Slashdot Mirror
Spam Is Back (theoutline.com)
Jon Christian, writing for The Outline: For a while, spam -- unsolicited bulk messages sent for commercial or fraudulent purposes -- seemed to be fading away. The 2003 CAN-SPAM Act mandated unsubscribe links in email marketing campaigns and criminalized attempts to hide the sender's identity, while sophisticated filters on what were then cutting-edge email providers like Gmail buried unwanted messages in out-of-sight spam folders. In 2004, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told a crowd at the World Economic Forum that "two years from now, spam will be solved." In 2011, cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs noted that increasingly tech savvy law enforcement efforts were shutting down major spam operators -- including SpamIt.com, alleged to be a major hub in a Russian digital criminal organization that was responsible for an estimated fifth of the world's spam. These efforts meant that the proportion of all emails that are spam has slowly fallen to a low of about 50 percent in recent years, according to Symantec research.
But it's 2017, and spam has clawed itself back from the grave. It shows up on social media and dating sites as bots hoping to lure you into downloading malware or clicking an affiliate link. It creeps onto your phone as text messages and robocalls that ring you five times a day about luxury cruises and fictitious tax bills. Networks associated with the buzzy new cryptocurrency system Ethereum have been plagued with spam. Facebook recently fought a six-month battle against a spam operation that was administering fake accounts in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. Last year, a Chicago resident sued the Trump campaign for allegedly sending unsolicited text message spam; this past November, ZDNet reported that voters were being inundated with political text messages they never signed up for. Apps can be horrid spam vectors, too. Repeated mass data breaches that include contact information, such as the Yahoo breach in which 3 billion user accounts were exposed, surely haven't helped. Meanwhile, you, me, and everyone we know is being plagued by robocalls.
But it's 2017, and spam has clawed itself back from the grave. It shows up on social media and dating sites as bots hoping to lure you into downloading malware or clicking an affiliate link. It creeps onto your phone as text messages and robocalls that ring you five times a day about luxury cruises and fictitious tax bills. Networks associated with the buzzy new cryptocurrency system Ethereum have been plagued with spam. Facebook recently fought a six-month battle against a spam operation that was administering fake accounts in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. Last year, a Chicago resident sued the Trump campaign for allegedly sending unsolicited text message spam; this past November, ZDNet reported that voters were being inundated with political text messages they never signed up for. Apps can be horrid spam vectors, too. Repeated mass data breaches that include contact information, such as the Yahoo breach in which 3 billion user accounts were exposed, surely haven't helped. Meanwhile, you, me, and everyone we know is being plagued by robocalls.
it never stopped. He said he doesnâ(TM)t see it, but he wouldnâ(TM)t since Iâ(TM)m sure he has someone screen his mail.
And it's a spam caller, I set the phone down and wait for the call to end. Make those guys use some of their resources.
Does anyone else get these a lot on their cell? It seems as if Mr. Likely calls me daily. I wish I could just block him but he changes number frequently.
why no paragraphs?
-linux... they can't *give* that shit away.
I never knew it decreased. When I check, I see that I still get tons, but my spam filters keep it at bay for the most part. If anything, the new kind (random phone calls on my cell/mobile everyday) is even worse than the old kind.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
but on my work email on outlook I get about 20 spam emails a day that make it through whatever filters they have set up.
Given the rise of e-receipts in the last few months, I'm not really surprised. Sure, they're more environmentally friendly, but being emailed a receipt for the t-shirt you just bought is basically just being asked to be spammed.
A friend of mine bought a pair of shoes and they asked if he wanted his receipt emailed to him. He asked if they'd spam him and was assured he wouldn't be. He then spelt out his email address and the shop assistant then double checked that he didn't want to be added to their mailing list.
Of course he doesn't want to be added to the mailing list, he wants the receipt for the shoes, and nothing else!
We need a micropayment system where all messages contain some payment. I then set my email reader to only preserve messages that contain at least 10 cents. My friends can pony up that money if they want me to read something.
And do not post the "why your email solution won't work" check list. That is perfect being the enemy of good.
Bill Gates book from the late 90s talked about attaching money to messages.
You could set a filter to discard anything with less than X amount of money attached.
A friend might attach $20 to make sure they reach you and you might give it back to be nice.
But spam operators? Thank you for the cash!
Why don't we have this yet?
Yes Congress. Please update this law. Get rid of the "unsubscribe" loophole that allows marketers to track you on a DIFFERENT channel (the web) if you are dumb enough to click.
Retrain DEA agents to go after spammers.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
No social medial account, burner emails for quick things, and I don't give my email to companies. I get 3 to 5 emails in spam folder a day and might receive 1 robo call or txt a month. My work phone is a nightmare, but meh!
I administer the spam filter / email relay at work and our spam volume is one one-hundredth what it was in 2010. So that's at least antidotal evidence that spam volume is down.
Junk paper mail -- the local grocery stores all sending out circulars to "current resident" telling me how much ham costs -- is a worse plague than anything electronic. There are no laws against it (since the USPS gets cash from the spammers), there's no way to filter it (since it's physical), you're required to constantly check it (or else the box gets full and USPS gets butthurt), and you can't stop using that communication channel (since the government uses it, and if you don't get their shit then they get butthurt and they have guns).
I suspect that the drain on the environment from paper spam is orders of magnitude higher than for e-spam, too.
AT&T knocks on my door about every other month trying to sell AT&T U-Verse. I cut all ties with AT&T years ago because their ISP sucks. I wrote them to stop the telemarketing, and received a response verifying I'm on their do not contact list, and put a NO SOLICITING sign on the front door. Those fucktards still knock on my door even after telling them all of the above. Worse than Jehovah's Witnesses.
The spam never changed much, we just put more money and time into pushing it away. Now those efforts are failing in more obvious ways - the ways that those of us who were paying attention knew would happen.
Filtering cannot solve the spam problem, as it only creates a race to the bottom of the signal:noise ratio. Spammers keep working on ways to get around filters by changing how they craft their messages; eventually making it so that more emails that should pass are not - at which point people start to complain that the filters aren't working.
Similarly, law enforcement cannot solve it either unless there is a single set of international laws against it that apply to all people equally regardless of where they or their targets are. Obviously this will never happen. People call for all kinds of terrible things to be done to spammers but not only will that not happen it won't make the situation better as there is a nearly endless supply of spammers out there ready to fill the void.
The only thing that works is to approach spam as the economic problem that it is. We need to stop pretending that spammers send out spam to piss people off; that is one of the dumbest lies on the internet. Spammers send out spam to make money. If you don't want spam, you need to do something to prevent spammers from getting paid. Cut off their cash flow and they go on to doing other things with their botnets instead.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
A man who made $600 spamming slashdot comments complains when someone inappropriately monetizes their relationship? Oh the irony.
Remember when you said that buying a child bride was "getting the most for your retirement dollar"? I remember that. Maybe you could make it into an ad campaign for a human trafficking service?
Private numbers are the ones which piss me off. There's no reason someone should be able to call my cellphone without me seeing their number, I always file a police report for harassment when it happens.
I never saw the slightest hint that spam might be fading away. I'm pretty sure the only way someone could think that spam was fading away, was if they were just a user, not someone who retrains spamassassin in spam/ham every week or two.
I don't measure things, but at least anecdotally/intuitively, I never saw anything that appeared to be even a minor dip in the amount of spam sent. It's just fairly well filtered now.
I get spam. No idea if it is more or less than what it used to be. But no robocalls since ever. I believe that has to do with how things work in Europe (Belgium in my case)
It is forbidden to sell customer data. You can also only send commercial information if you are a customer of a company. The law is a bit vague about when you stop being a customer. e.g. if you bought a car, when will they stop sending stuff without you asking them to stop it, is not really predefined. Just asking to stop will be honored in 99.9% of the cases. The rest will be either standard spam that I already receive or human error where they actually forgot to unsubscribe you.
Then there is the thing about the calls. In Europe the person who call will have to pay, not the person who gets the call (Unless he is outside Europe and has to pay roaming fees). Combine that with the fact that data can not be sold and you end up with only being able to call your own customers that have not yet opted out.
That leaves the calls from the Microsoft Support. They hardly do any cold calling and rely on standard spam and people calling them most of the time.
And even if the company tries to call their customer, people are extremely hesitant to give information.
But then that could also be all just me as I hardly give out my phone. I even ask why they wouild sue it to contact me and I often refuse to give it as I do not see why they need it. And for companies I use the email address like e.g. Slashdot.org@example.com so I know who is sending it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It never left... at least, if my email is at all representative.
Really the only thing CAN-SPAM changed is that, now, the spam I get mostly contains "unsubscribe" links which take you to a non-functional web form (on those rare occasions I even bother to check).
#DeleteChrome
Gmail apparently doesn't distinguish between a.b@gmail.com and ab@gmail.com
Now I get many emails that are similar to mine, but different names....so if mine was JPDough@gmail.com, I get emails to J.PDough@gmail.com, JP.Dough@gmail.com, JPD.ough@gmail.com with the correspondence referencing John, Jason, Jerry, etc.
Invariable is it is some legal, medical, or insurance thing that requires my signature...so click this link.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Spam never went away, it just moved: consider the many fraudulent advertisements scatted throughout the web. Same desired outcome, different medium.
Shut up, creimer. No one cares about your fake outrage.
The TLA hired a company, who hired a company, who hired you but hired another company to handle employing you and they treat you like shit. Hahaha it's like office space in the 1984 universe.
The reason they hired you was because a bean counter was woo'd by the low price advertised by your contractor. The end result was that the austin, seattle, and palo alto offices of this agency have literal retards doing all the menial of IT work. Almost like a security risk or something!
You are a walking talking shitting cut corner.
I know some other retards who do menial IT work. Hmm I wonder. Could I make a retarded IT staffing agency? Could I offer "Retirement in Mexico" as a way to keep costs down. I wonder how low I could keep a man's pay for life on such a retirement package. Hmmm.
I was signed up to Change.org's mailing list at one point. They would send out email alerts with links to petitions, sometimes from other progressive orgs. When you signed those petitions, you were automatically added to those other org's mailing lists.
After about a week of this, something like 30% of my email was petition requests.
I understand that getting the message out and making people aware of certain issues is important, but that just completely turned me off and I am no longer subscribed to ANY of those orgs.
I also realize that these particular emails are not *technically* spam, since they do notify you in the fine print at the bottom of the petition, but my point is that these types of emails have become the new "spam" for me. Gmail filters the "normal" spam for me. I never see it, but these chain-mailing-list progressive orgs have got to stop. "Hey, thanks for signing that petition! As a reward, here's another progressive mailing list subscription for a cause you don't really care that much abut!" The one GOOD thing about these is at least they obey unsub requests.
A man who made $600 spamming slashdot comments complains when someone inappropriately monetizes their relationship? Oh the irony.
Remember when you said that buying a child bride was "getting the most for your retirement dollar"? I remember that. Maybe you could make it into an ad campaign for a human trafficking service?
A musical interpretation of creimer's posts.
Hahah amazing, predictably "someone" modded cdreimer's post up as "interesting".
This just tells us that you have an account somewhere where you don't act like an insufferable asshole. This means nobody should take pity on you as some confused autistic who lacks social graces.
You willfully act this shitty.
that was me you hung up on each time. I was just trying to tell you that you need a Slashdot GOLD Account to qualify for improved site view capacity and you need a modern browser other than Lynx. For just $2.99 you can also patticipate in foobar xyz 123, do you have a creditcard number ready for me?
...As if I didn't already know.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
About the only spam that bothers me is the robocalls. They are getting pretty bad. It ranges from 1-5 calls a day now. Very obnoxious. Do-not-call does seem to help, but the idiots who implemented that, it's expires after like what 6 months or a year, I dunno, but as soon as it expires, the calls skyrocket like the same day.
What I'd really like to have on my smartphone is a whitelist for callers. I'm just done with these idiots. Not in my contact list: shunt to voicemail and pretend it never happened.
***CDREIMER submissions alert!!! please pay attention to the submissions update***
Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!
SUBMISSIONS UPDATE: /. so make sure to go to:
Note also that creimer is trying to regain karma by getting his submissions published as articles on
https://slashdot.org/~cdreimer
and mod down his submissions as well. The great thing is that you don't even need mod points to mod down a submission, just click on the "minus" icon!
creimer wrote:
I don't bother with mod points. I'm doing something much more sinister. It took ten story submissions ? I'll have to double check the number ? to move cdreimer's karma from neutral to excellent without ever being exposed to the capricious mods. Mmmmmwwwwahahahahahahaha!
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Danger! Creimy is posting more than 2 posts a day. Hurry! mod down otherwise /. will go to hell again!
Note: you can mod down even if already at -1 to lower karma and to prevent lost /. users to accidentally mod up.
creimer dumb fuck wrote:
All you need to do is find a website with a permissive TOS, say, Slashdot, create a Python script to scrape your own comments, sprinkle Amazon affiliate links in various posts, and then re-post past links whenever possible. Won't be long before you start making "coffee money" each month.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
C.D. Reimer is a renowned Slashdot collaborator, as he puts it himself; "Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."
But does anybody ever wondered what "C.D." stands for? Well, it stands for Creimy Dumpty of course!
Creimy Dumpty sat on the wall,
Creimy Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Creimy Dumpty
Together again.
Creimy's siblings video and theme song, very realistic, especially the pants, just like Creimy's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
With "Vice President Pence Vowing US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon", we are sure they will need miracle workers up there, here is what it would look like. Note that Creimy takes care of bringing a lot of food to the moon as depicted below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Creimy's real pictures:
Before the sex change:
https://ibb.co/cc7Ddw
After the sex change:
https://ibb.co/gVad65
Creimy's "enterprise-level" chair, he talks about it all the time on slashdot:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...
Creimy's head, while his supervisor was talking to him, not with him, since it is impossible to do with Creimy:
https://school.discoveryeducat...
Creimy acting in educational resource document, he actually confirmed himself on Slashdot that he was handled by Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education! He is really a king Dumpty!:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...
Anyone running their own mail server know how difficult it is to get a mail through a .outlook.com MX.
I have see nothing but spam increases in all my client filtering services since I started working in IT in 1997.
Have you stopped raping your 12 roommates yet?
I sent a nasty letter to my congress critter about the Obamacare repeal and got signed up for their 'send us money' email list.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
#DeleteFacebook
:)
I haven't been getting too much spam since quite long time ago. But the one I get is very weird like the one which I received right now (Slashdot doesn't support those characters).
I have been getting an email similar to that one about 2-5 times per week for over the last quite a few months. They are always written in a language I cannot understand (sorry about that, obsessive spammers, but I can only understand Spanish, English and bit of German) and usually include the word SPAM in the title!! I have never replied to any of them, visited anything referred by them or even made the tiniest effort to translate what they say.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Chris' case is really getting worse, he spends all day replying to himself as AC on /.
The tests we ran on Chris have shown that Chris has the intelligence of an ameba:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So, technically, he is able to conceive some kind of agenda but it will be silly or impossible to follow on a human scale.
For example, Chris had an agenda to post anything he felt like on Slashdot which did not work well because it was based on his false beliefs that he had an infinite number of karma points as he wrote here several times.
Several people here explained to Chris that karma maxed out at some level like 50 or so but Chris kept on insisting that his python script had confirmed that he had millions of karma points!
Oh well, as I wrote before: "It isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody."
For the valuable /. users that might already have read the following, please note that there is an important update.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education has invested money to buy Chris a new chair:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...
Information about Christopher Dale Reimer and autistic people:
Autistic people have obsessions about things normal people don't care. For example, one of our autistic patient went haywire when he realized that there was a penny missing in his pocket change.
To calm him down, one of our educator pretended to have found it on the floor and gave a penny to him.
The autistic patient condition went even worse because he realized it wasn't the same penny!
Chris has an obsession with budgeting every penny. He doesn't understand that most people do not budget to the penny and have a flexible amount they allow for miscellaneous items.
I am Nancy Guerrero and I am Director of Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. We use Chris' (a.k.a. creimer,cdreimer) picture in our document because he is the hardest case we have ever had to handle:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...
Our artists were inspired by the low carb diet that Christopher follows scrupulously for the small lunch box and by the picture linked below for the rest. I am sure that you will notice the similarities such as the bump on the side of his chest and more:
https://ibb.co/gVad65
Please be easy on Christopher although, I am aware that some of our staff handling Chris post joke comments here and obvoiusly, the Santa Clara County Office of Education disapprove that behavior vehemently:
https://school.discoveryeducat...
But it isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody.
Thank You dear users,
---
Nancy Guerrero
Director
Special Education
Santa Clara County Office of Education
I love their meat product.
The e-mail spam that evades my filters is down to one or two a week now, but I'm getting around one call a day from some Desi asswipe pretending to be an IRS agent or a Marriott employee offering me a free vacation. I'd like to know how we in the west can support India's Serious Fraud Office in hunting down and beating the crap out of them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"including SpamIt.com, alleged to be a major hub in a Russian digital criminal organization that was responsible for an estimated fifth of the world's spam"
It's bullshit statements like the above that only tend to discredit slashdot. The primary source of spam on the planet is all those compromised Microsoft Windows out there being co-opted into DDOD attacks and spewing email spam to the Internet.
That's not true: there's a way to stop them, if you want to take the trouble to implement it. You might have to google around for it, but I'll provide a link to get you started.
So, basically, your post office has a form that you can fill for blocking "erotically arousing or sexually provocative" junk mail: PS Form 1500.
You must be thinking, "Well, that's all well and good, but I'm talking about ads from the local grocery store, not sexually provocative stuff." This is where Rowan vs USPS comes in. You see, the only person who can decide what you find sexually provocative is YOU. So, you can say, "I find the logo of my local grocery store, and these pictures of low-priced vegetables, to be EROTICALLY AROUSING OR SEXUALLY PROVOCATIVE," and no one can say otherwise. The US Postal Service must stop delivering it. This was upheld by the Supreme Court.
So, go for it. Stop the junk mail.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Why bother targeting the 20% that comes from overseas? Fix the local problem first.
At the risk of promoting a commercial item, I will nonetheless recommend the Sentry 2 device for VOIP phones. It rejects (without ringing through) ALL robocalls and calls from its own list of spammers. Your friends press 0 to go through and be whitelisted ONCE. If a telemarketer lies and presses 0 you can do what you want and then press REJECT so he's added to the blacklist. We used to get half a dozen telemarketer/robocalls per day. Now it's down to one or two lying bastards a month. Best $50 I ever spent.
so tell that to the mafiAA, breinbaf and the happy-go-trolly bunch sending mass extortion mails hoping a few will pay up so their wage is paid that month ... face it, who's the only ones making money in the witchhunt ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?