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Whatever Happened To Sanford "Spamford" Wallace?
Tackhead writes "People of a certain age — the age before email filters were effective, may remember a few mid-90s buzzwords like 'bulletproof hosting' and 'double opt-in.' People may remember that Hormel itself conceded that although 'SPAM' referred to their potted meat product, the term 'spam' could refer to unsolicited commercial email. People may also remember AGIS, Cyberpromo, Sanford 'Spam King' Wallace, and Walt Rines. Ten years after a 2003 retrospective on Rines and Wallace, Ars Technica reminds us that the more things change, the more they stay the same."
Did Hormel sic their lawyers on Slashdot? The new icon isn't really accurate. There's more than that pig in spam.
ytcracker may not be a household name, or as well known known as Wallace, but he is the undisputed spam rap king. If ytc taught me anything, it is that every time a spammer is taken down, there are plenty more ready to take his place. The fact is that, even today, spam pays. Until people suddenly wisen up and stop falling for scams and stop being receptive to advertising in general, there will continue to be spam. Spam pays, folks, and leads to hacking.
Number one thing most spammers are most excited about right now: Microsoft's pledge to soon screw people who are still happy with/stuck on Windows XP. You think botnets are bad now, wait until M$ completely stops patching XP. I can't wait to cash in.
He's in debt to the courts for millions, fails to show up for his court appearances and has repeatedly returned to a life of crime. It's not even as if his lawyer is getting him off. He's a continual recidivist and shows no intention of reforming his ways. Even if the cases themselves were merely civil disputes, his failure to live up his court-ordered responsibilities should have consequences.
Why isn't this jackass in jail yet? He's far more deserving than some poor punk who had the bad luck to get caught with a baggie of pot in his pocket.
It's a shame Law and Order has squandered so much faith, credit and goodwill on meaningless culture war bullshit...
Yes, TV will save us. Mass media will save us all! And absolutely did not play an integral role in causing these problems...
"If Germany had the propaganda apparatus of the United States, she would not need an army". -- Hitler's propaganda minister. Do you understand why he said that?
What you dweebs don't realize is that malware was transferred to
the machines of millions of people via spam.
None of this was an accident, it was a covert op.
God damn, you fuckwits are so dense and so naive I'd be weeping
if I wasn't laughing my ass off on a nice warm beach with a secure
retirement fund.
- Sanford W.
I saw a movie with that title once, but (to my surprise) it wasn't about Email...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Lawyers going after money rather than the culprit. Some guy spends one minute in a coordinated DDoS attack and he gets jail time. This guy runs around free because the Lawyers thought that hitting his pocket book would matter but what they didn't realize is this guy has no concept of saving any money, he spends it and pisses it away on gambling so when they come to collect, his pockets are empty. In the meantime he cranks up the old routines to get more money to spend.
I do have to say one thing, it's great to see a guy make the Feds go in loops. We all believe that the Criminal Justice system is this fair system that only punishes the truly guilty. Yeah we want to believe it but if you're on the wrong side of that system without representation and money you're just gear lube for the the machine. This guy without a lawyer has the Feds running around trying to get money that doesn't exist, all the while playing the dumb fool. In the end he's nobody's fool.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Americas problem isn't even its sky-high incarceration rate.
It's problems lie is its viciously individualistic culture that entertains no notion of collection action or responsibility; tolerance of regulatory capture; and tolerance of conflicts of interest. This is all enabled by popular myths that pervade American culture, that anybody can get rich if they work hard enough, and that all poor people, by extension, are cunts.
Deal with the conflict-of-interest issue, and then things like the commercial, for-profit school-to-jail pipeline will eventually take care of themselves.
The statement of "before email filters were effective" is delirious at best. Filters will never, in the long term, be an effective anti-spam tool. All that filters do is drive spammers to change their syntax to make spam look less spammy so that they can get past filters. This creates a digital arms race then as people who use filters have to keep re-training their filters in reaction. This wastes, time, energy, and money.
Even worse, as time goes on the signal-to-noise ratio only gets worse as spammers get more creative and do a better job of sending spam that resembles wanted commercial email.
If you want to actually do something about the spam epidemic, don't fool yourself into thinking that your filters will do it. Spam is an economic problem, it needs economic solutions. Filters do not accomplish this.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You've obviously never been to Southern Illinois my friend, the most depressed place on earth.
...in a shallow grave in the Mojave desert?
He seems like he's the kind of archetypal low-rent scam artist with a gambling habit who thinks that because he can walk away from corporate civil judgements he can get away with anything.
Maybe I've seen too many movies, but Las Vegas seems like the place guys like this go only to find out that there's a difference between civil suits and guys in sharkskin suits, and the latter is more than willing to use extrajudicial means to recover their debts.
20 million people receiving an average of 1000 mails across their lifetime from him specifically at half a mail per second calculates out to 317 years. That's roughly three lifetimes. I guess that could be considered "quite a few lifetimes," but my numbers were liberal to begin with. I doubt he reached 20m people and I doubt each person spent half a second on every one of the mails they received, which likely totaled less than 1000.