What lawyer is going to pursue a case where the fine is $500?
Can you say class-action? Given that a spammer may pump out thousands, if not millions of pieces of spam, I'm sure sure that there are many lawyers who would be willing to settle for a small percentage cut of the gross.
It's obvious you're not a lawyer. Good luck finding a lawyer who's going to spend a ton of time and money to track down some broke looser who last week was selling Herbalife, and this week is spamming.
Assuming you can find a lawyer to take this case, which will likely prove more difficult than Andrew Dice Clay getting a date at an Indigo Girls concert, the fun will just be beginning.
After spending several thousand dollars on legal fees, you can slap him with a class action lawsuit, IF you can find him, and that's a huge IF because in some of the larger cases, you'll need to get computer records from other states, other countries, etc., then find out if you could even take action. Even then if everything went well, you'd find out the guy has approximately $347.22 to his name, not including his 1988 Toyota Corolla with a bad valve cover gasket leak that makes the car smoke every time he stops at a traffic light. But definitely get a lien on that Corolla because that'll cover 1/1000th of your legal bills.
So you nail his ass. After approximately 1-2 years worth of legal action after which he declares bankruptcy and you and your lawyer walk away with the satisfaction that you've gotten back at this poor dorf for daring to not put "ADV" in the subject of his penis-enlargement product solicitation, you have zero money from the perpetrator, and you also haven't discouraged anyone else to stop spamming.
Congrats! You are now qualified to run for Congress!
My question to you is, why should we care about how the "mainstream" views us?
That's a good question. Normally I'd be right with you and say screw the mainstream.
But who here really feels that the mainstream's idea of innovation and efficiency is even remotely accurate? How many people get frustrated when they see some marketing guy take a great idea and pervert it into something that is sad? Hasn't the tech community's indifference contributed to this problem? Yea, playing the game is demoralizing, but would it be that bad to play along more often in order to get the power to promote more superior ideals in this industry?
This probably touches upon a larger philosophical issue over whether there is some responsibility to develop and deploy technology in a productive manner, but do we really want to hold up as icons in our community, a guy who can light a barbecue pit with LOX, or turn a Macintosh into a bong?
This is not the first law that's had such a penalty and it has already proven to be a complete waste of time.
What lawyer is going to pursue a case where the fine is $500? To even find the identity of the spammer you have to serve subpeonas and all sorts of time and money intensive processes which make such a case impractical.
Add to that the fact that most spammers are small operators that float around from one ISP to another and are incredibly difficult to track. The amount of time to identify and take legal action against such losers makes the payoff a joke. And even if you could engage in some sort of class action suit, most of these spammers don't have any assets in the first place.
This is a total waste of time. I applaud any effort to recognize spam as an issue that needs to be dealt with, but this old idea of small fines has been tried and has proven to be totally ineffective.
The only true way to get rid of spam is to push not for new laws, but enforcement of existing criminal laws which spammers routinely violate, which include hijacking mail relays and third-party computer networks. The government refuses to pursue these cases and even if they nailed just a few spammers for computer break-ins, it would have ten times the effect that these spineless civil laws have in reducing spam.
Ok, I am finally prompted to write this... please forgive me but I feel compelled to comment.
There are two other times when I came to the realization that the tech community was sometimes way lost beyond the boundaries of practicality in addition to this latest thing. Once upon touring MIT and seeing the amazing amount of intellect dedicated towards uber mundane pursuits such as remotely identifying the inventory of a coke machine, and another situation at Siggraph seeing tens of millions of dollars wasted on research projects that had a snowball's chance in hell of developing practical applications for the findings.
Now I can appreciate the pursuit of a tech solution to something that's of interest, and I understand that things like Star Wars in ASCII are projects borne of love, but at the same time, I wonder, do tech people every try to achieve both in the same breath? Yes, you can add an ant farm to your PC case. But if you ever wonder why the mainstream looks at tech types as total weirdos, it's because they love to use as an example, these weird manifestations of our ability, when we all know, these are more the exception than the rule. Or are they?
So my question is, aside from the arguments where someone draws a reasoned path explaining how a tennis shoe with voice recognition will change society, is anyone concerned about the image of the tech community and finding more realistic ways to demonstrate the creativity and resourcefulness of nerds?
One way to address the spam issue is to open the.GOV TLD to every day people. Let us all get a.gov e-mail address and then we'll either not get spam, or the spammers will stop filtering.gov from their databases and clueless politicians and government people will begin to get an idea of how counterproductive not prosecuting these spammers can be.
What if the ISPs sued the backbone providers? They have money. Aren't they responsible in some way? Think about it:
If you get a telephone line and when you answer the phone all you get is static, so that maybe 70% of the phone conversation can be heard, should you be paying for this extra noise that is inhibiting your ability to get appropriate utilization based on what you're paying for?
They say that 40% or more of data travelling across the Internet nowadays is rogue data, neither solicited, nor welcome. Why should ISPs and their customers pay for more bandwidth than they really need because the backbones won't get involved and stop this noise?
Most of us know, as soon as you go live on the net; as soon as you have an IP, you have unwanted traffic, port scanners, random smtp gateways hammering your system, unsecured infected Microsoft systems propagating viruses, etc. Is this what we're paying for?
If you ordered a telephone line and half the time it rang with people calling you didn't know or invite, offering you scams and offensive solicitations, the phone company would do something about it. It's not as big a deal with end users because they're not paying based on bandwidth, but certainly their ISPs who are might have a decent case to push the backbone providers to not turn the other way when they clearly know a sizeable percentage of their pipes are filled with uninvited "noise". For example, Sprint's historical policy has not been to get involved in DOS attacks unless their customer's pipe is saturated. So you can be attacked as long as there is no bandwidth left, and only then will they intervene. Imagine if this policy applied to other important utilities? You can't put your garbage out until you have a certain amount; you can't get your electricity restored until a certain percentage of your city is dark. This is BS. I say, let's start holding the backbone providers liable for hooking us up to internet pipes that are chock full of data that we didn't invite, costing everyone money and reducing everyone's security, privacy and performance.
Yes, I know this is a much more complicated issue, but you cannot deny there is a substantive conflict of interest here between the backbones, which profit off spam, and everybody else who suffers because of it.
What's most interesting about this case is that it proves once again, international, federal, state and other law enforcement authorities are incompetent and ineffective. This guy broke various laws but the only way to get him was to pursue justice in civil court?
We have never needed tougher anti-spam laws... We've only needed a justice system that can get off its butt, stop chasing people in white vans, and prosecute criminals who break the law.
Remember this the next time your DA and other LEO figures come up for election. Most spammers break numerous existing laws that have nothing to do with the concept of freedom of expression which they perversely use as a smokescreen. In the case of this guy, he used stolen credit card numbers and fake identities, in addition to breaking into unauthorized computer systems.
Let that be a lesson to you spammers! If you get caught, you might have to declare bankruptcy! But you obviously don't have to worry about serving any jail time for credit card fraud or computer breakins.
What a joke. The government can spend $52 Million bucks to find out if Bill Clinton got a blowjob, but can't go after these spamming sleazebags who are polluting the Internet and breaking actual laws?
I agree. It seems to me at best this guy could claim copyright over the code to do a popup advert, but patentable? This is yet more evidence that the feds are clueless.
Technically speaking, any popup is an advertisement of some sort. I fail to see where the process is unique or even creative. He simply added an extra line of html/javascript which opens a new window and that is patentable?
Is this the state of creativity? We simply RTFM and when we discover a feature of some other technology we suddenly think we've invented something?!?
If this is the case, then I suggest we all rush out and obtain the following similarly viable PATENTS:
* Patent the use of a telephone as a means to wake a person up.
* Patent on the use of a butter knife as a screwdriver
* Patent on the reference of rodeos, pickup trucks, trains and ex-wives in musical compositions. Then unleash a team of lawyers on all country music artists.
* Patent the use of two fingers down ones throat as an effective weight loss method.
* Patent the use of a chair, not as a device to sit upon, but instead to stand upon for the purpose of reaching something at a higher elevation.
There's something poetic about an obnoxious advertiser, getting out of the advertising business to try to extort money from fellow obnoxious advertisers.
On a similar note, I encourage all spammers to go ahead and patent the process of hijacking mail relays, then go about suing each other out of existence.
Another SQL issue?
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Some time after midnight tonite, our network was hit with another large scale port 1434 DOS attack. The admin is concerned that there may be another new vulnerability in MS SQL Server. This attack saturated two T3s. People should be aware there may be another vulnerability in Microsoft OSes that is recently being exploited.
They have introduced sexy hot hardware, and at the sametime produced a service which fundamentally changes the business model for popular music.
You viral marketers need to be a little more surreptitious. Calling a two-year-old portable audio player with a larger hard drive "sexy hot hardware" gives you away.
As for the fundamental change in the business model for popular music... No more Kool-Aid for joo! Apple's efforts are nothing new. This style attempt to circumvent the traditional music business model has been tried many times over, especially on the Internet with efforts such as The Internet Underground Music Archive, Napster, Digital River, Open Market, AOL, Real Networks, MP3.COM and tons of others.
I wish anyone, including Apple, much luck in trying to foster an alternative content distribution medium, but if they are trying to claim this is new and innovative, or otherwise radically different than other efforts, it's obvious they aren't going to learn from the mistakes of others and are doomed to repeat them.
Apple continues its tradition of repackaging old technology in a proprietary wrapper and calling it "innovation". Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field(tm) is still operating at full power.
I applaud anyone brave (or foolish) enough to try the pay-for-content model. Anything that subverts the traditional entertainment monopoly distribution mafia is noble, but if you're going to charge someone for something, you have to make the product unique or better than what people can currently obtain for less. 128k is a joke. At least offer full 44.1 CD-quality tracks at the price you're charging - that's something worth buying. Re-assign some of your engineers which are busy working on the next proprietary peripheral plug, and have them focus on a way of delivering high quality audio with less bandwidth. Then you have something worth paying for.
* Universal language translator/pulsating showerhead
I can think of some uses for that...I'm attracted to foreign women.
I made the foolish assumption that by the time you have your strange foreign babe in the shower, you've broken the language barrier. Then again, I could be wrong. Maybe she availed herself of your chess set?
Pressed by increasingly effective anti-spam efforts, senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail are resorting to outright criminality in their efforts to conceal the source of their ill-sent missives,...
Ahem, what's new about this? Since day one, there's almost always been an illegal component to most spammer's activities, the most obvious of which has been the hijacking of third party mail relays.
Another nasty trick spammers are now using involves the exploitation of form mailing scripts on web servers. If you see references in web server logs to files such as "formmail.*", these are spammers probing for vulnerable versions of the Matt's Script Archive form mailing script that could be repurposed to overload the headers and effectively turn your web site into a spamming machine.
While spam continues to become an ever-increasing problem, the solution, in my opinion, has always been the same: vigoriously prosecute the criminal aspects of the spammer's activities which include breaking into computers, networks, and exploiting third-party relays. The sad truth is that there are laws already on the books criminalizing the activity of 99% of spammers, but the various governments consistently refuse to enforce these laws. We don't need more anti-spam legislation; we don't need more elaborate filtering. We need people to rally the government to crack down on the spammers by enforcing laws already on the books, and not put a requirement of a certain amount of monetary (or publicity) damage before they'll decide to take action against someone who has broken the law.
How difficult is it for SBC to employ a password scheme which isn't so easy to crack?
While it is foolish for the user to not change his/her password, that pales in comparison to the blatant negligence on the part of the voicemail provider, who presumably has plenty of resources and expertise at their disposal, though obviously not evidenced in this fiasco.
Whoever is responsible for this scheme at SBC should be fired. And SBC should be responsible for the victims' bills.
The problem with your logic is that with filtering in place, spammers don't know whether their mails get through or not. So how does this improve things? Spammers are already subscribing to the idea that 0.001% return on 10 million e-mails is a worthwhile endeavor... the fact that people don't read the junk they send has never deterred them in the past. The only thing that deters spammers is the cost of doing business. Client-side filtering doesn't address that, and is therefore ultimately useless except for companies that profit from implementing and maintaining such systems.
Spammers are already figuring out ways around the content filtering schemes. They continue to be ineffective.
Interesting that you say this, because Michael Moore in his latest rant claims that the "backlash" from his Oscar comments have resulted in more sales of his products and greater attendance of his movies. He also says the same thing happened to the Dixie Chicks, in contrast to the media reporting boycotts.
We all know why the music and entertainment industry is in a slump. It's not P2P or piracy...
It's the public's insatiable appetite for BOY BANDS and VIN DIESEL MOVIES!
We need more! These fine artists are simply not producing enough content to satiate the public.
There are still a few television shows that have not been made into feature-length movies. There are still more country tunes that need to be written about rodeos and lost love. How about an epic triology featuring Garfield? What's with the lull in "rogue cop" screenplays? I need MORE talking animal movies featuring Eddy Murphy! It's been almost a month since Tupac released an album! Hollywood! Are you listening??
If not for the spam situation being rampant, virtually all of your issues would not be issues. You can bet that the majority of problems with mail receipt/delivery performance, and reliability are due to ISPs requiring anywhere from 40-500% more resources than would normally be necessary to handle their users' e-mail activity... in order to deal with the humongous signal-to-noise ratio of data that consumes bandwidth and other resources.
In the early days of the Internet, before spamming scum started stealing other peoples' resources and bandwidth, this wasn't an issue. ISPs gave users a lot more control and flexibility with their connections and mail relays were not restricted. Shell accounts, free mailing list managers and all sorts of great features that customers had full control over *were* more freely available.
In addition to this, across-the-board, Internet costs and network services are higher because of all the resources that spam consumes. If the spam problem were resolved we'd have more bandwidth available at lower prices.
Filtering at the client level is a joke. It does nothing to address the real issue that if all this crap traffic wasn't spewing across the net proper, you'd be able to get whatever service you wanted a lot easier and a lot cheaper.
People need to remember one important thing: spammers are not "resourceful marketers" who are merely taking advantage of their First Amendment rights using new tools. They are thieves and criminals. 99.9% of spammers exploit the resources of innocent parties, they break into machines, they propagate worms and vires, they promote unethical and illegal schemes, hack accounts, hijack mail relays and much more. Most spammers are clearly breaking numerous local, federal and international laws. The problem is law enforcement agencies are clueless and don't get involved unless $x amount of damage is done, but no company that's been compromised wants to go public with the damage done.
If spammers operated ethically and legally, they'd be at static locations on the Internet, then they'd have to be responsible in their practices or face being easily blacklisted. They don't, and the backbone providers don't care because they get paid by the bit, whether it's penis enlargement ads, or legitimate traffic.
I really like Cringely. His Revenge of the Nerds PBS special is good and his book Accidental Empires is essential reading for anyone even close to the tech field. He's a great writer.
But I wouldn't put much weight into his advice or predictions. This is a guy who got into a dispute with a former employer over the rights to his own name, and was an Apple employee in the very early days and turned down stock options in lieu of more pay.
If anything, Cringely is a great storyteller, but not very good at predicting the future or recognizing the best use of technology.
Everyone who wishes to reproduce the spammer's personal info, and by all means do so, please be sure to list a phone number to an overloaded voicemail system in Pakistan that this loser can call to have himself removed from the list.
One utility that I recommend all my clients and friends use is Startup Cop. This is a great tool to find out what spyware and other annoying crap loads at startup.
Slashdot Mirror
It's obvious you're not a lawyer. Good luck finding a lawyer who's going to spend a ton of time and money to track down some broke looser who last week was selling Herbalife, and this week is spamming.
Assuming you can find a lawyer to take this case, which will likely prove more difficult than Andrew Dice Clay getting a date at an Indigo Girls concert, the fun will just be beginning.
After spending several thousand dollars on legal fees, you can slap him with a class action lawsuit, IF you can find him, and that's a huge IF because in some of the larger cases, you'll need to get computer records from other states, other countries, etc., then find out if you could even take action. Even then if everything went well, you'd find out the guy has approximately $347.22 to his name, not including his 1988 Toyota Corolla with a bad valve cover gasket leak that makes the car smoke every time he stops at a traffic light. But definitely get a lien on that Corolla because that'll cover 1/1000th of your legal bills.
So you nail his ass. After approximately 1-2 years worth of legal action after which he declares bankruptcy and you and your lawyer walk away with the satisfaction that you've gotten back at this poor dorf for daring to not put "ADV" in the subject of his penis-enlargement product solicitation, you have zero money from the perpetrator, and you also haven't discouraged anyone else to stop spamming.
Congrats! You are now qualified to run for Congress!
My question to you is, why should we care about how the "mainstream" views us?
That's a good question. Normally I'd be right with you and say screw the mainstream.
But who here really feels that the mainstream's idea of innovation and efficiency is even remotely accurate? How many people get frustrated when they see some marketing guy take a great idea and pervert it into something that is sad? Hasn't the tech community's indifference contributed to this problem? Yea, playing the game is demoralizing, but would it be that bad to play along more often in order to get the power to promote more superior ideals in this industry?
This probably touches upon a larger philosophical issue over whether there is some responsibility to develop and deploy technology in a productive manner, but do we really want to hold up as icons in our community, a guy who can light a barbecue pit with LOX, or turn a Macintosh into a bong?
This is not the first law that's had such a penalty and it has already proven to be a complete waste of time.
What lawyer is going to pursue a case where the fine is $500? To even find the identity of the spammer you have to serve subpeonas and all sorts of time and money intensive processes which make such a case impractical.
Add to that the fact that most spammers are small operators that float around from one ISP to another and are incredibly difficult to track. The amount of time to identify and take legal action against such losers makes the payoff a joke. And even if you could engage in some sort of class action suit, most of these spammers don't have any assets in the first place.
This is a total waste of time. I applaud any effort to recognize spam as an issue that needs to be dealt with, but this old idea of small fines has been tried and has proven to be totally ineffective.
The only true way to get rid of spam is to push not for new laws, but enforcement of existing criminal laws which spammers routinely violate, which include hijacking mail relays and third-party computer networks. The government refuses to pursue these cases and even if they nailed just a few spammers for computer break-ins, it would have ten times the effect that these spineless civil laws have in reducing spam.
Ok, I am finally prompted to write this... please forgive me but I feel compelled to comment.
There are two other times when I came to the realization that the tech community was sometimes way lost beyond the boundaries of practicality in addition to this latest thing. Once upon touring MIT and seeing the amazing amount of intellect dedicated towards uber mundane pursuits such as remotely identifying the inventory of a coke machine, and another situation at Siggraph seeing tens of millions of dollars wasted on research projects that had a snowball's chance in hell of developing practical applications for the findings.
Now I can appreciate the pursuit of a tech solution to something that's of interest, and I understand that things like Star Wars in ASCII are projects borne of love, but at the same time, I wonder, do tech people every try to achieve both in the same breath? Yes, you can add an ant farm to your PC case. But if you ever wonder why the mainstream looks at tech types as total weirdos, it's because they love to use as an example, these weird manifestations of our ability, when we all know, these are more the exception than the rule. Or are they?
So my question is, aside from the arguments where someone draws a reasoned path explaining how a tennis shoe with voice recognition will change society, is anyone concerned about the image of the tech community and finding more realistic ways to demonstrate the creativity and resourcefulness of nerds?
One way to address the spam issue is to open the .GOV TLD to every day people. Let us all get a .gov e-mail address and then we'll either not get spam, or the spammers will stop filtering .gov from their databases and clueless politicians and government people will begin to get an idea of how counterproductive not prosecuting these spammers can be.
What if the ISPs sued the backbone providers? They have money. Aren't they responsible in some way? Think about it:
If you get a telephone line and when you answer the phone all you get is static, so that maybe 70% of the phone conversation can be heard, should you be paying for this extra noise that is inhibiting your ability to get appropriate utilization based on what you're paying for?
They say that 40% or more of data travelling across the Internet nowadays is rogue data, neither solicited, nor welcome. Why should ISPs and their customers pay for more bandwidth than they really need because the backbones won't get involved and stop this noise?
Most of us know, as soon as you go live on the net; as soon as you have an IP, you have unwanted traffic, port scanners, random smtp gateways hammering your system, unsecured infected Microsoft systems propagating viruses, etc. Is this what we're paying for?
If you ordered a telephone line and half the time it rang with people calling you didn't know or invite, offering you scams and offensive solicitations, the phone company would do something about it. It's not as big a deal with end users because they're not paying based on bandwidth, but certainly their ISPs who are might have a decent case to push the backbone providers to not turn the other way when they clearly know a sizeable percentage of their pipes are filled with uninvited "noise". For example, Sprint's historical policy has not been to get involved in DOS attacks unless their customer's pipe is saturated. So you can be attacked as long as there is no bandwidth left, and only then will they intervene. Imagine if this policy applied to other important utilities? You can't put your garbage out until you have a certain amount; you can't get your electricity restored until a certain percentage of your city is dark. This is BS. I say, let's start holding the backbone providers liable for hooking us up to internet pipes that are chock full of data that we didn't invite, costing everyone money and reducing everyone's security, privacy and performance.
Yes, I know this is a much more complicated issue, but you cannot deny there is a substantive conflict of interest here between the backbones, which profit off spam, and everybody else who suffers because of it.
What's most interesting about this case is that it proves once again, international, federal, state and other law enforcement authorities are incompetent and ineffective. This guy broke various laws but the only way to get him was to pursue justice in civil court?
We have never needed tougher anti-spam laws... We've only needed a justice system that can get off its butt, stop chasing people in white vans, and prosecute criminals who break the law.
Remember this the next time your DA and other LEO figures come up for election. Most spammers break numerous existing laws that have nothing to do with the concept of freedom of expression which they perversely use as a smokescreen. In the case of this guy, he used stolen credit card numbers and fake identities, in addition to breaking into unauthorized computer systems.
Let that be a lesson to you spammers! If you get caught, you might have to declare bankruptcy! But you obviously don't have to worry about serving any jail time for credit card fraud or computer breakins.
What a joke. The government can spend $52 Million bucks to find out if Bill Clinton got a blowjob, but can't go after these spamming sleazebags who are polluting the Internet and breaking actual laws?
I agree. It seems to me at best this guy could claim copyright over the code to do a popup advert, but patentable? This is yet more evidence that the feds are clueless.
Technically speaking, any popup is an advertisement of some sort. I fail to see where the process is unique or even creative. He simply added an extra line of html/javascript which opens a new window and that is patentable?
Is this the state of creativity? We simply RTFM and when we discover a feature of some other technology we suddenly think we've invented something?!?
If this is the case, then I suggest we all rush out and obtain the following similarly viable PATENTS:
* Patent the use of a telephone as a means to wake a person up.
* Patent on the use of a butter knife as a screwdriver
* Patent on the reference of rodeos, pickup trucks, trains and ex-wives in musical compositions. Then unleash a team of lawyers on all country music artists.
* Patent the use of two fingers down ones throat as an effective weight loss method.
* Patent the use of a chair, not as a device to sit upon, but instead to stand upon for the purpose of reaching something at a higher elevation.
There's something poetic about an obnoxious advertiser, getting out of the advertising business to try to extort money from fellow obnoxious advertisers.
On a similar note, I encourage all spammers to go ahead and patent the process of hijacking mail relays, then go about suing each other out of existence.
Some time after midnight tonite, our network was hit with another large scale port 1434 DOS attack. The admin is concerned that there may be another new vulnerability in MS SQL Server. This attack saturated two T3s. People should be aware there may be another vulnerability in Microsoft OSes that is recently being exploited.
Others have tried the same business model including Digital River, Open Market and many others.
You viral marketers need to be a little more surreptitious. Calling a two-year-old portable audio player with a larger hard drive "sexy hot hardware" gives you away.
As for the fundamental change in the business model for popular music... No more Kool-Aid for joo! Apple's efforts are nothing new. This style attempt to circumvent the traditional music business model has been tried many times over, especially on the Internet with efforts such as The Internet Underground Music Archive, Napster, Digital River, Open Market, AOL, Real Networks, MP3.COM and tons of others.
I wish anyone, including Apple, much luck in trying to foster an alternative content distribution medium, but if they are trying to claim this is new and innovative, or otherwise radically different than other efforts, it's obvious they aren't going to learn from the mistakes of others and are doomed to repeat them.
Apple continues its tradition of repackaging old technology in a proprietary wrapper and calling it "innovation". Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field(tm) is still operating at full power.
I applaud anyone brave (or foolish) enough to try the pay-for-content model. Anything that subverts the traditional entertainment monopoly distribution mafia is noble, but if you're going to charge someone for something, you have to make the product unique or better than what people can currently obtain for less. 128k is a joke. At least offer full 44.1 CD-quality tracks at the price you're charging - that's something worth buying. Re-assign some of your engineers which are busy working on the next proprietary peripheral plug, and have them focus on a way of delivering high quality audio with less bandwidth. Then you have something worth paying for.
I made the foolish assumption that by the time you have your strange foreign babe in the shower, you've broken the language barrier. Then again, I could be wrong. Maybe she availed herself of your chess set?
Ahem, what's new about this? Since day one, there's almost always been an illegal component to most spammer's activities, the most obvious of which has been the hijacking of third party mail relays.
Another nasty trick spammers are now using involves the exploitation of form mailing scripts on web servers. If you see references in web server logs to files such as "formmail.*", these are spammers probing for vulnerable versions of the Matt's Script Archive form mailing script that could be repurposed to overload the headers and effectively turn your web site into a spamming machine.
While spam continues to become an ever-increasing problem, the solution, in my opinion, has always been the same: vigoriously prosecute the criminal aspects of the spammer's activities which include breaking into computers, networks, and exploiting third-party relays. The sad truth is that there are laws already on the books criminalizing the activity of 99% of spammers, but the various governments consistently refuse to enforce these laws. We don't need more anti-spam legislation; we don't need more elaborate filtering. We need people to rally the government to crack down on the spammers by enforcing laws already on the books, and not put a requirement of a certain amount of monetary (or publicity) damage before they'll decide to take action against someone who has broken the law.
In keeping with the trend of bundling two things together that otherwise wouldn't be thought of, let me offer these equally-useful suggestions:
* Upright vacuum with a blender attachment
* Chess set/tampon dispenser
* Combination show shovel and nosehair trimmer
* 801.11 CAT 5 cable
* Bicycle seat/Sliderule
* Traffic light that blinks in morse code
* USB-enabled fishing pole
* Umbrella/universal AC adapter
* Insulin pump/rodent defogger
* Universal language translator/pulsating showerhead
* Chainsaw/postage meter
* voice-activated tire gauge which recalls your favorite mixed drink recipes
* Electric guitar/cheese slicer w/Floyd Rose Grater attachment
Jeeez. Where's a patent attorney when you need one?
How difficult is it for SBC to employ a password scheme which isn't so easy to crack?
While it is foolish for the user to not change his/her password, that pales in comparison to the blatant negligence on the part of the voicemail provider, who presumably has plenty of resources and expertise at their disposal, though obviously not evidenced in this fiasco.
Whoever is responsible for this scheme at SBC should be fired. And SBC should be responsible for the victims' bills.
I want to know how come Peter Parker didn't see this coming with his tingling spider sense?
The problem with your logic is that with filtering in place, spammers don't know whether their mails get through or not. So how does this improve things? Spammers are already subscribing to the idea that 0.001% return on 10 million e-mails is a worthwhile endeavor... the fact that people don't read the junk they send has never deterred them in the past. The only thing that deters spammers is the cost of doing business. Client-side filtering doesn't address that, and is therefore ultimately useless except for companies that profit from implementing and maintaining such systems.
Spammers are already figuring out ways around the content filtering schemes. They continue to be ineffective.
Interesting that you say this, because Michael Moore in his latest rant claims that the "backlash" from his Oscar comments have resulted in more sales of his products and greater attendance of his movies. He also says the same thing happened to the Dixie Chicks, in contrast to the media reporting boycotts.
We all know why the music and entertainment industry is in a slump. It's not P2P or piracy...
It's the public's insatiable appetite for BOY BANDS and VIN DIESEL MOVIES!
We need more! These fine artists are simply not producing enough content to satiate the public.
There are still a few television shows that have not been made into feature-length movies. There are still more country tunes that need to be written about rodeos and lost love. How about an epic triology featuring Garfield? What's with the lull in "rogue cop" screenplays? I need MORE talking animal movies featuring Eddy Murphy! It's been almost a month since Tupac released an album! Hollywood! Are you listening??
Will the industry get it? I guess time will tell.
If not for the spam situation being rampant, virtually all of your issues would not be issues. You can bet that the majority of problems with mail receipt/delivery performance, and reliability are due to ISPs requiring anywhere from 40-500% more resources than would normally be necessary to handle their users' e-mail activity... in order to deal with the humongous signal-to-noise ratio of data that consumes bandwidth and other resources.
In the early days of the Internet, before spamming scum started stealing other peoples' resources and bandwidth, this wasn't an issue. ISPs gave users a lot more control and flexibility with their connections and mail relays were not restricted. Shell accounts, free mailing list managers and all sorts of great features that customers had full control over *were* more freely available.
In addition to this, across-the-board, Internet costs and network services are higher because of all the resources that spam consumes. If the spam problem were resolved we'd have more bandwidth available at lower prices.
Filtering at the client level is a joke. It does nothing to address the real issue that if all this crap traffic wasn't spewing across the net proper, you'd be able to get whatever service you wanted a lot easier and a lot cheaper.
People need to remember one important thing: spammers are not "resourceful marketers" who are merely taking advantage of their First Amendment rights using new tools. They are thieves and criminals. 99.9% of spammers exploit the resources of innocent parties, they break into machines, they propagate worms and vires, they promote unethical and illegal schemes, hack accounts, hijack mail relays and much more. Most spammers are clearly breaking numerous local, federal and international laws. The problem is law enforcement agencies are clueless and don't get involved unless $x amount of damage is done, but no company that's been compromised wants to go public with the damage done.
If spammers operated ethically and legally, they'd be at static locations on the Internet, then they'd have to be responsible in their practices or face being easily blacklisted. They don't, and the backbone providers don't care because they get paid by the bit, whether it's penis enlargement ads, or legitimate traffic.
I really like Cringely. His Revenge of the Nerds PBS special is good and his book Accidental Empires is essential reading for anyone even close to the tech field. He's a great writer.
But I wouldn't put much weight into his advice or predictions. This is a guy who got into a dispute with a former employer over the rights to his own name, and was an Apple employee in the very early days and turned down stock options in lieu of more pay.
If anything, Cringely is a great storyteller, but not very good at predicting the future or recognizing the best use of technology.
Everyone who wishes to reproduce the spammer's personal info, and by all means do so, please be sure to list a phone number to an overloaded voicemail system in Pakistan that this loser can call to have himself removed from the list.
One utility that I recommend all my clients and friends use is Startup Cop. This is a great tool to find out what spyware and other annoying crap loads at startup.