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.
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.
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
That's the real problem with /.'s moderation system: it incites people to act POLITICALLY CORRECTLY.
Actually, Political Correctness was introduced with Meta-Moderation. If you moderated a "darkly funny" joke up, then get meta-moderated by a tight ass you lose karma. This leads to conservative moderation and ultimately PC behaviour. It's because Rob added a conscience to the system (something above the action that determines if it is good or bad).
+&x
..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_
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.
Maybe this is just the result of a very agressive procmail filter.
If so, I hope it's Open Source.