I'm a Mac Head with a three button mouse and a scroll wheel. Never understood what the scroll wheel was good for on the NT box I have to use at work, but it's really great when it works everyplace (and on the OS from a company that only believes in the one button mouse -- uh huh).
This is the marketing company that is paying 25 spammers to promte the toys:
PennMedia 19001 S. Old LaGrange Rd. Suite 400 Mokena, IL 60448 http://pennmedia.com/
Voice: (708) 478-4500, Fax: (708) 478-5470 PENN is located in the south suburbs of Chicago.
Jaffer Ali, CEO, Jaffer@PennMedia.com Roy Weiss, Executive Vice President, Roy@PennMedia.com Tom Zegar, VP of Network Relations, Tom@PennMedia.com Mary Kolacki, mary@pennmedia.com John Nesbit, VP Wes Burnett, netsol contact, wes@pennmedia.com and wes@shagmail.com
They have also registered SENDOUTMAIL.COM.
I wonder if http://www.catalogrequest.com/ is also located in a Chicago suburb.
If your Univ has a law school, it would make a great student project...
In addition to the lanham act and the computer fraud and abuse act mentioned in the artical, there is also trespass to chattels and sexual harassment (for pron) as possible approaches for suing spammers.
I haven't checked Adelphia, but most Broadband ISPs are very up front about telling customers that there is absolutely no security provided by them. It's probably in the TOS, too. The only thing the ISPs block stuff for is performance tuning.
I've heard a number of stories about people finding Windows printers they didn't own when they got their cable modem connection...
One of my consulting clients spent $750,000 dealing with SPAM this year (for around 1000 employees). And they don't know how many sales they lost because the spam filter tossed legit e-mails.
It costs me about an hour day for my own business (that's around $25,000 in consulting fees).
Don't forget that anybody could have downloaded the files; so, APG might have copied the necessary evidence before sending the letters. They would only need to copy a few files from each user so they could pull the rug out from under them if they make false claims about the file contents.
Did you notice the thing about one of his Chinese "hosts" getting raided on suspicion of Falon Gong activity.
I remember when somebody on Slashdot suggested mentioning the Falun Gong in spam complaints about Chinese spammers. The idea would be that it would harrass the spammer AND tie up the Chinese censors in knots. It apparently worked...
Anybody know of any other organizations the Chinese secret service considers subversive?
I'll bet sending encryted data to the Chinese spammers would have a really cool effect, too.
If that's happening to them, they should have no problem with filing a complaint against the spammer and/or suing them. It violates trade dress laws in most states and if nothing else, it would be trespass to chattels.
What I do with those remove links is traceroute them to find the level one ISP and then add some e-mail addresses from their level 1 (like the NOC address from ARIN). Some of the spammers are undoubtedly clever enough to filter those out, but I'll bet most of them are too stupid. I started doing this a few weeks ago and I've been seeing a lot less spam lately....
I had some spammer start doing that to me and I filed a complaint with the local police department along with the contact info for their ISP. It stopped real fast.
That kind of forgery was very illegal. If you can connect it with the web site, you can probably sue them for a lot of money. Given that you had to handle the bounces manually, you can probably claim damages of a buck or two for each message and sue as well.
Then I would have a record of the ISP habitually not responding to spam complaints. I am running a business. I am suffering 5-10% losses due to having to deal with spam. If I can prove an ISP is not responding to spam complaints, then I can sue them for damages in small claims court. The logic there is that the ISP's action (not responding to spam complaints) constitutes negligence and makes them directly liable for my damages.
Not to mention that once you have proof that they are not responding to SPAM complaints, you also have some great material for press releases. I especially like the idea of sending press releases about publiicly traded companies to the financial press. A press release about pink contracts with a pron spammer sent to local news media can also be quite effective -- especially if the pron was sent to children (I have lots of examples of that archived for future use). This kind of pressure got level3 to drop a huge pron outfit (or at least fix it so traceroutes from my machine to to thier don't go through level 3). In that case, I was also sending e-mail directly to some of their major investors... Like I said, I am being severely damaged by SPAM and I am just starting to fight back.
The tool we really need to combat spam is a personal tracking database for spamvertised URLs. The idea would be to put every URL adversited by spam into the database and then send DAILY complaints to the level 1 ISP for the host until either
1. The URL no longer works.
2. The ISP responds with proof that the URL owner filed criminal complaints against the spammer.
I, for one, am thoroughly fed up with with the amount of time I have to waste dealing with spam. It's time to make it really painful for any ISP that tollerates it.
Companies that have dress codes should be avoided simply because they are wasting time and resources on things that don't get the job done.
The reality is that any employee should be able to figure out how to dress to get their job done (other than freshouts, maybe).
And of course, it DOES matter what you wear and it depends on the organization (many examples have already been given). First impressions are very important. IMO, it's more the quality of the way someone dresses than what they are wearing. A frumpy generic white shirt combined with a tie that has been (accidentally) dipped in coffee once a day for the last 3 months is not going to fool anybody... Frankly, somebody in a good quality T-shirt and jeans will look better than that!
Given that Philleps (the designers of CD format and owners of the trademarks), have publicly claimed the techniques to be "defects" not "copy protection schemes" I suspect it would be hard to prosecute. Of course that wouldn't stop harassment lawsuits.
For starters, there was the original PDP 11 C compiler. It only had three error messages:
Syntax Error. Undefined Symbol. Register Lockup.
But the real classic came from the Honeywell Level 6:
"Not enough memory to log off."
A hint to all you coders out there: Allocate any message buffer you will need to logout/disconnect/close at login/connect/open time (this rule is especially applicatble to streams drivers).
I'll bet it's real easy to spoof the speed traps into handing out false tickets with something like an electric fan. Just think, every time a politician drives by...
It can't be just the first one. It has to be a bounty to everyone who tracks the spammer down and take them to court. Otherwise, it just wouldn't pay to do it. A better scheme:
1. Allow anyone to take spammers to small claims court for around $2K.
2. Make the person selling whatever is advertised in the spam be responsible for unless they are willing to file a criminal complaint against the spammer.
3. Explicitly make is illegal to advertise someone else's product without authorization (it's probably already illegal...). This is to enable #2.
4. If an ISP cannot identify the spammer, the ISP must pay the fine. This may already be the case, but making is explicit would help.
IA64 would be another possible target for OS X (assuming Intel ever makes one that's fast enough to matter). It would be much better because it can be run big endian -- That would make application porting (including Carbon apps) pretty much a recompile -- Most developers wouldn't even know.
It's also a great machine for emulating other architectures (huge register set).
The law the RIAA wants passed only allows the RIAA to act when copyright infringement is going on. If they catch the RIAA, trying to break into the honeypot, the RIAA will be just a guilty (i.e., 20 years jail time) as any other hacker.
Also, the law in question does not allow they RIAA to do anything which affects innocent parties; so, it essentially does not legalize DoS.
The proposed law is very explicit in that it only applies to copyright violation. The law explicit says they cannot do any kind of damage to anyone else. In other words, if they mess up just once and hack an innocent bystander, they are looking at a long jail term (if they get caught).
The proposed US law ONLY allows them to take technical measures on copyright offenders. It explicitly does NOT allow them to interfere with anyone else. The rules out DOS, because DOS affects an entire network, not just the target.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent post.
I'm a Mac Head with a three button mouse and a scroll wheel. Never understood what the scroll wheel was good for on the NT box I have to use at work, but it's really great when it works everyplace (and on the OS from a company that only believes in the one button mouse -- uh huh).
This is the marketing company that is paying 25 spammers to promte the toys:
PennMedia
19001 S. Old LaGrange Rd.
Suite 400
Mokena, IL 60448
http://pennmedia.com/
Voice: (708) 478-4500, Fax: (708) 478-5470
PENN is located in the south suburbs of Chicago.
Jaffer Ali, CEO, Jaffer@PennMedia.com
Roy Weiss, Executive Vice President, Roy@PennMedia.com
Tom Zegar, VP of Network Relations, Tom@PennMedia.com
Mary Kolacki, mary@pennmedia.com
John Nesbit, VP
Wes Burnett, netsol contact, wes@pennmedia.com and wes@shagmail.com
They have also registered SENDOUTMAIL.COM.
I wonder if http://www.catalogrequest.com/ is also located in a Chicago suburb.
If your Univ has a law school, it would make a great student project...
In addition to the lanham act and the computer fraud and abuse act mentioned in the artical, there is also trespass to chattels and sexual harassment (for pron) as possible approaches for suing spammers.
I haven't checked Adelphia, but most Broadband ISPs are very up front about telling customers that there is absolutely no security provided by them. It's probably in the TOS, too. The only thing the ISPs block stuff for is performance tuning.
I've heard a number of stories about people finding Windows printers they didn't own when they got their cable modem connection...
One of my consulting clients spent $750,000 dealing with SPAM this year (for around 1000 employees). And they don't know how many sales they lost because the spam filter tossed legit e-mails.
It costs me about an hour day for my own business (that's around $25,000 in consulting fees).
Spamming really is theft!
Make sure all your neighbors know where to walk their dogs...
If somebody else went up and fixed it, who would own the satellite?
Don't forget that anybody could have downloaded the files; so, APG might have copied the necessary evidence before sending the letters. They would only need to copy a few files from each user so they could pull the rug out from under them if they make false claims about the file contents.
Did you notice the thing about one of his Chinese "hosts" getting raided on suspicion of Falon Gong activity.
I remember when somebody on Slashdot suggested mentioning the Falun Gong in spam complaints about Chinese spammers. The idea would be that it would harrass the spammer AND tie up the Chinese censors in knots. It apparently worked...
Anybody know of any other organizations the Chinese secret service considers subversive?
I'll bet sending encryted data to the Chinese spammers would have a really cool effect, too.
If that's happening to them, they should have no problem with filing a complaint against the spammer and/or suing them. It violates trade dress laws in most states and if nothing else, it would be trespass to chattels.
What I do with those remove links is traceroute them to find the level one ISP and then add some e-mail addresses from their level 1 (like the NOC address from ARIN). Some of the spammers are undoubtedly clever enough to filter those out, but I'll bet most of them are too stupid. I started doing this a few weeks ago and I've been seeing a lot less spam lately....
I had some spammer start doing that to me and I filed a complaint with the local police department along with the contact info for their ISP. It stopped real fast.
That kind of forgery was very illegal. If you can connect it with the web site, you can probably sue them for a lot of money. Given that you had to handle the bounces manually, you can probably claim damages of a buck or two for each message and sue as well.
Then I would have a record of the ISP habitually not responding to spam complaints. I am running a business. I am suffering 5-10% losses due to having to deal with spam. If I can prove an ISP is not responding to spam complaints, then I can sue them for damages in small claims court. The logic there is that the ISP's action (not responding to spam complaints) constitutes negligence and makes them directly liable for my damages.
Not to mention that once you have proof that they are not responding to SPAM complaints, you also have some great material for press releases. I especially like the idea of sending press releases about publiicly traded companies to the financial press. A press release about pink contracts with a pron spammer sent to local news media can also be quite effective -- especially if the pron was sent to children (I have lots of examples of that archived for future use). This kind of pressure got level3 to drop a huge pron outfit (or at least fix it so traceroutes from my machine to to thier don't go through level 3). In that case, I was also sending e-mail directly to some of their major investors... Like I said, I am being severely damaged by SPAM and I am just starting to fight back.
The tool we really need to combat spam is a personal tracking database for spamvertised URLs. The idea would be to put every URL adversited by spam into the database and then send DAILY complaints to the level 1 ISP for the host until either
1. The URL no longer works.
2. The ISP responds with proof that the URL owner filed criminal complaints against the spammer.
I, for one, am thoroughly fed up with with the amount of time I have to waste dealing with spam. It's time to make it really painful for any ISP that tollerates it.
Companies that have dress codes should be avoided simply because they are wasting time and resources on things that don't get the job done.
The reality is that any employee should be able to figure out how to dress to get their job done (other than freshouts, maybe).
And of course, it DOES matter what you wear and it depends on the organization (many examples have already been given). First impressions are very important. IMO, it's more the quality of the way someone dresses than what they are wearing. A frumpy generic white shirt combined with a tie that has been (accidentally) dipped in coffee once a day for the last 3 months is not going to fool anybody... Frankly, somebody in a good quality T-shirt and jeans will look better than that!
The only scheme for verifying the links that can't be fooled by the spammer is human moderation...
It's worked with every release of Mozilla for OS X from 1.0 on (discounting the bugs that Mo had with just about everything, of course).
Given that Philleps (the designers of CD format and owners of the trademarks), have publicly claimed the techniques to be "defects" not "copy protection schemes" I suspect it would be hard to prosecute. Of course that wouldn't stop harassment lawsuits.
For starters, there was the original PDP 11 C compiler. It only had three error messages:
Syntax Error.
Undefined Symbol.
Register Lockup.
But the real classic came from the Honeywell Level 6:
"Not enough memory to log off."
A hint to all you coders out there: Allocate any message buffer you will need to logout/disconnect/close at login/connect/open time (this rule is especially applicatble to streams drivers).
I'll bet it's real easy to spoof the speed traps into handing out false tickets with something like an electric fan. Just think, every time a politician drives by...
It can't be just the first one. It has to be a bounty to everyone who tracks the spammer down and take them to court. Otherwise, it just wouldn't pay to do it. A better scheme:
1. Allow anyone to take spammers to small claims court for around $2K.
2. Make the person selling whatever is advertised in the spam be responsible for unless they are willing to file a criminal complaint against the spammer.
3. Explicitly make is illegal to advertise someone else's product without authorization (it's probably already illegal...). This is to enable #2.
4. If an ISP cannot identify the spammer, the ISP must pay the fine. This may already be the case, but making is explicit would help.
IA64 would be another possible target for OS X (assuming Intel ever makes one that's fast enough to matter). It would be much better because it can be run big endian -- That would make application porting (including Carbon apps) pretty much a recompile -- Most developers wouldn't even know.
It's also a great machine for emulating other architectures (huge register set).
The law the RIAA wants passed only allows the RIAA to act when copyright infringement is going on. If they catch the RIAA, trying to break into the honeypot, the RIAA will be just a guilty (i.e., 20 years jail time) as any other hacker.
Also, the law in question does not allow they RIAA to do anything which affects innocent parties; so, it essentially does not legalize DoS.
The proposed law is very explicit in that it only applies to copyright violation. The law explicit says they cannot do any kind of damage to anyone else. In other words, if they mess up just once and hack an innocent bystander, they are looking at a long jail term (if they get caught).
The proposed US law ONLY allows them to take technical measures on copyright offenders. It explicitly does NOT allow them to interfere with anyone else. The rules out DOS, because DOS affects an entire network, not just the target.