Slashdot Mirror
Two Spammers Murdered in New Jersey
Zerbey wrote in with a CNN report about the excution-style murder of two shady online stock promoters whose primary marketing device was ... spam. Zerbey wrote, hopefully with tongue in cheek, that they may have been slain "by a disgruntled recipient of UCE who decided that e-mailing abuse@ simply wasn't effective enough." Farfetched? Perhaps. A quote from the story: "Though investigators have not pinpointed a motive or suspects, Monmouth
County Prosecutor John Kaye said the attack likely was at least partly tied to the pair's penny stock Web operation, www.stockinvestor.com, or other ventures."
I don't mean to make light of this. Yes, two people have been killed and this is a fundamental wrong thing (tm), it's just that there is this pattern that I keep seeing.
:), but these are just my observations of what is. Events like this are always bad, I just hope for some positive outcome when I see them. And what I look forward to in the future is recognition of and solutions to problems before horrible acts of violence force them to our attention. It has been said that "eternal vigilance is the price of freedom", but I think that if we can be attentive to the subtle things, our path will be smoother.
A few years ago, U.S. Postal workers flipped out regularly and started shooting up their place of employment. We haven't seen these events in Post Offices for a while. What happened? What changed? Was it just a phase of the moon? A syzygy (sp? - planetary alignment)? Some temporary problem of extraterrestrial influence? Maybe stress?
Hmmm... we might be onto something here. Perhaps the conditions were too repetitious/opressive/stressful and people flipped out. Maybe as a result of those events, the work model changed a bit. Maybe the bosses are a little less authoritarian. Maybe postal workers are being a little nicer to each other.
If the above is true, it could be a result of fear that their fellow workers might be capable of hurting them, or it could just be a recognition that there was a problem to start with and a sincere desire to make a positive change.
The bottom line is that there were a series of these events and now we haven't heard of such events for a long time.
In April, we had the Columbine shooting. There are some questions yet as to who the shooters were (philosophically), and their motives and targets. As a former High School outcast/geek, I can understand if their motive was fear or anger at jocks, being picked on, or excluded, or the structure or whatever. Maybe it was even due to their own mental imbalances. (I'm not condoning their behavior, only saying that I understand.) In any case, there is some reason why this happened and similar or copycat events continue to occur. There is some stressor, and I hope that these tragic events will cause the average person (student) to take a closer look, to stop and think about the impact of their actions. I can only hope that whatever brought about the change at the Post Office can happen in America's Schools. Maybe Jocks won't pick on Geeks because they're afraid of being shot. I realize that this is the wrong means to the desired end, but if we can take what was a tragic circumstance and make positive change as a result, at least there is some good. (My fellow Geeks, please do not take this a permission to go and shoot Jocks, and please do not believe that this is a good way to make a difference. I'm just arguing that since it's already done, maybe there can be some positive change.)
It appears that problems seem to fester and not come to serious light, let alone get lanced, until some extraordinarily bad event takes place. This is really unfortunate, but seems to be true.
Even though I agree that the killing of these two "shady" businessmen is certainly about the monetary fraud they committed, if it causes a Spammer to stop and think, "Maybe there is someone out there pissed off enough about what I am doing that they might try to do me bodily harm...", even to simply stop and consider the impact of his/her actions on others, this can only lead to improvement in our internet community the same as improvement has come to the Post Office.
Yes, I do recognize the downsides to all this as have been stated in many other posts. Labeling this as a Spam revenge thing can cause certain less-than-critically-thinking individuals to see us in a bad light. And this is the same tactic (at least the fear component) that has made it damned difficult for many women to obtain consitutionally protected abortion services. But there are facets of life that are simply fait accompli and we try appreciate the benefits we receive and fight against the injustices. As with most things, they can be used for bad or good.
IANAS (I am not a sociologist
Russ
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
Oh geez! Lighten up already!
I really don't need to hear anyone making cheap jokes at the expense of a couple of dead people.
Then ignore the thread. Nobody is forcing you to read these posts. Asking the moderators to aggressively down-mod this thread just so it palatable to your own sensitive intellect is just a little selfish (not to mention arrogant).
It's not funny.
But it is funny. Perhaps you don't know the definition of comedy. According to Mel Brooks (and he should know), "Comedy happens to other people. Tragedy happens to me." I don't know those two, so therefore it's funny. Apart from that, do you not realize that jokes and laughter are a very human coping mechanism for stressful stimuli?
It's not cute.
You're right, it's not cute. But cute is not the same thing as funny, and many of the posts here are hilarious.
They're dead.
That means they are totally beyond caring what we do or don't say about them. Are a few dark jokes going to make them any more dead? Will false empathy and crocodile tears bring them back to life? It didn't for Diana Spencer, so don't expect a miracle for these two losers. So who is harmed by a little dark humor on Slashdot? Before you claim yourself as a victim, though, please remember that nobody is forcing you to read Slashdot.
Those were human lives.
They were SPAMMERS so 'human' is a debatable term. Additionally, there are now over 6 BILLION people on this planet. It's not as though human life (or spammer life for that matter) is exactly a scarce commodity.
all of these tasteless jokes would be appropriately tagged ``flamebait''
Thanks ever so much for so selflessly volunteering your services as the "Touchstone of Tastefullness". From now on, I'll make sure to consult you before I read anything. God forbid anyone should be subjected to potentially offensive material.
I for one did not need this to ``brighten'' up my morning.
You've never administered a public mail server, have you? Well, after spending all night cleaning up a spool directory that was clogged with over 6 Gigabytes of UCE, this sure brightened up my morning.
I think there's a phrase that could be paraphrased here somehow, but I've been awake too long dealing with spam to think of how right now. The original quote is "A Liberal is just a Conservative that hasn't been mugged yet." I think it could go "An Overly Sensitive Thought Police On Slashdot is just a Heartless Uncaring Bastard who hasn't spent all night sorting and cleaning spam out of a mail spool yet.
Even if it's "fake child porn", all it does is encourage other pornographers and those that want to download child porn. It's sick, disgusting, and perverse and to think of it as anything other than that makes me suspicious of whoever does.
I'm sorry if you disagree.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Ah, yes, the good 'ol /. tradition of responding without reading what you're responding to.
FYI, the article you didn't read mentioned spam in passing. It was not a "spammer's get whacked" article... that's the spin the person who submitted the article put on it.
The two victim's business dealings in general were the focus of the article. The fact that they manipulated stock, defauded people, etc. That they used spam as a part of that was only simply mentioned. When they mentioned potential suspects, they only said there was more than one gunman involved, most likely, that certain people (ex husband of one of the victim's gf) was cleared, and a strong suggestion that it was tied to their "shady business." No mention of spam.
There's no mention of net vigilantes wreaking horrible vengence on spammers. I'm dismayed that a few people here actually are assuming this is what has happened (and, even more dismayed that they seem to sort of be into it...).
You know, if you are against media hysteria, perhaps you should try to not jump to conclusions yourself.
It may not stop anyone else from spamming but it will stop them.
Q: What do you call 10,000 spammers on the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.
Sorry, it had to be said. :-)
The government has allowed a massive annoyance and misappropriation of resources to continue for quite a long time now, and is not responsive to citizens' calls for regulation barring the practice (on the model of the earlier ban on junk faxes).
The spammers themselves are (understandably) unwilling to stop a practice they believe profitable, merely because people are annoyed.
The commercial network services have proven ineffective at stopping the practice, as spammers can create new accounts faster than the network operators can delete old ones, and the network operators themselves are not held liable for their customers behavior, and thus have no incentive to prescreen customers (and a disincentive, as it would reduce their customer base).
Technical solutions have not been effective - merely leading to an arms-race, which the spammers so far are winning.
This leaves a lot of very annoyed people with no effective way to abate the nuisance - except possibly direct action.
Now add to this the recognition that somewhere between one-in-50 and one-in-200 of the population in general are psycopaths. (Think of them as people with a brain damage that leaves them with no conscience - no sympathy for the suffering of others.) And that this group has the usual mix of smart and dumb, and of foreseeing and thinkers-for-today.
It's only a matter of time before one or more of them gets so mad as to try a little direct action. And given the above, such people might easily believe that the only direct action likely to eliminate the nuisance is to intimidate, damage, or eliminate the perpetrator of it.
This is, in my opinion, the inevitable result of the government's failure to live up to its claims of protection.
Please note that I'm not advocating either government action or literal attacks on spammers. I'm simply pointing out that I expect the latter in the absense of the former.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... On my aol account.
I kept getting messages like "I've got a stick to tell you about" etc. I think I actually responded once and told them it was illegal what they were doing (attempting to inflate the price through bogus means).
That is freaky shit.
I'm getting mailed about this folks, and no I didn't intend it to be a funny article - I posted it cause I assumed it would interest the Slashdot community. Whatever the guys did I would never condone murder or make fun of it.
Apologies if I offended anyone I certainly didn't intend to.
> If you produce it using real children that's bad.
The definition of "child porn" varies. In Denmark, in means real pictures produced with real children ( 15 years) in real sexual situations involving other people, animals or objects. Pictures of "nakid kids" are not even considered pornographic (respectable newspapers will bring them to show that "now its summer").
So for me, it is quite easy to hate child porn. Producing it hurts real children.
It is important that we never let the public know that geeks are people who get angry when violated, and who are able hate the people who violate them repeatedly. Those are dark emotions which we should keep hidden.
Gosh, my karma is going to suffer today.
and this dude comes on my server and starts spamming his URL in huge banner fonts. So I fragged him.
If their stupid and leave a 1800 number to get removed or to get more info do what I do..You get on your favorite sex newsgroup and advertise it as free sex talk..they get hundreds of thousands of phone calls. No one dies and they learn a lesson
Why not indeed. How about because you don't know where they are, and by the time you track them down, if you can, you will have cooled off slightly? Road rage would happen alot less if the people involved were 100 kilometres (or miles, if you prefer) apart.
I don't think spammers are going to be murdered on a very frequent basis. Mailbombed? Possibly. ISP cracked? Maybe. But murdered? It is an idea simply lacking in practicality.
I'll admit it seems like a fun thought, but I would hope it never really happens.
when sending out spam is a reason for murdering someone, what comes next?
;)
Murder for sending out massmessages on IRC?
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
And remember - the purpoise of the moderation system is to give higher ratings to the most interesting, insightful, and funny posts.
The purpoise is not to make it so that you don't see anything that might upset/offend you.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I read that they were working for the Feds. They may have been scumbags, it seems more likely somebody found out they were snitches and wasted them. Fact is few people will actually go out and kill because they got screwed out of money(especially honest ones). They just go to the cops, if they're smart enough to realize they got scammed. But there a plenty of people, once they get dirty, who will kill to avoid heavy jail terms. They only got fined 650k 'cause they cut a deal for information
-Every time I see you flourishing with a metaphor I experience the same anxiety I feel watching a child with a razor-
Death is'nt funny? Hey, I've got bad news for you folks: WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE. And those guys are ALREADY dead. Tough. Shit happens. Plus they were crooks. Not just spammers, crooks, who probably ripped many people of their life's savings.
You merkins listen: KEEP YOUR 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS' CRAP FOR YOURSELF.
These people were the ones behind the "JTSR Restaurants" series of spam runs late last year and earlier this year. That was one of the more massive spam runs of the last couple of years, involving nearly hundreds of fraudulently opened throwaway dialup accounts, and hundreds of hijacked mail relays over the course of several months.
I think that it is very much possible that someone who had his mailbox pummeled day in and day out with that crap -- many people received half a dozen copies of the same fucking spam every day for weeks -- went bonkers and tracked these people down.
When you start annoying tens of millions of people at random, you are bound to come across more than just a couple of nuts, kooks, and freakazoids. That's a given, according to laws of probability and statistics. There's no way around it. When you have such a large sample of population chosen at random, there are bound to be quite a handful of nuts in there.
Well, if you want to go around and start annoying and harassing a bunch of mentally unstable people, well, you'll just have to do it at your own risk. I'm really surprised that this hasn't happened more often.
--
"Both killed in iExecution style..."
Oh boy...
Looking at the first few comments posting to this article, it seems as though we're in for a bumpy ride.
This almost certainly has nothing to do with spam, and a lot to do with the $10m of investors money that disappeared.
Read the article and think before posting some off-the-cuff reply.
...j
We all hate spam. As gratifying as it is for the net-savvy to see spammers get theirs it is, we need to look beyond the immediate visceral rush.
This is going to make us look bad. Now, not only is the net the playground of pr0n vendors and the dreadful capitalism-destroying mp3s, we're a bunch of gun-toting vigilantes who work out our grudges with guns as well as harmless flames.
A crime like this could lead to even more net-hysteria among the clueless.
Poor guys...scummy as they were, nothing it looks like they did would make them deserve to be gunned down like an animal.
In July O7, I got a mac pro. There's no punchline. Just endless joy and wonder.
In the same vein on how alot of us have had thoughts of pouring iron filings into the back of a crappy monitor at work to get a new one, this is kind of the same logic.
I have to say that making jokes about spammers (a general group) isn't necessarily a wrong or evil idea. However, laughing at a the real thing (specific people) is morally reprehensible. Nobody deserves to die - that doesn't mean we can't joke about it. Seems alittle contradictory? It is. Non sequir. None the less, it is true.
--
Welcome to the wonderful world of natural selection, your host this evening is Mr. Darwin, he will explain how spammers are unfit life forms which in time will be erased by equally unfit homocidal elements, that in turn will be incarcerated, therefore elliminating two social ills at once. This has been a pulic service announcement.....
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Humor is completely subjective, and while I really do appreciate the cheap one liners, some may not. Yet, you don't see the humorous posts crying out against the bleeding-hearts. Why? Because they get it, when they rub a handful of neurons together they know that censorship and tastefulness are the tools of the fascist-minded.
..I actually find myself wishing for some more moderation. Honestly, anyone who's doing some moderation today, please take a moment to read this: I really don't need to hear anyone making cheap jokes at the expense of a couple of dead people. It's not funny. It's not cute. They're dead. Those were human lives. No one deserves to be murdered (this becomes an arguable point when it comes to the legal system and the death penalty, but in those cases the offenders have committed murder themselves, and as much as we all hate spam, it's not murder), and all of these tasteless jokes would be appropriately tagged ``flamebait''. Anyone who really cares to read all these sick, tasteless gestures can lower their threshold to 0 or less if they haven't already. I for one did not need this to ``brighten'' up my morning.
~ Kish
seriously, it sounds from the article that their deaths is not at all related to spamming, except indirectly. these guys were ripping people off with penny stocks. this kind of securities fraud is nothing new, its just nowadays people may believe spam mails telling them how to get rich. whereas before it may have worked only by word of mouth. the guys are fscking con artists, they probably skrewed up somewhere, stepped on someone's toes or ripped off someone who got
a
little
pissed.
and dude, to the guy who said something about how the spammers did well for themselves, the house is owned by one of the guys' girlfriend's dad. i doubt either of them was very wealthy.
unc_
Nope, the title has nothing to do with Doom induced high-school killing sprees, just an observation I've had.
Most of the time, I consider the majority of Slashdotters to be somewhat Liberal in social views. If nothing else, we have many posters from countries which have gun laws and look upon the US's gun society as a barbaric one.
Given this somewhat leftist slant, It's sort of shocking to see the majority of people cheering and supporting the execution style murder of two humans. Where are all the posts crying for stronger gun laws I usually see with this type of story. I hate spammers as much as the next guy, but I would never have guessed that the denizens of slashdotland would be so bloodthirsty in their view of this "seedy underbelly" of net commerce.
Since we seem to have estabilished that it is OK to shoot spammers, what does everyone think of having a gun in the home for protection? Is that still evil? I'm not trying to be flamebait here (honestly), I just want to know why the view of guns changes when it comes to spammers (in the grand scheme of things, on of the least of all criminals)?
For the record, I'm a gun owner who believes in the gun laws we have on the books, and wished they would be enforced before we add new ones. I have a gun in my home to protect my family, but I would never condone the killing of someone simply because they sent you an annoying e-mail.
All this cheering about their deaths is kind of sick people.
Finkployd
"There are many who live who deserve death, and many who die who deserve life, can you give it to them?" Gandalf, from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
Microsoft's Y2K "important message" is being sprayed all over - including addresses that had previously opted-out of their informational newswire mailings, and apparently harvested addresses as well.
This spam is different. This time a huge company is violating it's own privacy policy and blatantly disrespecting the wishes of the recipients.
I'm very disappointed that this is getting no press whatsover. It is about the worst precedent that could possibly be set by a industry leader.
Prepare for the deluge of spam from mainstream companies.
ObOnTopicComment: It wouldn't surprise me if this was spam-related. As with "road-rage", and other similar psychologically triggery scenarios, anger is not unusual. Mix that with a few too many down the bar, and a knowledge of who the spammer is, and this could easily be the result.
Whilst this is certainly disturbing, I have to say that inciting anger, to save money on marketing, isn't an FDA-approved method of staying in good health. It doesn't excuse what happened, no matter what the reason or motive, but if you choose to live dangerously, don't blame danger if you don't make a Hollywood escape.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Some spammers put in other peoples adresses or phone numbers as revenge, typically against people who got them kicked out of their last ISP.
This is the _real_ reason you shouldn't try to get even with the spammers, you might hit the wrong people.
Maybe this is just the result of a very agressive procmail filter.
If so, I hope it's Open Source.
"child porn spammers deserve an espcially painful death"
"if it were child pornography spam then nothing short of what happened to them would be required"
Why is so many attacking this all the time? Ok, spam in general is bad but why would child porn spam be extra bad? If you produce it using real children that's bad. Just as producing regular porn by raping people. But I can't see anything wrong with child porn in itself.