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.
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.
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.
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.
Retrain DEA agents to go after spammers.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
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.
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.
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 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.
Paragraphs went the same way as capitalisation, apparently.
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?
Bill G is a very generous man. He's going to pay me $.25 every time I forward the email I just got from him.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
That's why one has throwaway addresses, be it foo+bar@gmail.com, or aliases on your own domain, so you can pinpoint which group of schlubs decided to break their pinky promise of not spamming, as well as to just delete the alias or filter it to /dev/null. Some places, I just use mailinator.
You just have to assume that if you give your phone or E-mail address out, it will be hawked to third parties and spammed to Hell and gone.
...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.
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/
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.
As a mail server admin, my observation is that spam is perhaps slightly down, but scams are rising. Almost all sent through botnets.
What has helped me the most is scoring e-mail based on which countries the e-mails are relayed through, and what timezone they were apparently sent from, and where URLs lead to.
The currently worst ratio of spam/scam to legitimate e-mail are:
Timezones: +0530, +0800, +0700, +0300, +0200
Relay countries: CN, DE, IN, AR, IR
URL countries: DE, GB, RU, AR, CN
So if you get an e-mail sent from India (+0530), relayed through Argentina, and with an URL in Russia, chances are almost parity that it's spam or a scam, and that you can firewall the connecting host for a year with no ill effects.
#DeleteFacebook
This is why I never ask for an ereceipt. The amount of paper used is trivial, and it keeps my email address off of their spam list.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
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."
Why TF would anyone want an email receipt? I was taken aback when I was first asked if I wanted one, it is so obviously for collecting addresses for spam. It surely takes longer for you to give them your email address than it does for them to give you a paper receipt anyway.
"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]
Only Apple users are pretentious enough to use non-English characters on the American internet.
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 ?