If I go to a website with pop-ups, and I don't like them, I can never come back... but with this pop-up advertising, they were there, without any action on my part, and directly interrupted me.
Grin... you need MozillaFirebird. Block those popups, you'll never go back to Internet Exploder, er, Internet Infector, errr, I mean, Internet Explorer.
That's what I don't get. When you try to obfuscate your email address, doesn't that say to them "I'm not interested and will never buy anything advertised over email?"
There exists the Rules of Spam as promulgated over on news.admin.net-abuse.email:
0. Spam is theft. 1. Spammers lie. 2. When in doubt about whether a spammer is lying, see Rule 1. 3. Spammers are stupid.
This is Rule 3 in spades. They'd just assume that it would be too much work to scrub out the non-deliverables and bad prospects, they'll simply keep hitting an address for no reason. I post to usenet with an address that has never worked, and I smile every time I see it appear in my logs with a spam reject.
As for any other motives, who knows? Spammers could be space aliens for all I know. It's obvious that they don't think like normal humans.
-- DETROIT SUBGENIUS DEVIVAL Nov 29, 2003 Magic Stick Theatre 4120-4140 Woodward Ave Detroit, MI Rev.Ivan Stang - The Amino Acids - The Jollys MAN - Downtown Brown - Old Tyme Preachin', Teachin' & Ravin' http://www.subgenius.com/newdevivals.html TINLC Unit #2309 - Death to all spammer accounts. - WWSB?
you really think the FBI (aka Fascist Bureau of Instigation) would lift a damn finger? They certainly didnt when osirusoft got taken all the way out. The FBI only cares about Thoughtcrime and crimes against major campaign donors. Anyone else simply doesnt matter. We're on our own here, and we're gonna have to fix this problem ourselves.
Y'all need to have a talk with Ron Guilmette, owner/operator of monkeys.com. Ron was running a very extensive network of proxy honeypots and using it to collate and publish data about various ISP's harboring proxy-abusing spammers. His data proved essential in identifying the outfits responsible for the virus-related abuse that we're seeing now. Ron also ran the proxies.monkeys.com blocklist, which was terribly good at filitering spam for me and many others.
Back at tail end of August, beginning of September, he was knocked off the net when monkeys.com came under dDoS attacks, most notably from machines known to be infected by viruses, all harboring open proxy software installed by the virus. He called the local police, who had to be coerced, he says, to come out and take a report. The FBI wasn't even interested enough to come out and take a look at his data. If you cannot prove a minimum of $5k worth of damages, you're shit out of luck.
Seriously, I've been getting less spam lately thanks to filters. Sure, it's not gone entirely, but it's a lot less of a hassle than it used to be. I sure hope this is a sign of things to come... If they're this desperate to stop anti-spammers, they gotta be in their throws of death.
No, I cannot concur here. In the last two weeks, I've noticed that the reject rate on my filters has gone up by a surprising amount. I use a custom access table, backed up by several RBL lookups done by postfix, with SpamAssassin on the backend to catch anything that does make it through the initial gauntlet.
Looking back through my logs, I've only got three weeks saved, but here's the breakdown of rejects for each week:
Week ending Oct 18 - 122 Week ending Oct 25 - 250 Week ending Nov 1 - 214 0400 Yesterday through now - 37
Note that I'm seeing hits on addresses that have never existed here, i.e. webaster@$mydomain (yes, the spelling mistake in webaster is theirs, not mine), spammers_lie@$mydomain (non-deliverable, harvested from my usenet posts), mers_lie@$mydomain (trying to remove the obfuscation I might have put in), and now I'm seeing the idiots try to get their crap through by using a non-existent address, john@$mydomain, as the "mail from:" value to attempt to get their crap through.
Yes, they've become so desperate that criminal methods aren't below them. All the filtering that's being done has lowered their response rates to where it's no longer as profitable as it used to be. Of course, the mindset of these idiots is that they'll just crank out the spam all that much harder, in all that much more quantity, in order to get the rates back up to something manageable. Of course, it's beyond them to think that if people are no longer interested in their pitches, they might check employment opportunities at the local McDonald's, as that might be more a more lucrative situation for them.
How does SCO propose to make any money on any of their product lines when they've pissed off their entire prospective customer base by either suing them or declaring their works and the copyleft under which they're released "unenforceable"? Don't they understand that when this is over, SCO software will be unwelcome in any data center?
AT&T three years ago were caught out when a "pink contract" they held with Ronnie Scelson's Cajun Hosting was brought to light by anti-spammers on news.admin.net-abuse.email. Now they're going to do something about the spam hitting their user's inboxes.
Less spam would hit their user's inboxes if they were to sever all ties with their pet spammers. It's my own hog-fucking opinion that AT&T still has plenty of pink paper over there and are still helping spammers to stay in business. However, money still talks the loudest. Those spam contracts usually bring double or triple the going rate to ignore complaints.
That double-click-slowly-to-rename thing is one of the worst OS features that MS ever came up with. Go ahead, you try to explain it to someone over the age of 40. I dare you.
Nice. There are some of us 40-y/o's and up who know how to use a friggin' mouse, idiot.
Stupid people come in all ages, flavors and sizes. The problem is that they outnumber geeks.
I'm not a big Microsoft fan (hell as I write this reply I'm loading Mandrake 9.1 on my subnotebook), but your comment is patently false.
Patently false? Most folks, when keeping up a software product, do a rewrite every once in a while to incorporate those bugfixes and patches. The OP says that since IE has been released, it's gone from what, version 3.1 to 4.0 to 4.1 to 5.0 to 5.5 to 6.0 to 6.1 to 6.1+SP1 or whatever the fuck. Yes, he may be a bit off on the software patches but *since XP was released 2 years ago* what has come out new in IE? 2 years ago it was still version 6.0, or at least 5.5 going on 6.0. Whoop-de-doo.
Windows 2003? We're talking IE here, the motherload of vulnerability and unpatched Active X virus transmitting software, pretty much the main interface. It's still in W2k3. It's still version 6.1sp1. One wonders why they've not done a code rewrite in the last 2 years.
Anyone who reads somethingawful.com knows that this isn't necessarily the nobrainer that you think it is. They had a particular problem where people would be able to sign up for their forum accounts, but they could not be mailed back with the activation because of the SPEWS blacklist determining that the part of the internet SomethingAwful belonged to was Spammerville, USA. This meant that 10-20% of the people who tried to get a forums account couldn't be mailed back, and SomethingAwful could even mail them back to explain why!
Here's a nice link for the angry rantings of Zack "GeistEditor" Parsons on the subject. Yes, we should fight spammers at every turn we get, but the "collatoral damage" means that some people can't even find out why they never get a reply from their girlfriend/grandparents/long lost friend.
SomethingAwful is a poor example to use in this case. Zack Parsons, in my own hog-fucking opinion, is a child who doesn't understand the basic functioning of email and blocklists and incited the flooding of newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email by his idiot subscribers. We saw Zack on the newsgroup and on the above-mentioned page whining like a little girl about his problems.
Oh fucking well. Hosting with a spam-friendly provider could have been avoided. He could have contacted his hosting provider and gotten things straightened out on his own. Inciting his readers to harrass the spam fighters because he got his panties in a bunch over his mail not getting through was a bad move, and I'd think it would be an embarrassment for him.
SPEWS and the "collateral damage" concept are one of the few things that have gotten providers off their asses to remove spammers from their networks. Just because some kid's little chat site gets their mail blocked is no reason for the site's readers to act just like spammers, and probably resulted in somethingawful's mail being even more widely blocked than it had been when only SPEWS was listing it.
Everyone on the various anti-spam mailing lists and newsgroups were thinking that these worms were creating a network of spam proxies.
Maybe they were creating a network of DDoS zombies.
Some editing recommendations:
Remove the period and blankline after "proxies", remove the "Maybe" and substitute the word "and".
A cursory bit of websearching on SoBig and what it does reveals it's main mission was to provide both proxies and remote zombies from as early on as the.B version of the worm.
Unfortunately, THEY DO. It's called Free Speech. Bill of Rights, at the top.
Read this:
"Amendment I
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Where exactly is this supposed right of free use of my email inbox by spammers in the above text. Please tell me exactly how you arrived at that decision?
Restart SPEWS? Where are you getting this disinformation from? I'm still using it along with others. It's still rejecting a good amount of spam here.
The only thing that's changed is the method of distribution of the list.
Spammers may have disabled the website but the list is still being edited and updated on a daily, even multiple times daily, basis. It only means that more admins whose networks have been blocklisted can't determine what the problem is with their network and fix it.
Let me get this straight. The blocklists lists ISP's in ever widening circles, until their entire userbase is blocklisted, and then the blocklists get DDoSed, and ask for help from the very same ISP's that they blocklist, and trash in NANAE????
Yeah, that's what we expect, but what the hell, the ISP's are part of the problem, they don't mind raking in the extra bux from the spammers to keep them connected. It's just *business* after all. **spit**
ISP's make money hosting spammers so ergo to put spammers out of business cuts them out of a goodly sum of cash to keep their already failing businesses alive. It's all *so* much bullshit.
Matthew Sullivan from Osirusoft has a long record of trashing posters in NANAE, I suppose he conviently forgot that fact when he reported the DDoS. Any good investigator would of asked him, "do you know of anyone that would do you harm?". He's probably still writing that list out! I don't condone DDoSing anyone, but, you get what you give.
Wrong, get your facts straight. Joe Jared runs Osirusoft. Matthew Sullivan runs SORBS.org. The only thing he gave was a general derision for all the Average Joe's who thought they could run mail servers competently by opening a Microsoft Exchange box and installing the CD, or any other software, without giving any thought to reading the friggin' manual, no thought for whether or not that software was set up securely or whether their systems were fully patched.
Yeah, we should automatically assume everyone on the 'net is as competent as Matt Sullivan. Yeah, that's the ticket!
How are they doing the DDOS, using PCs infected with a trojan?
Exactly. This is what the Sobig trojan writer was commissioned to do, in my own personal belief. I've read some extensive analysis of what the Sobig trojan and some of the other recent worms that have been crushing the net, and they were explicitly designed to become tools of spammers and denial-of-servicing fleabags.
The sad part is that Ron Guilmette, the fellow who ran monkeys.com, has tried to get law enforcement and the ISP's where the DDoS was coming from interested in this problem and was pretty much rebuffed outright. FBI won't look at it, the ISP's are signing pink contract at double the usual rates at least to keep spammers connected and ignore complaints. No one is interested in helping with this and it's sad.
It's getting more and more like the Wild, Wild West every time I hook up to the 'net anymore. There are people complaining that they don't like the vigilante justice involved with running the DNSBL's. Imagine what your spam load would look like *without* the DNSBL's.
Ah, yes, I remember it well. A bunch of whiny children showed up on NANAE and waved their tiny penes around about how leet they were and how they would show SPEWS who's who.
I've seen the sadness that is their site. It suxors.
Would it not be possible for large ISPs to lauch similar suits as class-action? Imagine AOL suing spammers on behalf of all subscribers in Washington, with any judgement distributed among the receivers (minus whatever fees come off a class-action suit).
Why use Washington's law when Virginia, where AOL is located, has a much more effective law with stiffer penalties?
You'd have people signing up for AOL, just to get the spam.
As the Rowan court says In this case the mailer's right to communicate is circumscribed only by an affirmative act of the addressee giving notice that he wishes no further mailings from that mailer.
In sum: if you don't want spam, it's up to you to hold yourself out as not wanting spam so that spammers know not to send you spam.
If you don't do that, all else being equal, you're out of luck.
I don't think so. Here, check this out:
smtpd_banner = $myhostname ESMTP $mail_name NO UCE
Directly from my/etc/postfix/main.cf file. Shows up anytime anything connects to my mail server.
What's difficult to understand about that, pray tell? It's told to the assholes each time they connect to my mail server, right in the SMTP transaction. It should appear in their logs. It should be taken as a sign that I don't wish their crap on my server.
Right along with the 39 rejects that I found in my logs in the 24 hours from 0000 UTC -0400 9 Sept 2003 to 0000 UTC -0400 10 Sept 2003, all of them tagged with the SMTP 554 repsonse, right along with a message explaining why their spam bounced. Yet it still arrives. Why? Have I not told them I don't want their email enough times already?
How many times must I opt out of their mailing lists? How many hours a day must I spend to click on the remove links or emailing them to get off their lists.
I'd rather see it become de rigeur for them to *NOT CONTACT ME WITHOUT MY PRIOR PERMISSION*, especially if *I'M FOOTING THE BILL*!! Italy gets it. The EU gets it. Both have implemented opt-in legislation. What's so difficult for spammers to respect my right to JUST SAY NO??
The problem isn't my ISP using them, it's other people using them. If my network neighbor spams you, how the fuck is it my fault? How is my ISP being a dork about it my fault?
Effectively, you've helped support the spammers also by providing the hosting ISP with your money to help them stay alive. Those of us who believe in the idea behind SPEWS feel that if you're paying a recalcitrant ISP for service, you're helping them stay alive and helping them to further support the spammers. Besides, why would you stay with an ISP that supports spammers?
Under your "logic" (note the quotes), you would encourage a city to put up military roadblocks, and prevent anyone from going in, when they find one crack dealer in your neighborhood. And when you go to complain, noone exists. Not "you know their name, but don't have access to them", but "nobody knows their names, and we won't tell you".
Tell that to the pizza shop two blocks over whose driver was beaten and robbed when he tried to deliver to the house next door to the crack house. It's nothing more than simply saying, "Until you stop providing support for Spammer X, we won't trade SMTP traffic with you."
Fuck spews. Fuck them until they bleed, then fuck them harder.
But I'd still like to see SPEWS sued into the stone age. If you want to block spam, that's fine... but you just can't convince me that blocking thousands of legit servers, just because they're close to spam servers, is in any way a good practice.
So, gimme a better incentive for an ISP to clean up its network than being blocklisted to hell and back for supporting spammers? MAPS tried to do it by the single IP and they damned near got sued out of existence, or at least into irrelevance. Other lists have concentrated on listing single IP spam sources and have had only limited effect on the problem.
It took the folks behind SPEWS to get ISP's around the world to sit up and take stock of their problems with hosting spammers, spammish websites and providing dns to spammers. Nothing hits home like listening to a customer tell you about how you're going to leave their service unless they clean up their network space.
People aren't free to choose if when they're being feed disinformation.
Boycott organiziers like SPEWS should be accountable for what they "say" via their lists.
If, for example, they claim to list only spammers, and ISPs that support spammers,
but they also list anyone who owns a rabbit, then they are publishing disinformation.
It would be completely unfair to bunny owners, and they should be held accountable for that.
SPEWS never said it would only block spammers or single IP spam sources. SPEWS exists to block spam-friendly service providers. Where's the disinformation? Listing starts at the single IP, and maybe the/24 he's occupying. If the spam stops, the listing is lifted. If the spam continues and further complaints are ignored, the blocking expands, sometimes until an entire ISP's delegation is covered.
Again, where's this "disinformation?" Having trouble comprehending the SPEWS FAQ?
I'm all for suing spammers, or even killing them. But SPEWS sucks ass, they are a bunch of arrogant jackasses, and a lot of people are chosing to block email to people other themselves based on spews (like say, an Admin blocking email for everyone who uses a service). I'm glad they're being DDoSed. bleh
So, which spanked spammer are you? Ralsky? Scelson? Bubba Catts? Drew Amend? C'mon, fess up, we know your penis hurts.
Um, I'm sure you mean corporal punishment, not capital punishment. Capital punishment equates to a death sentence. But maybe when we're talking about spammers both are appropriate?
If the caning were delivered by each of the millions of people who received the penis-pill spammer's crap, don't you think it would end up being capital punishment?
I'd imagine his body would be a bleeding hamburger after being smacked with a cane 5 millions times over.
You must really hate that spam.
or really hate freedom. nobody likes spam, sure, but this whole scene is really about encouraging the government to regulate communication. i find it amazing that the slashdot crowd who are usually such virulent defenders of an unfettered internet are more than willing to give the government more control when it comes to penis-pill ads!
We love freedom, freedom from assholes who think that they own our inboxes. A marketer's right to push his information into my living room ends at my doorstep, whether it be physical or electronic. This isn't about freedom of speech in this case at all, as it's been determined before that commercial entities have a very limited right to freedom of speech.
See U.S. Supreme Court
ROWAN v. U. S. POST OFFICE DEPT., 397 U.S. 728
Chief Justice BURGER delivered the opinion of the Court:
"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit.... The ancient concept that 'a man's home is his castle' into which 'not even the king may enter' has lost none of its vitality.... We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good'
ideas on an unwilling recipient. That we are often 'captives' outside the sanctuary of the home and subject to objectionable speech and other sound does not mean we must be captives
everywhere.... The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."
Then of course, there's the CyberPromo/AOL lawsuit, in which the judge held that CP had no First Amendment right to send UCE to AOL's customers. The transcript for that case can be found at:
Slashdot Mirror
Grin... you need MozillaFirebird. Block those popups, you'll never go back to Internet Exploder, er, Internet Infector, errr, I mean, Internet Explorer.
There exists the Rules of Spam as promulgated over on news.admin.net-abuse.email:
0. Spam is theft.
1. Spammers lie.
2. When in doubt about whether a spammer is lying, see Rule 1.
3. Spammers are stupid.
This is Rule 3 in spades. They'd just assume that it would be too much work to scrub out the non-deliverables and bad prospects, they'll simply keep hitting an address for no reason. I post to usenet with an address that has never worked, and I smile every time I see it appear in my logs with a spam reject.
As for any other motives, who knows? Spammers could be space aliens for all I know. It's obvious that they don't think like normal humans.
--
DETROIT SUBGENIUS DEVIVAL Nov 29, 2003
Magic Stick Theatre 4120-4140 Woodward Ave Detroit, MI
Rev.Ivan Stang - The Amino Acids - The Jollys
MAN - Downtown Brown - Old Tyme Preachin', Teachin' & Ravin'
http://www.subgenius.com/newdevivals.html
TINLC Unit #2309 - Death to all spammer accounts. - WWSB?
Y'all need to have a talk with Ron Guilmette, owner/operator of monkeys.com. Ron was running a very extensive network of proxy honeypots and using it to collate and publish data about various ISP's harboring proxy-abusing spammers. His data proved essential in identifying the outfits responsible for the virus-related abuse that we're seeing now. Ron also ran the proxies.monkeys.com blocklist, which was terribly good at filitering spam for me and many others.
Back at tail end of August, beginning of September, he was knocked off the net when monkeys.com came under dDoS attacks, most notably from machines known to be infected by viruses, all harboring open proxy software installed by the virus. He called the local police, who had to be coerced, he says, to come out and take a report. The FBI wasn't even interested enough to come out and take a look at his data. If you cannot prove a minimum of $5k worth of damages, you're shit out of luck.
No, I cannot concur here. In the last two weeks, I've noticed that the reject rate on my filters has gone up by a surprising amount. I use a custom access table, backed up by several RBL lookups done by postfix, with SpamAssassin on the backend to catch anything that does make it through the initial gauntlet.
Looking back through my logs, I've only got three weeks saved, but here's the breakdown of rejects for each week:
Week ending Oct 18 - 122
Week ending Oct 25 - 250
Week ending Nov 1 - 214
0400 Yesterday through now - 37
Note that I'm seeing hits on addresses that have never existed here, i.e. webaster@$mydomain (yes, the spelling mistake in webaster is theirs, not mine), spammers_lie@$mydomain (non-deliverable, harvested from my usenet posts), mers_lie@$mydomain (trying to remove the obfuscation I might have put in), and now I'm seeing the idiots try to get their crap through by using a non-existent address, john@$mydomain, as the "mail from:" value to attempt to get their crap through.
Yes, they've become so desperate that criminal methods aren't below them. All the filtering that's being done has lowered their response rates to where it's no longer as profitable as it used to be. Of course, the mindset of these idiots is that they'll just crank out the spam all that much harder, in all that much more quantity, in order to get the rates back up to something manageable. Of course, it's beyond them to think that if people are no longer interested in their pitches, they might check employment opportunities at the local McDonald's, as that might be more a more lucrative situation for them.
Wall Street would be void of human life if this were to happen.
Rich
How does SCO propose to make any money on any of their product lines when they've pissed off their entire prospective customer base by either suing them or declaring their works and the copyleft under which they're released "unenforceable"? Don't they understand that when this is over, SCO software will be unwelcome in any data center?
AT&T three years ago were caught out when a "pink contract" they held with Ronnie Scelson's Cajun Hosting was brought to light by anti-spammers on news.admin.net-abuse.email. Now they're going to do something about the spam hitting their user's inboxes.
Less spam would hit their user's inboxes if they were to sever all ties with their pet spammers. It's my own hog-fucking opinion that AT&T still has plenty of pink paper over there and are still helping spammers to stay in business. However, money still talks the loudest. Those spam contracts usually bring double or triple the going rate to ignore complaints.
Patently false? Most folks, when keeping up a software product, do a rewrite every once in a while to incorporate those bugfixes and patches. The OP says that since IE has been released, it's gone from what, version 3.1 to 4.0 to 4.1 to 5.0 to 5.5 to 6.0 to 6.1 to 6.1+SP1 or whatever the fuck. Yes, he may be a bit off on the software patches but *since XP was released 2 years ago* what has come out new in IE? 2 years ago it was still version 6.0, or at least 5.5 going on 6.0. Whoop-de-doo.
Windows 2003? We're talking IE here, the motherload of vulnerability and unpatched Active X virus transmitting software, pretty much the main interface. It's still in W2k3. It's still version 6.1sp1. One wonders why they've not done a code rewrite in the last 2 years.
SomethingAwful is a poor example to use in this case. Zack Parsons, in my own hog-fucking opinion, is a child who doesn't understand the basic functioning of email and blocklists and incited the flooding of newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email by his idiot subscribers. We saw Zack on the newsgroup and on the above-mentioned page whining like a little girl about his problems.
Oh fucking well. Hosting with a spam-friendly provider could have been avoided. He could have contacted his hosting provider and gotten things straightened out on his own. Inciting his readers to harrass the spam fighters because he got his panties in a bunch over his mail not getting through was a bad move, and I'd think it would be an embarrassment for him.
SPEWS and the "collateral damage" concept are one of the few things that have gotten providers off their asses to remove spammers from their networks. Just because some kid's little chat site gets their mail blocked is no reason for the site's readers to act just like spammers, and probably resulted in somethingawful's mail being even more widely blocked than it had been when only SPEWS was listing it.
Some editing recommendations:
Remove the period and blankline after "proxies", remove the "Maybe" and substitute the word "and".
A cursory bit of websearching on SoBig and what it does reveals it's main mission was to provide both proxies and remote zombies from as early on as the
Read this:
"Amendment I
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Where exactly is this supposed right of free use of my email inbox by spammers in the above text. Please tell me exactly how you arrived at that decision?
Contrast that with this:
http://antitele.home.texas.net/free_speech.html
And tell me again how does the first amendment guarantee that a spammer is allowed to abuse my resources to send his message?
Idiot.
Restart SPEWS? Where are you getting this disinformation from? I'm still using it along with others. It's still rejecting a good amount of spam here.
The only thing that's changed is the method of distribution of the list.
Spammers may have disabled the website but the list is still being edited and updated on a daily, even multiple times daily, basis. It only means that more admins whose networks have been blocklisted can't determine what the problem is with their network and fix it.
Yeah, that's what we expect, but what the hell, the ISP's are part of the problem, they don't mind raking in the extra bux from the spammers to keep them connected. It's just *business* after all. **spit**
ISP's make money hosting spammers so ergo to put spammers out of business cuts them out of a goodly sum of cash to keep their already failing businesses alive. It's all *so* much bullshit.
Wrong, get your facts straight. Joe Jared runs Osirusoft. Matthew Sullivan runs SORBS.org. The only thing he gave was a general derision for all the Average Joe's who thought they could run mail servers competently by opening a Microsoft Exchange box and installing the CD, or any other software, without giving any thought to reading the friggin' manual, no thought for whether or not that software was set up securely or whether their systems were fully patched.
Yeah, we should automatically assume everyone on the 'net is as competent as Matt Sullivan. Yeah, that's the ticket!
Exactly. This is what the Sobig trojan writer was commissioned to do, in my own personal belief. I've read some extensive analysis of what the Sobig trojan and some of the other recent worms that have been crushing the net, and they were explicitly designed to become tools of spammers and denial-of-servicing fleabags.
The sad part is that Ron Guilmette, the fellow who ran monkeys.com, has tried to get law enforcement and the ISP's where the DDoS was coming from interested in this problem and was pretty much rebuffed outright. FBI won't look at it, the ISP's are signing pink contract at double the usual rates at least to keep spammers connected and ignore complaints. No one is interested in helping with this and it's sad.
It's getting more and more like the Wild, Wild West every time I hook up to the 'net anymore. There are people complaining that they don't like the vigilante justice involved with running the DNSBL's. Imagine what your spam load would look like *without* the DNSBL's.
Or imagine the Pandora Project coming to life.
Ah, yes, I remember it well. A bunch of whiny children showed up on NANAE and waved their tiny penes around about how leet they were and how they would show SPEWS who's who.
I've seen the sadness that is their site. It suxors.
Why use Washington's law when Virginia, where AOL is located, has a much more effective law with stiffer penalties?
I dunno, AOL still sux.
I don't think so. Here, check this out:
smtpd_banner = $myhostname ESMTP $mail_name NO UCE
Directly from my
What's difficult to understand about that, pray tell? It's told to the assholes each time they connect to my mail server, right in the SMTP transaction. It should appear in their logs. It should be taken as a sign that I don't wish their crap on my server.
Right along with the 39 rejects that I found in my logs in the 24 hours from 0000 UTC -0400 9 Sept 2003 to 0000 UTC -0400 10 Sept 2003, all of them tagged with the SMTP 554 repsonse, right along with a message explaining why their spam bounced. Yet it still arrives. Why? Have I not told them I don't want their email enough times already?
How many times must I opt out of their mailing lists? How many hours a day must I spend to click on the remove links or emailing them to get off their lists.
I'd rather see it become de rigeur for them to *NOT CONTACT ME WITHOUT MY PRIOR PERMISSION*, especially if *I'M FOOTING THE BILL*!! Italy gets it. The EU gets it. Both have implemented opt-in legislation. What's so difficult for spammers to respect my right to JUST SAY NO??
It took the folks behind SPEWS to get ISP's around the world to sit up and take stock of their problems with hosting spammers, spammish websites and providing dns to spammers. Nothing hits home like listening to a customer tell you about how you're going to leave their service unless they clean up their network space.
Again, where's this "disinformation?" Having trouble comprehending the SPEWS FAQ?
I'd imagine his body would be a bleeding hamburger after being smacked with a cane 5 millions times over.
See U.S. Supreme Court
ROWAN v. U. S. POST OFFICE DEPT., 397 U.S. 728
Chief Justice BURGER delivered the opinion of the Court:
"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit.... The ancient concept that 'a man's home is his castle' into which 'not even the king may enter' has lost none of its vitality.... We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. That we are often 'captives' outside the sanctuary of the home and subject to objectionable speech and other sound does not mean we must be captives everywhere.... The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."
You can read the entire Supreme Court decision on the FindLaw web page (http://www.findlaw.com/). The specific URL is http://www.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=U
Then of course, there's the CyberPromo/AOL lawsuit, in which the judge held that CP had no First Amendment right to send UCE to AOL's customers. The transcript for that case can be found at:
http://www.leepfrog.com/E-Law/Cases/Cyber_Promo_v
Note: Most of this was lifted verbatim from Message-ID: 343A9BBF.4340@stanford.edu
http://ares.penguinhosting.net/~leftreveggplant
Just if yer gonna go, take a *good* camera that won't flash when taking photos of the black Jag as it exits the driveway.