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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.
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.
Get Google to implement it with Google Pay, and integrate it into Gmail. Other email services could opt-in using secure payment tokens in email headers.
The micropayments should roughly balance... just not for spammers.
Emails which don't include a micropayment can continue to be spam-filtered as usual.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]