And for those who consider spam free speech: E-mail messages cost bandwidth. An individual e-mail does not cost much, but when multiplied by the number of spams an individual may receive, and multply that by a corporation's user base, it could add up to a lot of money wasted in unnecessary bandwidth usage. It's definitely not free speech! Just ask the spammees.
If a spammer paid you a 1/10 of a cent for each spam, would that make it ok? Didn't think so.
Spam is bad for a number of reasons, but the relative costs to the spammer/spamee isn't one of them.
You've got it backwards. It's spammers who threaten anti-spam sysadmins and ISPs: sometimes with frivolous lawsuits, but sometimes even with death threats. Just take a look around news.admin.net-abuse.email [google.com].
All the anti-spam ISPs do is operate mail servers that refuse mail from spammers and those who host them. That's not "threatening"; it's just perfectly reasonable stewardship of their property. If every time I let you in my store you knock my stock off the shelves and crap on my floor, I'm going to pretty soon decide you don't get to do business with me any more.
Before we force Verio to force others to close their open relays, How about some evidence that closing open relays helps stop spam.
Take a look at the spam you receive. Where's it from? Most of the spam I get is from China and Korea. How come? Thanks to the anti-spam movement, the majority of domestic ISPs have shut down open relays and implemented anti-spam policies. The spammers have to go to places where the anti-spam movement hasn't reached in order to send their spam.
One of those places, evidently, is toad.com. No anti-spam ISP is going to "threaten" John Gilmore about that. They're just going to refuse to accept mail from him.
(The volume of spam is increasing for the same reason as the volume of email is increasing: there are more people online. Cities of one million people average more murders than villages of two hundred, too. That's why murder stats are reported per unit population.)
No, I haven't got it backwards. Just because spammers fight dirty, it doesn't mean the vigilantes don't too. Spammers are probably a lot worse individually, but there are a lot more vigilantes.
The anti-spam people do a lot more than just block email from spammers. The most obvious example is that they also block email from ISPs that host web pages which spam points to. But they have their share of death threats, frivolous lawsuits, hacking attacks, denial of service attacks, boycotts, libel, slander, and cussedness too. You probably don't do any of these things, but as I said, there are a lot more vigilantes than spammers.
Most of the spam I receive is emailed to me directly from address blocks which resolve to US hosts. Less than 10% goes through a relay. And a larger percentage of spam is "personalized" with an ID word this year compared with last. But don't take my word for it - after all I don't take yours. Check your headers, see for yourself.
I don't believe that blocking open relays will reduce spam even 10%, nor do I believe that stopping 10% of the spam in the world is worth sacrificing a tiny bit of network connectivity.
Sorry, but I just don't buy that the villain here is Gilmore or Verio.
This is a war between spammers and the spam vigilantes. The spammers want to send their spam, and vigilantes want them not to send their spam. And like all wars, the people hurt the most aren't the combatants, but the poor sods caught in the crossfire.
Standard vigilante tactics are to threaten people for running open relays, because it makes it easier for the spammers to send spam. Since that doesn't always work, they turn to threatening the people who host the people who run the open relays. Verio isn't a third party - it's a fourth party in this dispute.
Even if I thought the ends justify the means, I don't believe closing open relays would achieve the vigilante's ends. Before we force Verio to force others to close their open relays, How about some evidence that closing open relays helps stop spam. ORBs has been around for a long time, but I still get spam.
A lot of students that I know consider software [purchases] just like a book expense. If they are taking a Flash course, they buy the software. If they are taking a design course, they buy Photoshop, both at Educational prices. Other things like Matlab or AutoCad or Pro/E are [definitely] educational purchases as well.
Yes, exactly. When I was in college, I only bought used books, and then I sold them back. But if I could, I'd just borrow the books from other students. Exactly the same as what I did with the software I used. (I never learned to spell either, but I did learn to use a spell checker.)
I thought the same thing at first, but really, with caching I think it would work. I actually thought they already do this...
They do - it's call a block list or black hole list. Some people test servers and post a cache of which ones are open relays. That way you don't have to go to the trouble of performing the test yourself.
The trouble with block-lists is they also block legitimate email along with the spam. This can be very annoying to those who are found guilty by association, but most people believe the collateral damage is an acceptable price to pay. Of course, most of the people who say that don't pay the price...
The best solution for this particular problem IMO would be setting up some central email server that are properly run. I.e. tell anyone who's running an open relay that they have to switch their users to a state run email server, and shut their server off.
Re:Bought and Paid For
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
Don't be silly, US politicians will sell out to foriegn interests just as quickly as they will to domestic ones. You may need to funnel your money through a PAC, like the bigger US corporations do, but you too can own your own senator.
-- this is not a sig.
Please, tell me I'm reading this wrong.
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
The bill would also make it illegal for someone to make a copyrighted work publicly available after its protections have been removed or altered.
Wow, those congress people must have debated long and hard on that part. Imagine making publishing a copywritten work a crime. Maybe they can pass a law against murder too.
Hey Disney, get a clue. If I don't have any qualms about giving my friend a copy Fantasia, what makes you think I'm going to care about giving them a copy of DeCSS?
The key to controlling a population is to make everyone a secret criminal. If you make it overt, then people won't be worried about being exposed, and you can't blackmail them anymore. Worse, you miss out on important tax opportunities.
It sure is nice to think of all those people who would never have been selected as mates simply because one of their chromosomes caused a physical abnormality that will now be given a chance.
Before you condemn the practice, consider that it's only a matter of degree between this and deciding whom to marry. Unless you think people should be paired at random, you've already decided there's an amount of this that is acceptable. The only questions are, do we draw the line, and who gets to decide where we draw it?
-- I come from a very long line of families with children.
The NSA factors numbers, and their work is top-secret. When I read stories like this, I wonder if people are just discovering things that the NSA has known about for years. If the NSA could factor 2 Kbit keys, would they tell people? Probably not.
The trouble with this game is that you can just as easily play it the other way. Does the NSA ever do anything besides suck money out of congress and take credit for things they never did? (Oh, the NSA has know that for years...)
This may be a significant advance in factoring, but I notice that rsa-576still hasn't been factored. Until someone does that, I'm not going to lose any sleep over 1024 bit keys.
I don't know about you, but I find non-100% spam filters worse than useless. It's not just that they let some spam through -- I can live with that. But I also need to see all the email that I don't consider spam.
I too consider false positives (claiming something is spam that isn't) much worse than false negatives (letting spam through). I assume almost everyone does.
Checksumming, when done right, has an extremely low false positive rate (near 0) which makes it useful in my opinion even if the false negative rate is 90%.
With a bit of pre-processing, you can make 32Kbps MP3s sound, well, tolerable. Just filter them with a low pass filter set to about 4,000 hertz, and use mono. With a bit of work, you can make it sound about as good as AM radio.
"E-mail advertising, which is relatively inexpensive, is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving..."
According to whom?
Every single person I know complains about spam.
How can you say everyone you know has gotten so much spam they are complaining about it, and still think that spam isn't thriving? What did you think "thriving" meant - "making people happy"? Which lion would you say is thriving, the one all the gazelles complain about, or the one they say is nice?
It is. A rock will let you enter a locked car, but you still lock your car. A filter doesn't need to be 100% effective to be useful, and it's not likely that spammers will care until this kind of thing is guarding more than 50% of mailboxes.
The random string is more likely a tag to find out who responded than an attempt to bypass filtering.
The problems of legacy can be fixed somewhat by pushing the existing three letter TLDs under a.us label. When resolving a domain, if the last part is not a two letter country code, then the country code of the DNS server is appended. That would have the nice side effect of every domain subject to a known countries laws. If Ford wants to sue over fordsucks.it, they have to do it in an Italian court.
If a company really wanted to be global, then they could register.com.it,.com.us,.com.uk, etc. And of course, any country that wanted to could assign Network solutions to manage their.com (but I'd bet against any of them doing so without a lot of bribes.)
Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder about a company like AT&T having massive problems because of a few spammers? Isn't it a little more likely that somebody screwed up the mail routers and they blamed it on spam? I wouldn't expect them make a press release saying "we fucked up email, sorry.".
1 Sysadmins living in a 'clue fee zone' must be wised up. This means, amoung other things, more education for sysadmins, better products and documentation, better or more translations of documentation, etc. It should be easy to obtain documentation in your local language. Every HOWTO has to have an accurate, up to date translation readily available. As should documentation for proprietory products.
While I agree that education is a good thing (tm) as is documentation in lots of languages, in the end I think this is a hopeless task. It's always September somewhere on the net, and if it only requires a tiny percentage to be clueless to screw things up, then things are going to be screwed up perpetually.
2 The economics of SPAM must be altered, literally turned on their head. It costs to receive bandwidth, but (generally) little, or none at all. (The obvious exception is when you have a bandwidth intensive site that requires nice fat outward pipes). It costs so little to send, just electricity, enough money for a bulk sender (off the shelf or home brewed) and a net connection. Pay the real cost of outgoing mail and watch the volume of spam decrease to an approximation of zero.
In 2001, bandwidth could be bought by the end consumer for less than $5 a gigabyte, (a lot less if you knew what you were doing). A typical spam is less than 10K. (Based on a semi-random sampling, 5.2K per spam.) That makes the cost, under 1/200 of a cent. If you don't send 1 to 1, and you're efficient about sending it, it's about 50 times better, or under 1/10,000 of a cent per spam. (We could revoke that bit in RFC 821 that says you have to accept at least 100 RCPT commands for each email, but that would hurt legitimate mailing lists and ISPs a lot more than spammers)
The problem isn't that spammers aren't paying for bandwidth. They do. They even offer to pay extra if they can keep spamming. If you want to make a change through economics, you need to make spam cost a lot more. For example, if sending an email to a recipient was a dollar, which was refunded if the recipient agreed it wasn't spam, then you might reduce spam.
The problem I see is that there is no requirement that they not label CDs that aren't copy impeded. Once they cross the magic threshold (I'd guess about 10%) they start putting the label on everything.
I suppose it's possible, with the exception of those shows (usually sporting events) which state that "This broadcast is property of . No portion of this broadcast may be redistributed or reproduced without the express written permission of."
By reading this post, you agree to pay me $50.00
That is, unless you believe that saying something doesn't necessarily make it true.
That just means that it's theoretically profitable.
Show me an independant source that says that spam is profitable. I dare you.
Plenty of people who sell spamming tools say that spam is profitable. What you really want is some reliable evidence. Clearly, I can't post anything to/. that can't be a fabrication.
But think about it for a minute and I think you'll agree that selling by spamming is profitable. You get a spam. Then, a week later you get the same damn spam again. A month later you get a copy sent to a different email account. That means the person sending that spam did it once, and then did it again later. You know that spammers get bitch slapped pretty hard. They certainly lose their account, and have to set up a new one. That takes time and effort. Why do it a second time if it didn't work the first? Once could be an experiment, but multiple spams over time have a real reason. Do you think spammers are doing it just to piss you off?
-- What I really hate is people who ask you to give up your freedom to stop spam.
Actually, the irresponsible ISP admins are the ones letting the spammers win.
Yeah, it's never us, it's always the other guy.
Every year, there is a new crop of "irresponsible ISP admins". It's always September somewhere on the net. If you want to tackle that problem, you have to distrust everybody by default. I.e. don't block email from bad people, build a list of people you trust, and only accept email from them.
Slashdot Mirror
If a spammer paid you a 1/10 of a cent for each spam, would that make it ok?
Didn't think so.
Spam is bad for a number of reasons, but the relative costs to the
spammer/spamee isn't one of them.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
No, I haven't got it backwards.
Just because spammers fight dirty, it doesn't mean the vigilantes don't too.
Spammers are probably a lot worse individually, but there are a lot more vigilantes.
The anti-spam people do a lot more than just block email from spammers.
The most obvious example is that they also block email from ISPs that host
web pages which spam points to. But they have their share of death threats,
frivolous lawsuits, hacking attacks, denial of service attacks, boycotts, libel,
slander, and cussedness too. You probably don't do any of these things,
but as I said, there are a lot more vigilantes than spammers.
Most of the spam I receive is emailed to me directly from address blocks
which resolve to US hosts. Less than 10% goes through a relay.
And a larger percentage of spam is "personalized" with an ID word this
year compared with last.
But don't take my word for it - after all I don't take yours.
Check your headers, see for yourself.
I don't believe that blocking open relays will reduce spam even 10%,
nor do I believe that stopping 10% of the spam in the world is
worth sacrificing a tiny bit of network connectivity.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
Sorry, but I just don't buy that the villain here is Gilmore or Verio.
This is a war between spammers and the spam vigilantes. The spammers want to send their spam, and vigilantes want them not to send their spam. And like all wars, the people hurt the
most aren't the combatants, but the poor sods caught in the crossfire.
Standard vigilante tactics are to threaten people for running open relays, because it makes it easier for the spammers to send spam. Since that doesn't always work, they turn to threatening the people who host the people who run the open relays. Verio isn't a third party - it's a fourth party in this dispute.
Even if I thought the ends justify the means, I don't believe closing open relays would achieve the vigilante's ends. Before we force Verio to force others to close their open relays, How about some evidence that closing open relays helps stop spam. ORBs has been around for a long time, but I still get spam.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
Yes, exactly.
When I was in college, I only bought used books, and then I sold them back.
But if I could, I'd just borrow the books from other students.
Exactly the same as what I did with the software I used.
(I never learned to spell either, but I did learn to use a spell checker.)
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
They do - it's call a block list or black hole list. Some people test servers and post a cache of which ones are open relays. That way you don't have to go to the trouble of performing the test yourself.
The trouble with block-lists is they also block legitimate email along with the spam. This can be very annoying to those who are found guilty by association, but most people believe the collateral damage is an acceptable price to pay. Of course, most of the people who say that don't pay the price...
The best solution for this particular problem IMO would be setting up some central email server that are properly run. I.e. tell anyone who's running an open relay that they have to switch their users to a state run email server, and shut their server off.
-- Spam Wolf - the best vaporware on the net.
No need to re-invent the wheel.
You've just described Vipul's razor
-- Spam Wolf - the best vaporware on the net.
Don't be silly, US politicians will sell out to foriegn interests just as quickly as they will to domestic ones. You may need to funnel your money through a PAC, like the bigger US corporations do, but you too can own your own senator.
-- this is not a sig.
Wow, those congress people must have debated long and hard on that part. Imagine making publishing a copywritten work a crime. Maybe they can pass a law against murder too.
Hey Disney, get a clue. If I don't have any qualms about giving my friend a copy Fantasia, what makes you think I'm going to care about giving them a copy of DeCSS?
The key to controlling a population is to make everyone a secret criminal. If you make it overt, then people won't be worried about being exposed, and you can't blackmail them anymore. Worse, you miss out on important tax opportunities.
It sure is nice to think of all those people who would never have been selected as mates simply because one of their chromosomes caused a physical abnormality that will now be given a chance.
Before you condemn the practice, consider that it's only a matter of degree between this and deciding whom to marry. Unless you think people should be paired at random, you've already decided there's an amount of this that is acceptable. The only questions are, do we draw the line, and who gets to decide where we draw it?
-- I come from a very long line of families with children.
The trouble with this game is that you can just as easily play it the other way. Does the NSA ever do anything besides suck money out of congress and take credit for things they never did? (Oh, the NSA has know that for years...)
This may be a significant advance in factoring, but I notice that rsa-576still hasn't been factored.
Until someone does that, I'm not going to lose any sleep over 1024 bit keys.
-- 10 bits, 3 digits, it's all the same.
I too consider false positives (claiming something is spam that isn't) much worse than false negatives (letting spam through).
I assume almost everyone does.
Checksumming, when done right, has an extremely low false positive rate (near 0) which makes it useful in my opinion even if the false negative rate is 90%.
-- This is not a
That's more than an order of magnitude higher than the last time I checked.
Where are you pulling that statistic from?
-- It must be true, I saw it on the internet.
With a bit of pre-processing, you can make 32Kbps MP3s sound, well, tolerable. Just filter them with a low pass filter set to about 4,000 hertz, and use mono. With a bit of work, you can make it sound about as good as AM radio.
.sig
-- this is not a
How can you say everyone you know has gotten so much spam they are complaining about it, and still think that spam isn't thriving? What did you think "thriving" meant - "making people happy"? Which lion would you say is thriving, the one all the gazelles complain about, or the one they say is nice?
-- Is a "no soliciting" sign spam?
And when the eco-terrorists, or the Republican party starts sending you "position papers" who do you sue then?
-- Is a "no soliciting" sign spam?
It is.
A rock will let you enter a locked car, but you still lock your car.
A filter doesn't need to be 100% effective to be useful,
and it's not likely that spammers will care until this kind of thing is guarding more than 50% of mailboxes.
The random string is more likely a tag to find out who responded than an attempt to bypass filtering.
-- Is a "no soliciting" sign spam?
The problems of legacy can be fixed somewhat by pushing the existing three letter TLDs under a .us label. When resolving a domain, if the last part is not a two letter country code, then the country code of the DNS server is appended. That would have the nice side effect of every domain subject to a known countries laws. If Ford wants to sue over fordsucks.it, they have to do it in an Italian court. .com.it, .com.us, .com.uk, etc. And of course, any country that wanted to could assign Network solutions to manage their .com (but I'd bet against any of them doing so without a lot of bribes.)
.sig
If a company really wanted to be global, then they could register
-- this is not a
{devils_advocate
.sig
And why exactly is it that the amount of money Joe Shmoe is entitled to is related in any way to the amount that MGM makes?
}
-- this is not a
Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder about a company like AT&T having massive problems because of a few spammers? Isn't it a little more likely that somebody screwed up the mail routers and they blamed it on spam? I wouldn't expect them make a press release saying "we fucked up email, sorry.".
-- I saw it on the internet, it must be true.
While I agree that education is a good thing (tm) as is documentation in lots of languages,
in the end I think this is a hopeless task. It's always September somewhere on the net, and if it only requires a tiny percentage to be clueless to screw things up, then things are going to be screwed up perpetually.
In 2001, bandwidth could be bought by the end consumer for less than $5 a gigabyte, (a lot less if you knew what you were doing). A typical spam is less than 10K. (Based on a semi-random sampling, 5.2K per spam.) That makes the cost, under 1/200 of a cent. If you don't send 1 to 1, and you're efficient about sending it, it's about 50 times better, or under 1/10,000 of a cent per spam. (We could revoke that bit in RFC 821 that says you have to accept at least 100 RCPT commands for each email, but that would hurt legitimate mailing lists and ISPs a lot more than spammers)
The problem isn't that spammers aren't paying for bandwidth. They do. They even offer to pay extra if they can keep spamming. If you want to make a change through economics, you need to make spam cost a lot more. For example, if sending an email to a recipient was a dollar, which was refunded if the recipient agreed it wasn't spam, then you might reduce spam.
-- Is a no soliciting sign spam?
The problem I see is that there is no requirement that they not label CDs that aren't copy impeded. Once they cross the magic threshold (I'd guess about 10%) they start putting the label on everything.
.sig
-- This is not a
By reading this post, you agree to pay me $50.00
That is, unless you believe that saying something doesn't necessarily make it true.
$0.02??? According to the fee schedule I saw it was 0.02 cents. That's $5.18/day, not $518.40
What am I missing?
Plenty of people who sell spamming tools say that spam is profitable. What you really want is some reliable evidence. Clearly, I can't post anything to
But think about it for a minute and I think you'll agree that selling by spamming is profitable.
You get a spam.
Then, a week later you get the same damn spam again.
A month later you get a copy sent to a different email account.
That means the person sending that spam did it once, and then did it again later. You know that spammers get bitch slapped pretty hard. They certainly lose their account, and have to set up a new one. That takes time and effort. Why do it a second time if it didn't work the first? Once could be an experiment, but multiple spams over time have a real reason. Do you think spammers are doing it just to piss you off?
-- What I really hate is people who ask you to give up your freedom to stop spam.
Yeah, it's never us, it's always the other guy.
Every year, there is a new crop of "irresponsible ISP admins".
It's always September somewhere on the net.
If you want to tackle that problem, you have to distrust everybody by default.
I.e. don't block email from bad people, build a list of people you trust, and only accept email from them.
-- Your choice, your soul or no sandwitch.