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Google Says Spam Volumes On the Rise
alphadogg writes "Despite security researchers' efforts to cut spam down to size, it just keeps growing back. The volume of unsolicited email in the first quarter was around 6 percent higher than a year earlier, according to Google's e-mail filtering division Postini. Security researchers have won a few significant battles against the spammers in the last year, first against those hosting the spammers' control systems, and later against the control systems themselves, but they will have to change tactics again if they want to win the war. In the first half of last year, security researchers concentrated their efforts on identifying the ISPs or hosting companies that allowed command-and-control servers to operate, and shutting these botnet purveyors down. The success of that tactic was short-lived, however."
Yes, because the inconvenience of mashing the 'delete" key a few times is exactly comparable to the inconvenience of having a family member kidnapped and held against their will. Why not involve the FBI in the fight against SPAM, it's not like they have anything better to do.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
you don't declare a war on spam, win it, and then spam is forever gone
Why not? It worked on drugs, terrorism, obesity and poverty.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
the same applies to hard core drug addicts
I agree with everything you said, except this. Please note that addicts are not the problem; violent dealers and a black market are the problem. Eradicate the black market and the dealers by legalizing and regulating it, and you will find much of the violence and crime associated with the substances will go away.
Last time I checked, there weren't roving gangs fighting over turf so they could sell Heineken on the back streets of inner cities...they just open a beer store.
Living With a Nerd
Actually, if you look at it purely in monetary terms, spam is probably a bigger problem in the United States than terrorism
Spam bankrupted an entire industry?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The "few seconds" times the amount of spam just one of the major spammers sends out in a month comes to easily an entire human lifetime.
So does the time we spend idling in traffic. Your point?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
http://www.41pounds.org/
this site is a way to globally tell junk mailers to fuck off
onwards goes the eternal arms race
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
read the rest of my fucking comment past the first sentence, then respond. because i already address what you write
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I said it before and I'll say it again: It's all Microsoft's fault. Thanks to the Microsoft swisscheese security model, millions of computers are turned to zombies which in turn send the spam.
Microsoft could very well give free upgrades with improved security models for old boxes - but OH NO, PIRACY! GASP! We must not give the benefit of a secure operating system to those damned overseas pirates!
Thanks to the "genuine advantage" scam, XP users are skipping Microsoft upgrades rather than having to deal with Big Brother taking control of their computers.
Meanwhile, botnets are roaming around the world, running in infected XP machines while their users are oblivious to the fact. How to solve that? Users think that by purchasing antiviruses the problem will be fixed. It's as if botnets and antiviruses formed a very well-thought ecosystem, with the antiviruses relying on the viruses' threat to survive.
Fix the security of the machines, and both will disappear: Botnets will become more and more scarse, and antiviruses will become redundant and disappear for lack of use. Sadly, that doesn't go well with Microsoft struggling to sell us more and more versions of Windows. If Microsoft comes with its own antivirus, antivirus companies will sue.
Spam will not be over until it becomes unprofitable for Microsoft and the antivirus companies to have all those zombies running in the wild. That will only happen if spam quantity becomes exceedingly high. But that won't happen because of the bandwidth costs. The outcome is that spam will increase slowly, as bandwidth costs become lower, and that people will still find it tolerable, as long as they pay for an OS with a slightly improved security and the mandatory antivirus.
For now, all we can do is educate people on spam, botnets, and contribute with our grain of sand by switching to a more secure OS.
because people are constantly getting emails from people they never got email from before, and they WANT that functionality, for a million reasons, from registering for a site to getting a query from an old classmate to getting a reply from a stranger about a blog post
the whitelisting you describe is obviously not the solution
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it