There is no "fix".... there is a "hack" and what does it ultimately involve?
Client authentication.
Ok, kids, what is client authentication? What's another name for it?
Whitelisting.
Now ask yourself. Are there more SMTP servers out there spamming than acting honorably?
No. The spammers are fewer in number than the legit SMTP servers.
So do we need a new SMTP protocol?
No. We need to blacklist rogue ISPs and SMTP relays that don't act responsibly.
You can list 100k rogue mail server IPs, or you can manage billions of legitimate SMTP IPs. Which makes more sense?
The RBL community has already taken this upon themselves to address this problem. If you don't understand the real dynamics at play here, at least just go along with those that do.
For instance: Subscribing the Detroit area spammer and his lawyer to enough real-world junkmail lists to bury his bills and other US Main correspondence in several daily truckloads of catalogues and other solicitations
With all due respect, get a clue.
You don't fight a noisy neighbor by cranking up your stereo.
The most effective spam solution at this time is RBL blacklisting. Bottom line.
When you take into account that the biggest problem of spamming is bandwidth consumption and network resources, there is NO better way than blacklisting spam sources and refusing to communicate with them.
Services like Spamcop's RBL really piss off the spammers. All client-side filtering is counterproductive and ultimately useless as you constantly have to update the systems to catch new efforts on the part of spammers to thwart the filters. At least with RBLs, the spammers' connections are immediately refused as soon as they're ID'd.
If you want to identify what is the most effective solutions, it's simple. Look at what pisses off the sleazebag spam community the most. That's relay blacklisting. They don't DDOS the moronic client-side filtering companies because the spammers know they're useless, and even if they're not, the spammers can't tell. What hurts them are when systems say, 'screw you spammer, (click)' and that's done via relay blacklisting.
Why are spammers increasingly changing mail relays and pursuing open proxies? Because of RBLs. Even AOL uses RBLs (including Spamcop). All the major ISPs look at the RBLs because they are THE most effective way of stopping spam. And they're the only way to actually shut down the spammers.
Forget client or server-side content-based filtering. They will NEVER work. RBLs are responsible for forcing spammers into corners of IP space, forcing them to deploy worms and viruses to infiltrate new IP space (which exposes them to more prosecution). RBLs ** WORK ** !
... meanwhile, there's some loser in New Jersey who is likely behind all of this. He sets up shop through a convoluted array of connections overseas, but all these spammers, especially the ones coming from foreign countries are likely Americans and can easily be traced back to the US.
Imagine all the illegal activity they've probably engaged in, as a result of their efforts to obfusicate their identity and launder money overseas. When are the authorities going to string up some of these people?
These people are the same people who are spamming. Since more and more systems are employing RBLs, they're stooping to even more unehtical tactics such as copying high-traffic web sites and using them as fronts to promote the same schemes (home refinance scams, etc.) that they have been doing via e-mail.
Due to the chaotic jurisdictional nature of the Internet, there's no easy way to deal with this.
Personally, I think the best approach is to start blacklisting all IP traffic from ISPs that don't enforce even a remotely responsible policy. We already reject all SMTP traffic from many countries such as Korea, which have proven to be nothing more than spam-havens. Let's just cut off these third-world networks until they learn to behave responsibly. What else are you going to do?
Which worms are routing through the user's SMTP server? I don't know of any, and if there are, then the ISP's SMTP relay is set up to catch this and stop it.
I contend the vast majority of worms do the following:
1. open up a back door, turn the PC into a proxy/spammer
2. act as an smtp relay and start propagating themselves
I have seen only a handful of worms that go through the preset SMTP relay.. most don't do that.
This is because the DAs like busting drug-related cases. They know nothing about the Internet and cybercrime, but they apparently have a lot of experience with bongs and drug cases.
The Feds are at the mercy of the District Attorneys who decide whether to pursue cases or not. People need to lobby their DAs to start taking action against cybercrime.
Spammers have to be earning a decent amount of money from all those people that DO actually open the spam and buy into those products. Otherwise no one would go to the trouble of cataloguing e-mail addresses, setting up messages and methods to defeat the spam filters, and then sending all of those messages out to bazillions of people.
To use your analogy, homeless people must also be making a lot of money because I see them stand out by the highway all day. I get tons of advertisements for "work at home" operations, so they must all be extremely profitable.
How much effort do you think it takes to download some script that weasels the web for e-mail addresses? How much effort does it take to go to a site like OpenProxies.com and grab a list of IPs and start spamming? Have you seen these spam filter bypass efforts? They're far from "scientific" - don't give these people that much credit. They're not smart. They're not rich. If they were really making a lot of money, they'd be much more trackable. They're not making money, any more than your average Herbalife salesman is pulling in $100k/year.
If spamming really was profitable, more legitimate companies would be doing it, for more legitimate products. The vast majority of spamvertized ventures seem to be based around commissions-earning through referrals to web sites, so the spammers rarely get any money up front. It's much more likely that if the spammers are getting paid at all, it's by get-rich-quick losers who are blowing little bits of money thinking that spamming will improve their attempt to grab the brass ring without really having to work, which is something that, since the dawn of time, has proven to be a foolish waste of time for 99.9999% of humanity.
Nonetheless, there will always remain a percentage of the populace who will believe that a pill will make them lose 50 pounds or gain 8". And there will always be people who will try to prey on these ignorant people. In the old days, these guys would role into villages in a wagon, make a pitch for some "magic salve" and then get out quickly before they were beaten up. Now they do it electronically. Sure, every once in awhile, some carpetbagger might manage to create a Listerine, but most of them are panhandlers who make their living misleading other people and exploiting their resources. The only way to deal with them is to let them know they are not welcome in your town. Where's the Sherriff when you need him?
My impression is that one of the reasons why we don't have more criminal prosecutions is because the government (politicians) seem to believe that passing laws is analogous to enforcing laws. Their method of solving a problem is to make it illegal, and at the same time, not dedicate any substantive resources to enforcement/prosecution.
So every time something doesn't work the way we want, some politician passes another law. You'd think somewhere along the line they would put some resources into actually enforcing the tons of laws already on the books. I don't directly fault the Feds -- I think they're really trying, but their resources are limited and more effort needs to be put into educating District Attorneys and others on cybercrime so they're likely to pursue these cases, which they don't seem to have an interest in doing so at this point.
I have to assume that they would include and subpoena the records of the businesses the spammers are promoting.. that's a key method to help identify them. If the companies aren't the employers of the spammers themselves already.
I just hope the criminal authorities also follow the civil case and then nail these people with criminal charges.
when these spammers face criminal charges.... anything less won't make much of a difference. Most of these spammers don't have any money and have probably declared bankruptcy in the past so it'll be no big deal to do so again IF they're even identified, much less lose in court.
What we need is Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison time for spammers. AOL, Microsoft and others should lobby the government to start prosecuting these spammers. You can follow any one of them and find that they've exploited and broken into other computer systems.
These spammers hack AOL accounts, send out viruses and worms, misrepresent themselves, engage in credit card fraud, break into third-party servers and promote fraudulent activity. We have laws against these sorts of things... criminal laws. Why is it that the only action that seems to be taken is civil?
Unless we happen to notice an increase in traffic from one of the customers, it's not easy to catch when a user's PC is infected with one of these worms.
Almost every one of these worms turns the local PC into an SMTP relay. All you have to do is monitor port 25 traffic and if it's not going to your SMTP relay, there's a good chance the user's PC is infected. How difficult is that? Other ISPs, including AOL started controlling this stuff years ago.
Personally, I'd like to see more type of this internet policing by ISP's. They should also be blocking people who have open SMB shares on their Windows Networks. I cant count the number of times I've purposely went in Someones SMB share and dropped a text file telling them how to fix it.
While I can appreciate the nobility of such an act, unless it's part of Comcast's user agreement that they are allowed to have control over, and the ability to deposit data on their customer's computers, you just violated a bunch of laws. Anyone who had this happen to them could probably sue the crap out of Comcast.
This is what Tivo is for. I don't watch television either. I watch Tivo. It's like an entirely different medium.
This is the problem the cable/sat companies can't deal with. They bundle channels into packages so they can sell advertising. If they let users pick the programming they wanted a la carte, they'd lose tons of ad revenue because most of the channels nobody wants. Tivo essentially does the same thing, which is why companies like Comcast are doing their best to shunt its implementation.
TV sucks. I agree with you - it's probably better to not have any TV than to have to wade through 1000 channels of crap, but with something like Tivo, it allows you to extract just the content you feel is worthwhile.
I saw the laundry being aired on stations on my DirecTV service as well. At least it's refreshing that DirecTV isn't involved in this. Cox Cable has also been whining about ESPN jacking their rates. These companies charge for content and they pay for content. It seems really inappropriate when they try to make the consumer feel it's their fault because the broadcast companies don't want to pay the fees the content providers are asking. I have no sympathy for Cox and other companies who seem to resent having to pay for the content that they sell to their customers and make the content provider out to be the bad guy. Bogus.
It's ironic that the companies complaining that they're being taken advantage of by content producers are also among the highest-charging cable and satellite companies in their industries.
Although the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) never officially makes public when it investigates an organization, an SEC staff member told NewsForge that complaints and tips about suspected under-the-table funding, stock-kiting, illegal insider trading, and money-laundering involving Microsoft or Microsoft-connected individuals to the financially struggling SCO Group have been coming into the agency with regularity since last August. The SEC "does not take such complaints lightly," the source said.
Most of the complaints have been registered by telephone and by using the SEC's Web site. "We've gotten a lot of them," the SEC source said. An SEC investigation would look into alleged backtracking and charting fund transfers, suspicious timing of certain stock transactions, possible instances of stock-kiting and insider trading, and other potentially serious infractions.
Other individuals may be far ahead of the SEC in this investigation. Several open source advocates have been conducting their own, private investigations of SCO's financial dealings for many months.
More people should complain to the SEC if this is what it takes to find out who's funding (and profiting) from this legal wild goose chase.
This is all a testament to how disposable our society has become.
They could make OS upgrades improve performance on the same equipment, but that doesn't drive the new disposable economy. OTOH it creates more markets for hackers to repurpose old equipment.
Back in the days, programmers actually were intimate with the hardware upon which they developed applications. Now they're 10 levels removed, with each level including an ever-increasing appetite for resources.
And we wonder why nothing works well anymore? We wonder why 30 years ago we could put a man on the moon, yet our "more innovative" technology doesn't work nearly as well?
I for one have made a conscious effort to resist the temptation of purchasing more "stuff". I am not going to pick up the latest-and-greatest gadget, only to realize that its firmware can't be updated and a newer model will come out in a month with more functionality. I'm not buying any more Sony digital cameras that have crippled jpeg compression so as to not compete with higher-end units that cost the same to manufacture. I'm not purchasing an egg peeling machine when I can do it with my hands just as well. I'm not going to purchase a game that requires me to upgrade a perfectly good video adapter.
I've noticed this trend to manufacture obsolescence in so many products it's starting to get ridiculous. Rubbermaid comes out with a new line of plastic storage tubs, but their shape isn't compatible with the previous line so they won't stack neatly on top of their older model storage boxes. It's just crazy.
IMO, one of the most valuable pieces of information available in the future will be personal information associated with static IP addresses. I suspect many entities are busy compiling "IP databases" and this would be a product that could be of great use to both businesses and individuals who might want to identify users on their web sites, people on IM/IRC systems, or the senders of pseudo-anonymous e-mail.
Even a single company like Amazon.com likely has a huge database of IP addresses associated with detailed customer information (imagine if an information broker started consolidating this information across many sites). Due to the almost non-existant privacy laws in this respect, Amazon, or anyone could sell this information. You get an e-mail from someone you don't like? With their IP address you can get their name, address, phone number, etc. Anyone who wants to gather a mailing list of people who have visited their web site can run a cross-reference of the web logs against these sorts of databases. As more people move to DSL and cable, with static IPs, a database of this nature becomes the missing link to make most Internet activity un-anonymous.
Bill gates has called a meeting with the memory chip manufacturers...
GATES: "Gentlemen, I'm here to offer you a proposition. With my evil, resource bloating operating system, you can join with Microsoft and we will band together and control all the memory on the planet."
JAPANESE BUSINESSMAN: "I am not comfortable with this."
GATES: "I understand."
(He presses a red button on his arm rest)
(A trap door opens up from the ceiling and 10,000 copies of WordPerfect, Borland C++, Lotus, and Quattro Pro, bludgeon the Japanese semiconductor CEO to death. His lifeless body slumps over.)
GATES: "Anyone else have any problems with my plan?"
What companies? Most of the spam is affilliate crap. Which further emphasizes the fact that 99% of spamming isn't profitable when you send out millions of messages on the premise that maybe it might bring you a commission.
Slashdot Mirror
What "fix" is there to SMTP?
There is no "fix".... there is a "hack" and what does it ultimately involve?
Client authentication.
Ok, kids, what is client authentication? What's another name for it?
Whitelisting.
Now ask yourself. Are there more SMTP servers out there spamming than acting honorably?
No. The spammers are fewer in number than the legit SMTP servers.
So do we need a new SMTP protocol?
No. We need to blacklist rogue ISPs and SMTP relays that don't act responsibly.
You can list 100k rogue mail server IPs, or you can manage billions of legitimate SMTP IPs. Which makes more sense?
The RBL community has already taken this upon themselves to address this problem. If you don't understand the real dynamics at play here, at least just go along with those that do.
For instance: Subscribing the Detroit area spammer and his lawyer to enough real-world junkmail lists to bury his bills and other US Main correspondence in several daily truckloads of catalogues and other solicitations
With all due respect, get a clue.
You don't fight a noisy neighbor by cranking up your stereo.
Make no mistake...
The most effective spam solution at this time is RBL blacklisting. Bottom line.
When you take into account that the biggest problem of spamming is bandwidth consumption and network resources, there is NO better way than blacklisting spam sources and refusing to communicate with them.
Services like Spamcop's RBL really piss off the spammers. All client-side filtering is counterproductive and ultimately useless as you constantly have to update the systems to catch new efforts on the part of spammers to thwart the filters. At least with RBLs, the spammers' connections are immediately refused as soon as they're ID'd.
If you want to identify what is the most effective solutions, it's simple. Look at what pisses off the sleazebag spam community the most. That's relay blacklisting. They don't DDOS the moronic client-side filtering companies because the spammers know they're useless, and even if they're not, the spammers can't tell. What hurts them are when systems say, 'screw you spammer, (click)' and that's done via relay blacklisting.
Why are spammers increasingly changing mail relays and pursuing open proxies? Because of RBLs. Even AOL uses RBLs (including Spamcop). All the major ISPs look at the RBLs because they are THE most effective way of stopping spam. And they're the only way to actually shut down the spammers.
Forget client or server-side content-based filtering. They will NEVER work. RBLs are responsible for forcing spammers into corners of IP space, forcing them to deploy worms and viruses to infiltrate new IP space (which exposes them to more prosecution). RBLs ** WORK ** !
... meanwhile, there's some loser in New Jersey who is likely behind all of this. He sets up shop through a convoluted array of connections overseas, but all these spammers, especially the ones coming from foreign countries are likely Americans and can easily be traced back to the US.
Imagine all the illegal activity they've probably engaged in, as a result of their efforts to obfusicate their identity and launder money overseas. When are the authorities going to string up some of these people?
These people are the same people who are spamming. Since more and more systems are employing RBLs, they're stooping to even more unehtical tactics such as copying high-traffic web sites and using them as fronts to promote the same schemes (home refinance scams, etc.) that they have been doing via e-mail.
Due to the chaotic jurisdictional nature of the Internet, there's no easy way to deal with this.
Personally, I think the best approach is to start blacklisting all IP traffic from ISPs that don't enforce even a remotely responsible policy. We already reject all SMTP traffic from many countries such as Korea, which have proven to be nothing more than spam-havens. Let's just cut off these third-world networks until they learn to behave responsibly. What else are you going to do?
Which worms are routing through the user's SMTP server? I don't know of any, and if there are, then the ISP's SMTP relay is set up to catch this and stop it.
I contend the vast majority of worms do the following:
1. open up a back door, turn the PC into a proxy/spammer
2. act as an smtp relay and start propagating themselves
I have seen only a handful of worms that go through the preset SMTP relay.. most don't do that.
This is because the DAs like busting drug-related cases. They know nothing about the Internet and cybercrime, but they apparently have a lot of experience with bongs and drug cases.
The Feds are at the mercy of the District Attorneys who decide whether to pursue cases or not. People need to lobby their DAs to start taking action against cybercrime.
Spammers have to be earning a decent amount of money from all those people that DO actually open the spam and buy into those products. Otherwise no one would go to the trouble of cataloguing e-mail addresses, setting up messages and methods to defeat the spam filters, and then sending all of those messages out to bazillions of people.
To use your analogy, homeless people must also be making a lot of money because I see them stand out by the highway all day. I get tons of advertisements for "work at home" operations, so they must all be extremely profitable.
How much effort do you think it takes to download some script that weasels the web for e-mail addresses? How much effort does it take to go to a site like OpenProxies.com and grab a list of IPs and start spamming? Have you seen these spam filter bypass efforts? They're far from "scientific" - don't give these people that much credit. They're not smart. They're not rich. If they were really making a lot of money, they'd be much more trackable. They're not making money, any more than your average Herbalife salesman is pulling in $100k/year.
If spamming really was profitable, more legitimate companies would be doing it, for more legitimate products. The vast majority of spamvertized ventures seem to be based around commissions-earning through referrals to web sites, so the spammers rarely get any money up front. It's much more likely that if the spammers are getting paid at all, it's by get-rich-quick losers who are blowing little bits of money thinking that spamming will improve their attempt to grab the brass ring without really having to work, which is something that, since the dawn of time, has proven to be a foolish waste of time for 99.9999% of humanity.
Nonetheless, there will always remain a percentage of the populace who will believe that a pill will make them lose 50 pounds or gain 8". And there will always be people who will try to prey on these ignorant people. In the old days, these guys would role into villages in a wagon, make a pitch for some "magic salve" and then get out quickly before they were beaten up. Now they do it electronically. Sure, every once in awhile, some carpetbagger might manage to create a Listerine, but most of them are panhandlers who make their living misleading other people and exploiting their resources. The only way to deal with them is to let them know they are not welcome in your town. Where's the Sherriff when you need him?
My impression is that one of the reasons why we don't have more criminal prosecutions is because the government (politicians) seem to believe that passing laws is analogous to enforcing laws. Their method of solving a problem is to make it illegal, and at the same time, not dedicate any substantive resources to enforcement/prosecution.
So every time something doesn't work the way we want, some politician passes another law. You'd think somewhere along the line they would put some resources into actually enforcing the tons of laws already on the books. I don't directly fault the Feds -- I think they're really trying, but their resources are limited and more effort needs to be put into educating District Attorneys and others on cybercrime so they're likely to pursue these cases, which they don't seem to have an interest in doing so at this point.
I have to assume that they would include and subpoena the records of the businesses the spammers are promoting.. that's a key method to help identify them. If the companies aren't the employers of the spammers themselves already.
I just hope the criminal authorities also follow the civil case and then nail these people with criminal charges.
when these spammers face criminal charges.... anything less won't make much of a difference. Most of these spammers don't have any money and have probably declared bankruptcy in the past so it'll be no big deal to do so again IF they're even identified, much less lose in court.
What we need is Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison time for spammers. AOL, Microsoft and others should lobby the government to start prosecuting these spammers. You can follow any one of them and find that they've exploited and broken into other computer systems.
These spammers hack AOL accounts, send out viruses and worms, misrepresent themselves, engage in credit card fraud, break into third-party servers and promote fraudulent activity. We have laws against these sorts of things... criminal laws. Why is it that the only action that seems to be taken is civil?
Unless we happen to notice an increase in traffic from one of the customers, it's not easy to catch when a user's PC is infected with one of these worms.
Almost every one of these worms turns the local PC into an SMTP relay. All you have to do is monitor port 25 traffic and if it's not going to your SMTP relay, there's a good chance the user's PC is infected. How difficult is that? Other ISPs, including AOL started controlling this stuff years ago.
Personally, I'd like to see more type of this internet policing by ISP's. They should also be blocking people who have open SMB shares on their Windows Networks. I cant count the number of times I've purposely went in Someones SMB share and dropped a text file telling them how to fix it.
While I can appreciate the nobility of such an act, unless it's part of Comcast's user agreement that they are allowed to have control over, and the ability to deposit data on their customer's computers, you just violated a bunch of laws. Anyone who had this happen to them could probably sue the crap out of Comcast.
wow! It only took Comcast two years to deal with this problem, when they were made aware of it within seconds.
Congrats Comcast! I look forward to hearing about your customers getting decent DVRs with Tivo some time in 2137.
How much you want to bet they have that ramdrive plugged into a big octopus with no UPS?
This is what Tivo is for. I don't watch television either. I watch Tivo. It's like an entirely different medium.
This is the problem the cable/sat companies can't deal with. They bundle channels into packages so they can sell advertising. If they let users pick the programming they wanted a la carte, they'd lose tons of ad revenue because most of the channels nobody wants. Tivo essentially does the same thing, which is why companies like Comcast are doing their best to shunt its implementation.
TV sucks. I agree with you - it's probably better to not have any TV than to have to wade through 1000 channels of crap, but with something like Tivo, it allows you to extract just the content you feel is worthwhile.
I saw the laundry being aired on stations on my DirecTV service as well. At least it's refreshing that DirecTV isn't involved in this. Cox Cable has also been whining about ESPN jacking their rates. These companies charge for content and they pay for content. It seems really inappropriate when they try to make the consumer feel it's their fault because the broadcast companies don't want to pay the fees the content providers are asking. I have no sympathy for Cox and other companies who seem to resent having to pay for the content that they sell to their customers and make the content provider out to be the bad guy. Bogus.
It's ironic that the companies complaining that they're being taken advantage of by content producers are also among the highest-charging cable and satellite companies in their industries.
More people should complain to the SEC if this is what it takes to find out who's funding (and profiting) from this legal wild goose chase.
This is all a testament to how disposable our society has become.
They could make OS upgrades improve performance on the same equipment, but that doesn't drive the new disposable economy. OTOH it creates more markets for hackers to repurpose old equipment.
Back in the days, programmers actually were intimate with the hardware upon which they developed applications. Now they're 10 levels removed, with each level including an ever-increasing appetite for resources.
And we wonder why nothing works well anymore? We wonder why 30 years ago we could put a man on the moon, yet our "more innovative" technology doesn't work nearly as well?
I for one have made a conscious effort to resist the temptation of purchasing more "stuff". I am not going to pick up the latest-and-greatest gadget, only to realize that its firmware can't be updated and a newer model will come out in a month with more functionality. I'm not buying any more Sony digital cameras that have crippled jpeg compression so as to not compete with higher-end units that cost the same to manufacture. I'm not purchasing an egg peeling machine when I can do it with my hands just as well. I'm not going to purchase a game that requires me to upgrade a perfectly good video adapter.
I've noticed this trend to manufacture obsolescence in so many products it's starting to get ridiculous. Rubbermaid comes out with a new line of plastic storage tubs, but their shape isn't compatible with the previous line so they won't stack neatly on top of their older model storage boxes. It's just crazy.
AT&T has traditionally been the least innovative and most expensive player in the marketplace. They are the Verisign of telcos. Caveat Emptor.
In case you didn't get that, it takes the same amount of skill to press the reset button as it does to spray some Lysol into smartly colored footwear.
All is not lost.
ME: Don't blame me because your MCSE is about as valuable as Iraqi currency.
There's always a career available in disinfecting bowling shoes.
IMO, one of the most valuable pieces of information available in the future will be personal information associated with static IP addresses. I suspect many entities are busy compiling "IP databases" and this would be a product that could be of great use to both businesses and individuals who might want to identify users on their web sites, people on IM/IRC systems, or the senders of pseudo-anonymous e-mail.
Even a single company like Amazon.com likely has a huge database of IP addresses associated with detailed customer information (imagine if an information broker started consolidating this information across many sites). Due to the almost non-existant privacy laws in this respect, Amazon, or anyone could sell this information. You get an e-mail from someone you don't like? With their IP address you can get their name, address, phone number, etc. Anyone who wants to gather a mailing list of people who have visited their web site can run a cross-reference of the web logs against these sorts of databases. As more people move to DSL and cable, with static IPs, a database of this nature becomes the missing link to make most Internet activity un-anonymous.
Bill gates has called a meeting with the memory chip manufacturers...
GATES: "Gentlemen, I'm here to offer you a proposition. With my evil, resource bloating operating system, you can join with Microsoft and we will band together and control all the memory on the planet."
JAPANESE BUSINESSMAN: "I am not comfortable with this."
GATES: "I understand."
(He presses a red button on his arm rest)
(A trap door opens up from the ceiling and 10,000 copies of WordPerfect, Borland C++, Lotus, and Quattro Pro, bludgeon the Japanese semiconductor CEO to death. His lifeless body slumps over.)
GATES: "Anyone else have any problems with my plan?"
What companies? Most of the spam is affilliate crap. Which further emphasizes the fact that 99% of spamming isn't profitable when you send out millions of messages on the premise that maybe it might bring you a commission.