The[y] (sic) seem ripe for an SEC investigation. How many shady share trades can they go through before someone looks at it?
Yeah, well, there's quite the good complaint already submitted, though I don't think it's to the right address. The detail the guy went into with regard to the obvious shady stock trading activities since this case started is pretty astounding.
Would you be proud of your activities after having ruined your corporation's reputation in the business environment? I wonder how the guy sleeps at night.
SCO has no chance of surviving even if they get the $5 billion by some stroke of insane luck. Who would do business with a company headed up by this overly litigious asshole? "Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with," indeed.
We discover intelligent life up there immeasurably superior to ourselves and they become our new gods.
This material's been done.
Since the calendars have been fucked around by the Conspiracy, 1998 hasn't arrived yet and the space critters from Planet X are yet to arrive (or "Bob" fucked up and transcribed 8991 as 1998, the year of the Rupture). However, once they do, they're only concern is to take this planet as the valuable resource it really is. They rescue all the Subgenii and whisk them off the planet to have sex with space goddesses with three pussies and fifteen tits, and destroy all the Pinks infesting Earth.
Anyway, that's what it says in The Book of the Subgenius. You decide.
[Richter] *is* a convicted felon (fenced some stolen goods a decade or so ago), a habitual liar (high-volume email deployer, anyone?) and he steals every day by spamming.
Correction: It wasn't a decade ago. According to this, the conviction and probation for the stolen goods charges resulted from an investigation carried out by authorities during a period from 1999 to 2001, three to five years ago. That's pretty recent activity.
Now, look at guys like Alan Ralsky (insurance and securities fraud), Thomas Cowles (B&E, fraud and theft), Charles Childs (domestic violence & aggravated menacing), I think we have a pretty stereotypical description of spammers--people who don't give a fuck about the rules, laws, etc, and will do anything to make a buck, even screw their own families over, if it will earn a nickel.
Think of it this way. Let's say someone signs you up for a list that you didn't want them to. In the case of confirmed opt-in, they will get one useless extra email. In the case of unconfirmed opt-in, they will get one potentially useful extra email that they only have to reply or click on to get removed.
I'd rather see the one single email from an entity that I will never hear from again if I don't act than dozens or hundreds of emails from an entity that doesn't understand that I shouldn't be on a list that *I* didn't sign up for in the first place. Any entity that sends me stuff that I never asked for information on gets the same treatment:
su - (password) cd/etc/postfix vi access o (IP address) 550 your mail is unwelcome here (esc):wq postmap access (ctrl-d)
Thank you, please drive through. Since you advocate spamming as the perfect model (send email until the recipient opts-out), this phrase should be something that becomes a daily part of your vocaulary.
You got it. Being a Canadian myself I would like to bask in the glory of us as a whole being smarter, better, more educated, more richeous etc., but...
http://www.spybot.info . That's all it takes. Have it run on people's windows startup and they're set.
Don't forget to grab copies of AdAware and Spywareblaster while you're at it. AdAware often times catches stuff that Spybot misses. Spywareblaster will create null registry entries and faux empty files that will make spyware installation proggies think that they're already installed. Then, make certain you've hit "Immunize" from the Spybot S&D menu. It will catch items that Spywareblaster won't.
Unless they are all in a small bunch you may go through a couple magazines of uzi rounds to get the job done. It's much easier to just take out the whole building at once. The odds of a grenade jamming are mighty low.
I say we nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
SEC. 5. OTHER PROTECTIONS FOR USERS OF COMMERCIAL ELECTRONIC MAIL.
. . .
(b) Aggravated Violations Relating to Commercial Electronic Mail-
(1) Address harvesting and dictionary attacks-
(A) IN GENERAL- It is unlawful for any person to initiate the transmission, to a protected computer, of a commercial electronic mail message that is unlawful under subsection (a), or to assist in the origination of such message through the provision or selection of addresses to which the message will be transmitted, if such person had actual knowledge, or knowledge fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances, that--
(i) the electronic mail address of the recipient was obtained using an automated means from an Internet website or proprietary online service operated by another person, and such website or online service included, at the time the address was obtained, a notice stating that the operator of such website or online service will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by such website or online service to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages; or
(ii) the electronic mail address of the recipient was obtained using an automated means that generates possible electronic mail addresses by combining names, letters, or numbers into numerous permutations. --end quote--
It's obvious that Scotty doesn't understand the doctrine of clean hands.
'they gonna' get 'em on tax evasion, or mail fraud? [reflections on the ol' 'capone issue]
Does it really matter? I'd like to see the charges lumped against them:
CAN-SPAM violations mail/wire fraud postal violations tresspass to chattels conversion felony computer crimes
I think with all that possibly mounted together -- we won't know for certain are involved until someone gets to the courthouse and gets a copy of the complaint with the charges (I live close enough and have the time to do it) -- these guys are looking at significant time and expense no matter how they are charged.
If they're going to go after someone in the Detroit area why not Alan Ralsky?
Oh, but they have. These are the two bit tech creeps that have several things that are attractive to Ralsky:
1. Technical knowledge. Ralsky is no technician. He's a sales man and business operator. He pays these guys to run his servers for him.
2. Foreign Language Skills: The Lins and Chung are obviously of Chinese heritage, and probably bilingual or trilingual to boot, able to correspond and communicate with the Chinese hosts who house Ralsky's servers (see this and this).
3. Young guys who can easily take the heat away from the master criminal in this case, Ralsky. Having a layer or two of personnel away from the kingpin is a classic way of lending plausible deniability for Ralsky. When asked if he knows any of the perps, he simply says, "I never saw them in my life." Bingo.
Now, instead of swooping in on Ralsky, you go after the little guys and get them to turn State's evidence in trade for an easier plea. The feds are doing this right: Approach the kingpin slowly via the little guys and *really* mount up the evidence against him, to make their own case against him *incontrovertible*.
As the owner of the negatives of Ralsky's house, I hope he fries, right along with the four other little fish.
yeah, but it's several dozen times EVERY FRIGGIN DAY.
Do you have any idea how much lost productivity we're having because of spam?
Should read, "... several dozen times, to millions of people around the world, EVERY FRIGGIN' DAY."
Then don't forget the costs of abuse support personnel at all the ISP's around the world, additional servers and disk to handle the extra traffic, increased bandwidth to handle the inflow of junk, etc, etc, ad infinitum, glorius estibus fortuna del est.
The ISP industry around the world is eating the bill for all the junk these assholes push. *That* is why they need criminal punishment, for their abuses of the system.
According to Shiksaa, they're Alan Ralsky's little fish. Nail him, and the world's spam load really will drop.
From my own memory and from googling, Daniel Lin has been involved in operatings with Ralsky as early as 2001. In fact, when I was very actively tracking Ralsky, I wrote the following little gem tying Ralsky, Lin and Ken Holt out of Oklahoma together in their email barrage activities:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=daniel+lin+ral sk y+grindbind&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=Pine. LNX.4.33L2.0111211350240.1594-100000%40beavis&rnum =2
Heh. I agree with your sentiments, I'm allowing for the unusual cases, where there are four or five levesl of communications between upstream and downstream customers, contacting and educating wayward noobs who have never had experience with email except as AOLusers who decide email marketing might be a brilliant way to market their business, etc.
Cut them off at the knees if you have incontovertible proof ASAP. However, if you can't be certain, one should allow for more time.
"Blocking off an entire country" is meaningless in this context. You make it sound as if no one in Spain can send e-mail now; that's completely untrue. What has been blacklisted is e-mail originating from Spain's national ISP: that won't affect the Yahoo Mail, or hotmail, or GMail, or any other mail service accounts of people in Spain. Only the accounts provided by Telefonica De Espana, or companies that rely on them for hosting, will be blocked.
I should point out also that this only occurs on servers where the administrator has *voluntarily* configured his equipment to query said blocklist. Some may not use the blocklist, some may use an internal blocklist, some may consult a blocklist and tag the inbound message for later filtering by the client.
What everyone seems to forget is that this isn't a case where "no email will issue forth from Telefonica.es whatsoever because the AHBL is returning 127.0.0.2 on all their addresses." If your ISP doesn't use the AHBL for mail filtering, you've nothing to worry about, eh?
Actually - EV1 has a history of hosting spammers. Well before their SCO involvement.
It's not so much that EV1 was hosting spammers... any ISP can inadvertently host spammers. However, when notified that the ISP is hosting spammers, what matters is what gets done about it. Does the spammer lose connectivity soon after being reported? Or does the ISP play games, like move the spammer to a new IP addy? Or send the reports off to the spamming bastards for listwashing, mailbombing, joejobbing, etc??
All that has to happen is that when notified, an ISP should investigate and terminate a spammer in a timely fashion. 14-45 days seems like a good time period. Anything beyond 45 days is truly tolerating abuse.
You know, this is something that is a kind of strange thing. I'm more annoyed by the message coming up asking if I'd like to accept the cookie or not than I am just having a cookie get stored. It's not like it's useful for anything. They can't pop-up advertising. They can't have it interact with spyware on my computer (since there isn't any). They don't actually know anything about me, other than the sites I visit they have tracking on. They can use it to display ads on the web page that are more tailored to me.
The answer to your question is to simply allow cookies from the originating site only. Most of the adware and spybot type cookies come in from the banner ad and popup/popunder sites that are linked from that site.
Heh... I'm laid off and making extra money helping friends and relatives clean their computers up. This is only another good reason to promote Linux over Microsoft's insecure swiss cheese food product.
I live and work in the Detroit area, at the time for a small computer service company. I had been out on calls that afternoon and having just finished my last call for the day at about 3:45pm in Southfield, I was headed home, but avoiding the traffic on the freeways and especially trying to avoid Woodward Avenue, since that weekend was going to be the Woodward Dream Cruise and already people were out to drive their classic cars and camp along the avenue to watch.
I made most of the trip back eastbound along 13 Mile Road and by about 4:15 or so I had made it as far as John R Road when I was stopped by a traffic light in light to medium traffic conditions. As I sat waiting for the light to change, suddenly it dimmed, brightened, dimmed yet again, started to flash, then went out. I thought maybe it was a local power failure, and proceeded forward, waiting to cross the intersection, four-way-stop style.
Once I made it through that light, I continued onward to Dequindre Rd, which is another mile east. It, too, was dark and traffic was crawling through the intersection. Since the area was probably served by the same circuits as the previous intersection, I didn't think much of it, but picked up my cell phone to dial up the Madison Heights police to report what I'd seen.
The phone wouldn't dial, all I could get was a busy signal and service unavailable message. By this time, I was hitting Ryan Road -- dark! What da f... I continued to Mound Road, where the lights *were* functional. Odd that, I thought, and turned southbound and took that down to 8 Mile Rd.
All the way across, I found the intersection at 12 Mile Rd lit and traffic crossing normally. I continued further south, though, and the lights were *out*. No further lit intersections along the rest of the route. I had tuned to the local news station and was hearing reports about power out in the downtown area of Detroit, elevators stuck in some of the larger buildings, all the stuff that would be expected with a widespread outage but no real news as no one knew anything yet.
Made it home and thought, water -- get water because we don't know how long this will last and what effect it will have on the supply. I found several containers and filled them up. My son walked in at about that time and helped finish filling up. I found my emergency radio and flashlights, got the candles out and basically prepared for a dark night.
By this time, reports on the radio indicated that the power outage was more severe than I thought, reports were coming in from New York City, Cleveland, Ontario that there were outages there. I killed the breakers leading into the house and al the individual circuits, powered off my UPS's on the computer equipment in the bedroom, then went outside to sit on the porch and keep cool.
Thankfully, I had a good stock of beer in the fridge that was still cold. As the evening passed, I watched as neighbors came home and secured their own property, then went to sit with the guy across the street. Another neighbor joined us, and we drank and joked and listened to the radio for more information.
Darkness fell and the stars came out. It was a clear night and I decided to go in after the telescope. Usually the city lights are too much for the 'scope, and I'll usually on use it at one of the local parks up well up north of the city away from the light pollution. Not that night, though. Mars was high in the sky and provided some cheap entertainment.
We migrated over to the other neighbor's front yard. He pulled out a small grill, set it up on the lawn, and we got nicely drunk while roasting hotdogs and marshmallows around the fire, while providing our neighbors with a sort of drunken neighborhood watch. We stayed up until nearly 1:30 am.
I got up for work the following morning, went in and helped answer phones. Most everyone else was told to stay home until the power came on except for a small skeleton crew that came in anyway. We amused ourselves with movies played o
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, well, there's quite the good complaint already submitted, though I don't think it's to the right address. The detail the guy went into with regard to the obvious shady stock trading activities since this case started is pretty astounding.
Take a look at it here.
Would you be proud of your activities after having ruined your corporation's reputation in the business environment? I wonder how the guy sleeps at night.
SCO has no chance of surviving even if they get the
$5 billion by some stroke of insane luck. Who would do business with a company headed up by this overly litigious asshole? "Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with," indeed.
This material's been done.
Since the calendars have been fucked around by the Conspiracy, 1998 hasn't arrived yet and the space critters from Planet X are yet to arrive (or "Bob" fucked up and transcribed 8991 as 1998, the year of the Rupture). However, once they do, they're only concern is to take this planet as the valuable resource it really is. They rescue all the Subgenii and whisk them off the planet to have sex with space goddesses with three pussies and fifteen tits, and destroy all the Pinks infesting
Earth.
Anyway, that's what it says in The Book of the Subgenius. You decide.
Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
Correction: It wasn't a decade ago. According to this, the conviction and probation for the stolen goods charges resulted from an investigation carried out by authorities during a period from 1999 to 2001, three to five years ago. That's pretty recent activity.
Now, look at guys like Alan Ralsky (insurance and securities fraud), Thomas Cowles (B&E, fraud and theft), Charles Childs (domestic violence & aggravated menacing), I think we have a pretty stereotypical description of spammers--people who don't give a fuck about the rules, laws, etc, and will do anything to make a buck, even screw their own families over, if it will earn a nickel.
I'd rather see the one single email from an entity that I will never hear from again if I don't act than dozens or hundreds of emails from an entity that doesn't understand that I shouldn't be on a list that *I* didn't sign up for in the first place. Any entity that sends me stuff that I never asked for information on gets the same treatment:
su -
(password)
cd
vi access
o
(IP address) 550 your mail is unwelcome here
(esc)
postmap access
(ctrl-d)
Thank you, please drive through. Since you advocate spamming as the perfect model (send email until the recipient opts-out), this phrase should be something that becomes a daily part of your vocaulary.
I have it mirrored here on a host with lots of bandwidth, go ahead, beat on it.
unfortunately, we can't spell for shit.
The party starts now. Anyone who knows where I live, is welcome over here for a drink.
Don't forget to grab copies of AdAware and Spywareblaster while you're at it. AdAware often times catches stuff that Spybot misses. Spywareblaster will create null registry entries and faux empty files that will make spyware installation proggies think that they're already installed. Then, make certain you've hit "Immunize" from the Spybot S&D menu. It will catch items that Spywareblaster won't.
I say we nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Not to mention a direct violation of CAN-SPAM:
(from http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/108s877.html)
--begin quote--
15 USC 7701
SEC. 5. OTHER PROTECTIONS FOR USERS OF COMMERCIAL ELECTRONIC MAIL.
.
.
.
(b) Aggravated Violations Relating to Commercial Electronic Mail-
(1) Address harvesting and dictionary attacks-
(A) IN GENERAL- It is unlawful for any person to initiate the transmission, to a protected computer, of a commercial electronic mail message that is unlawful under subsection (a), or to assist in the origination of such message through the provision or selection of addresses to which the message will be transmitted, if such person had actual knowledge, or knowledge fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances, that--
(i) the electronic mail address of the recipient was obtained using an automated means from an Internet website or proprietary online service operated by another person, and such website or online service included, at the time the address was obtained, a notice stating that the operator of such website or online service will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by such website or online service to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages; or
(ii) the electronic mail address of the recipient was obtained using an automated means that generates possible electronic mail addresses by combining names, letters, or numbers into numerous permutations.
--end quote--
It's obvious that Scotty doesn't understand the doctrine of clean hands.
this video didn't already prove that Richter is an asshat, he goes and files this lameoid suit against Ironport?
Scotty, why don't you hang a target around your neck and start waving a sign that says, "Next CAN-SPAM lawsuit can be filed against me!"
Does it really matter? I'd like to see the charges lumped against them:
CAN-SPAM violations
mail/wire fraud
postal violations
tresspass to chattels
conversion
felony computer crimes
I think with all that possibly mounted together -- we won't know for certain are involved until someone gets to the courthouse and gets a copy of the complaint with the charges (I live close enough and have the time to do it) -- these guys are looking at significant time and expense no matter how they are charged.
Bailiff!! Whack his pee-pee!!
Oh, but they have. These are the two bit tech creeps that have several things that are attractive to Ralsky:
1. Technical knowledge. Ralsky is no technician. He's a sales man and business operator. He pays these guys to run his servers for him.
2. Foreign Language Skills: The Lins and Chung are obviously of Chinese heritage, and probably bilingual or trilingual to boot, able to correspond and communicate with the Chinese hosts who house Ralsky's servers (see this and this).
3. Young guys who can easily take the heat away from the master criminal in this case, Ralsky. Having a layer or two of personnel away from the kingpin is a classic way of lending plausible deniability for Ralsky. When asked if he knows any of the perps, he simply says, "I never saw them in my life." Bingo.
Now, instead of swooping in on Ralsky, you go after the little guys and get them to turn State's evidence in trade for an easier plea. The feds are doing this right: Approach the kingpin slowly via the little guys and *really* mount up the evidence against him, to make their own case against him *incontrovertible*.
As the owner of the negatives of Ralsky's house, I hope he fries, right along with the four other little fish.
Anyone up for a cookout??
Should read, "... several dozen times, to millions of people around the world, EVERY FRIGGIN' DAY."
Then don't forget the costs of abuse support personnel at all the ISP's around the world, additional servers and disk to handle the extra traffic, increased bandwidth to handle the inflow of junk, etc, etc, ad infinitum, glorius estibus fortuna del est.
The ISP industry around the world is eating the bill for all the junk these assholes push. *That* is why they need criminal punishment, for their abuses of the system.
From my own memory and from googling, Daniel Lin has been involved in operatings with Ralsky as early as 2001. In fact, when I was very actively tracking Ralsky, I wrote the following little gem tying Ralsky, Lin and Ken Holt out of Oklahoma together in their email barrage activities:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=daniel+lin+ra
Read and enjoy.
On Windows boxen:
Symantec Norton Antivirus
Spybot Search & Destroy
Adaware
Spywareblaster
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Thunderbird
Sun J2RE
OpenOffice.org
Winamp
Anachron
and then...
Mandrake in a separate partition.
No one gets a box from me without Linux installed on it.
Heh. I agree with your sentiments, I'm allowing for the unusual cases, where there are four or five levesl of communications between upstream and downstream customers, contacting and educating wayward noobs who have never had experience with email except as AOLusers who decide email marketing might be a brilliant way to market their business, etc.
Cut them off at the knees if you have incontovertible proof ASAP. However, if you can't be certain, one should allow for more time.
I should point out also that this only occurs on servers where the administrator has *voluntarily* configured his equipment to query said blocklist. Some may not use the blocklist, some may use an internal blocklist, some may consult a blocklist and tag the inbound message for later filtering by the client.
What everyone seems to forget is that this isn't a case where "no email will issue forth from Telefonica.es whatsoever because the AHBL is returning 127.0.0.2 on all their addresses." If your ISP doesn't use the AHBL for mail filtering, you've nothing to worry about, eh?
It's not so much that EV1 was hosting spammers... any ISP can inadvertently host spammers. However, when notified that the ISP is hosting spammers, what matters is what gets done about it. Does the spammer lose connectivity soon after being reported? Or does the ISP play games, like move the spammer to a new IP addy? Or send the reports off to the spamming bastards for listwashing, mailbombing, joejobbing, etc??
All that has to happen is that when notified, an ISP should investigate and terminate a spammer in a timely fashion. 14-45 days seems like a good time period. Anything beyond 45 days is truly tolerating abuse.
Yet. Wait awhile, it'll all wash out. This has been the *finest* pump & dump ever crafted.
The answer to your question is to simply allow cookies from the originating site only. Most of the adware and spybot type cookies come in from the banner ad and popup/popunder sites that are linked from that site.
Heh... I'm laid off and making extra money helping friends and relatives clean their computers up. This is only another good reason to promote Linux over Microsoft's insecure swiss cheese food product.
I live and work in the Detroit area, at the time for a small computer service company. I had been out on calls that afternoon and having just finished my last call for the day at about 3:45pm in Southfield, I was headed home, but avoiding the traffic on the freeways and especially trying to avoid Woodward Avenue, since that weekend was going to be the Woodward Dream Cruise and already people were out to drive their classic cars and camp along the avenue to watch.
I made most of the trip back eastbound along 13 Mile Road and by about 4:15 or so I had made it as far as John R Road when I was stopped by a traffic light in light to medium traffic conditions. As I sat waiting for the light to change, suddenly it dimmed, brightened, dimmed yet again, started to flash, then went out. I thought maybe it was a local power failure, and proceeded forward, waiting to cross the intersection, four-way-stop style.
Once I made it through that light, I continued onward to Dequindre Rd, which is another mile east. It, too, was dark and traffic was crawling through the intersection. Since the area was probably served by the same circuits as the previous intersection, I didn't think much of it, but picked up my cell phone to dial up the Madison Heights police to report what I'd seen.
The phone wouldn't dial, all I could get was a busy signal and service unavailable message. By this time, I was hitting Ryan Road -- dark! What da f... I continued to Mound Road, where the lights *were* functional. Odd that, I thought, and turned southbound and took that down to 8 Mile Rd.
All the way across, I found the intersection at 12 Mile Rd lit and traffic crossing normally. I continued further south, though, and the lights were *out*. No further lit intersections along the rest of the route. I had tuned to the local news station and was hearing reports about power out in the downtown area of Detroit, elevators stuck in some of the larger buildings, all the stuff that would be expected with a widespread outage but no real news as no one knew anything yet.
Made it home and thought, water -- get water because we don't know how long this will last and what effect it will have on the supply. I found several containers and filled them up. My son walked in at about that time and helped finish filling up. I found my emergency radio and flashlights, got the candles out and basically prepared for a dark night.
By this time, reports on the radio indicated that the power outage was more severe than I thought, reports were coming in from New York City, Cleveland, Ontario that there were outages there. I killed the breakers leading into the house and al the individual circuits, powered off my UPS's on the computer equipment in the bedroom, then went outside to sit on the porch and keep cool.
Thankfully, I had a good stock of beer in the fridge that was still cold. As the evening passed, I watched as neighbors came home and secured their own property, then went to sit with the guy across the street. Another neighbor joined us, and we drank and joked and listened to the radio for more information.
Darkness fell and the stars came out. It was a clear night and I decided to go in after the telescope. Usually the city lights are too much for the 'scope, and I'll usually on use it at one of the local parks up well up north of the city away from the light pollution. Not that night, though. Mars was high in the sky and provided some cheap entertainment.
We migrated over to the other neighbor's front yard. He pulled out a small grill, set it up on the lawn, and we got nicely drunk while roasting hotdogs and marshmallows around the fire, while providing our neighbors with a sort of drunken neighborhood watch. We stayed up until nearly 1:30 am.
I got up for work the following morning, went in and helped answer phones. Most everyone else was told to stay home until the power came on except for a small skeleton crew that came in anyway. We amused ourselves with movies played o
the Land of the Caged and the Home of the Paranoid.
Step right over here, mugshots, queue up and have your photo taken!
Then right over here for your fingerprints... Sorry about that nasty blank ink all over your hands.
We're certain you won't mind just this little inconvenience. Our own sheep^Wcitizens don't seem to mind at all.
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK