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A Third of World's Spam From One Russian Man
DaveNJ1987 writes "The FBI believes that one third of the world's spam messages are being generated by one 23-year-old Russian man. Oleg Nikolaenko of Moscow is being blamed for operating the Mega D botnet that sent spam emails from over 500,000 infected computers."
Who's ready for a good old fashioned lynching?
From the article cited in the summary:
The botnet sends out millions of spam messages ...
You're a few orders of magnitude off there. Try tens of billions ...
My work here is dung.
The FBI believes that one third of the world's spam messages are being generated by one 23-year-old Russian man
Congratulations to Oleg Nikolaenko for achieving so much at such a young age!
Summation 2
that's too quick (obviously). i'm thinking coliseum full of people, him with a dull sword, and some hungry tigers.
Yes, lets forget about laws and giving sentences that are in line with the crime. No matter how you want to spin it, spamming clearly isn't as big crime as rape, violence or killing someone.
Yes but it might be 1/500,000 as bad - justifying the same sentence.
I looked at this summary over my first sip of coffee and read "A Third of World's Sperm From One Russian Man," and nearly spit it onto my macbook.
Titles like this should wait until after 10:00 am Eastern/7:00 am Pacific.
I can see the fnords!
Somewhere in Moscow, a geek named Oleg Nikolaenko is hunched over a pile of computers in a dank and dark basement.
Suddenly, a knock on the door!
Cautiously, Oleg watches through the door peephole at a tall, muscular stranger, with shades on, dressed all in black leather, except for a "Google" patch on the left side of his jacket.
The stranger (with a strong Austrian accent): "Oleg Nikolaenko?"
Several days later, at a Google HQ conference in Mountain View:
- "Yes, our motto is, and still remains: 'Do not be Evil'... We made an exception this one time, but the project nicknamed 'Extreme Prejudice (beta)' has been officially disbanded and the blueprints destroyed. The persons responsible for the projects have been sacked. Any questions?"
- "Yes, Mr Brin, what is the *other* project Google wanted to discuss?"
- "Well, we are pleased to announce that the new Google Map now incorporates 'Satellite Friend Tracking' to know -- in real time -- where all your friends are, anywhere in the world!"
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
> Apologies for stereotyping...
Apology not accepted.
> ...but you must be American...
Like the Canadian advisor to the PM who recently called for the murder of Julian Assange? Or the British police who attack Brazilian tourists in the subway and shoot them in the head?
> Civilized countries arrest someone, then try him.
And, not coincidentally, he has been arrested in the USA and will be tried.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Apparently America is not a "civilized" country because its citizens are free to use humor as they see fit. I sincerely doubt the GP would actually shoot this man, but it's Friday morning and many would like to start their morning with humor.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Email, on the server-side, is an io-bound process. That is, disk usage is a concern every bit as much as memory and bandwidth. I've seen spam kick loads on servers that would be running ~2-5 up to around a 15. Dropping the spammer in the firewall brought the load down almost immediately. I then had to remove all the mail they were pushing to us from the queue so I could force-deliver the legitimate mail, as the queue had become severely backed up, and mails that should have gone through right away had been backed up for several hours. The server had been in critical for CPU for several hours in nagios before I came in and fixed it because the people on the previous shift hadn't thought to check the mail queue, despite the fact the mail queue was also in critical on that server.
Spam is a plague like no other. It's a vector for phishing and infection and causes verifiable harm in and of itself.
...spam sends you.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
> I don't understand why people hate Email Ads so much.
They constitute more than 99% of email traffic.
> All you have to do is filter them out.
It is impossible to reliably filter them all without losing real mail.
> It's not worth killing someone.
Correct.
> Now the head of the RIAA or MPAA - that's a different story.
No it isn't.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
There are also a outcry from surprisingly mainstream figures in the US for the summary murder of Julian Assange. I can't think of any people from other countries who talk that way about US citizens, other than people we call terrorists. So, I'm curious why you say it's universal. Again, not a rhetorical question, what I'm asking for is a example or two of where else this is happening.
Apparently America is not a "civilized" country because its citizens are free to use humor as they see fit. I sincerely doubt the GP would actually shoot this man, but it's Friday morning and many would like to start their morning with humor.
In its haste to bring about world peace, it seems the UN forgot to include humor in its declaration of human rights. We'll have to ask Libya and Sudan at the next meeting of the Human Rights Commission if they'll approve adding it.
One of the lesser-known sections of the code of Hammurabi reads "If a man shall falsely promise p3n1s 3xt3nsion and thereby cause public nuisance and distress, his own penis shall be stretched by one digit for each such false promise. If he spreads his false promises by means of another man's messenger, he shall be flogged."
They often skip this one in elementary history lessons on the matter; but it is arguably quite salient in today's interconnected world...
How many billions and billions of dollars does spam cost in terms of hardware, bandwidth, and human effort?
How much does the opportunity cost of these billions of dollars hurt the world in terms of more productive progress?
How many financial lives are ruined through scams, trojans, and viruses that enter people's computers through spam?
This guy was likely responsible for ruining many lives.
Having dealt with an assortment of people dealing with emotional loss, whether because of molestation, rape, or financial ruin - I can tell you that it's all the same. The perpetrator of these crimes took perfectly good lives and damaged them, possibly destroying many.
By sitting on the sidelines and poo-pooing the true devastation that spam causes, you're complicit in society's failure to deal properly with its worst enemies.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
So what are we waiting for? Someone shoot him.
Oh, I forgot. We live in an age where the general public is not something that anyone stands up for anymore. Our politicians are all bought, we ourselves are too lazy and scared, and most of what we have in NGOs has become a political quagmire of commercialized selling of "feel good".
Sending the same amount of traffic to an individual company would result in charges for a DOS attack, no questions asked. But no, as long as you have enough victims and only minor damage to each, nobody really cares very much.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Of course other countries do that, they just do a better job at keeping it secret. Just because you don't know of a case where that happens, doesn't mean there isn't one.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Nope, it's not. Find someone who would rather be raped to deleting 500,000 messages from their inbox.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
He wasn't an illegal alien
According to the Home Office, he arrived in Britain on 13 March 2002, on a six-month visitor's visa. After its expiry, he applied to stay on as a student, and was granted permission to remain until 30 June 2003. The Home Office said it had no record of any further correspondence, but added: "We have seen a copy of Mr Menezes' passport, containing a stamp apparently giving him indefinite leave to remain in the UK. On investigation, this stamp was not one that was in use by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate on the date given."
- Wiki
CCTV footage released of the incident shows he wasn't running
It was later indicated by the leaked IPCC documents that Menezes may have run across the platform to get a seat on the train, and did not know at the time that he was being watched or pursued.
- Wiki
[not] wearing a big bulky jacket.
Correct.
Menezes was wearing a pair of jeans and a light denim jacket.
Then again,
Mark Whitby, a witness to the shooting, told Reuters that he observed Menezes wearing a large winter coat, which "looked out of place".
Anthony Larkin, another eyewitness, told the BBC that Menezes appeared to be wearing a "bomb belt with wires coming out."
- Wiki
I would not kill the head of the RIAA or MPAA. Not because it is "inhumane". But because it does not solve anything.
If you want to deal with them, shut them down. Kill the organization. These organizations do not fall just because you kill the head. The head is replaceable, just like everything else. That's why killing them is so hard. It is insanely hard to show that the organization and not just a person within committed a crime. If everything fails, they'll find a sacrificial lamb. The bigger the crime, the bigger the lamb most likely, but it will not be anything that kills the organization. It just continues with another person in that place. Everyone can be replaced. Killing someone within the organization does not accomplish anything.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The FBI believes that one third of the western world's news articles are being generated by one 79-year-old Australian-born American man. Rupert Murdoch is being blamed for...
How about give him 1 minute of jail time for every spam email sent. That sounds pretty fair. Of course he would never see the light of day given that he has sent over 37 million spam equating to just over 70 years jail.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Yeah, but then you come back to them later and then they're all "g'day mate." Do you really want that to happen again? :P
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
The Soviets never managed to keep it a secret when they were doing those kinds of things
The Soviets just kill their vocal ex-patriots and reporters. The murderer is then elected to Parliament and granted immunity.
Just make him delete all the spam he sent.
From each inbox.
Manually.
Yes, spamming is a massive crime, akin to murder. This person is responsible for a third of the world's spam. How much time does a person waste per a month on dealing with spam? Let's say you waste 10 minutes (which is probably a lower estimate). That means you waste about 2 hours on spam a year. If we apply that estimate to just a few Americans (say 30 million of them) then that means in the course of one year this person has wasted 20 million hours of peoples time. There are around 9000 hours in a year. That means he's wasted about 2000 years worth of time. So in a year he's deprived from lives the same amount as if he killed thirty infants. Now, that's a ridiculous underestimate since there are a lot more internet users than just 30 million Americans. If we instead estimated using 300 million which is still an underestimate for the combined population of US and Europe that has regular internet access, that means he's doing the equivalent to killing 300 infants a year. Part of the problem here is that humans are really, really bad at appreciating scale. Killing an actual human being feels very different primarily because humans didn't evolve in a context where it was possible for someone to be evil by harming lots of people a tiny bit. But the point should be clear: By any rough metric this person is equivalent to a mass murderer.
Spambot increase your destruction of weak capitalist regime.
Eventually you will do REAL SOVIET DAMAGE
Firstly it's 500,000 computers, which send ~61,000,000,000 messages per day (Wikipedia: 183,000,000,000 spam emails a day). 706,019 emails per second.
It's pointless trying to compare crimes like assault to crimes like email spam. Murder is obviously a terrible crime, it deprives someone of a life and causes misery for many others. I don't think anyone wants to make out that it's negligible by comparison. Yet, pretending that sending 22,265,000,000,000 spam emails each year is nothing more than a trivial irritant is equally wrong. In terms of harm to society as a whole I would say the costs were considerably higher than a single murder.
Except that the $3B spent wasn't spent by the government. Had that money not been spent by network operators and email admins they would have spent that money on other things, such has other IT capital, dividends got their stock holders, or new carpet for the office. The bottom line is that there is no moral or legal justification for the capital punishment of a spammer, much less the summary execution without due process.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.