just because you disagree with a company, that doesn't make you a "threat."
What scares me most is how, suddenly, the idea that we are somehow not allowed to speak out against just such corporations is becoming more and more common to the average Joe.
When did America become this country of limp wristed wussies who were afraid to speak their minds because they might be sued by some big corporation? Yeah, they might sue, and you might have to defend a lawsuit if what you speak is not the truth. What one must do to speak out on any given subject, including this one, is to educate oneself!
If you know more than the other guy and can only speak about the truth, what is there to fear?
Call me from Missouri. I'll buy that for a dollar. There's a sucker born every minute. I can't believe I ate the whole thing. Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. Clap on -- Clap off. Set it... and FORGET IT!! Tastes like chicken, but it's NOT!!
More FUD to spin, trust me. Whey they say they're not spinning FUD, THEY REALLY ARE!!!
But the actions of the spammers (Super-Zonda in this case) are reprehensible. They are clearly reaking the law in hacking into people's computers in the manner that they are, and they should be punished appropriately for that.
Unfortunately, since SuperZonda is a group of people from Argentina, the only laws broken in this case are the laws of Argentina. They are out of the jurisdiction of the US and have nothing to fear.
This is why a law banning spam in the US will fail--every spammer on the planet will set up shop on networks hosted out of US jurisdiction and spam with impunity. This will make them easy to block, however. I don't hesitate to drop packets from places like China, Argentina, Korea, etc.
Until I see full headers. Any spam that I see that claims to be from hotmail seems to be a forgery of the From: line; the majority of my spam actually comes via unsecured proxies.
If it wasn't for the DNSBLs that target open proxies, I'd be swimming in spam.
Frankly, I'm tired of finding out about *actual* great deals online that I already missed out on. If THAT info made it to my Ads box, then I'd be happy.
*CACKLE*! When was the last time that happened? The only time I've gotten something similar is on a list to which I signed up. Ticketbastard, for example, sends out an occasional newsletter listing events that take place close to home as a result of my buying concert tickets through their online service. Great, wonderful, I like that.
What I don't like, however, is some idiot scraping my email address from my USENET posts and sending along whatever goatse.cx photos they happen to have handy at the time they created their "ads".
How much do you pay for email? Come on, stop bullshitting. As far as I know, most email providers are either free (hotmail) or flat-rate (your ISP), regardless of volume. Also, if you take basic precautions (like not posting your email address in robot-readable form), you will not get more than one or two spams a month.
You miss the point, my comprehension-challenged friend. Yes, I pay for email via the fee I pay to my ISP. You pay for your email via a fee you pay to your ISP. When was the last time that fee went down? Also, not everyone lives in an area (think Europe here) where they can get an unmetered internet account (also think business-class T1 or better where they charge extra rates for traffic over a certain cap). Those people are bearing the brunt of the costs of the spammer's need for their message to get as many eyeballs as possible.
But if I could filter it all into an "Ads" mailbox, just like I have mailboxes for various mailing lists, I would scan the offers about stuff I might actually want. I'd be much more inclined to "click through" then, while my all-time number of click-throughs of spam email to date totals 0.
Why not just be honest. Didn't you really mean to say/dev/null? Ads mailbox my ass. IF I WANT IT IN MY MAILBOX, I'LL SIGN UP TO IT. OTHERWISE, KEEP THE FUCK OUT. Marketers don't realize that I'll allow free access to friends, relatives and anyone else I've had an existing business relationship with. All others can pay ME to use it or subsidize my ridiculously expensive internet bill, which their current efforts are what keeps it so friggin' high in the first place.
Christ, who do you think is paying for any of this shit? US!!
All spammers are bad, but they gotta start with the worst in these cases. It's true that a deceptive email subject line bringing you to a porn site is alot worse than someone trying to sell you a pair of shoes (to parents anyway).
So even if it's not everything, it's a step in the right direction, I am happy:P
Unfortunately, what the FTC is cracking down on is the fact that his subject line is misleading, he's showing pron to minors, and his email doesn't contain proper contact information. Until there's legislation enacted that makes the unsolicited nature of spam the primary category whereby they can penalize the sender, it's all bad. Spam is bad because of its unsolicited nature and the theft of resources that it takes to get the spam into your inbox. It's about someone who thinks that my computer is their advertising tool. It's about someone who thinks my ISP's mail servers should take the brunt of the crapload without proper reimbursement for their services.
Typical over-simplified bullshit. I wonder if anyone posting messages like this really understands the ramifications of what's happening.
Ask yourself, WHO gets hurt?
Certainly not the spammer, they can move around at will.
The ISP? Maybe. But even if they do boot off that spammer another will come along to take their place or the same spammer will re-apply under a different name. ISP's can't and shouldn't have to chase spammers all the time in some virtual game of whack-the-mole.
Personally, I don't friggin' care who gets hurt. The problem we've got now is ISPs signing up the same spammers over and over and over. Individual, pinpoint blocks have been tried. Didn't work, no incentive for the spammer to stop spamming, no incentive for the ISPs to get a handle on the problem. Now, there's an organization with a huge stick whackin' on these ISPs and the moles they keep around--SPEWS!
The only people who get hurt in this are the non-spamming end-users. Their mail bounces, they may lose business, important messages get dropped.
Any business owner stupid enough to rely on a medium of communication over which he does not have ultimate control or is carried by a company with common-carrier status is what I'd call an idiot and I would consider worthy of all the lost business. Spam is affecting me, making me lose track of important messages that I want to receive. Now, I know you don't friggin' care about my lost mail, why the hell should I care about yours?
And their reaction when they find out why isn't going to be, "gee, I'd better call my ISP to get rid of them darn spammers", it's going to be " WHO THE FUCK DO THOSE SPEWS ASSHOLES THINK THEY ARE??!! FUCKING INTERNET GODS??"
Oh, yes, that's a very mature reaction. Come out, throwing punches, expecting to win the fight from the get-go, not even realizing that your opponent is an 800lb gorilla. Note, there's no way that you can contact SPEWS. There's only one way to solve the problem: Make the spam stop. Now, do you want to be part of the solution or continue supporting the problem by feeding your ISP more cabbage to stay alive, spam supporting attitude and all.
Change their ISP?? Get real kiddies, in most places there isn't another choice.
For certain small values of $MOSTPLACES. I travel frequently for my job, sometimes to some rather rural destinations. There are tons of national ISPs that provide dialup service. If you find yourself in the sticks and limited to one choice of ISP, you could always contract for mail service through a third party who isn't blocked. Charge the bill back to the other provider to make up for the broken service he's providing.
ISPs have tried to rely on 'common carrier' defenses in the past. However, if they start blocking SOME email, can they be held liable for mail that they DON'T block?
Moot point. ISPs have never had common-carrier status. Each ISP is a private network being carried over a private backbone which both rent bandwidth to their customers. None has the responsibility to ensure that traffic gets to where it is going; in fact, there is no guarantee in place that will ensure that traffic will get through, especially SMTP traffic. This all relies on a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" philosophy, which is the basis on which the 'Net was founded.
Problem has become that some networks have stopped being good network neighbors and have let their spammy users run rampant in that they selectively enforce their terms of service or don't enforce at all. In my own hog-fucking opinion, I don't want to trade email with a provider who's willing to sit back and smile while their customer dumps a truckload of manure in other people's email inboxes.
And can you selectively give up common carrier status? If you block some email but host anyone's web page, for instance, can you be sued successfully for objectionable content on those web pages?
This is exactly why ISPs don't want common carrier status.
Most spam originates from a small group of die-hard spammers that move between ISPs. It's not the same thing.
True, too true. Take a look at http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso and see for yourself.
And then there's 'direct-to-MX' spam from dialup and cable/broadband accounts.
That was true a year and a half ago. Not now. The majority of spam now originates via open proxy rape in 75% of the spam attempts I see on my little home postfix server. Yeah, most are on dsl/cablemodem accounts, but it's much different than the direct-to-MX attacks we used to see from cheapo throwaway dialup accounts back then. If the software authors would get their heads out of their asses and ship their product set so that its secure outta the box (AnalogX comes to mind), half that battle would be won and out of the way.
So, while folks like ROKSO and Spamhaus.org do provide blacklists, they're not 100% effective and there's always the risk of false-positives.
Such is the way with spam filters. Win some, lose some, just like any battle, from small foxhole fighting to whole world wars.
The analogy is much the same as having a crack house open in your neighbourhood. You either take action on the crack dealers or move out...
My $Deity, where to begin...
To correct your analogy the spammer is the crack house operator. What SPEWS does is start blowing up all the houses in the neighbourhood that surround the crack house in the hopes that the neighbours will complain to the authorities (The ISP)to take action.
Blowing up the houses in the neighborhood? Right.
A more accurate analogy would be that SPEWS has a map of the Internet. It starts out pinpointing the spammer's house, then redlines the spammer's street, then the spammer's city, indicating to people who live outside that neighborhood that they might not want to enter that neighborhood for fear of being robbed or beaten.
If an ISP won't listen to complaints from outside its network, maybe they'll listen to their paying customers once they see the mail bouncing. That's the idea. It's simply enacting a boycott on SMTP traffic from ISPs that won't react to abuse complaints involving their network space, whether it's spam sent from that space or spam support services being provided, such as http, dns, etc.
Seems rather simple to me. Stop supporting spammers by paying your hosting company to ignore complaints from the outside. If you're mail is bouncing, it's probably for pretty damned good reason.
I'd argue this collateral damage has destroyed the usefulness of email even more than spam has. It's simply an unreliable medium these days -- you never know if your mail got there or not, because it could have been silently dropped with no bounce message sent. Thus whenever I send reasonably-important emails now, I use either the phone or AIM to confirm it was received.
Who do we blame for this? The spammers. If they would simply relent and respect the right of the recipient to say, "No, I don't want your marketing crap in my mailbox," all would be well with the world.
I'm receiving spam attempts to USENET message id's that are being mistakenly harvested as supposedly valid email addresses. Someone please explain to me how a message id subscribed to some idiot spammer's opt-out list?
Back to the topic at hand, what I'd like to know from Bernie is how much money his business has spent on upgrades to mail servers, ie, RAM, diskspace, processing power, in order to accomodate the extra load that has resulted from the ever-increasing spam-load over the last 2-3 years. I can imagine that he's spent thousands, tens of thousands--even hundreds of thousands--of dollars on this. That's one hell of an expense to eat because some sociopath thinks his marketing message is so damned important that every person on the planet with an inbox has to see it.
But how do people get on the spam-lists to begin with? I mean, I have one email address for work and one private. Neither one of these gets more than one spam/month. Ever. The (obvious) reason for this is that I never use these addresses "in public" (web forms, online buying, etc.), for that I have my spam-collector, the Hotmail account, which do recieve a lot of these messages.
Excellent point. However, I believe the real question is:
Who are the idiots who actually respond to spam email advertisements and buy the products associated with them?
Until that question is answered and the offending parties identified and re-educated as to the fact that buying from spamvertisers is a huge no-no, the spam problem will not go away.
When you said "I think" you gave yourself certain protections. If you had stated absolutely that he is an asshole you would be implying that you knew this for certain and it would be libelous. Instead it's just your opinion:)
However, I think many would choose to agree with you.
Exactly my point. In my opinion, I think the guy is a dickwad, a dweeb, a raving loon. I can make that point as loud as I want to.
In the defendant's opinion, the articles he received from the plaintiff were utter shite, not what he believed he was getting. That's the risk you take when buying from eBay. He made that opinion known in the form of feedback on eBay's site. Hopefully, no one will buy from the plaintiff again.
Just because eBay makes a conduit available for the buyer to rate the seller and his items doesn't mean some schmoe should be able to sue them for the things said there. His beef, however weak, is with the buyer and his negative opinion. I believe, though IANAL, that if the defendant were to show up for his day in court with the goods in hand and say, "Here's the crap I was sold, I said in my feedback that I received what I thought was utter crap and I wasn't happy," the judge would likely toss the case and the plaintiff outta his courtroom in their collective ear. ICBW, YMMV, or kill me.
I think this guy's a fucking asshole. I think he should be sued for being an asshole.
Now, come and sue me, bright boy. My words are my own. Slashdot is only the conduit by which I post them for the world to see. I bear full responsibility for my words.
Idiots like this are why the justice system is completely fubar and needs to be overhauled.
How does the DMCA apply here? This is a parody site, no one's using anything computer-related to break into Dow's intellectual property. What a travesty of justice. I hope Thing.net will pursue this idiocy.
Hopefully, the person discovering this has gotten the image to some people with serious expertise in image enhancement, forensic or intelligence in the hopes of getting the Jaguar's license number.
I did send the negative of the rear-end of the Jag off to a photographic professional to attempt to resolve the license plate. Here's a scan of what he was able to accomplish.
According to the gentleman who performed the hi-res scan of the negative, the details are muzzled up by camera movement, slow shutter speed and lack of quality of the film. Remember, this was a cheapo disposable Kodak camera, available at any CVS pharmacy around the US.
Rich
I've posted my story on a website here. I got too curious and decided to go for a ride, since this guy was right on the way home from a service call at work. Best to hit the photo mirrors here so the photo sites can be a bit more distributed.
I had a story submission on this that Taco and his bunch have sat on since Friday morning. Why?
From the look of it, if you're a company paying a geek or herd of geeks to write filters for your mail or have purchased some sort of filtering software solution to screen out the spam, you're still wasting money on filtering spam! Office productivity might be up but the company is still having to spend $xxxx.xx on a filtering solution, which I'd bet doesn't offset the increased productivity.
Also, don't forget the cost, albeit small, associated with missed mail that was flagged as a false postive.
A better idea if everybody send him an invoice for mail server usage and bandwidth, keep it reasonable amount, and when he does not pay register a bad debt against him. This could work best if done out of his juridiction.
From reading his rapsheet on spamhaus.org's ROKSO database, I don't think Big Al would give a fudge about whether or not he pays you, regardless if he had a court order to do so or not. Remember, he's not going to blink at handing out quarters, he's got so damned much money.
What we need to find out are his ASN numbers so routers can be programmed to ignore all traffic from those ASNs. Here's wishing.
Slashdot Mirror
What scares me most is how, suddenly, the idea that we are somehow not allowed to speak out against just such corporations is becoming more and more common to the average Joe.
When did America become this country of limp wristed wussies who were afraid to speak their minds because they might be sued by some big corporation? Yeah, they might sue, and you might have to defend a lawsuit if what you speak is not the truth. What one must do to speak out on any given subject, including this one, is to educate oneself!
If you know more than the other guy and can only speak about the truth, what is there to fear?
Call me from Missouri. I'll buy that for a dollar. There's a sucker born every minute. I can't believe I ate the whole thing. Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. Clap on -- Clap off. Set it... and FORGET IT!! Tastes like chicken, but it's NOT!!
More FUD to spin, trust me. Whey they say they're not spinning FUD, THEY REALLY ARE!!!
Praise "Bob"!
This is why a law banning spam in the US will fail--every spammer on the planet will set up shop on networks hosted out of US jurisdiction and spam with impunity. This will make them easy to block, however. I don't hesitate to drop packets from places like China, Argentina, Korea, etc.
Until I see full headers. Any spam that I see that claims to be from hotmail seems to be a forgery of the From: line; the majority of my spam actually comes via unsecured proxies.
If it wasn't for the DNSBLs that target open proxies, I'd be swimming in spam.
Looks like Buddha is *not* smiling down upon the Hindu children. Pretty soon, techies in India will be doing what techies in America are doing:
Slaving for low wages or searching for a new job.
May "Bob" smile down upon them instead, may they quit their jobs and SLACK OFF!
Whatever McBride's smoking, I wish he would tell ME! It's gotta be some good shit.
Or the mushrooms this year are particularly fine.
What I don't like, however, is some idiot scraping my email address from my USENET posts and sending along whatever goatse.cx photos they happen to have handy at the time they created their "ads".
That is what I'm pissed off about.
Christ, who do you think is paying for any of this shit? US!!
Problem has become that some networks have stopped being good network neighbors and have let their spammy users run rampant in that they selectively enforce their terms of service or don't enforce at all. In my own hog-fucking opinion, I don't want to trade email with a provider who's willing to sit back and smile while their customer dumps a truckload of manure in other people's email inboxes. This is exactly why ISPs don't want common carrier status.
A more accurate analogy would be that SPEWS has a map of the Internet. It starts out pinpointing the spammer's house, then redlines the spammer's street, then the spammer's city, indicating to people who live outside that neighborhood that they might not want to enter that neighborhood for fear of being robbed or beaten.
If an ISP won't listen to complaints from outside its network, maybe they'll listen to their paying customers once they see the mail bouncing. That's the idea. It's simply enacting a boycott on SMTP traffic from ISPs that won't react to abuse complaints involving their network space, whether it's spam sent from that space or spam support services being provided, such as http, dns, etc.
Seems rather simple to me. Stop supporting spammers by paying your hosting company to ignore complaints from the outside. If you're mail is bouncing, it's probably for pretty damned good reason.
I'm receiving spam attempts to USENET message id's that are being mistakenly harvested as supposedly valid email addresses. Someone please explain to me how a message id subscribed to some idiot spammer's opt-out list?
Back to the topic at hand, what I'd like to know from Bernie is how much money his business has spent on upgrades to mail servers, ie, RAM, diskspace, processing power, in order to accomodate the extra load that has resulted from the ever-increasing spam-load over the last 2-3 years. I can imagine that he's spent thousands, tens of thousands--even hundreds of thousands--of dollars on this. That's one hell of an expense to eat because some sociopath thinks his marketing message is so damned important that every person on the planet with an inbox has to see it.
Who are the idiots who actually respond to spam email advertisements and buy the products associated with them?
Until that question is answered and the offending parties identified and re-educated as to the fact that buying from spamvertisers is a huge no-no, the spam problem will not go away.
Take the Boulder Pledge!
Nah, I'm avoiding that. I'd sooner watch flies fornicate.
Football is just grown men playing a boys game. Nothing better than grabass over an oblate sphere.
One good thing: I've caught up on my USENET reading and some much missed sleep this weekend.
Exactly my point. In my opinion, I think the guy is a dickwad, a dweeb, a raving loon. I can make that point as loud as I want to.
In the defendant's opinion, the articles he received from the plaintiff were utter shite, not what he believed he was getting. That's the risk you take when buying from eBay. He made that opinion known in the form of feedback on eBay's site. Hopefully, no one will buy from the plaintiff again.
Just because eBay makes a conduit available for the buyer to rate the seller and his items doesn't mean some schmoe should be able to sue them for the things said there. His beef, however weak, is with the buyer and his negative opinion. I believe, though IANAL, that if the defendant were to show up for his day in court with the goods in hand and say, "Here's the crap I was sold, I said in my feedback that I received what I thought was utter crap and I wasn't happy," the judge would likely toss the case and the plaintiff outta his courtroom in their collective ear. ICBW, YMMV, or kill me.
If he's feelin' froggy, I say go for it:
I think this guy's a fucking asshole. I think he should be sued for being an asshole.
Now, come and sue me, bright boy. My words are my own. Slashdot is only the conduit by which I post them for the world to see. I bear full responsibility for my words.
Idiots like this are why the justice system is completely fubar and needs to be overhauled.
How does the DMCA apply here? This is a parody site, no one's using anything computer-related to break into Dow's intellectual property. What a travesty of justice. I hope Thing.net will pursue this idiocy.
The DMCA is just pure corporate evil.
According to the gentleman who performed the hi-res scan of the negative, the details are muzzled up by camera movement, slow shutter speed and lack of quality of the film. Remember, this was a cheapo disposable Kodak camera, available at any CVS pharmacy around the US. Rich
What, and get slapped with a stalking charge if I'm caught once again? Nah, I have other operatives who can do that dirty work for me.
I've posted my story on a website here. I got too curious and decided to go for a ride, since this guy was right on the way home from a service call at work. Best to hit the photo mirrors here so the photo sites can be a bit more distributed.
I had a story submission on this that Taco and his bunch have sat on since Friday morning. Why?
Rich
From the look of it, if you're a company paying a geek or herd of geeks to write filters for your mail or have purchased some sort of filtering software solution to screen out the spam, you're still wasting money on filtering spam! Office productivity might be up but the company is still having to spend $xxxx.xx on a filtering solution, which I'd bet doesn't offset the increased productivity.
Also, don't forget the cost, albeit small, associated with missed mail that was flagged as a false postive.
From reading his rapsheet on spamhaus.org's ROKSO database, I don't think Big Al would give a fudge about whether or not he pays you, regardless if he had a court order to do so or not. Remember, he's not going to blink at handing out quarters, he's got so damned much money.
What we need to find out are his ASN numbers so routers can be programmed to ignore all traffic from those ASNs. Here's wishing.