, the majority of the spam hitting my mailbox has Chinese characters in the title...which, unfortunately, AOL's custom word list refuses to accept. I think this is the first time I thought "damn, why aren't they using Unicode?" Seriously, what the hell is the hold up?
The author writes..."Yet the amount of spam seems to be declining. Postini (www.postini.com) keeps real-time data on the amount of spam it stops. A few years ago, it said spam made up around 80% of all the email circulating. When I looked last week the figure was about 60%."
This doesn't prove that spam is declining, it just shows that the ratio of spam to overall email traffic is declining (according to Postini's numbers). If the number of email messages grows at a rate greater than the number of spam messages, the percentage of spam would appear to decline, even though the number of spam messages could be ingreasing. It could also mean that more spam is getting through Postini's filters.
One word... Spambayes (http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/) In 5 months at 250+ messages per day, it hasn't made a single error. And this was done with training only 20 messages as good or bad. My brother has been using it for over 8 months on two domains to the tune of 1500+ per day... and not one error.
But in response to the article, yes spam is a problem. And no, you're not the only that has noticed.
Run a trace to find the originating IP, attempt to confirm identity, try to isolate an address, then send the contents of the spam folder to them (auto mail can be useful.) Nobody likes getting 8000 spam in one day.
are my kung-fu...and it is strong. Na banners, scriptkiddie pages irritating flashy movies no nothing, except for the information I was looking for, loads faster too.
:D
Oh and even the pages of electronic banking are working with this
Just 1 site is not working, the M$ upgrade site for my gaming computer called M$XP
Message from god, Please logoff, rebooting the Universe
I mean my one gmail account gets a lot of spam, but it's the account I post online, so it's pretty much expected. All of my other accounts are basically spam-less, though I get maybe one a week total.
The real problem is phishing attacks - I get three or four a day. For everything - ebay, half, paypal, hell even Amazon which I've never gotten before this winter.
Seriously, been seeing an upsurge of spam... not a decline.
The difference between steve jobs's and bill gates's reality bubbles are that steve's produces positive results while bill's result in users getting f'd over when the "defeated" threats arrive(malware, spyware, virus(s), security flaws, a**-backward drm, etc.)
Every time I _have_ to start up IE, I', wonderiing if _this_ time, I'll get screwed over.
Winged Power Photography
"Spam is Dead" - Arthur
"Arthur is Dead" - Spam
n.b.: for you youngun's out there, this is a play on a 1970's bumper sticker:
"God Is Dead" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche Is Dead" - God
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Except her policies aren't carried out very well. National Security advisor? How 'bout advising the president that Iraq wasn't a threat? She blew that one... or maybe she was in on the whole lie, in that case her "political science" acumen should have tipped her off to what a BAD IDEA invading Iraq was. So she whored her way into the big time...big deal. We'll see how well the state department does reconstructing Iraq now that they've been given the job since defense botched it. This(the iraq occupation) is the real deal: ass kissing doesn't matter, being a right wing black woman doesn't matter. She's playing with the big boys now...they're going to bomb the hell out of her little school painting and power plant projects and her PhD won't mean shit.
I've been unable to find a lot of evidence of Condi's academic career. Her PhD in Sovietology has been published as a book. One that has received some less-than-complimentary reviews. She made a meteoric rise through the ranks to become Provost at Stanford. She won a teaching award at Stanford. She has also been a US administration hack since before she got her PhD.
If somebody could point me to her academic CV - not the fluff the White House publishes - showing her journal publications and other scholarly contributions, I'd be much obliged.
The most likely way that will happen is if someone notices (preferably before an actual incident) that spam is an excellent criminal/terrorist comm channel (by steganographically encrypting messages in the anti-filter junk attached to the spam mailing). Traffic analysis is defeated by sending the message to millions of random people, a few of whom know that the hidden message exists.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Spam was about 20 a day until about 2 weeks ago.
It suddenly jumped to over 100 a day.
Yay... I guess the war is won. Not.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com