Someone actually checked how many IP addresses SPEWS listed.
It was less than 1% of all IP addresses.
But I guess for a spammer or someone hosted by a spam enabling ISP that's listed in SPEWS, it does pretty much feel like 100% blockage, don't it? And that's exactly how it should be.
If you learn anything by past occurances, all this means is that the next generation of blocklists will be even more BOFHish.
That has been a consistent development since MAPS RBL became d***less. Every single blocklist that followed another one that went down, was more strict than the one it replaced.
Whoever is doing the DDOSing the nameservers of SPEWS and osirusoft is pretty achieving nothing in the end.
The FTC is not blasting the concept of passing an anti-spam law. They're bashing the existing anti-spam bills that are about to become law. They're essentially saying we need better laws.
somethingawful.com is a bunch of script kiddie wannabes having a temper tantrum, because they can't send their 3|337 emails to their elementary school friends.
Something of note here...their provider, cogentco.com is hosting a HUGE number of, not just your regular spammers, but criminal spammers. They have an infestation of spammers, who are actively scanning for open proxies 24/7 on multiple netblocks. See Mark Ferguson's recent proxypot stats posted on news.admin.net-abuse.email for evidence.
Not only that SBL has 19 separate listings for Cogentco for hosting career spammers (not just first-time or flyby spammers, these guys are the high volume pumpers) The earliest goes back to Jan 2003. That's over half a year of hosting a known, career spammer.
SBL, btw, is one of the most conservative blocklists out there and has a rock solid reputation among both users and the ISPs.
So, in summary, mentioning somethingawful.com as an example of how the "spam war" has gone too far is completely bogus. Cogentco has a huge spam problem and has refused to clean it up. Why should anyone want to accept any IP traffic from them?
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death.
All large volume spammers are well known to the anti-spamming circles. Their information is listed on such resources as ROKSO (Registry Of Known Spam Operations), SPEWS (down due to DDOS by spammers on its nameservers) and Google Groups searches on newsgroups like news.admin.net-abuse.email or news.admin.net-abuse.sightings.
Then there're mainstream companies that have managed to fake legitimacy that target not the fly-by Viagra peddlers, but real businesses, politicians (you may recall the Howard Dean spam debacle from last week) and other legitimate advertisers and pretty much lie about the nature of their business ("we're strictly opt-in" while blatantly spamming to harvested addresses, etc.). These sort of companies buy full page ads on industry magazines. They're all over the place.
The chickenboning scam artists spammers are typically found by word-of-mouth or through "bulker's clubs", i.e. private web based bulleting boards spammers advertise their wares. Most of these clubs have anti-spammers as members though, so they rarely fly under the radar.
Yet another way to find spammers are contract job listing sites and reverse auction job sites (or whatever the hell they're called, where someone who wants a job done will advertise his need, then contractors will bid for it). There's a whole bunch of ethically challenged companies asking for bulletproof hosting and spamming services on them all the time.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first so that they won't run away while you slowly torture them to death
It's no different than any social study on the general public. It's done in academia all the time.
If someone thinks their Usenet posts are so damn sensitive or private they don't want people to look at or study them later, don't post to Usenet or use an anonymizing service.
To get on the list is automatic. You can't even prevent it.
To get off the list you have to go over so many hoops, most people probably won't bother. I tried doing that sometime ago, btw. They will mail you paper forms.
About a year or so ago people started getting spam addressed to the wrong "John Smith". Some folks tracked the spam to Axciom. It appears that they'd started selling epending services for their clients.
Basically a client supplies information about the consumer (name, partial address, etc.) to Axciom. Axciom then takes their best guess as to what the Email address for the consumer might be.
Where the problems come with this approach when you have a common name and your address information is incomplete. Axciom will happily give the client the buest guess, and the client will happily spam the living ****loads out of whoever's email address they can get their hands on.
But, hey, you can always opt-out...one client at a time...
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
Re:This is bullshit Huh? RTFA
on
Linking Dangerously
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Disorderly conduct or unlawful assembly are not felonies.
He was convicted for a felony.
Nothing I read in the CNN article said he was convicted for anything else but providing links to sites that, among other things, had bomb making instructions.
The CNN article did NOT say he was advocating the use of bombs against the federal government.
Now, in typical hack-journo way, the CNN article might have failed to mention all the facts about this case, but if I have to go with the information provided by the CNN article, he was convicted of expressing unpopular thought.
There's probably more to the story, but if you RTFA, as you instruct, one can only assume John Asscroft is yet again managed to stiffle the freedom of speech in the name of national security.
[I will resist the temptation of putting my usual.sig in here now, I could be arrested and convicted to 20 years in prison]
Diversity of opinions makes our lives more interesting... That's my adage.:)
I agree that M$ will clobber Nintendo (excluding GameBoy). I believe Sony is another matter. They're almost Microsoft-like in their own field.
PlayStation is an institution. It'll be very hard (or time-consuming) to topple Sony. They've been around in their field for so long, they know all the tricks (they did what M$ is trying to do with PS1).
All I'm saying is that the execs at M$ will not allow XBox to be a money drain forever. I don't also see anything that indicates XBox will suddenly start making money any time soon. There's going to be a point when the execs at M$ will say enough is enough, let's put a stop on this.
I say that point is $3.5B in losses. Should be sometime before end of 2004, if nothing changes dramatically.
I'm actually hoping this won't happen. It'd leave Sony as the sole player in the field. That'd be really bad. The fierce competition in the video gaming market has been very benefitial to gamers.
I didn't predict Microsoft's demise, just XBox's demise. Microsoft will be just fine after they finally dump XBox.
What I don't understand why anyone could call XBox a success.
Sure, the hw is great and some of the games are incredible, it is an awesome video game platform, that's for sure, but the fact is the XBox unit is losing an insane amount of money. $1.5B+ by the end of 2003. That is not what I would call a success, especially since these losses are higher than projected by M$ when they started the venture.
It's not a success at all, yet. My bet is it will never be a success, because M$ will pull the plug somewhere around the $3.5B mark.
Nintendo is a non-factor. They'll die before XBox, for sure. If Sony executes like they did on PS1, their handheld will kill the Gameboy within the next 5 years and Nintendo is gone completely. That's a really big if, though. Gameboy's pretty solid. Gamecube, however...another dissapointment from Nintendo. They haven't had a major success since NES...
The end result of this decade's video game wars is Sony with 75% market share. They will completely dominate.
The fact that PS3 will have a chip FooBar over XBox 2 has nothing do with it. It's business, and as a business Sony is dominating over every competitor right now. If they keep executing as well as they've done for the past few years, there is nobody that can touch them.
I'm betting the XBox and the various side projects associated with it (XBox Live! and the whole home entertainment center strategy) will be Microsoft's highest profile failure in a year or two.
When Sony publishes their next generation video game console and starts putting some serious effort into their home entertainment center strategy, it's going to be game over for M$. I have absolutely no doubts about that.
XBox sales, both hw and sw, are lagging way behind projections, as are XBox Live! subscriptions. M$ is losing an arm and a leg on XBox and the losses are growing, not going down quarter to quarter. Some analysts are estimating losses on XBox to reach $1.7B by the end of 2003.
They can not sustain this for that much longer, even if they are swimming on money.
And I'm speaking as an owner of an XBox system (I know, I should be ashamed for buying M$).
They recently started spamming ALL Email addresses in their database, regardless of whether the account is inactive, supposedly deleted (I have 2 of these), opted-out of their junk spam or in any other status. If they have the Email in their db, you will be spammed.
I'm getting six copies of every spam of theirs after about 2 years of silence from these scum.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone actually checked how many IP addresses SPEWS listed.
It was less than 1% of all IP addresses.
But I guess for a spammer or someone hosted by a spam enabling ISP that's listed in SPEWS, it does pretty much feel like 100% blockage, don't it? And that's exactly how it should be.
If you learn anything by past occurances, all this means is that the next generation of blocklists will be even more BOFHish.
That has been a consistent development since MAPS RBL became d***less. Every single blocklist that followed another one that went down, was more strict than the one it replaced.
Whoever is doing the DDOSing the nameservers of SPEWS and osirusoft is pretty achieving nothing in the end.
He did, several weeks ago.
Uh, you don't think that's going to be customizable?
/. readers are power users and use interfaces that are very different of those used by regular joes.
Furthermore, I would hazard a guess that most of
I think the user interfaces in the screenshots look great and probably work VERY nicely indeed, when used by regular joes.
I would probably tinker with the interface to the point where it wouldn't look anything like that though.
"See Mark Ferguson's recent proxypot stats..."
That's actually Ronald Guilmette's recent proxypot stats.
The FTC is not blasting the concept of passing an anti-spam law. They're bashing the existing anti-spam bills that are about to become law. They're essentially saying we need better laws.
somethingawful.com is a bunch of script kiddie wannabes having a temper tantrum, because they can't send their 3|337 emails to their elementary school friends.
Something of note here...their provider, cogentco.com is hosting a HUGE number of, not just your regular spammers, but criminal spammers. They have an infestation of spammers, who are actively scanning for open proxies 24/7 on multiple netblocks. See Mark Ferguson's recent proxypot stats posted on news.admin.net-abuse.email for evidence.
Not only that SBL has 19 separate listings for Cogentco for hosting career spammers (not just first-time or flyby spammers, these guys are the high volume pumpers) The earliest goes back to Jan 2003. That's over half a year of hosting a known, career spammer.
SBL, btw, is one of the most conservative blocklists out there and has a rock solid reputation among both users and the ISPs.
So, in summary, mentioning somethingawful.com as an example of how the "spam war" has gone too far is completely bogus. Cogentco has a huge spam problem and has refused to clean it up. Why should anyone want to accept any IP traffic from them?
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death.
All large volume spammers are well known to the anti-spamming circles. Their information is listed on such resources as ROKSO (Registry Of Known Spam Operations), SPEWS (down due to DDOS by spammers on its nameservers) and Google Groups searches on newsgroups like news.admin.net-abuse.email or news.admin.net-abuse.sightings.
Then there're mainstream companies that have managed to fake legitimacy that target not the fly-by Viagra peddlers, but real businesses, politicians (you may recall the Howard Dean spam debacle from last week) and other legitimate advertisers and pretty much lie about the nature of their business ("we're strictly opt-in" while blatantly spamming to harvested addresses, etc.). These sort of companies buy full page ads on industry magazines. They're all over the place.
The chickenboning scam artists spammers are typically found by word-of-mouth or through "bulker's clubs", i.e. private web based bulleting boards spammers advertise their wares. Most of these clubs have anti-spammers as members though, so they rarely fly under the radar.
Yet another way to find spammers are contract job listing sites and reverse auction job sites (or whatever the hell they're called, where someone who wants a job done will advertise his need, then contractors will bid for it). There's a whole bunch of ethically challenged companies asking for bulletproof hosting and spamming services on them all the time.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first so that they won't run away while you slowly torture them to death
Take out the commercial part.
The definition is, and will always be, despite the efforts of the DMA and other spam friendlies, "unsolicited bulk email".
Not commercial, not porn, not fraudulent, but ALL unsolicited bulk email regardless of content.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
What's so alarming about this?
It's no different than any social study on the general public. It's done in academia all the time.
If someone thinks their Usenet posts are so damn sensitive or private they don't want people to look at or study them later, don't post to Usenet or use an anonymizing service.
Exactly...
To get on the list is automatic. You can't even prevent it.
To get off the list you have to go over so many hoops, most people probably won't bother. I tried doing that sometime ago, btw. They will mail you paper forms.
About a year or so ago people started getting spam addressed to the wrong "John Smith". Some folks tracked the spam to Axciom. It appears that they'd started selling epending services for their clients.
Basically a client supplies information about the consumer (name, partial address, etc.) to Axciom. Axciom then takes their best guess as to what the Email address for the consumer might be.
Where the problems come with this approach when you have a common name and your address information is incomplete. Axciom will happily give the client the buest guess, and the client will happily spam the living ****loads out of whoever's email address they can get their hands on.
But, hey, you can always opt-out...one client at a time...
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
Disorderly conduct or unlawful assembly are not felonies.
.sig in here now, I could be arrested and convicted to 20 years in prison]
He was convicted for a felony.
Nothing I read in the CNN article said he was convicted for anything else but providing links to sites that, among other things, had bomb making instructions.
The CNN article did NOT say he was advocating the use of bombs against the federal government.
Now, in typical hack-journo way, the CNN article might have failed to mention all the facts about this case, but if I have to go with the information provided by the CNN article, he was convicted of expressing unpopular thought.
There's probably more to the story, but if you RTFA, as you instruct, one can only assume John Asscroft is yet again managed to stiffle the freedom of speech in the name of national security.
[I will resist the temptation of putting my usual
Don't buy from a spammer, it's bound to hurt you...
M$ lays off game developers.
And so it begins...
Diversity of opinions makes our lives more interesting... That's my adage. :)
I agree that M$ will clobber Nintendo (excluding GameBoy). I believe Sony is another matter. They're almost Microsoft-like in their own field.
PlayStation is an institution. It'll be very hard (or time-consuming) to topple Sony. They've been around in their field for so long, they know all the tricks (they did what M$ is trying to do with PS1).
All I'm saying is that the execs at M$ will not allow XBox to be a money drain forever. I don't also see anything that indicates XBox will suddenly start making money any time soon. There's going to be a point when the execs at M$ will say enough is enough, let's put a stop on this.
I say that point is $3.5B in losses. Should be sometime before end of 2004, if nothing changes dramatically.
I'm actually hoping this won't happen. It'd leave Sony as the sole player in the field. That'd be really bad. The fierce competition in the video gaming market has been very benefitial to gamers.
This is not a f***ing contest.
I stated an opinion, you obviously believe otherwise. Whoppedoo.
I'm poor, sue me.
I didn't predict Microsoft's demise, just XBox's demise. Microsoft will be just fine after they finally dump XBox.
What I don't understand why anyone could call XBox a success.
Sure, the hw is great and some of the games are incredible, it is an awesome video game platform, that's for sure, but the fact is the XBox unit is losing an insane amount of money. $1.5B+ by the end of 2003. That is not what I would call a success, especially since these losses are higher than projected by M$ when they started the venture.
It's not a success at all, yet. My bet is it will never be a success, because M$ will pull the plug somewhere around the $3.5B mark.
The real issue about costs of spam is not what it costs today, but what it costs a year, two or 5 years from now, if it's not killed today.
The volume of spam is increasing exponentially. It will reach a point when it will start choking up Email entirely.
At that point it's too late.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
Nintendo is a non-factor. They'll die before XBox, for sure. If Sony executes like they did on PS1, their handheld will kill the Gameboy within the next 5 years and Nintendo is gone completely. That's a really big if, though. Gameboy's pretty solid. Gamecube, however...another dissapointment from Nintendo. They haven't had a major success since NES...
The end result of this decade's video game wars is Sony with 75% market share. They will completely dominate.
The fact that PS3 will have a chip FooBar over XBox 2 has nothing do with it. It's business, and as a business Sony is dominating over every competitor right now. If they keep executing as well as they've done for the past few years, there is nobody that can touch them.
Here we have a perfect example of fanboyism in its truest form.
Why let facts come before faith...
I'm betting the XBox and the various side projects associated with it (XBox Live! and the whole home entertainment center strategy) will be Microsoft's highest profile failure in a year or two.
When Sony publishes their next generation video game console and starts putting some serious effort into their home entertainment center strategy, it's going to be game over for M$. I have absolutely no doubts about that.
XBox sales, both hw and sw, are lagging way behind projections, as are XBox Live! subscriptions. M$ is losing an arm and a leg on XBox and the losses are growing, not going down quarter to quarter. Some analysts are estimating losses on XBox to reach $1.7B by the end of 2003.
They can not sustain this for that much longer, even if they are swimming on money.
And I'm speaking as an owner of an XBox system (I know, I should be ashamed for buying M$).
The Baltimore Inner Harbor area is a pretty awesome place to visit regardless of whether you're a geek or not.
:(
Visit the Maryland Science Center for the real geeky stuff (more info at their website, check the fishes at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.
When I visited they had the excellent Videotopia video game history exhibit there, but sadly that's no longer there
Chances are she's got just as much free time...
Remember to wear protection *wink*
Do not buy anything from spammers.
They recently started spamming ALL Email addresses in their database, regardless of whether the account is inactive, supposedly deleted (I have 2 of these), opted-out of their junk spam or in any other status. If they have the Email in their db, you will be spammed.
I'm getting six copies of every spam of theirs after about 2 years of silence from these scum.
More details at Google Groups.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spamming scum