Aww but all
those emails you send that people want still cost the ISP money.. If we are charging spammers, why not charge everyone? When it comes down to it, its all still just bits...
You seem to forget how the internet works. When i send my freind an email, he (in some small way) pays for it. But, it is traffic he wants. Plus, when he responds I pay a little bit. It evens out. Spammers abuse this.
Dictionary attacks to suck... sure punish network abusers..or write a program to reconize an attack coming in
tryin to email every possible user and deny those IP's...u can figure sumthing out.. if it becomes illegal.. you really think that will stop spammers??
No, it won't stop them, but it does give me a legal recourse to stop it from happening again.
I never said people would'nt complain(i don't bulk email personally) but what i'm saying is why draw the line at
"bulk" as opposed to 1 or more pieces... you set bulk at 400 pieces and wham! spammers will send 399..... again legislation is not an answer...
It is not a question of 'bulk', it is a question of permission.
See above a few comments.. spend more time beforehand securing your
networks.. personally I've had much greated problems at work than our mailserver having problems.
So, it is *my* fault that spammers hose my servers? Thanks, pal.
[...]mostly part of the international voip network i deal with going down at times.. much more important
than some spam in my inbox which i can ignore, filter or delete. I prefer a much unregulated interent... the more its regulated, the more its turned into AOL or other MAJOR controled
online services where everything is sterile and nothing is new....(granted AOL gets ton of spam funny enough)
So, you don't deal with mail servers? You can't really comment on how big of a problem spam is to an ISP then, can you? You can say that your personal mail box does not have a problem, but you can't say that system/internet wide does not.
Whenever you get spammed by someone with an 800 number call... repetedly... give them some costs too...
Make sure to call from a pay phone; it costs more. Plus, if you call from home, they will have your phone number (even if you try to block it). I knew some people who would carry a list of 800 numbers and would call them from pay phones at the metro or grocery.
1. If they pay for email, you should have to pay for email you send anywhere as well and then we will be back to having a regulated postal service.
Well, there is a difference in the mail that spammers send and that I send. I send emails to people I know and who *want* to recieve email from me. Spammers send to who ever is on thier list. While the one spam I get does not cost me much it does over time; it also costs the ISPs who have to recieve and store the large numbers of unwanted emails.
2. E-mail is arguably free.. Its a system of networked servers designed to pass messages from one user to another.... they are using that.. why do you assume there is a level of
personal privacy there?
Actually they are abusing that. The email is definatly *not* free (from an ISPs stand-point). When a spammer tries to dictionary attack your mails erver or sends a 100k spam to all 10K+ of your customers, you quickly find that cleaning up after a spammer is not cheap.
I can send an email to anyone! bob@yourmomsuck.com president@whitehouse.gov cmdrtaco@slashdot.org..
True, but if you are sending these people uncolicited bulk email, don't be shocked when they complain.
if we start charging people does this mean if i
receive an email from someone i don't like I can now charge them for it?
If it is spam, yes.
I guess where do draw the line? is spam that infuriating to you? Personally it doens't bother me.. I have a few different pop accounts i use, with one i give out to people so i can read
messages from and one for mailing lists(usually one per mailing list) and one for signing up for dumb stuff online where it sounds like i'm gonna get spammed for it...
Spam *is* that infuriating to an admin who has to come in to the shop at 4am to work on a mail server that has hung trying to process a boatload of spam.
What do you do about postal spam? Personally i can't stand that.. I get over 2 pounds a week of trash mail in my mailbox that some how now I AM RESPONSIBLE to recycle or
throw away.. My name is Not Postal Customer, or Recipient... i've fought with my post office and left the junk mail in my mailbox.. that does nothing unfortunately.. those are the people
who should be paying us for email..
I throw it away. It really does not cost me anything. the people sending it pay for it's delivery. It does not piss me off; that is because postal spam has yet to flood me to the point where I have to spend an hour destroying mail just to be able to open my PO box.
if you get some spam... thats reason #45628 the DELETE key was invented...
But, how does that solve the problem. Your box is just refilled the next day
I think theere are highly more pressing issues to worry about then some junk mail...
Well, I guess you have never worked on a high traffic mail server or had to deal with abuse issues.:)
Just my thoughts...perhaps losing some karma now:)
Generating complaints is not against the law.
True, but generating complaints due to spamming will tend to get your account canceled due to AUP violations.
Violating private contracts is not against the law.
But, violating a private contract will usually cause what ever service you were recieving to be terminated.
Spamming is not against the law.
But it is against the AUP that you agreed to when you signed up with your provider. Your provider is well within their rights to terminate your service if you violate the contract.
However, the disengenuous law says that if you spam, and have your account canceled, you violate the law.
The spammers need to read their contracts and AUPs then. Just because they spam people does not make them exempt from the AUP they agreed to.
How can you be responsible for actions other people take (your ISP.) That's not fair. If the law wants to say "No UCE" it should say it, not beat around the bush with judicial
interpretation and private-party actions.
The spammers ARE responsible for what happens. If they send mass email to people who do not want it, they are violating their ISP's TOS and will lose theeir account. Spammers need to make sure that they are sending to people who want their ads. (well, they aren't spammers if they do that tho...) There are companies out there that send out ads to people via email that have no problems with this law, because they send to people who want the ads. If a spammer just randomly emails people, he is going to generate compliants and get booted off. Just cause the law does not say it is illegal, does not mean the ISP have to perit him to do it.
This law basicly bans spam, but it still allows bulk email. Spammers, who use non-optin mail lists, will generate a butt-load of complaints to what ever ISP he/she used. Spam is against the AUP of most, if not all, ISPs; this gets their accounts canceled. If the person uses an optin mail list, there are few, if any, complaints. the sender will have complied with the law and will have records of the recipient asking for the emails.
What's even more interesting is that this is, in some respects, an internet censorship law. I don't believe that the government should have a hand in regulating what passes over the
internet, and this is just the beginning, folks. This law sets a precedent.
The spammers can still email people; they just can't forge their headers. The spammers can also advertise via other mediums as well.
By passing a law that prevents the sending of some kinds of email, the government is limiting the free speech of both individuals and companies. Whether you agree with SPAM or not,
it's a constitutionally protected right of the sender, just like gun ownership.
the Supreme Cout has found that companies don't have the same free speach rights as people. While you are right in the fact that people have the right to bear arms; they do not have the right to randomly fire those guns into people's homes. The same is with spammers; they can send out adverts, but not to people who do not want them.
The only thing that will truely solve the SPAM problem are market forces. When people decide that having to relay spam is costing them more money than it would to fight said abuse of
their systems, we will see unsolicted commercial email disappear pretty darn quick. In the meantime, the government just gets in the way and trys to speed a process that really can't
be controlled by any one entity.
Due to the spammers low start up costs, market forces are not going to do much to them. Spammers do what they do cause it is cheap and after a few sales, you have covered your costs. If there is a couple of $500 fines levied against you every spam run, you are not going to spam people for very long. That is the only thing that will stop a spammer (outside of death or prison) is when it costs more to spam that what they make of the spamming.
The open source community has not yet found a way to
accumulate, focus and exploit comparable resources. Perhaps it never will, because the community seems to have a gut fear of concentrated resources.
Many of these groups may also simply not play nice with each other. Many were formed when one product's developers got into an argument over something that caused them to fork. then we have the various licenses that these are released under. Getting the GPL, BSD, LGPL and others to come together would be next to impossible. No one would want to look like the loser.
umm..no. linux is a grassroots movement not a company.
I was basing my idea on the fact that MS is a group sthat makes a product and Linux is a group hat makes a product(s). But, I see your point as well.
M$ can pay its employees staggering sums of cash to get focus out of its strategy. linux developers get paid
nothing so they work on stuff which interests them.
That is, in a way, what i am trying to say. MS has 100 guys on a product. Linux has 25 working on free*, 50 working on gnu*, 25 on open*. And, since the linux programmers do 'stuff which interests them', they may leave the project to go else where. MS programmers, to my understanding, get paid fairly well and will most likely stay until the end of their project/contract.
I wonder if MS' continued growth is due to their being able to have a unified front against other companies? MS acts as one while Linux has numerous groups all with the same core beliefs (basicly) but, with their own idea of how things should be done. When MS puts out a piece of software, there is only one version at a time. Often in the Linux world you will have a free* version, a open* version, a gnu* version, etc... MS is once again able to use its unified front against these other (and often times better) products to give the impression that it's product is more popular and thus (in their eyes) better.
You might be supprised as to what gets qualified as fruit juice. Some are less than 10% actual fruit juice. Most of them are sugar and water with some juice for flavoring.
i don't see the problem. MAPS has a set of guidelines that must be met before an IP is put into the database. Macromedia was, according to MAPS rules, talked to about their ongoing problem and what they need to do to resolve it. Macromedia obviously did not take their advice and were thus added to the RBL.
They try to open source everything: your car, the Coke machine, the company bank account, anything. Your best bet in scaring them away from things you care about is to put a 'Powered by Microsoft'; no OSS person will touch it. Becareful tho, BSD freaks might try to put NetBSD on it. (they have on just about everything else!)
I guess that India's cafes could block all ports and just allow access thru proxies, if they wanted to fight that. It will go back and forth untill they either give up, or cafe's are all but unusable except for basic email and web access.
Those headers are only reliable if nobody futzs with them. And futzing with them (or deleting them) is trivial.
Adding headers is trivial. Adding headers that make sense, is not. (also, there is no way to delete headers from mail)
It's also trivial to spoof your IP address
During an interactive SMTP session? You might want to check on that.
could create an email message
here on my machine, add a couple of headers that say it was routed through Microsoft's and Sun's SMTP servers, and deliver it directly to your ISP's SMTP server with a spoofed IP
that looks like I'm sending it from slashdot's IP address.
True, but i would throw those out as being bogus due to the fact that there is no reason for slashdot to send mail thru Microsoft who would then pass it to Sun who would then pass it thru you who would then pass it to me.
Your IPS's server might attempt a reverse DNS lookup (probably wouldn't), and even if it failed, it'd probably just mark the
thing as "unverified."
Who cares if rDNS fails? I have your IP address, thus i have you.
There would be no way to trace that message back to me.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to forget how the internet works. When i send my freind an email, he (in some small way) pays for it. But, it is traffic he wants. Plus, when he responds I pay a little bit. It evens out. Spammers abuse this.
Dictionary attacks to suck... sure punish network abusers..or write a program to reconize an attack coming in tryin to email every possible user and deny those IP's...u can figure sumthing out.. if it becomes illegal.. you really think that will stop spammers??
No, it won't stop them, but it does give me a legal recourse to stop it from happening again.
I never said people would'nt complain(i don't bulk email personally) but what i'm saying is why draw the line at "bulk" as opposed to 1 or more pieces... you set bulk at 400 pieces and wham! spammers will send 399..... again legislation is not an answer...
It is not a question of 'bulk', it is a question of permission.
See above a few comments.. spend more time beforehand securing your networks.. personally I've had much greated problems at work than our mailserver having problems.
So, it is *my* fault that spammers hose my servers? Thanks, pal.
[...]mostly part of the international voip network i deal with going down at times.. much more important than some spam in my inbox which i can ignore, filter or delete. I prefer a much unregulated interent... the more its regulated, the more its turned into AOL or other MAJOR controled online services where everything is sterile and nothing is new....(granted AOL gets ton of spam funny enough)
So, you don't deal with mail servers? You can't really comment on how big of a problem spam is to an ISP then, can you? You can say that your personal mail box does not have a problem, but you can't say that system/internet wide does not.
Make sure to call from a pay phone; it costs more. Plus, if you call from home, they will have your phone number (even if you try to block it). I knew some people who would carry a list of 800 numbers and would call them from pay phones at the metro or grocery.
Well, there is a difference in the mail that spammers send and that I send. I send emails to people I know and who *want* to recieve email from me. Spammers send to who ever is on thier list. While the one spam I get does not cost me much it does over time; it also costs the ISPs who have to recieve and store the large numbers of unwanted emails.
2. E-mail is arguably free.. Its a system of networked servers designed to pass messages from one user to another.... they are using that.. why do you assume there is a level of personal privacy there?
Actually they are abusing that. The email is definatly *not* free (from an ISPs stand-point). When a spammer tries to dictionary attack your mails erver or sends a 100k spam to all 10K+ of your customers, you quickly find that cleaning up after a spammer is not cheap.
I can send an email to anyone! bob@yourmomsuck.com president@whitehouse.gov cmdrtaco@slashdot.org ..
True, but if you are sending these people uncolicited bulk email, don't be shocked when they complain.
if we start charging people does this mean if i receive an email from someone i don't like I can now charge them for it?
If it is spam, yes.
I guess where do draw the line? is spam that infuriating to you? Personally it doens't bother me.. I have a few different pop accounts i use, with one i give out to people so i can read messages from and one for mailing lists(usually one per mailing list) and one for signing up for dumb stuff online where it sounds like i'm gonna get spammed for it...
Spam *is* that infuriating to an admin who has to come in to the shop at 4am to work on a mail server that has hung trying to process a boatload of spam.
What do you do about postal spam? Personally i can't stand that.. I get over 2 pounds a week of trash mail in my mailbox that some how now I AM RESPONSIBLE to recycle or throw away.. My name is Not Postal Customer, or Recipient... i've fought with my post office and left the junk mail in my mailbox.. that does nothing unfortunately.. those are the people who should be paying us for email..
I throw it away. It really does not cost me anything. the people sending it pay for it's delivery. It does not piss me off; that is because postal spam has yet to flood me to the point where I have to spend an hour destroying mail just to be able to open my PO box.
if you get some spam... thats reason #45628 the DELETE key was invented...
But, how does that solve the problem. Your box is just refilled the next day
I think theere are highly more pressing issues to worry about then some junk mail...
Well, I guess you have never worked on a high traffic mail server or had to deal with abuse issues. :)
Just my thoughts...perhaps losing some karma now :)
I hope you don't lose karma. Good luck.
How do you explain to your girlfriend the fact that you get a lot of pay-per-view porn ads?
Huh...? I thought CTS was a joke? :)
Ok, I have to admit, seeing pr0n stars in almost life size would be kinda cool. However, it would suck to see the goatsecx image on that.
Spotting this should be easy. Just look for the 'large bird' traveling at mach2.
True, but generating complaints due to spamming will tend to get your account canceled due to AUP violations.
Violating private contracts is not against the law.
But, violating a private contract will usually cause what ever service you were recieving to be terminated.
Spamming is not against the law.
But it is against the AUP that you agreed to when you signed up with your provider. Your provider is well within their rights to terminate your service if you violate the contract.
However, the disengenuous law says that if you spam, and have your account canceled, you violate the law.
The spammers need to read their contracts and AUPs then. Just because they spam people does not make them exempt from the AUP they agreed to.
How can you be responsible for actions other people take (your ISP.) That's not fair. If the law wants to say "No UCE" it should say it, not beat around the bush with judicial interpretation and private-party actions.
The spammers ARE responsible for what happens. If they send mass email to people who do not want it, they are violating their ISP's TOS and will lose theeir account. Spammers need to make sure that they are sending to people who want their ads. (well, they aren't spammers if they do that tho...) There are companies out there that send out ads to people via email that have no problems with this law, because they send to people who want the ads. If a spammer just randomly emails people, he is going to generate compliants and get booted off. Just cause the law does not say it is illegal, does not mean the ISP have to perit him to do it.
Also, I have yet to see and ISP who had to raise it's rates due to people downloading the latest kernel.
This law basicly bans spam, but it still allows bulk email. Spammers, who use non-optin mail lists, will generate a butt-load of complaints to what ever ISP he/she used. Spam is against the AUP of most, if not all, ISPs; this gets their accounts canceled. If the person uses an optin mail list, there are few, if any, complaints. the sender will have complied with the law and will have records of the recipient asking for the emails.
The spammers can still email people; they just can't forge their headers. The spammers can also advertise via other mediums as well.
By passing a law that prevents the sending of some kinds of email, the government is limiting the free speech of both individuals and companies. Whether you agree with SPAM or not, it's a constitutionally protected right of the sender, just like gun ownership.
the Supreme Cout has found that companies don't have the same free speach rights as people. While you are right in the fact that people have the right to bear arms; they do not have the right to randomly fire those guns into people's homes. The same is with spammers; they can send out adverts, but not to people who do not want them.
The only thing that will truely solve the SPAM problem are market forces. When people decide that having to relay spam is costing them more money than it would to fight said abuse of their systems, we will see unsolicted commercial email disappear pretty darn quick. In the meantime, the government just gets in the way and trys to speed a process that really can't be controlled by any one entity.
Due to the spammers low start up costs, market forces are not going to do much to them. Spammers do what they do cause it is cheap and after a few sales, you have covered your costs. If there is a couple of $500 fines levied against you every spam run, you are not going to spam people for very long. That is the only thing that will stop a spammer (outside of death or prison) is when it costs more to spam that what they make of the spamming.
Don't you normally eat the 'wild' mushrooms first, then start to think you are a raccoon?
Many of these groups may also simply not play nice with each other. Many were formed when one product's developers got into an argument over something that caused them to fork. then we have the various licenses that these are released under. Getting the GPL, BSD, LGPL and others to come together would be next to impossible. No one would want to look like the loser.
I was basing my idea on the fact that MS is a group sthat makes a product and Linux is a group hat makes a product(s). But, I see your point as well.
M$ can pay its employees staggering sums of cash to get focus out of its strategy. linux developers get paid nothing so they work on stuff which interests them.
That is, in a way, what i am trying to say. MS has 100 guys on a product. Linux has 25 working on free*, 50 working on gnu*, 25 on open*. And, since the linux programmers do 'stuff which interests them', they may leave the project to go else where. MS programmers, to my understanding, get paid fairly well and will most likely stay until the end of their project/contract.
I wonder if MS' continued growth is due to their being able to have a unified front against other companies? MS acts as one while Linux has numerous groups all with the same core beliefs (basicly) but, with their own idea of how things should be done. When MS puts out a piece of software, there is only one version at a time. Often in the Linux world you will have a free* version, a open* version, a gnu* version, etc... MS is once again able to use its unified front against these other (and often times better) products to give the impression that it's product is more popular and thus (in their eyes) better.
You might be supprised as to what gets qualified as fruit juice. Some are less than 10% actual fruit juice. Most of them are sugar and water with some juice for flavoring.
They are getting their RBL feed via BGP. They are setting thier routers to send those packets to null0.
i don't see the problem. MAPS has a set of guidelines that must be met before an IP is put into the database. Macromedia was, according to MAPS rules, talked to about their ongoing problem and what they need to do to resolve it. Macromedia obviously did not take their advice and were thus added to the RBL.
Oh, c'mon. As if anyone on Slashdot actually reads the stories... :)
They try to open source everything: your car, the Coke machine, the company bank account, anything. Your best bet in scaring them away from things you care about is to put a 'Powered by Microsoft'; no OSS person will touch it. Becareful tho, BSD freaks might try to put NetBSD on it. (they have on just about everything else!)
I guess that India's cafes could block all ports and just allow access thru proxies, if they wanted to fight that. It will go back and forth untill they either give up, or cafe's are all but unusable except for basic email and web access.
Will you be saying that when you are the first against the wall?
Yeah, It isn't like /.ers like to look at hotties on the net or anything...
I don't think a spammer would give a rats ass about any notice on a SMTP server. Plus, how is he going to see it?
Adding headers is trivial. Adding headers that make sense, is not. (also, there is no way to delete headers from mail)
It's also trivial to spoof your IP address
During an interactive SMTP session? You might want to check on that.
could create an email message here on my machine, add a couple of headers that say it was routed through Microsoft's and Sun's SMTP servers, and deliver it directly to your ISP's SMTP server with a spoofed IP that looks like I'm sending it from slashdot's IP address.
True, but i would throw those out as being bogus due to the fact that there is no reason for slashdot to send mail thru Microsoft who would then pass it to Sun who would then pass it thru you who would then pass it to me.
Your IPS's server might attempt a reverse DNS lookup (probably wouldn't), and even if it failed, it'd probably just mark the thing as "unverified."
Who cares if rDNS fails? I have your IP address, thus i have you.
There would be no way to trace that message back to me.
I think I could. In fact, I know I can.