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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."
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.
I saw a movie with that title once, but (to my surprise) it wasn't about Email...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"Until people suddenly wisen up and stop falling for scams and stop being receptive to advertising in general, there will continue to be spam."
Insightful comment. The spammers, revolting subhumans though they are, are simply a symptom of the real problem. And the big "legitimate" marketing companies are signs of the same problem. A sane person would go out of their way to avoid purchasing anything that they saw advertised, and if a significant percentage of the population were sane advertising and marketing would be dead, and all the people currently stuck in those soul-leeching jobs could become productive members of the economy instead.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
Insightful comment. The spammers, revolting subhumans though they are, are simply a symptom of the real problem. And the big "legitimate" marketing companies are signs of the same problem. A sane person would go out of their way to avoid purchasing anything that they saw advertised, and if a significant percentage of the population were sane advertising and marketing would be dead, and all the people currently stuck in those soul-leeching jobs could become productive members of the economy instead.
This article really brings back memories. I remember this douche from so many years back. He is one of the few internet "celebrities" that I can remember from 10 and 15 years ago.
I said this years ago, and I still believe its true now, you will never kill off the spamers as long as the market is there. No matter what laws you pass, or how much you fine them there will always be some willing to take the risk. There is just to much money there, it's like drug dealers. As long as there is money to be made there will always be someone willing to take the risk.
You want to kill this beast you have to kill the market and just like any market there is the supply and there is the demand. The demand side is the innocent people that click on the links that keep the spammers in business. The war against spam seems to always be about eliminating that side of the market. Well people are stupid and we have all clicked on some link that we didn't realize was a spam link. So that side of the argument is a hopeless fight.
Going after the spammers themselves is equally useless for reasons already stated.
So that leaves one side of the market, the supply. People think the spammers are the supply but they are not. They are just the middlemen. You want to put a real dent in the spam problem, you go after the real supplier. Where that link leads, that is who you go after. The person that is paying the spammer to spam.
The people that supply the products that is who you go after. The spammers themselves they have throw away accounts and a never ending revolving door of ipaddress they can use. Things get to hot the states, they just move it overseas. But the people that pay the spammer they have real address, with physical locations. There is your target, that is who you need to go after.
An I've heard the argument that some of these companies are innocent and may not be aware that they are spamming. Well I say that doesn't exempt them. If you are advertising through a company then you should be aware of how that company does its advertising. Ignorance is not an excuse.
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