One Man's Fight Against Forum Spam

JWSmythe writes "Free Internet Press has an interview with 'Random Digilante,' an anonymous hacker who has been taking over forum spammers' email accounts, and notifying forum operators to delete those accounts. It looks like his reasoning is sound, and his methods are safe, where he won't hurt any real users."

Comments

Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

No matter your reason, it's illegal to access other peoples email accounts without their permission. Even more so when you disable the accounts.

If you do what you want based on what you feel is right, we might just not have any laws at all. There is a reason why the laws are created by the society as whole and not a single person or a group with single interest.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Deal with it.

Re:Illegal

[clone53421]

He’s thought of that already, and seems to have his case made. RTFA.

RD: If I were taking over an account that was created by a human being who actually cared to contribute to my forums, yes that would be illegal.

FIP: Are you concerned about the possible legal consequences of your actions?

RD: Here is the reasoning I use, and I know that a lot of people argue it.
Especially now that I have a few dedicated forums whose only reason for existing is that they capture the login credentials of forum spammers, my feeling is that they're not people, they're robots. Xrumer [a forum spamming software] is a 100% automated process. The human has to set up the email address where the responses get sent for things like confirming your account by clicking on a link, but everything after that is done by the software. No human being is harmed by what I do, only a piece of software. If they cared, they would pay attention to the fact that these accounts are getting taken over very regularly by me. They don't. They just set up new accounts and start over.

It's hard to feel "bad" about taking these accounts over. All I can tell you is that I have never taken over any account that was not very obviously being solely used repeatedly to auto-register to forums. In fact by the time I get to them it's obvious that the spammer only set them up from 1 - 6 days prior to me taking it over. There are no human-written messages in any of these accounts. I certainly would not have gone so public with this activity if there had been. Only purely automated messaging has ever been present in any of these, and I have enough hard data to back that up.

Basically he claims that since a robot registered the e-mail accounts, you aren’t infringing on any person’s rights.

I doubt that it’d fly, actually, but who knows.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

He says it's "a legal gray area".

Can you say specifically what laws he has broken, and in what jurisdiction?

It's not very clear to me exactly what he did, so I'm on the fence as to whether he committed a crime.

In order for me to say he committed a crime, I need to know very specifically what law was broken and what evidence supports the accusation. Generally, my standard for evidence is an approximation of the federal rules of evidence, but I am not very strict about it.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

He says it's "a legal gray area".

Can you say specifically what laws he has broken, and in what jurisdiction?

It's not very clear to me exactly what he did, so I'm on the fence as to whether he committed a crime.

In order for me to say he committed a crime, I need to know very specifically what law was broken and what evidence supports the accusation. Generally, my standard for evidence is an approximation of the federal rules of evidence, but I am not very strict about it.

See, see there... you're asking the whiner to substantiate what he's whining about. That might happen but it's extremely unlikely.

Re:Illegal

[Quothz]

If you do what you want based on what you feel is right, we might just not have any laws at all. There is a reason why the laws are created by the society as whole and not a single person or a group with single interest.

So, just as an analogy, if the police decided to stop enforcing laws against auto theft, you believe it would be wrong for others to do so. I don't think that holds water. What this guys is doing is indeed illegal, but not immoral; when our government is unwilling or unable to enforce or prosecute laws it becomes incumbent upon non-sanctioned individuals to protect society by doing so. The simple fact is that the government is not able to even begin to scratch the sheer volume of spam, nor is it interested in going after spammers unless it can wrench a large settlement and some headlines out of the deal. If we wish to preserve the Internet as a medium for the exchange of ideas, some of us must take action to protect it from those who exploit it at a very real, monetary cost to innocent people.

Re:Illegal

[corbettw]

That's not at all what he's claiming. He's claiming that since a robot is operating the account, and he disagrees with the motivation behind the running of that robot, it's OK for him to hack into someone else's account. He even admits that a human being has to initially open the mail account before turning on the software to run it.

I dislike people who have their POP clients set to download email every minute and process it using filters to put any email from me into a special folder. Does that give me the right to then hack their email accounts and take them over? Using the logic RD outlined above, it very much does. Which should show just how spurious his logic is.

There's a reason why your mother taught you that two wrongs don't make a right. The world would be a better place if more people remembered that.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Unauthorized Access is against the law in quite a few juristictions.

Re:Illegal

[Krau Ming]

he is Rick Dekard.

Re:Illegal

[Monkeedude1212]

Clearly - the best way for him to get around this legal debacle, is to take the breaking into and shutting down process and make it into a simple shell script.

With Robots fighting robots, he's not actually breaking into the accounts, they aren't actually registering, and its all fair game. And then when people claim that they were in fact the ones registering the accounts, they can stand before the court with 2000+ charges against the CAN-SPAM act.

Re:Illegal

[Duradin]

And that action should go through the boxes in the correct order without skipping any. Jumping right to the 'ammo' box isn't the right way to do things in a lawful society.

Re:Illegal

[clone53421]

Well, his other point was, who’s going to complain? the robot?

Chances are the human operator doesn’t even know what happened to the account, the robot just flags it as deactivated and asks the human to feed it more accounts. They probably don’t have any way of telling that somebody hacked the account and closed it vs. e-mailing the e-mail provider and having it shut down properly.

Of course the main question (in my mind, at least) is why spammers are registering forum accounts with the same password they used to register the junk e-mail account that they’re registering under...

Re:Illegal

[geminidomino]

The flawed "if illegal(X) then immoral(X)" argument was already addressed, so I'll skip it.

But this:

There is a reason why the laws are created by the society as whole and not a single person or a group with single interest.

is arguable, at best, and horse hockey at worst.

Re:Illegal

[gmuslera]

Somewhat make me remember irc bots (or more recently, google wave bots), where some where spammers, some don't. Putting them all into the same bag darkens a bit that gray area. Somewhat a rightful use of automated tools became quicksand because spammers can use it too.

Re:Illegal

[Jaysyn]

There is an easy fix for this. In his forum's usage agreement he needs to add a line stating that if he detects you are running a spambot he has the right to hack your account & disable it. Problem solved.

Re:Illegal

[Pteraspidomorphi]

I think you're right, but is it more illegal than spamming? I believe the kind of spam sent by these people/bots is illegal in the United States and several other countries (though I'm not american, so I may be wrong). The sender is hiding his identity, deliberately getting around spam prevention systems and offering no method for opting out. So we're dealing with criminals here, and what is law enforcement doing about it? Random Digilante writes in his blog that he contacts ISPs, who would normally be expected to investigate these people (who inclusively break the ISPs own terms of service), but they usually do nothing. So while the taking over of e-mail addresses registered by criminals for the sole purpose of breaking laws and annoying the hell out of everyone may not be exactly nice, shouldn't you save your indignation for the actual spammers, their customers, ISPs, law enforcement agencies and lawmakers? Or for people who are out in the streets embezzling, scamming, mugging, kidnapping, raping and murdering?

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

And then when people claim that they were in fact the ones registering the accounts, they can stand before the court with 2000+ charges against the CAN-SPAM act.

CAN-SPAM was quite specific to email spam, this guy is dealing with forum spam, which in and of itself is actually legal (although some of the content of those spam messages might not be).

Re:Illegal

[mcgrew]

No matter your reason, it's illegal to access other peoples email accounts without their permission. Even more so when you disable the accounts.

Not if you're the email provider. I had a gmail account that I used for mundane things like emailing friends and family (real meatspace friends, not facebook friends). They informed me that the account was being taken down for violating TOS. No indication of which Ts of the OS were violated; like I said, I used it for normal, mundane emailing and there is no way I violated any terms whatever. No way to contact or discuss it with a human.

I no longer use Gmail, of course. Even though they would be happy to set up another account, no thanks, Mr Google. What you did was evil. If you're a Google insider I'd like to talk to you, because I've been kind of pissed at Google for this for a year now.

Re:Illegal

[xenn]

I believe you are not correct all of the time. In certain circumstances it is commendable for the populace to stand up for itself in lieu of assumed protection, toward currently post-useful statutes.

Indeed, it is my duty.

Re:Illegal

[idontgno]

Here's a historical lesson in automated spam-fighting in the ancient equivalent of fora:

http://catb.org/jargon/html/A/ARMM.html

I was reading USENET a lot at the time of the Depew incident. Newsgroups were pretty much unusable for nearly a month, and yucky for months after that.

Re:Illegal

[Scrameustache]

he claims that since a robot registered the e-mail accounts, you aren’t infringing on any person’s rights.

I doubt that it’d fly, actually, but who knows.

Oh, it certainly wouldn't fly with Jean-Luc Picard, that's for sure.

Re:Illegal

[Dishevel]

The world would be a better place if we had a justice system instead of a legal system. Until that day....Fuck the spammers and destroy the bots.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

If a machine starts acting up, you unplug it. That's all he's doing.

Re:Illegal

[Scrameustache]

What this guys is doing is indeed illegal, but not immoral; when our government is unwilling or unable to enforce or prosecute laws it becomes incumbent upon non-sanctioned individuals to protect society by doing so.

Bruce, we've been over the five stages of grief a million times: I keep telling you, you're stuck at Anger and you need to move on.

Re:Illegal

[gorzek]

But he is doing this on other people's sites. Including mine, coincidentally. I already have spam filtering methods in place. Spambots can register but they can't do much of anything. I "trap" them quite effectively.

I'm rather annoyed that he is breaking into spambot accounts on my site and sending me messages to deactivate their accounts. I don't need to deactivate their accounts--they are well-contained already. His "helpful" messages wind up being a greater irritant to me than the spambots themselves. I don't need you to tell me how to run my site, thanks.

Re:Illegal

[qwijibo]

As a juror, I would have a hard time voting to convict a person for such an offense. There is very little you can do legally against spammers, so just as the legal system turns a blind eye to their actions, there's nothing wrong with doing the same to vigilantes going after them.

Re:Illegal

[Monkeedude1212]

and it has since been widely cited as a cautionary example of the havoc the combination of good intentions and incompetence can wreak on a network

That's about all I needed to read from the link. Emphasis Mine.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

    Well, it's impossible to say if he or she has broken any laws. No one knows what jurisdiction applies. The interview was done in English (assume he didn't use a translator), so lets say that we limit it to countries that have English speakers (native or otherwise) Oh. That's every country. I wouldn't want to be the one figuring out jurisdictional laws for 1.8 billion people, spread out over every country.

Re:Illegal

[Bobfrankly1]

I dislike people who have their POP clients set to download email every minute and process it using filters to put any email from me into a special folder. Does that give me the right to then hack their email accounts and take them over? Using the logic RD outlined above, it very much does. Which should show just how spurious his logic is.

The POP using people you describe are taking their email and sorting it how they want to within their own mailbox. You may not like it, but it's their space.
The forum spammers you're comparing them to use their e-mail address and software with the sole purpose of invading his website, which he pays real money for, and spends time maintaining, and which other people use to have conversations. The spammers further use this software to stuff his website with ads for pills, child porn, and other nastiness. This slows down his server (due to the load of fake accounts registering and posting) and can make his forums unreadable, driving away users. If his forums use ads, driving away users means a monetary loss

Your comparison is invalid, and your attempt at logic is laughable. They broke into his property, he kicked them out and took away their crowbar, which they signed up for under false pretenses.

Re:Illegal

[gknoy]

Keeping in mind that most people of us are less competent than we think we are, it's an especially good warning. :)

Re:Illegal

[Bobfrankly1]

Unauthorized Access is against the law in quite a few juristictions.

The only issue there is by suing "RD", they would be identifying themselves and making themselves an easy target for a return lawsuit. It's a stalemate.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

QQ

Re:Illegal

[Bobfrankly1]

There is a reason why the laws are created by the society as whole and not a single person or a group with single interest.

I almost choked laughing at this line. You must be delusional. In what part of the world do you reside?

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Google rep here.

There isn't a need to discuss this issue further. We have analyzed your search habits and other information about you, your family, your friends and your enemies. Based on your state of mind, there is no purpose served by pursuing this issue, so we'll mark it as closed. If you become more rational later we will let you know and accept your apology.

Google. Doing no evil since 1996.

Re:Illegal

[Bobfrankly1]

Doesn't sound like he's breaking into the accounts on other people's sites. He's just setting a vacation message ("Out of Office" for those stuck with Outlook) on the e-mail accounts that are used for spamming. The message only gets sent in response to e-mails that the account receives (according to his website).

Re:Illegal

[DaveGod]

If you do what you want based on what you feel is right, we might just not have any laws at all. There is a reason why the laws are created by the society as whole and not a single person or a group with single interest.

So, just as an analogy, if the police decided to stop enforcing laws against auto theft, you believe it would be wrong for others to do so. I don't think that holds water. What this guys is doing is indeed illegal, but not immoral; when our government is unwilling or unable to enforce or prosecute laws it becomes incumbent upon non-sanctioned individuals to protect society by doing so. The simple fact is that the government is not able to even begin to scratch the sheer volume of spam, nor is it interested in going after spammers unless it can wrench a large settlement and some headlines out of the deal. If we wish to preserve the Internet as a medium for the exchange of ideas, some of us must take action to protect it from those who exploit it at a very real, monetary cost to innocent people.

The analogy is incorrect; it should say "if the government decided to redact laws against auto theft". A point covered by the parent is that the police deciding to do or not do something is not close to "society as a whole". Many argue the government isn't either, but there's at least a pretence and theoretical association. This goes a long way to explaining why there is a slight air of plausibility that the police may one day cease bothering to enforce auto theft, yet the idea that the government may legalise it seems so absurd.

Secondly how laws are enforced is not the same as whether laws exist nor whether they are effective; for example the police generally do not enforce civil law (only criminal law).

But most important is the concept of due process. It is not only that auto-theft laws are designed by society and enforced by those appointed by and accountable to it, but the way in which this is done. This is utterly fundamental and without it any moral good that arises is merely by chance.

Re:Illegal

[darguskelen]

Actually, he didn't do this to your site. He setup a vacation responder on the e-mail address that the bot was using that automatically responded to YOUR automated e-mail. And I'm willing to bet that for every ONE person that knows how to run his site, the vacation auto responder HELPED a couple dozen people kill a spam account that they didn't want on their site. It also teaches those people to be a little more stringent with their registration requirements.

Re:Illegal

[cheekyjohnson]

"There's a reason why your mother taught you that two wrongs don't make a right"

No, that's just basic logic.

Re:Illegal

[gorzek]

It sounds like I misunderstood what he was doing. However, Google might be interested to know that he apparently has control over some (many?) spambot Gmail accounts, since that's where the messages I've got are coming from.

I do hope his messages are helpful to others but they sure aren't of much use to me.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you confusing this with the ultimate September (which was in 1993)?

How, pray tell, did the ARMM problem (which is only a test of the system in one group) cause newsgroups to be yucky for *months*?? WTF are you smoking?

It was pretty much a one or two-day incident, affecting one area of USENET (which happened to include many of those that were responsible for operating sites), cost in phone charges only a subset of people (but this of course was pretty transient), and might have caused some random downtime around various USENET running sites. Other than a few wearied admins in some affected IT departments, most of those just found the whole thing very funny and a nice Nelson Ha-Ha moment for Dick Depew and some of his accolytes.
How in the world do you associate this one incident with a multi-month effect?

Re:Illegal

[guyfawkes-11-5]

Never heard of change Xrumer, interesting. Vbulletin has a lot of plugins and user setting that capture or deny 99% of the spam. Its to the point that on a good Vbulletin setup, the only place a new user can add an external URL is in their profile, which would be a nofollow link anyway. I still haven't figured a way to deny a new user with less than 5 posts a link to their homepage though

Re:Illegal

[sosume]

"He's claiming that since a robot is operating the account, and he disagrees with the motivation behind the running of that robot, it's OK for him to hack into someone else's account"

It should be " it's OK for him to hack into *something* else's account" - it's not specific, and it's not setup by a human being, just some script running, so there can be no ownership
involved. Or would you claim that, would my dog succeed in opening a bank account, that I would be the legally responsible entity for that account?

Re:Illegal

[darguskelen]

They might. He didn't change any of the passwords, just guessed them, though. So Google might be more interested in knowing that spam is coming from the OTHER IPs that are accessing those same accounts. Heck, if they do a little digging I'm sure they can come up with more than a couple IPs that if blocked could stop a lot of spam.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

two wrongs don't make a right.

No, but three lefts do.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Who decides what boxes there are? Where they are? In which order they must be filled? Obviously there's really no laws being broken.
If a machine (against terms of the user agreement to make an account in the first place) creates an account, and then proceeds to spam (also against the terms of the user agreement) then getting rid of said account is not actionable in any way.

Re:Illegal

[vegiVamp]

So if he states that if he detects you running a spambot, he has the right to come over to your house and forcibly relieve you of your anal virginity, doesn't that solve the same problem ?

Stating intent does not necessarily make the announced action legal.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the old "you can beat up prostitutes because they can't complain to the cops" principle.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds you are supporting Arizona in their disagreement with the Feds over enforcement issues involving illegal immigration.

Re:Illegal

[ironjaw33]

I think you're right, but is it more illegal than spamming?

I think the real question is if this is any _different_ from spamming. This guy is sending unsolicited messages in large numbers that request something of the recipient.

Re:Illegal

[Mana Mana]

> [...] guys is doing is indeed illegal, but not immoral [...]

That's for a court of law to decide; ahem! His actions can best be described sans adjudication as "extralegal."

Not facilely, as you might be tempted to retort, an apropos aphorism is "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." Alternatively known as "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Re:Illegal

[BobMcD]

They might. He didn't change any of the passwords, just guessed them, though

Look, I understand that you like the guy, but you're fabricating facts:

By "take over" I mean that I would guess the password for the email account, gain access to the email account, change the user information, change the password, add a new signature, and create a "vacation message" that would automatically be sent in reply to any message the account received from that moment forward.

Not that it matters. One could reasonably argue that by allowing them to stay open, he is accepting the responsibility for any further actions done via those accounts. Also he's unduly taxing servers to spread his agenda. He is, in effect, sending forum admins spam from compromised accounts.

Re:Illegal

[BobMcD]

Your analogy doesn't account for the true nature of the crime, though, and this alone illustrates how it will never, ever, ever be effective in stopping spam.

If we want it to stop, we need to attach a cost to it. We could, for example, severely punish those who respond to spam ads. Or we could automatically bankrupt any company proven to willingly contract with a spammer. Or, finally, we could insist on 'postage' for our internet traffic, thereby limiting the volume of the crap we receive by virtue of the free market.

We'll never do any of that, though, so I fail to see the point of likening this to autos. You ought to liken it to stealing imaginary unicorns, as those are just as limitless and have precisely as few protections.

Re:Illegal

[Provocateur]

You know if you read the title using the Movie Trailer Announcer Voice ("In a world full of spam...One Man...his forums battered and infested by the enemy...HIS NAME..."), you might just wind up cheering him from the cheap seats.

Re:Illegal

[History's Coming To]

However, if the initial account was set up in breach of an ISP or mail provider's terms and conditions then it's not really a valid account anyway?

Re:Illegal

[improfane]

You have to be prepared to put up with some nastiness if you want to stamp out the bad.

You do not solve real world problems without getting your hands dirty.

That spam is a small cry to what the damage causes to the spammer community. This forces spammers to change tactics and forums to take action. It is good when there is resistance to spammer efforts, look at BigBlue and how that crumbled from the response.

Crime only exacerbates if you do not resist it. This is resistance.

If you don't do anything...anything at all, then what do we expect? For the problem to disappear over night?

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

You can figure out how to do all that with the site you administer, but you can't figure out how to filter his irritatingly helpful messages to you? Not quite sure what to make of that.

Re:Illegal

[BobMcD]

"The ends justify the means, and those who use violence while working towards justice are never wrong." This is a very human position, and is very normal. It also has several well known flaws.

Re:Illegal

[Hatta]

If you do what you want based on what you feel is right, we might just not have any laws at all.

When the average person is more likely to be victimized by the law than protected, and the average villain is more likely to use the law as a weapon than fear it, that doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

There is a reason why the laws are created by the society as whole and not a single person or a group with single interest.

Hahahaha, welcome to America.

Re:Illegal

[darguskelen]

Oops. I missed that part when I was reading the article. My point of view is not whether what he's doing is moral, immoral, legal or not. I know *I* would rather have someone notify me that there are some accounts on my forum that are specifically spam so I can take action against those accounts rather than let them fester to be used later. Apparently that is the unpopular opinion on /. in this case.

Re:Illegal

[AlphaCentauri4]

I believe the article said he spent four years contacting the owners of the forums to try to educate them that they are displaying advertising for stolen credit card data, and that he then tried notifying the hosting services, also with no response. Sounds like he agrees with your stipulation and followed it.

Re:Illegal

[Bobfrankly1]

Ah, the old "you can beat up prostitutes because they can't complain to the cops" principle.

That's one way to exaggerate it. Keep in mind that these "prostitutes" are the spammers filling up his forums with spam, some of which is child porn and fake pills.

Re:Illegal

[Mike Kristopeit 9]

claiming that he wouldn't have gone public if there WERE "human-written" messages is an admission of guilt... the crime isn't in the existence of messages, but the potential for such messages to exist. that potential did exist, and "Random Digilante" has conceded as such.

Re:Illegal

[Duradin]

That would be box one, the soapbox. Two left before getting to the ammo box.

Re:Illegal

[initialE]

So is this guy going to make a superhero costume or not? What you've written is the premise for Batman Begins.

Re:Illegal

[tepples]

And how would you recommend applying the ballot box or the jury box against foreign spammers?

Re:Illegal

[Duradin]

Seems like someone figured it out http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/10/06/0158227/Canadian-Spammer-Fined-Over-1-Billion/.

Re:Illegal

[RocketRabbit]

"There is a reason why the laws are created by the society as whole and not a single person or a group with single interest."

Since when? Most of the laws created since I have been alive have been created by groups with single interests, who get them passed by graft.

Disobeying an unjust law is patriotic.

Re:Illegal

[tepples]

For one thing, this billion dollar lawsuit took place in Canada, which has friendlier relations with the United States than some of the Eastern European and Asian countries where a lot of spam originates. For another, Facebook is large enough to have a multinational presence; most forums that Random Digilante defends are not.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

If the law says "Unauthorized Access EXCEPT against spammers" then I'd agree. Otherwise, you better go with the letter of the law. In your scenario, why even have laws? It sounds like you have already convicted a spammer which hasn't even been convicted of such.

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Just don't tell him to go into the light. Well, I'd worry more if she was telling me to go into the light.

    I'm not dead yet. It's just a flesh wound. Stop saying I'm dead. What do you mean that we always say that? What are you doing?

Re:Illegal

[mattsoftnet]

why do you feel threatened because of this? my basic understanding is that people are afraid of the unknown. first of all, hacking isn't some super power. it's just a greater understanding of how things work. now to my point, how do you know he's hacking your forum? my guess is he isn't! he's capturing the passwords of known spammer accounts and using that same password to access the email account. that's why he has his own forums set up to do this. he doesn't have access to the database driving your own forum, therefore he can't "hack it". it just takes a little understanding. I've actually seen this guy around myself. I've gotten messages similar to what he describes. I know he hasn't hacked my forum, the spammers are more guilty of this then anyone. the spammers do many many times more damage then he has done to them.

Predicted future news:

[Even on Slashdot FOE]

Forum spammer sues vigilante, gets both arrested. Vigilante does more time.

Re:Predicted future news:

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact only vigilante does time. Remember that only email spam is covered by law, forum spam is not.

Re:Predicted future news:

[geekoid]

As he should.

Re:Predicted future news:

[bsDaemon]

That's exactly what a spammer would say. Spam costs real people real money. Email is already a fairly heavily I/O bound process, especially at volume. I've seen spam floods kick a server from a load of 2 to a load of 15, and banning the sending IPs dropped the load immediately, but only once we figured out it was email that was causing the issue. After that incident, that became the first thing I'd check, if it weren't completely obvious that it was a problem account on the server (I was an admin at a web hosting company at the time).

The majority of my day as spent dealing with spam, either incoming or out going, sometimes from hacked accounts and other times from "email marketers" who would get entire /24's entered in spamhause and then keep legitimate email from being processed. That included personal correspondence, and a lot of times business mail from customers on vps or dedicated servers, who just happened to have the misfortune of having an IP in a block that got a bad reputation because of some douchebag.

Then, those people call into support, who of course can't do anything about it except come bother the admins. Then we have to find a new IP address that hasn't been tainted, reconfigure the mail server to use it, waste an IP in the process, and hope to stop the cause of the issue and get the old IP de-listed before we have to start all over again.

Spammers should be drawn and quartered. They are the worst, most vile people ever. If Francisco Franco molested baby kittens, he'd still not be as bad as a spammer.

Re:Predicted future news:

[vlm]

Forum spammer sues vigilante, gets both arrested. Vigilante does more time.

I'm guessing a jury trial might provide different results.

Re:Predicted future news:

[Dishevel]

You are guessing that a jury is made up of intelligent people who listen and dole out justice. Your guess is wrong.

Re:Predicted future news:

[Bobfrankly1]

Child porn and fake drugs are covered by a multitude of laws. These things being placed on a forum doesn't change this. Spammer does more time.

Re:Predicted future news:

[RaymondKurzweil]

You say the majority of your day (I assume working) is spent dealing with spam.

So why do you hate the people that essentially make your paycheck?

You can argue macroeconomic stuff, blah, blah, blah.... that has nothing to do with it... at the end of the day (this day) your current bread on the table is coming from spammers (by your account here)... if there wasn't spam, you as a resource would have to be reallocated.. not saying it wouldn't be... but it isn't today (and there is no one holding a gun to your head to work in your current job.. you could work at CostCo). Right now, as it stands, spam helps your personal bottom line.

So, cry me a river.

Re:Predicted future news:

[Anonymous Coward]

Spammers should be drawn and quartered. They are the worst, most vile people ever. If Francisco Franco molested baby kittens, he'd still not be as bad as a spammer.

*Clap* *Clap* *Clap*. Well said.

Re:Predicted future news:

[bsDaemon]

That was at my last job. I left for other reasons. But if it's a cross between infrastructure building/projects/expansion, or slogging against punk-ass mailers, I'll choose the digging through Perl to the playing whack-a-mole against the spammers.

There were a lot of projects and other tasks that got delayed or just died because we were too busy doing crap like that.

Re:Predicted future news:

[BobMcD]

Placed from the Soviet Union on which forum? One hosted in Thailand, perhaps?

So silly....

[catbutt]

Forum spam is best solved with good forum software. A good karma system is probably the best solution. I've never seen spam on slashdot (unless I dig through the low rated posts).

Re:So silly....

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad karma? Rush to fast? Increase karma size with v1agral! Bomb woman womb and be king! Souper special deal at RealFarmacee.cm!

Re:So silly....

[Darkness404]

Not really and Slashdot really highlights it because far too often people who disagree with the poster will mod that post down for no other reason other than that.

The reason why /. doesn't have much spam is because there is no market, how many people on Slashdot would want to buy P3n15 3nh@nc3rz?

Re:So silly....

[Anonymous Coward]

W0nt f0rum $of+w4r3? +ry 4 fr33! 83$t d34l 0n1in3 +0d4y! www.goodforumsoftware.ru/abigscam/takeallthemoney/spammill

Re:So silly....

[Monkeedude1212]

There's more to spam than just covering the page. He says the main reason he got into this was that spam was slowing his forums down. Wasted Bandwidth.

Re:So silly....

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could go the SomethingAwful route and charge money for the privilege to post. And then come up with a ton of douchebag rules that exist solely to make people have to repurchase their accounts. And still be populated solely by assholes.

But at least it's spam-free...

Re:So silly....

[corbettw]

how many people on Slashdot would want to buy P3n15 3nh@nc3rz?

You sell P3n15 3nh@nc3rz?!? Man, I need one of those! Where can I get one?

Re:So silly....

[catbutt]

You really believe that the reason that slashdot wouldn't have spam if people were able to post spam on slashdot and have it reach more than a few eyeballs?

Anyway, slashdots system isn't perfect, and is designed to do more than kill spam. Regardless I think it works fairly well for what it does.

For eliminating spam in forums and comments, all you need to do is this:

Give the readers the ability to mark comments as spam with one click, and, as long as the reader has a decent history of not abusing the priviledge, the message will disappear immediately.

This isn't that hard, but to do it well isn't trivial either. Probably best done by a company like Disqus where it is their business.

There would need to be some checks and balances, where a person can get reported for erroneously marking something as spam. The system needs to be scalable, so that the admin of the forum doesn't have to deal with much, as all the work is done by users, and there is a checks and balances system to determine how much to trust users.

The nice thing is that over time it reduces the incentive to bother spamming the forums, since (typically) the first person who sees a message, eliminates it. Also, on a system like disqus, where you have a global identity with some history, it could be smarter about how prominent to make posts if the person has no history of posting without being marked as spam.

Re:So silly....

[catbutt]

Yes but a good system will eliminate the incentive to bother spamming it.

Re:So silly....

[Ethanol-fueled]

Recently I have accessed the E-mail and Slashdot login of the user Ethanol-fueled, real name Ethan Pearsall from Santa Rosa California, who has been spamming Slashdot with racist comments and miscellaneous threats of violence against the emo culture, Mac users, and religious people.

Don't fret - I have changed the login information so that he will no longer spam Slashdot. This forum will be a much better place with him gone, so I do not care if you disagree with my methods. It serves him right. People should not be allowed to be dickheads online thinking that somehow it will not affect their working lives. I will now be able to submit my articles with +5 first posts without having to live in fear of Ethan's ridicule. God bless you all.

-- eldavojohn

Re:So silly....

[catbutt]

Well that's just stupid. Although what do you expect, given the name?

There are lots of smart ways to handle it that don't require extreme measures like charging to post, or having vigilantes out there hacking accounts. It amazes me this problem hasn't been addressed well yet.

Re:So silly....

[Caerdwyn]

Not really and Slashdot really highlights it because far too often people who disagree with the poster will mod that post down for no other reason other than that. The reason why /. doesn't have much spam is because there is no market, how many people on Slashdot would want to buy P3n15 3nh@nc3rz?

You answer your own question.

Re:So silly....

[Deep Esophagus]

Let me know if you find a good karma system. I have been on /. for years, have never posted anything remotely spammy, have attempted to participate in discussions... so why is my karma set at "bad"? I have no idea what, if anything, I can do about that and because of it my comments never appear in any discussion threads. It is likely nobody will ever see this unless, as you say, they dig through the low rated posts. Not that I'm bitter.

Re:So silly....

[Yetihehe]

There are lots of smart ways to handle it that don't require extreme measures like charging to post, or having vigilantes out there hacking accounts.

Please name some. I haven't seen a smart one yet.

It amazes me this problem hasn't been addressed well yet.

Maybe it's because there are no easy ways to prevent spam?

Re:So silly....

[clone53421]

I, and lots of other people, read at -1. Don’t assume that just because you’re starting at 0 nobody will read your post; Anonymous Coward posts at 0 by default.

If you want to get your karma back up, here are a few things to keep in mind. They may or may not help, but hey, it’s free advice.

Post early. Don’t post often. Make sure you aren’t just repeating someone else’s post. Funny doesn’t give you karma. Funny+Troll burns karma quickly. Sometimes it’s what you say. Sometimes it’s how you say it.

Re:So silly....

[catbutt]

That's fine that you do, but I don't consider it a big problem that those who want to read at that level are exposed to crap. As far as I'm concerned, the spam problem on slashdot is solved. I think slashdot's system could be a lot better (for instance, I think that those with good karma should ALWAYS be able to mark something as spam...not only when they have mod privileges), but at least there is little incentive to spam slashdot. I seriously doubt anyone who tries it is rewarded with any revenue from their efforts.

Re:So silly....

[Fjandr]

I ran a forum for a couple years that was used by a group of about a dozen people. It was targeted repeatedly by forum spammers.

The scale of the operation seems to have little bearing on whether they'll target something or not. It's much more likely that the key issue is whether they can easily use automated spamming software. They probably don't bother with unique commenting systems, just those that have a large number of installations.

Re:So silly....

[Critical Facilities]

I have been on /. for years, have never posted anything remotely spammy, have attempted to participate in discussions... so why is my karma set at "bad"?

Well, it seems that you've only submitted 5 comments in the last couple of years, so you're not exactly participating in a lot of conversations. Thus, you're not really "improving" (term used loosely) any of the comment threads, and therefore not receiving any good karma.

Not trying to be snarky here, I'm genuinely surprised you didn't realize this.

Re:So silly....

[davev2.0]

And, then you get flame wars, cliques, and karma bombing. Nothing like watching a small group of people with multiple accounts spend a few weeks clobbering one's karma by modding down old posts. It has happened to me and can happen to anyone, including you. All it takes is offending the wrong fanboys.

Re:So silly....

[catbutt]

Only a poorly designed karma system would allow that. For instance, if they have multiple accounts, how did all those accounts acquire a good enough reputation to be able to mod things down?

This problem is not so different from that of how search engines (e.g. PageRank) deal with link farms.

Regardless I don't think that is as big a problem as people suggest it is. I'd be interested to see which of your posts caused this....I'm guessing it was pretty inflammatory stuff.

Re:So silly....

[b4dc0d3r]

Funny, a slippery slope argument disguised as a fake hijacked account.

Ethanol-fueled (1125189) is not a bot, does not seem to have a history of spamming, and thus is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion. If eldavojohn were to actually do this, Ethan Pearsall from Santa Rosa California would be able to accuse eldavojohn of hacking, which might be illegal where eldavojohn lives. It would be taken as seriously as the locale takes unauthroized computer access.

In the case of Random Digilante, any complaint would not be taken seriously once the contents of the account were revealed. In the USA, Can-Spam would probably get the plaintiff thrown in jail. Outside of the USA, it would probably just be dismissed.

Slippery slope arguments suggest that once we draw a line, it moves very easily. With the current laws in place, it can't move.

Re:So silly....

[davev2.0]

So, what you are saying is that Slashdot has a bad karma system. Nothing that inflammatory, just completely opposite of those that karma bombed me, backed up by evidence. They couldn't take being proven wrong.

Re:So silly....

[JWSmythe]

    Ok, great solution. But how many forums are run by people who picked a package and got a friend to install it? And of them, how many never upgrade the software, regardless of how many spambots abuse them, or warnings on the publishers site say "you must upgrade because of this huge security flaw"?

    I remember one that was a pretty good little site. He stopped maintaining it, because the forum wasn't just exploited, but they locked him out of the admin interface. He didn't take the site down, he just abandon it, and it ran for quite a while as a pathetic dumping ground for illicit pharmaceutical ads. It did finally go away, but it was waste of a good little online community he had going.

    I've found quite a few sites like that still out there. The owners just stop caring and abandon them.

Re:So silly....

[JWSmythe]

    Actually, Slashdot has done some work to reduce/prevent it. If I remember Slashcode right from years ago, there were significant safeguards. There was a period of a couple weeks where some determined spammers were hitting here, but even then they were only getting 3 or 4 spammy posts in per 100 real ones. I suspect there may have been some upset users who may have taken matters into their own hands on them, or at least it was suggested in the threads at the time. :)

   

Re:So silly....

[Anonymous Coward]

POst anonymously so as to preserve my worthless "Excellent" karma status... I rarely post - half a dozen times a year. I've pulled a couple of +5 Interesting/Informatives since I've been here (my UID is in the 500k range), but I usually don't get modded. If I do, it's the odd +2 upwards, mostly for funny (clearly, I'm not that funny). I've got Excellent karma. Go figure...

Re:So silly....

[catbutt]

Well here you go. You got modded up.

I agree that what you describe is the worst thing about Slashdots system, it took my a year to get good karma (although I don't think mine was ever bad). I would like to see someone design a system that works better in that regard, and others.

Re:So silly....

[stephanruby]

For someone that has only made a handful of posts for all the years he's been on here, I don't think the system thinks that you're bad. Anti-social, may be. Bad, no.

Re:So silly....

[Late Adopter]

In addition to sibling comments:

Use paragraphs. Posts without line breaks appear disorganized and are difficult to read. If you're set to the default HTML posting style, you need to use "p" or "br" tags to get line breaks to appear. Otherwise change to plain text.

Consider starting from scratch. It's easier to go from no karma to "excellent" than from "bad" to "excellent". In addition to needing fewer up-mods to get good karma, those up-mods will be easier to receive since you're starting at 1 and not 0.

Re:So silly....

[TubeSteak]

Funny doesn't give you karma. Funny+Troll burns karma quickly.

Sometimes it's worth burning karma just to see that "(Score:5, Troll)" above your name.

Re:So silly....

[pookemon]

So I'm guessing you've never noticed any of the moron's posting "Frist P0st" or "goatse.cx"? Not to mention the significant number of other idiot's that make other worthless posts. Perhaps you don't consider offtopic, racist (for example) posts as SPAM?

Re:So silly....

[AlphaCentauri4]

It would be nice if ignoring them made them stop. For instance, I will never reply to anything advertised in spam. I report quite a lot of spam, and spammers know it. (I've seen my email address posted in spammer forums on a list of "antis.")

Yet the spammers keep mailing to that same address, and my spam volume keeps growing. I used to think 50 spams a day was a lot. Now I get more than that in an hour, as the spammers try to compete for the attention of the few people who will respond to their messages. Making it hard for them to get noticed only makes them increase the volume.

Re:So silly....

[Archangel Michael]

I know exactly what kinds of posts get modded insightful, and what get modded "troll". I've had excellent Karma, and I've had bad karma. Currently it is "good". Not sure if I'll ever get "excellent" again, but here's to hoping.

I don't care about Karma too much. I care, just not too much.

Re:So silly....

[Deep Esophagus]

No snarkiness detected, CF. I understand that one needs to participate to generate GOOD karma; I was asking how mine turned BAD.

Re:So silly....

[Critical Facilities]

Glad you didn't take me as someone trying to get your goat there. While I'm not claiming to be an expert on SlashDot, I'm assuming that the reason your Karma is "Bad" is because of this comment's moderation. As far as I can see, of all of your comments, this was the only one that was moderated, and "Offtopic" is considered "bad".

On the bright side, your comment from yesterday should negate that "offtopic" mod quite nicely. Another couple of "informatives" or "insightfuls" or "interestings" and you should be good to go.

Re:So silly....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that does explain my plunge to the depths of Bad Karmativity. Apparently I haven't learned to spot the fine line between funny and offtopic.

Re:So silly....

[clone53421]

To clarify my comment about “Funny+Troll”, and follow up on CF and your comments about funny vs. offtopic...

Funny is the only moderation that has no net effect on karma. The lowest possible score for a post is -1; normally this limits the amount of karma you can lose per post. However, getting Funny mods bumps your post score back up, which means it can be moderated down again. A post that is repeatedly modded +1 Funny and -1 Offtopic, Troll, Flamebait, or Overrated can quickly burn through a lot of karma.

Moderators aren’t always perfectly oblivious to this, of course... I’d like to hope that most mods would hesitate to mod a Funny post Overrated just because they think it isn’t very funny. And I’m sure some mods will also occasionally mod a Funny post Underrated, Insightful, Informative, or Interesting to give you a little karma boost as a reward for a post that they think deserves it.

Overperforming busy bodies

[G3ckoG33k]

Overperforming busy bodies? How does he get them?

Yeah!

[Oasiz]

He is like an internet superhero!
Using the 'powers' to stop the bad guys!

I was banned from Free Republic

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I created an account and was banned almost immediately.

They have extremely vigilant forum monitors who will bring the banhammer down for the slightest offense.

My offense? I insinuated that gays might be able to serve in the military just as well as straights.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[i-c-electrons]

That's hilarious. About the gayus in the military, the media over hypes it. I'm in the military for going on 12 years now and I've known several gays. Nobody really cares except for the people that are arrogant and probably inbred. Sorry went off topic for a minute.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[tophermeyer]

How dare you express an opinion about a controversial topic on the internet?

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[hedwards]

Actually, the media underhypes it if anything. Sure as far back as Vietnam, and probably earlier there were gays serving more or less openly. The problem though is that as soon as one of them starts doing something which arouses too much attention or makes somebody jealous or gets a promotion that somebody else wanted.

There's a reason why there's a difference between de juris and de facto in these cases. Hell, even if you manage to make it 18 years, there's cases where people get outed and booted anyways.

As for the matter at hand, what he's doing is illegal, and he's ultimately risking the same sort of consequences that those that haxxor other people's machines to send spam face. Assuming they were actually caught.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to get slapped down on slashdot, just post an actual quote from Obama under a story about one of his policies showing what a clueless idiot he is, and you can go from excelent to negitive karma in a single post. Plus they will periodically zero any positive values for your karma forever afterwards. They are as aggressive as a Talaban who has spotted a bear in a cartoon.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Many sites develop groupthink. Slashdot certainly isn't immune.

Free Republic takes it to a higher level and eliminates any dissenting voices by deleting their posts, banning their accounts from posting, and logging their IP address so that future accounts created at that IP are automatically banned.

Forum spam is a different story, of course. But the thinking behind it is the same. These are posts that are not welcome on this site, therefore we must eliminate them.

Of all the sites I've visited, Slashdot (and perhaps Kuro5hin) has the best system. Posts are never deleted, and even posts modded to -1 can still be read by those interested. There is the pink page of death and other nasty bits that I think /. could get rid of, but on the whole this site caters to its posters very well.

That said, the groupthink is still very obvious.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[Anonymous Coward]

I created an account and was banned almost immediately.

Quite perceptive of them! They could tell you were BadAnalogyGuy even under a different name, before you posted anything! :-D

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[Anonymous Coward]

I created an account and was banned almost immediately.

You will have a full and active life even without being exposed daily to a forum that have juicy topics such as:

• HomosexualAgenda
• NaturalBornCitizen
• TeaPartyRebellion

- former freeper. banned for defending science.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Science?! What kind of pinko Muslim loving homosexual are you?

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[Jaysyn]

Not so Free are they?

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[mcgrew]

My friend Don Darund was banned from Paul McArtney's web site. The moderator said it wasn't the first time they'd banned Don Darund and it wouldn't be the last.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[Anonymous Coward]

This has never happened. You cannot cite a single instance of it.

But maybe if you dig enough you'll find a post you can lie about and pretend that this is what happened. It won't hold up under even casual scrutiny, but it will allow you to hold onto your persecution complex a little longer.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[vegiVamp]

By that logic, locking up murderers is also groupthink. I would beg to differ - groupthink is a decidedly different beast than a group of people all crying out against the same problem: in the latter case, the majority of the group has come to the conclusion that behaviour x is unwanted on their own, based on their personal experiences; and not because a lot of their peers also have that opinion.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[rsborg]

Of all the sites I've visited, Slashdot (and perhaps Kuro5hin) has the best system.

The system used by Kuro5hin (scoop) is used by many other sites including political popular sites like DailyKos and RedState.

Personally, I think Slashdot is better, but it's more developed and nuanced... the moderation qualification (ie, Funny, Insightful, Troll, etc) is what makes a huge difference in avoiding the puritans downmodding sarcasm and/or unpopular but useful posts.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[VisceralLogic]

I created an account and was banned almost immediately.

They have extremely vigilant forum monitors who will bring the banhammer down for the slightest offense.

My offense? I insinuated that gays might be able to serve in the military just as well as straights.

That's nothing! I was preemptively banned from the Huffington Post for merely attempting to comment on an article. Or something weird like that. I followed a link from Google News to what I considered an interesting article, attempted to post a comment, and was informed that I was banned from commenting, although I had never attempted to do so before. An email to them received no response, so I haven't been back since...

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[BobMcD]

Hey, I'm with you. I got kicked out of the Tea Party Network for pointing out that there was no way in hell Obama would ask Hillary to sit on SCOTUS.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[Bassman59]

Anyone who actively posts on the Free Republic forums, or believes anything the Freepers say, is a mouth-breathing moron who should be prevented from spawning.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[jmac_the_man]

I would beg to differ - groupthink is a decidedly different beast than a group of people all crying out against the same problem: in the latter case, the majority of the group has come to the conclusion that behaviour x is unwanted on their own, based on their personal experiences; and not because a lot of their peers also have that opinion.

OK, but I'm pretty sure most of FreeRepublic didn't serve in the military with gays who weren't up to military standards.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[djh2400]

I completely agree with you in every aspect.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[gmhowell]

Hehe. You said 'arouse'.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[jrumney]

... the moderation qualification (ie, Funny, Insightful, Troll, etc) is what makes a huge difference in avoiding the puritans downmodding sarcasm and/or unpopular but useful posts.

As long as the vague Underrated/Overrated mods are available (and AFAICT these mods never come up for Meta-moderation), the puritans and other agenda-pushers can moderate without proper cause.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[thrawn_aj]

There is the pink page of death and other nasty bits that I think /. could get rid of, but on the whole this site caters to its posters very well. That said, the groupthink is still very obvious.

What's the pink page of death? o.O (I'd really like to know)

Also, there is a fine line between groupthink and consensus. That line is defined by objective correctness (when it exists, else the line becomes vanishingly thin). I don't doubt that groupthink does exist even here, but I do trust that you're not making the common mistake of thinking the two are identical. For what it's worth (based on what I remember of your posting history), I don't think you are.

Just needed to be said because there are far too many idiots on the intertubes (again, not referring to you) with persecution complexes the size of Montana who immediately cry "groupthink" (and break out their copy of Sparknotes: 1984) when their pet lunacies are summarily dismissed by rational people.

As for being banned from Freeperville, isn't that the final test of a rational human being? Like being cast out from intellectual purgatory and sent back to earth.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[vegiVamp]

Given that the military accepted them, I dare say that they were up to military's standards. They may not have been up to *your* standards, but that is entirely your own problem.

Really, you shouldn't be so afraid of losing your cherry, boy.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[martyros]

I insinuated that gays might be able to serve in the military just as well as straights.

It's possible that they have a huge number of genuine trolls on that site who do the same thing. It's also possible that in the past they have had a large number of discussions go off-track into useless bickering because of the same kinds of topics being expressed. (i.e., not caused by intentional trolls, but having the same effect).

In the past I've had a number of experiences, when joining a new community (and unaware of its history or unwritten rules) of accidentally saying something or bringing up a topic which looks, to the moderators of that community, just like the stuff nasty trolls start. Same kind of thing -- just asking a question or making a comment which is genuine, not knowing that this is what all trolls do.

In a way it's like this. Lots of friends who are musicians and play large instruments which are awkward to transport (such as a cello, double-bass, &c) hear people say, when they're struggling to get their instrument through a tight corner, something like "I bet you wish you played the piccolo." To the guy who says it, it's clever because it's fresh and new. But what they don't realize is that everyone else says the exact same thing, and the person they're saying it to has already heard it hundreds of times. It wasn't very funny the first time, and it certainly isn't funny the 100th time.

I bet if you lurked on the Free Republic long enough, you'd see how you were perceived by the moderators, and understand why you were banned.

That, or you'd find out that the moderators are bigoted fascists who won't tolerate dissenting opinions. :-)

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[JWSmythe]

What's the pink page of death? o.O (I'd really like to know)

    The Pink Page of Death is a polite warning that shows up here, saying your IP has been blocked, and it won't be unblocked until you ask for forgiveness. You may get it through ToR, but you're most likely to get it if you go out hunting for lists of anonymous web proxies, and then come in here through one. They automagically block spammers for some reasons (I don't know the qualifications) to keep the noise down to us humans (usually). I've only ever seen it while experimenting with anonymous (and published) proxies.

    If you happen to be so unlucky that you ever see it from home, well, you must have really pissed someone off. :) Most users shouldn't ever see it, because they shouldn't do anything to deserve seeing it.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[rsborg]

As long as the vague Underrated/Overrated mods are available (and AFAICT these mods never come up for Meta-moderation), the puritans and other agenda-pushers can moderate without proper cause.

You know, just to check I went back over my last 100 or so posts here and found that only 10% of mods done to my posts (of those that were modded) were over/under rated. I don't see this as a pernicious problem.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[thrawn_aj]

Thanks for the info :). Weird stuff...

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[jmac_the_man]

Wow, you completely missed what I was getting at. Your initial post seems to be arguing that "group think" can be differentiated from "group of people all crying out against the same problem... based on their personal experiences; and not because a lot of their peers also have that opinion."
My argument is that the reason most of Slashdot agrees on most things is because "a lot of their peers also have that opinion," which is your definition of group think. In order for your post comparing about group think, non-group think, Slashdot, and FreeRepublic to make sense, given that Slashdot has group think, FreeRepublic must NOT have group think. That's clearly not true, hence my post.
What gay people do in their own homes doesn't affect me. I don't care about that. Idiots on slashdot DO affect me, and since we're nominally talking about useless fourm posts (such as morons asserting that "HURF DURF IT'S NOT GROUP THINK IF THEY AGREE WITH ME) that's what my post was about.

Re:I was banned from Free Republic

[vegiVamp]

My post was never about Slashdot or Free Republic. Thus I also never insinuated (well, knowingly) that either of them did not have groupthink.

It's everywhere, unfortunately; although it can certainly be argued that nothing would ever get done without it.

As to your point, yes, it's long been agreed that metoo should be nuked from orbit.

Bullshit

[geekoid]

Yon don't take over someone else's email account, just it's automated.

It's also a stupid way to solve the problem.

Like One Man Against a Zombie Army

[Squeebee]

As long as it's him working manually and the spam bots working automatically he won't even make a dent in the flow of forum spam.

Re:Like One Man Against a Zombie Army

[bsDaemon]

Ash did just fine. Maybe we just need to get this guy a chainsaw hand?

Re:Like One Man Against a Zombie Army

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as it's him working manually and the spam bots working automatically he won't even make a dent in the flow of forum spam.

From the site linked in the summary, "To date I have taken over a total of 70 email accounts for this purpose, and each of them had registered to anywhere from 4,500 to way, way over 135,000 forums, only for the purposes of spamming one or another fake product or porn site in violation of the rules of all of the forums they registered to and in many cases in violation of law. (Lots of porn, lots of pills.)"

Yes, I rtf site... Sounds to me like his numbers are big enough that it could be making a dent.

Greetings

[rakuen]

You are a great writer. I found this article very informative. Would you like to be buying genuine spam today?

forum spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

best solved with a bullet through their head.

Spammers are getting good

[Dan East]

As someone who deals with forum spam on a daily basis, I'm rather surprised at how intelligent the spambots are becoming.

Of course there's always the blatant, obvious spam (99% of which are video encoding tools for iPad, iPhone, etc). But I've recognized two other types of very covert spambots.

First one will take fragments of sentences from previous posts in the topic and regurgitate them. At first glance it seems on topic, but closer inspection reveals the post doesn't make sense and is just portions of others' posts.

The second type uses a database of sentences harvested from other websites, and attempts to post a sentence that matches keywords in that topic. Usually I can spot those because they aren't exactly on topic to the thread. I've also seen these modify various throw-away words, like adjectives and articles, so the sentence isn't an exact copy of the original source.

Now the key thing with both of these kinds of spambots is that they do not include any links initially. A couple weeks after posting they come back and change their signature, which results in spam links appearing under all of their previous posts.

I've also noticed that the vast majority of spambots use yahoo.com email addresses, so yahoo's captcha must be weaker than gmail / hotmail.

Now on the topic of this story, I don't quite understand. The forums I moderate have a few spambot accounts created daily (using recaptcha and custom implemented captcha). So it's not like there's just a couple spambot accounts causing all the trouble. Over the course of a month it around a hundred different accounts. So I don't see how this hacker is helping anything going after accounts one at a time manually.

Re:Spammers are getting good

[clone53421]

First one will take fragments of sentences from previous posts in the topic and regurgitate them. At first glance it seems on topic, but closer inspection reveals the post doesn't make sense and is just portions of others' posts. ... A couple weeks after posting they come back and change their signature, which results in spam links appearing under all of their previous posts.

For another example of this exact thing, just look at slashdot user clint999.

http://slashdot.org/~clint999

Last post was yesterday... it’s still active. Funnily enough it almost always posts exactly 30 min. after the hour, but not every hour.

Re:Spammers are getting good

[rhizome]

Now the key thing with both of these kinds of spambots is that they do not include any links initially. A couple weeks after posting they come back and change their signature, which results in spam links appearing under all of their previous posts.

You might consider disabling .sigs.

Re:Spammers are getting good

[Anonymous Coward]

or making the sig become part of the post, rather than some separate entity that can be updated long after the post's contents stop being editable.

Re:Spammers are getting good

[Raenex]

I'm rather surprised at how intelligent the spambots are becoming.

I'm guessing those are paid spammers from places like India or even the United States. Amazon's Mechanical Turk are full of shady jobs like this, and I'm sure they're not the only operation around. Pay somebody 10 cents to put a post on a forum, multiply by a thousand times, and you've got a really good search engine optimization for $100.

Re:Spammers are getting good

[Nimey]

The cleverer forum spammers I've seen will post empty nonsense to a long-dead thread, with a spam link in their signature.

Re:Spammers are getting good

[Quirkz]

Only a hundred different accounts in a month? With some of my old forum software, I was getting ~20-40 a day for a while. Basically I just turned off automatic activation and required every "real" person to read the activation message to get fully activated. (Small group of people, tied to a game, so people could contact me inside the game as verification.)

Part of the problem was the captcha was broken in the old version, so I had it turned off. With the most recent update they fixed the captcha, and I've been down to only one spam account per month, maybe. I'm sure over time it'll get worse again as the bot writers figure out how to break things again.

Re:Spammers are getting good

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understant why .sigs are changed for all previous posts. What is the point of changing it in all posts made by that person? Wouldn't it make sense to just change it such that future posts include the .sig?

Re:Spammers are getting good

[RocketRabbit]

Yahoo seems involved with the spammers. An experiment I did once:

I logged into Yahoo with SSL, and created an account. I never sent any mail to anybody from it, never told anybody what I was doing or the new email address.

Then I logged in in one month, and was barely astonished to see that there were literally hundreds of spam messages in the account. How did the spammers get that email address? It was something like oi807b31978qgv@yahoo.com (can't remember the account name any more) so they couldn't have guessed at the account name.

My conclusion? Somebody at Yahoo is selling their email addresses to spammers, or Yahoo is operating a spam farm on the side.

He has no impact

[neiltrodden]

My forum software gets spammed. My solution is to ask real users to email me to activate the account. I get 200 sign-ups a day and all are spammers so i just filter them from my inbox. What does this guy do? Sends me an email warning that the account is spam bringing his unsolicited spam message into my inbox. I think I've had about 5 messages from him and probably have had about 30,000 spam sign-ups.

Re:He has no impact

[Jaysyn]

You can't add questions to your forum sign up routine? On my forums the following three questions have completely eliminated forum auto-spammers from even signing up.

1.) "Are you a human, yes or no."

2.) "Leave this line blank"

3.) Another question pertaining to the forum's focus, easily figured out by a human that knows how to use a search engine.

   

Re:He has no impact

[clone53421]

Those only work because you’re a low-profile target. They’d be trivially easy to defeat if anyone actually wanted to spam you.

Re:He has no impact

[Khyber]

Then you should send this dipshit an e-mail back saying 'Your efforts are futile and absurd, plus you're just costing me more traffic by adding to the garbage already being sent out by the spambots. Cease and desist you incompetent fuckwit.'

Re:He has no impact

[Jaysyn]

Spambots can perform context aware Google searches on the fly now? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Re:He has no impact

[clone53421]

Unless you give them a different challenge question every time, they don’t need to. Are you generating context-aware challenge questions on the fly?

Re:He has no impact

[Jaysyn]

No, but I could set it up so they are randomly getting 3 questions out of a list of N or so. I could also follow that up by auto-banning any IP & username that answers incorrectly more than N amount of times.

I guess if a human was directly targeting my website they could get thru, once, but that's a human doing the work & not a bot.

Re:He has no impact

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Or you could choose to be less polite. Heck, you could even be rude if you wanted to.

Re:He has no impact

[neminem]

I mod for a reasonably big forum. We implemented something similar a couple years ago (1 question randomly out of a list of 6, trivial for a human to figure out, but not for a bot). Before that, we got dozens of spambot posts a *day*. After, we've gotten a few spam posts a year, mostly the sort clearly written by a human (the kind we had to actually *research* to figure out whether it was spam or a misguided legitimate poster.)

Yes, this only works because our forum isn't big enough to special-case in bot code, but really, if each unique forum had their own method of signing up, with their own not-a-bot questions that couldn't be guessed automatically... I expect almost *all* forums would be "low-profile".

Re:He has no impact

[clone53421]

but really, if each unique forum had their own method of signing up, with their own not-a-bot questions that couldn't be guessed automatically... I expect almost *all* forums would be "low-profile".

No... all you’d do is force them to produce something versatile enough (plugin-extensible, perhaps) to attack all of them.

The situation is no different for the file hosting/downloading sites (RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile, just to name a few), all of which have implemented various captcha/timer systems to prevent automated downloading. jDownloader supports over a hundred such sites and would only need a plugin added to support any new site that was created. In all cases it will handle wait times automatically, and in some cases it will even perform its own captcha recognition. When it can’t, it just pops up a box displaying the captch and asking for the user to enter it.

Receivie amazing intelligence!

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting this anonymously because Random Digilante got my account deleted.

Dear Decision maker , We know you are interested in
receiving amazing intelligence . This is a one time
mailing there is no need to request removal if you
won't want any more . This mail is being sent in compliance
with Senate bill 1625 ; Title 4 ; Section 302 . THIS
IS NOT MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING ! Why work for somebody
else when you can become rich as few as 33 days . Have
you ever noticed people love convenience and more people
than ever are surfing the web ! Well, now is your chance
to capitalize on this ! WE will help YOU decrease perceived
waiting time by 190% and increase customer response
by 150% . You can begin at absolutely no cost to you
. But don't believe us . Ms Ames of Florida tried us
and says "My only problem now is where to park all
my cars" ! We are licensed to operate in all states
! We implore you - act now ! Sign up a friend and you
get half off . God Bless !

Example "advanced" spam

[Dan East]

Here's a specific example of what I'm talking about. Here is a post made to my forums in July 2010:

You can choose ‘Micro-ATX’ size motherboard for your HP. That limits the possible range of motherboards deals you will find. My advise is to buy a case that fits full ‘ATX’ form factor motherboards and go from there, many choices. It is depending on money and what you want if your building a good rig for gaming multimedia etc and don't buy a case with power supply. Please choose a separate power supply.

Now here is a post from another website made in 2009:

Your HP case (the cheapest part of the pc!) takes a ‘Micro-ATX’ size motherboard.

That limits the possible range of motherboards\deals you will find. (look for a motherboard\processor package)

Now you are already buying ‘a whole new computer’ except the case, why stop there? (unless you want the small form factor)

My advise (thats why your here!) is to buy a case that fits full ‘ATX’ form factor motherboards and go from there, much more choice.

Depending on money and what you want if your building a good rig for gaming\multimedia etc DON’T buy a case with power supply, they are usually sh*t (cheap\unreliable). Choose a case, choose a separate power supply (after research!)

Re:Example "advanced" spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at the above quote, I guess we aren't far from situation when these post by spambots will actually make more sense than some real ones.

Re:Example "advanced" spam

[clone53421]

Keep in mind that it’s also entirely possible that some guy in India is getting paid fractions of a cent to make those posts. It might not necessarily be a spambot.

Re:Example "advanced" spam

[webmosher]

Mmm... you know, after browsing forums long enough, all the spammer has to do is add a caption at the beginning or end "Sorry my English is so bad, but... " and this might pass through quite a few more eyes before its caught. Kinda surprising they haven't caught on to that yet.

Re:Example "advanced" spam

[noidentity]

That's some good advice, man. I'm definitely going with a separate power supply, after researches.

Re:Example "advanced" spam

[Anonymous Coward]

What about these two posts says spam to you? It sounds to me like somebody just doesn't like micro-ATX motherboards and is happy to advise other people not to buy them.

Were some of the words hyperlinks to bogus pharmacy sites or something?

Re:Example "advanced" spam

[Ankur Dave]

I think the idea is that there are too many phrases in common between them, so the first one is probably an auto-recycled version of the second.

Both comments *could* be by the same person, but it seems pretty unlikely...

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[SockPuppetOfTheWeek]

Michael David Kristopeit is a spammer.

edrugtrader (442064)
madddddddddd (1710534)
Michael Kristopeit (1751814)
Michael D Kristopeit (1887500)
M. D. Kristopeit (1890086)
M. Kristopeit (1890764)
Kristopeit, Michael (1892492)
Kristopeit, M. D. (1892582)
Mike Kristopeit (1900306)
Mike D. Kristopeit (1900568)
Kristopeit, Mike D. (1900570)
MichaelDavKristopeit (1905312)
Mike Dav. Kristopeit (1905334)
MichaelDa.Kristopeit (1905336)
Mike Da. Kristopeit (1905338)
Kristopeit, Mike Da. (1905342)
Kristopeit, Mike (1905452)
Kristopeit, Mike Dav (1905462)
Kristopeit,MichaelDa (1905518)

Sadly, *he'll* probably end up getting in trouble

[elrous0]

It would be nice to live in a world where whistleblowers and positive vigilantes were rewarded for their actions. But, in the vast majority of cases, these people end up in more trouble than the scumbags they're exposing and fighting. This guy will probably end up with more legal trouble for fighting spam than the spammers themselves will ever face for their network-clogging, frequently illegal, openly harassing activities.

The e-mail being sent

[Arjes]

I received one of his e-mails today. For anyone interested, here is the e-mail he is sending.

Do not auto-approve this forum account, it was created by a forum spammer.

The account which created this forum account did so using automated means. The reason was so that he could post a forum account and then use it to automatically post thousands of fake messages to your forum to promote some form of ridiculous product there.

In all likelihood your website has nothing to do with whatever this idiot is promoting, but in any case you definitely do not want to be promoting this scumbag's websites.

Delete this account, and any other account tied to the email address which sent you this automated response.

The way to prevent this activity from continuing is to make all new registrations require a more complex, secure password. Increase the required length and make sure it requires uppercase, lowercase and punctuation characters. Do not allow automated self-registration of new accounts. If you've been getting a lot of messages like the one you're reading now, that means your forum is still far too easy to register at, even if you manually approve the accounts.

Apologies for any further inconveniences this message causes.

Sincerely,

Random Digilante

http://randomdigilante.blogspot.com/

Re:The e-mail being sent

[albertid]

Let me guess, his e-mail is: robin.hood@sharewood-forest.com?

Re:The e-mail being sent

[rakuen]

You know, if all forum administrators started requiring longer passwords with upper/lowercase and punctuation... why on earth would the spambot makers not adjust their bots accordingly? It's really not that hard.

Re:The e-mail being sent

[Bobfrankly1]

I was thinking the same thing. Once a majority has the increased requirements, the automated account makers will too. It's an arms race.

Re:The e-mail being sent

[rakuen]

It's not even really an arms race if the weapon is password length. There'll eventually be a break point where you can't tighten the password requirements anymore. It's always very easy for a computer to generate a random gibberish string of characters and save it somewhere for future use. It's progressively more difficult to convince Joe Schmo to come up with a password X characters long with Y special characters in it as both X and/or Y increase.

Re:The e-mail being sent

[Bobfrankly1]

Password length isn't the only weapon, it's just the particular one being raised by "RD". Captcha, random test questions (what is this site about?), and forum admin reviewing registration requests, are just some of the weapons that are in use. Spammers end up using more sophisticated tools to work around the "defenses" meant to stop them. Arms Race.

Re:The e-mail being sent

[AlphaCentauri4]

Requiring stronger passwords works because there are an amazing number of websites that have registration algorithms that prohibit a password of MORE than 8 characters (or one containing special characters). The spambots that use the same password everywhere have to choose one or the other, and the 8-character-and-under-password websites are the low hanging fruit.

Warrantless wiretaps are illegal too

[Anonymous Coward]

Warrantless wiretaps are illegal in many jurisdictions too. This doesn't seem to be a problem.

Likewise, bugging someone's home, ESPECIALLY a child, with video cameras is illegal, but a school having done so still seems to be At Large.

Re:If you ask me...

[halivar]

You should go hunt them down, or something.

Correct, I don't. He does.

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct, I don't. He does. And what experience and knowledge applicable to you bring so that your pronouncement about it being a stupid way to solve the problem can be taken with no supporting evidence?

Or was your entire post bullshit?

Civil Disobedience is often right

[Zero__Kelvin]

"There's a reason why your mother taught you that two wrongs don't make a right."

Unfortunately, your Mother's clever saying presumes that the second act is a wrong. Since this discussion is about if it is in fact wrong or not, your presumption is unfounded. Bear in mind that doing something illegal is not necessarily wrong. In fact, my good friend Henry David Thoreau wrote an excellent essay arguing that, in many cases, violating the law is in fact the only "Right" thing you can do.

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAHAHA

    So you reply from a second account to show that you aren't the spammer?

by Mike Kristopeit (1900306)

by Mike D. Kristopeit (1900568)

    Yup, you have us all convinced.

Make a filter

[improfane]

Make a filter that detects his notifications and deletes the account automatically.

He is trying to help and he is fighting.

What are you doing about it? You're not helping anyone except of course protecting your advertising on your site.

Re:Make a filter

[gorzek]

I don't see how it's my responsibility to prevent spam on anyone's site but my own.

I thought Slashdotters were big on personal responsibility. Make sure your site is secure and doesn't let spambots run roughshod over everything. People who let spambots take over their sites and crap up the place aren't going to have much traffic. It's a self-correcting problem unless you're just not paying attention at all to your site.

If he wants to help people, that's fine, but going out and giving people unsolicited "help" by breaking into spambot accounts smacks more of being a busybody sticking your nose in where it doesn't belong and isn't wanted. If he really wants to provide help he should approach webmasters directly.

For that matter, it's a duplication of effort, because I'm already not allowing spam to thrive. He is wasting his time notifying me of spambots.

Instead of just shooting off messages that "account x is a spambot, please delete it," why not provide people with tips on spam control in general? What he's doing seems more like throwing water on a fire while doing nothing about the gang still throwing gasoline on it.

Re:Make a filter

[Pieroxy]

If someone runs into your backyard and shoots at squirrels - because he doesn't like them - you are supposed to grab your gun and give him a hand?

You may, but you are certainly not obliged nor compelled to. Especially if the guy is a perfect stranger.

Re:Make a filter

[cheekyjohnson]

"If someone runs into your backyard and shoots at squirrels - because he doesn't like them - you are supposed to grab your gun and give him a hand?"

I'd probably shoot him, instead.

Re:Make a filter

[Anonymous Coward]

So send him an email explaining that you don't need nor want his help. That leaves him free to spend more time on other forums and you are rid of his notifications. It's easy, no?

Re:Make a filter

[Anonymous Coward]

QQ moar. This guy's doing the right thing. i feel as much pity for you as a botnet spammer.

Re:Make a filter

[improfane]

Your priorities are black or white; a spammer is more damaging to the web than a vigilante cracker. The cracker is in the right, he has justice on his side*.

* Only if he is a good cracker.

It's a shade of gray.

Re:Make a filter

[AlphaCentauri4]

Actually, it wouldn't help to email him to unsubscribe. He's not the one sending you email. He just sets up a vacation message on a spambot's email account. In effect, you're sending yourself email when you autorespond to a spambot with an autoresponder. The best suggestion is the one above, to set up a filter to autodelete any random digilante emails if you don't want them. It's not like he's changing or obfuscating them to outwit your spam filters. What I'd like to know is whether he can confirm his assertion that once a forum has instituted a strong password requirement -- so even the initial attempt at registration fails -- that forum is removed from Xrumer's preloaded list of forum URLs. If so, the reduction in bandwidth ought to make that a much better strategy than permitting registrations and subsequently deleting/sandboxing the bots.

I guess someone missed the obvious South Park ref

[e065c8515d206cb0e190]

flamebait? really?

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[ihatejobs]

Obvious troll is obvious.

! good against signature spam & low traffic si

[SethJohnson]

Your comment is well-thought-out here, but I have to say your recommended approach is flawed when dealing with a vast quantity of comment spam. It certainly will work on high-traffic sites like slashdot. The problem is with lower-traffic sites with a lot of scattered content. In high-traffic forums, your approach will generally work.

Sites with articles and photo albums, will need to additionally disable comments on older content because it won't be seen by visitors, but the indexing bots will pick up the thousands of links. Another problem is with signature spam, and that can hit forums hard. A spam bot can post a bunch of innocuous forum posts for months, then after the threads have sunk out of sight, the spam bot changes the signature to include a bunch of spam links, and no notification is given to the admin or other users that new content (posts) have been added to the forums, but the spam links are all over the place in the signature of the spam bot's posts. Users can mark the specific posts as spam, but they will be scattered through thousands of old threads. The users will need to be able to mark the user as spam to notify the admin to delete all posts by the spam bot.

Seth

Re:! good against signature spam & low traffic

[catbutt]

As I said, its not a completely trivial problem. (BTW, sorry for the first sentence in my post which was garbled. I meant to say something like: "You really believe that slashdot wouldn't have spam, if people were able to freely post spam on slashdot and have it reach more than a few eyeballs?")

First off, I think signatures that can be changed later are seriously problematic. (I hate sigs, personally) If people find that feature so important, it would have to be handled separately. (e.g. users with a reputation could mark a sig as being spam, and the sigs on all posts by that user would be immediately disabled)

Low traffic sites or old threads aren't that big a problem either. If anyone is viewing it, the spam will be found and killed immediately. Even users with no reputation could mark something as spam, but those would be reviewed by another member before action would be taken. If the system is global (like Disqus or the like), the whole process can be smoother because truly "new" posters are pretty rare....if they don't have history of posting benign posts (even on other sites), the posts can be flagged as "needing review" before large numbers of people view them.

I could go on and on, but the gist is, the system needs to spread the work of marking spam among many, make it very easy and quick, and make sure that spam messages are viewed by very few before they are killed. Slashdot's system is designed for a high traffic site, but there is nothing that says a system can't work on low traffic sites as well. Spam messages may stick around longer on very low traffic sites, but if no one sees them, that's not such a problem.

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Anonymous Coward]

the difference between a "spammer" and a "real user" is a matter of opinion.

the opinion of the users here on slashdot, which I can deduce from the moderation of your posts and the posts made in response to your posts, is that you are the spammer.

by your own standards I will judge you.

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Anonymous Coward]

that's because I AM YOU engaging yourself in discussion. by your own words I will condemn you. by your own standards I will judge you. you just condemned yourself.

the difference between a "spammer" and a "real user" is a matter of opinion. the opinion of the moderators is that you are a spammer. by your own words, you are a spammer. by your own words I will condemn you. by your own standards I will judge you. I AM YOU engaging yourself in discussion. if I am nothing, it is only because YOU are nothing.

One question...

[Spacezilla]

This is probably obvious, since no one is talking about it, but how is he taking over the email addresses? Surely the bots aren't registrering on his honeypot forums with the same password as is used for the e-mail they use to register.

Re:One question...

[corychristison]

Surely the bots aren't registrering on his honeypot forums with the same password as is used for the e-mail they use to register.

That's exactly what they are doing.

From what I gather, he's written a program to automatically feed suspicious looking e-mail addresses into and check the the registration password/e-mail combo to see if they are using the same for both the e-mail address and the forum software. If there it is a successful combination, it flags and suspends the account.

Dunno if that is 100% correct, but that's what I've gathered (I have not RTFA either)

Re:One question...

[Spacezilla]

Well, in that case this should be pretty easy to fix for the spammers, assuming they care.

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Mike Dav. Kristopeit]

the assumption that "a moderator" is equivalent to "the moderators" is as incorrect as an assumption that there are not forces out to silence me or that the systems of control on this site are not susceptible to such attempts.

you post anonymously because you are DRIVEN BY FEAR.

you are NOTHING.

Ballot and jury don't work across borders

[tepples]

And that action should go through the boxes in the correct order without skipping any. Jumping right to the 'ammo' box isn't the right way to do things in a lawful society.

Soap, ballot, jury, ammo: Ballot and jury fail unless the parties have substantial assets in the same jurisdiction. So I don't see anything wrong with skipping to ammo against judgment-proof spammers.

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Anonymous Coward]

You're batshit insane, you know that right?

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Anonymous Coward]

No attempt to discredit you is necessary; there's no credit to begin with. You're simply a raving lunatic, repeating the same phrases with the same insane punctuation and capitalization style, assuming somehow that if you do it often enough someone is bound to be swayed.

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Anonymous Coward]

Who am I?

I am YOU

So you are NOTHING

Scream that I'm right again. You're doing it RIGHT NOW.

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Kristopeit, Mike Da.]

i never post without assigning responsibility of said posts to myself.

you're a lying coward.

pathetic.

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Anonymous Coward]

You screamed that I'm right as you were told.

Do it again.

You will always obey.

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be surprised if you meet the diagnostic criteria for Schizophrenia, or at the very least general delusional disorder. My recommendation is to see a psychologist, or at the very least to engage in discussions with your family members. Seek help, don't be ashamed.

The following can indicate a delusion:

1. The patient expresses an idea or belief with unusual persistence or force.

That's certainly true. You've responded this far to anonymous cowards trying to bait you, and have created a bajillion accounts to do so with.

2. That idea appears to exert an undue influence on his or her life, and the way of life is often altered to an inexplicable extent.

You appear to be wasting an inexplicable amount of time on Slashdot, as evidenced by your posting habits, so this is so.

3. Despite his/her profound conviction, there is often a quality of secretiveness or suspicion when the patient is questioned about it.

4. The individual tends to be humorless and oversensitive, especially about the belief.

Your bloody-minded persistence and repeated name calling in this thread come to mind.

5. There is a quality of centrality: no matter how unlikely it is that these strange things are happening to him, the patient accepts them relatively unquestioningly.

Seems to fit. You're not some sort of spam freedom-fighter, no matter how strongly you think so and how little sense that makes.

6. An attempt to contradict the belief is likely to arouse an inappropriately strong emotional reaction, often with irritability and hostility.

Oh boy, don't get me started on irritability and hostility.

YOU ARE ALL IDIOTS.

7. The belief is, at the least, unlikely, and out of keeping with the patient's social, cultural and religious background.

No one likes a spammer, much less people who spend a lot of time on Slashdot. This fits.

8. The patient is emotionally over-invested in the idea and it overwhelms other elements of his or her psyche.

I can't make a judgment here as I have no experience with you outside of this thread. It seems likely, however.

9. The delusion, if acted out, often leads to behaviors which are abnormal and/or out of character, although perhaps understandable in the light of the delusional beliefs.

10. Individuals who know the patient will observe that his or her belief and behavior are uncharacteristic and alien.

Abnormal relative to the rest of society, yes. Again, I can't judge your character completely however.

Schizophrenia

1. Characteristic symptoms: Two or more of the following, each present for much of the time during a one-month period (or less, if symptoms remitted with treatment).
* Delusions
* Hallucinations
* Disorganized speech, which is a manifestation of formal thought disorder
* Grossly disorganized behavior (e.g. dressing inappropriately, crying frequently) or catatonic behavior
* Negative symptoms: Blunted affect (lack or decline in emotional response), alogia (lack or decline in speech), or avolition (lack or decline in motivation)

If the delusions are judged to be bizarre, or hallucinations consist of hearing one voice participating in a running commentary of the patient's actions or of

Seems outdated...

[Jicehix]

Mmm is this just me, or is the blog article dated "Monday, February 8, 2010" ?

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Michael Kristopeit 1]

you're wrong.

you suggest i see a psychologist, suggesting you are not a psychologist... then you proceed to suggest a diagnosis you are not qualitified to make, of multiple personalities when i SOLELY present myself as who i am: MICHAEL DAVID KRISTOPEIT.

and just like someone who is lying and does not want to be labeled as such, you post cowardly and anonymously.

you are NOTHING

ur mum's face have been around at least for a little while.

Don't become your cause

[ksandom]

I like the intentions of this person, but his/her words are starting to sound like a vigilante.

These are some of the stupidest people I have ever heard of.

...these scum add to every forum they do this to.

Good intentions are great, but don't get consumed by your project. That will lead you down a very bad path.

I am all for benevolent vigilantism...

[GeoSanDiego]

But isn't his method going to stop working once the spammers start creating more complex and unique passwords for their email accounts?

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't suggest you had multiple personalities, you retard. That's not what schizophrenia is.

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Mike Kristopeit 9]

it is what schizophrenia can be... the anonymous coward did not provide all the symptoms seen for the diagnosis of a disease WHERE NO TEST EXISTS.

talk about wasting time. how about this, i diagnose you as an idiotic asshole. symptoms include being an idiotic asshole or having an idiotic asshole mother.

he didn't suggest anything... because HE doesn't exist. a COWARD made the claims against me THAT CAN NOT BE PROVEN TRUE. A PERSON has rejected those claims WITH PROVABLE FACTS.

i DO exist. i am michael david kristopeit.

you are NOTHING

clarification

[ILuvRamen]

That last line isn't quite correct. The people it affects are "real users" they're just assholes. Again, imaginary: no, jackass: yes.

reCAPTCHA

[zieroh]

This is all well and good, but it sounds like he's gone to an awful lot of work to solve a problem that could have been more easily remedied just by installing reCAPTCHA. I run a large forum, and the use of reCAPTCHA (plus a few other minor tricks, like changing the name of the registration script) has eliminated 100% of automated spam. I now only have to deal with the fairly small trickle of manually-registered accounts, which is quite a bit more manageable.

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[Anonymous Coward]

Talk about proving the man's point.

Oh, I'm sorry. Did you actually think you were refuting him?

Re:the reasons are most certainly NOT sound

[MichaelKristopeit 50]

why do you cower? what are you afraid of?

any diagnosis or conclusions you offer are irrelevant.

you are NOTHING