Yes. The technical name for such meddling is "science".
'Funny'? Did someone take this as a joke? 'Insightful', certainly, but definitely not 'funny'. Meddling with forces we do not comprehend is what's brought us this far. Most animals run from fire, giving a force they do not comprehend a very wide berth. Our ancestors meddled with it, they learned how to control and use it. I'm sure a great many of them got burned before they got it right. People still burn to death on a daily basis because of a fire getting out of hand. But if we hadn't meddled with forces we didn't comprehend, where would we be now?
Electricity was a force we did not comprehend. Radio. Magnetism - should navigators have used compasses if they couldn't write out and solve Maxwell's equations? Meddling with forces we do not comprehend is what humans DO. It's our big evolutionary advantage, that where most creatures will run from things they don't understand, we'll go right up to them and start prodding, even at the risk of our lives. Meddling with forces we do not comprehend has won us the Earth. Meddling with forces we do not comprehend can win us the stars too. Maybe it can win us near-immortality. If you don't want to meddle with forces you don't comprehend, switch off your computer, take off all your clothes that contain synthetic fibres and live in a cave.
The Sun is expected to blow up into a nova in three billion years, and perhaps then collapse to form a small black hole of its own, he said.
The Sun will do no such thing. It'll blow up into a red giant, and then when the outer atmosphere drifts away it will leave behind a white dwarf. The Sun doesn't have remotely enough mass to form a black hole.
It indicates to me that it is causing pain to innocent people (I'm not a spammer!). The continuing flow of spam tell me that it isn't hurting the spammers much.
If your ISP doesn't use SPEWS, then how can you expect SPEWS to reduce your spam load?
What would that be, the handmade $240K Aston Martin or the one-of-a-kind Omega Seamaster watch or what about the $1000 Sony Ericson phone? They're hardly trying to sell us these products. Who could afford them? And who is going to stop drinking Sprite and switch to 7UP because of a movie. And everyone knows that a razor shaves closer than an electric. This is all a means to keep one of the greatest movie series going for years to come.
Not to mention that the Bond series has been selling products _forever_. How many cars did Aston Martin sell because men with more money than sense wanted to drive James Bond's car? How many Omega watches were sold, even if they didn't have a hidden garotte or laser beam? How many Walther PPK guns? (ok, maybe not that last one...) How many vodka martinis (shaken, not stirred)? How many stylish black suits?
The car's the big one. I imagine all companies making high-end sports cars compete like mad to be the Bond Car, because that's the most obvious bit of 007 kit. An Aston Martin, a Shaguar, a BMW... wonderful, just as long as it isn't one of those hideous plastic cars he had in the Eighties.
To be honest, I can't complain so vehemently about product placement when it's basically 'This Ericsson phone has bugger all to do with the production model except the exterior; Q Branch have torn out the circuitry and installed a whole new - don't touch that, 007!' 'Our watches have tranquilliser darts built in.' 'Our cars have machine guns.'
www.antispews.org already did it. They say people should use Spamcop instead (not sure why exactly, maybe just because Spamcop are not anonymous) and offer their mail server as a relay, for a fee. Apparently they can guarantee it won't get listed by SPEWS; if that's their claim, they'd better be _really_ conscientious about dealing with the inevitable spammers who sign up...
White lists don't work because the spammers are already faking From: addresses, Received: headers, etc. so that the email looks like it comes from someone you know, just like Klez viruses do.
Then whitelist on IP _and_ 'From' header. If it's 'From' your mum, but for some reason it's being sent from a Korean high school, drop it.
Except that, as I've already pointed out several times, a professional spammer can afford to lease a machine a week, even if it gets shut down at the end of the week, and, apparently, this is just fine with SPEW.
Sure. SPEWS know who all the professional spammers are, they block them on sight. If the ISP disconnects them in a timely fashion then that's not a problem at all. Sooner or later the spammer will run out of places to hide, and will wind up on some provider, maybe Chinanet, which doesn't care who blocks it. Then they can spam all they like, they'll only ever hit blacklists.
I assume, of course, that no ISP is going to be fool enough to take on the same spammer twice. This is in general a reasonable assumption, but Verio will insist on proving me wrong... they disconnected and then reconnected your original Antipodal troublemaker.
If it didn't well, no problem, spam hunting could be about intimidation or just plain old elimination. I'm sure that there are enough people in places like china and europe that'd love to help, and not just gun-totin' 'merkins!
Americans would want to use guns on spammers, I'm sure - that's their cultural background. Europeans and Chinese have a far older and more refined tradition of hurting people, involving all kinds of unpleasant equipment. Guns are far too merciful.
Let's think about this for 30 nanoseconds. If I need to send emails to someone, and I discover that the emails are returned because of SPEW, am I going to
a: stop communicating with that person until they put pressure on their ISP to change their spamming policy or
b: find another way of sending email to that person?
Let's think about it for even fifteen nanoseconds. Who's using SPEWS here? If your ISP is using SPEWS, then mail from addresses listed in SPEWS will be dropped. Mail TO addresses in SPEWS generally won't. SPEWS is used to prevent spammers sending crap to you, not to prevent you sending crap to spammers!
In the case you describe, it's YOUR provider that is listed in SPEWS and that needs to change its ways. I would therefore say that (b) is your best choice - find another way of sending them email. That other way would be to send it from an address that is not listed in SPEWS - i.e. switch to a non-spamming ISP. That way ISPs find that hosting spammers is bad for business, and spammers find that they are no longer welcome. Which is the idea.
I don't get it: every time federal government thinks about having a discussion that might result in a bill that might be passed that might one day be amended to possibly reduce the freedom of one cracker, 1,000/.ers start ranting about infringement of freedom, but having SPEW zap people's businesses for the hell of it is apparently a really neat idea...
SPEWS are not the federal government. SPEWS have no power to do anything save the power that their users grant them. If SPEWS begin abusing their power, then the mail admins who at present use SPEWS will decide it is no longer useful, and they will use something else. It's a perfect democracy, a government who rules solely with the consent of the ruled, and a population who have the power to remove that government at any time they like. If you don't like SPEWS, fine, don't use it. If you don't like the federal government, I suppose you can vote, but even that won't help if you're in the wrong part of Florida...
6. SPEWS blocks small IP range, sends second warning
8. SPEWS blocks larger IP range, sends third warning
When SPEWS mails people, I doubt they do so saying 'We're SPEWS and this is an official warning.' They'd do it saying 'This spammer at aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd hit my account this morning, please remove him'. This would have two advantages:
1) SPEWS remains anonymous - this helps, because by now there are an awful lot of spammers screaming for blood
2) ISPs have to treat every spam complaint seriously, because they have no way of knowing which ones are from SPEWS and which are from ordinary users
If SPEWS sent complaints in their own name, then ISPs would simply ignore all non-Spews complaints. An anonymous SPEWS leads to ISPs reading their abuse@ mailboxes with much greater care...
So just to get this straight, if my ISP sells 5,000 RaQs a day to spammers for $100, lets them send spam non-stop until someone complains, and then closes their account, that's OK, but if they fail to act immediately on one client on one of their x thousand machines, all their customers get blacklisted?
There aren't that many spammers. Most of the spam comes from a relatively small number of well-known spam gangs (check out http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso); the rest comes from fools who've bought a Millions CD and don't realise the magnitude of their folly, or who've bought into a pyramid scheme of some kind.
If an ISP signs up a newbie, who then for some reason begins spamming, then they can't be expected to pre-empt that. How could they have known? If they close them down promptly, this is not a problem for most people.
If an ISP signs up one of the career spammers listed in ROKSO, then they shouldn't be surprised if a good proportion of the net blocks them off in self-defence even before the first mail is sent. These people are block-on-sight.
There's no way anyone will find five thousand new spammers a day without recycling. If you sign the same spammer back up after having deleted him once already, you deserve everything you get.
Usenet, great and thriving discussion and publishing system. Then someone realizes they can profit by exploiting it. People think, "Well that will only work until people get sick of it and stop reading..." Wrong - it's still there, with almost nothing left but spam in the unmoderated groups.
Usenet went down because ISPs stopped caring about it. As the Web ballooned into the monster it is today, Usenet became a neglected backwater, where once it had been the core of an ISP's business. Suddenly the threat of a UDP isn't so terrible; most of your customers won't even notice. So why bother dealing with your Usenet spammers?
By the way, Usenet isn't such a desolate wasteland as it's often depicted. The problem is that old newsgroups never die - alt.current-events.desert-storm for instance (although that one could well see a renaissance in the very, very near future...) - so a group that has outlived its usefulness lives on as a ghost town, accumulating the occasional spam. The big groups - alt.fan.[someonepopular], sci.[subject], alt.religion.[insertflamewarhere] are still going strong, because there'll always be more people interested in that topic. Odd little net.cults like alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb, though once a part of the geek experience, are faded away like Mahir.
The same thing will (has already?) happened with email - as long as the cost of exploiting it is less than the percieved profit opportunity, it will be exploited. Given the costs of sending email, it's unlikely to stop being exploited - ever.
Email isn't looking like being superseded by anything in the way that the Web eclipsed Usenet. A listing on a major blacklist (Spamcop, SPEWS, whatever) is a big threat that strikes at the core of an ISP's business, just like the UDP was in the Elder Days, and so rogue ISPs can be bullied into submission by a sufficiently large boycott. Spam will always be with us as long as the economics make it worth doing, but the economics of the email business make it worthwhile for an ISP to fight email spam. Sadly, Usenet is no longer financially worth that kind of effort...
I don't even use SPEW (I use SpamAssassin), but I'll be damned if the "support guy" isn't the cretin himself.
IIRC, by default, SpamAssassin has 'listed in SPEWS' as one of its rules. Not weighted heavily enough to mark a message down as spam in itself, but certainly enough that it doesn't take much additional spammishness to send a message over the limit.
You mean I almost lost customers because of a problem that had nothing to do with me and over which I had no control, along with a few thousand other completely innocent people, and the bad guy is still in business?
The spammer is still in business, and still blacklisted by SPEWS, as are those who shelter him. The spammer is no longer on your ISP, who are no longer on the blacklist (though the record is still there for reference). The spammer's life is made far more difficult; his mails bounce, his ISP finds that their other customers are complaining about their mails too, and then finds out why... The career spammer becomes a Jonah, whose presence at an ISP has the potential to sink it. That's the idea.
SPEWS aren't in this to make friends. They're in this to inflict damage on spam-friendly ISPs, and force them to change their ways. And it's working. Check the original record on the spammer who caused all this trouble: he's been thrown off Rackspace and Cavecreek, two of the blackest hats on the net. They ignore every abuse@ email they get, but they can't pretend SPEWS doesn't exist.
As for you? You're a customer of an ISP who is sheltering spammers, and unfortunately you're likely to be collateral damage when the daisycutters come in. Too bad. Be glad your ISP killed the spammer, and that you only suffered for a week. Some people decide to make a fight of it, they posture grandly in news.admin.net-abuse.email ranting on about their upcoming lawsuite and their right to frea speach, and meanwhile the list stays there, denying them mail access to a large slice of the net... Your ISP is hopefully now on the side of the angels, and will be sure not to let this happen again. If it does happen again, I suggest you look for a different provider.
Have a private detective check on any potential clients to make sure they have no connection with the spamming trade?
In this case, the spammer seems to have been an Aussie porn spam gang with a truly abominable record; no private detective needed, just type the guy's name into Google and see if there's anything in news.admin.net-abuse.sightings.
The/16 block thing didn't work either, the support guy basically said 'the people refusing your mail are cretins, they'll probably get over it'. Which they did.
Going by your website, I assume the problem was http://www.spews.org/html/S1995.html - this was reduced to level 2, which is a 'yellow alert' which people don't generally use for blocking. The spammers were booted by hosteurope.com, the listing reduced to a level 2 instead of level 1, and your email started getting through again. The listing worked exactly as intended.
Replying to a complaint about a spammer with 'just use the spammer's remove link' is unhelpful in the extreme. I'm not surprised your provider was listed.
At least 90% of the Spam we get here has either totally fake or someone else's email address ( the cute ones is when you appear as the sender of the Spam you get ) in their header. And most often bounced from somewhere overseas..
You certainly don't complain based on the From: header; those are almost always faked. Sometimes, they're addresses taken from the famous List of Anti-Commerce Radicals Who Want The Net For Themselves... You go through the Received: headers to find where the mail really came from. Also, if the spammer is actually trying to sell something, he has to give a genuine contact somewhere. Maybe it's a website - so complain to whoever hosts it. Maybe it's an email address - complain to the provider. Maybe it's an 0800 phone number - call out of office hours and complain at length to the answerphone at the spammer's expense, preferably filling the tape so that if anyone calls to actually order anything there's no room.
Who am i going to contact? Some innocent person that has NOTHING to do with it?
If it's been bounced from somewhere else, then someone's mail server is an open relay, usually without their knowledge. Korean high schools are particularly careless in this regard, for some reason. Certainly you should complain to the admin of that machine - nobody wants spammers abusing their bandwidth. They're innocent, perhaps, but they certainly have something to do with it, and they can stop it happening again.
If it's come from China, they don't seem to prioritise spam complaints very highly. Put something like 'Thank you for your support for the Free Tibet Movement' in the complaint just so it gets flagged up as high priority;-)
A while back our server got blacklisted for a week or so by SPEW because it was in the same 16-bit IP range as a machine that has been used for spam. That's potentially 65k machines! It was at this point that I vowed not to co-operate with any of these anti-spam measures, which inevitably martyr innocent users at random and don't touch the big spammers with the resources to change IP address and ISP three times a day if necessary. The cure is worse than the original disease!
The idea of SPEWS is not just to block spam, but also to force ISPs to terminate their spammers. Blocking only the spammer's IP is pointless; too many providers just move the spammer about in their IP space, and the world has to play whack-a-mole. SPEWS' policy is that if an ISP decides it wants to keep its spammer online in the face of repeated complaints, fine; but then SPEWS don't want to receive any email from such a network.
Now, the question is: do you agree with SPEWS' policy? If you do, great! Use SPEWS' blacklist to filter incoming email. If you don't, no problem; there are plenty of other blacklists, some more lenient, some far more radical. Pick one or more, or none if you want to accept everything. It's a free internet.
The great advantage of SPEWS is that it _really_ hurts to be listed. It's the email version of the UDP, and has the power to hit rogue ISPs where it hurts, strongly encouraging them to rethink their policies.
Would your ISP have terminated their spammer if SPEWS hadn't escalated their listing to the whole/16? I doubt it... SPEWS normally start with the single IP, then incrementally expand the listing (as further complaints are ignored, most likely). If it took a/16 block to force them to terminate him, then certainly no number of polite mails to abuse@ would have worked.
As for big spammers who can change ISP frequently: if the threat of a SPEWS listing is so terrible, what ISP is going to sign up Empire Towers as a customer? Nobody in their right mind. Alan Ralsky spams from China these days, I gather, because nobody in the West will touch him. ISPs must decide whether they want spammers or humans as customers; those that choose the spammers will surely be listed by SPEWS, and so real humans won't have to receive their crap. Those that choose humans will not be listed, for they will terminate their spammers promptly and will not play silly buggers with IP numbers. If this means that the internet fragments into the spamnet and the nospamnet, fine - who wants to hear from the spamnet anyway?
Using a user-friendly tool like Photoshop would defeat the whole geeky purpose! He was able to use the words "custom program" and "hacked" in the same sentence -- a prerequisite for recognized by slashdot.
OK, shall we compromise? Someone get them a copy of the Gimp...
Just like the missles we had pointed to them in Turkey?
Yes, very much like them. And not so very different from the ones in Britain and Germany, and in Canada pointing across the pole. Not that anyone ever had a double standard...
Yes, the intelligence pics that proved the Soviets had missiles in Cuba were taken by U2 spy planes. They were published immediately - if you're trying to force the Russians to remove their missiles, you don't keep it a secret that you know about the missiles. You tell the world.
In the early sixties, satellite reconaissance was primitive - it was still at the stage of ejecting the film in a little capsule to be picked up on the ground:-) Planes were getting much better material then.
However I just can't ignore the incredible amount of resources this 'fun' is going to cost. The amount of fules neccesary for one trip is just rediculous (don't give that clean fuel / hydrogen crap as it takes oil / elctrolysis to get the hydrogen in the first place).
As any fule know...:-)
If we're postulating mass space tourism, we can probably get away with postulating efficient solar or fusion power to go with it... they're both pipe-dreams hovering somewhere in the technological middle-distance. Then you can have your hydrogen by electrolysis without trouble.
To make space tourism economic, we need to either (a) make it possible to get into orbit using far less energy, or (b) make energy available much more cheaply. So nobody's going up there without some major breakthrough that would massively reduce the resources required.
There's a funny old Irish law that still holds in one of the counties making it legal for an Irishman to kill a Scotsman provided the Scot is wearing a kilt at the time...
I hear there's an old law in Hereford making it legal to shoot a Welshman provided he's inside the city walls on a Sunday. Am I the only one that thinks the SAS could take advantage of this for training purposes?
Slashdot Mirror
You don't want to play Star Whores. You want to go home and rethink your life.
Yes. The technical name for such meddling is "science".
'Funny'? Did someone take this as a joke? 'Insightful', certainly, but definitely not 'funny'. Meddling with forces we do not comprehend is what's brought us this far. Most animals run from fire, giving a force they do not comprehend a very wide berth. Our ancestors meddled with it, they learned how to control and use it. I'm sure a great many of them got burned before they got it right. People still burn to death on a daily basis because of a fire getting out of hand. But if we hadn't meddled with forces we didn't comprehend, where would we be now?
Electricity was a force we did not comprehend. Radio. Magnetism - should navigators have used compasses if they couldn't write out and solve Maxwell's equations? Meddling with forces we do not comprehend is what humans DO. It's our big evolutionary advantage, that where most creatures will run from things they don't understand, we'll go right up to them and start prodding, even at the risk of our lives. Meddling with forces we do not comprehend has won us the Earth. Meddling with forces we do not comprehend can win us the stars too. Maybe it can win us near-immortality. If you don't want to meddle with forces you don't comprehend, switch off your computer, take off all your clothes that contain synthetic fibres and live in a cave.
The Sun will do no such thing. It'll blow up into a red giant, and then when the outer atmosphere drifts away it will leave behind a white dwarf. The Sun doesn't have remotely enough mass to form a black hole.
... finally gets to make an appearance in earnest.
'lp1 on fire'
It indicates to me that it is causing pain to innocent people (I'm not a spammer!). The continuing flow of spam tell me that it isn't hurting the spammers much. If your ISP doesn't use SPEWS, then how can you expect SPEWS to reduce your spam load?
Not to mention that the Bond series has been selling products _forever_. How many cars did Aston Martin sell because men with more money than sense wanted to drive James Bond's car? How many Omega watches were sold, even if they didn't have a hidden garotte or laser beam? How many Walther PPK guns? (ok, maybe not that last one...) How many vodka martinis (shaken, not stirred)? How many stylish black suits?
The car's the big one. I imagine all companies making high-end sports cars compete like mad to be the Bond Car, because that's the most obvious bit of 007 kit. An Aston Martin, a Shaguar, a BMW... wonderful, just as long as it isn't one of those hideous plastic cars he had in the Eighties.
To be honest, I can't complain so vehemently about product placement when it's basically 'This Ericsson phone has bugger all to do with the production model except the exterior; Q Branch have torn out the circuitry and installed a whole new - don't touch that, 007!' 'Our watches have tranquilliser darts built in.' 'Our cars have machine guns.'
www.antispews.org already did it. They say people should use Spamcop instead (not sure why exactly, maybe just because Spamcop are not anonymous) and offer their mail server as a relay, for a fee. Apparently they can guarantee it won't get listed by SPEWS; if that's their claim, they'd better be _really_ conscientious about dealing with the inevitable spammers who sign up...
Then whitelist on IP _and_ 'From' header. If it's 'From' your mum, but for some reason it's being sent from a Korean high school, drop it.
Sure. SPEWS know who all the professional spammers are, they block them on sight. If the ISP disconnects them in a timely fashion then that's not a problem at all. Sooner or later the spammer will run out of places to hide, and will wind up on some provider, maybe Chinanet, which doesn't care who blocks it. Then they can spam all they like, they'll only ever hit blacklists.
I assume, of course, that no ISP is going to be fool enough to take on the same spammer twice. This is in general a reasonable assumption, but Verio will insist on proving me wrong... they disconnected and then reconnected your original Antipodal troublemaker.
Americans would want to use guns on spammers, I'm sure - that's their cultural background. Europeans and Chinese have a far older and more refined tradition of hurting people, involving all kinds of unpleasant equipment. Guns are far too merciful.
a: stop communicating with that person until they put pressure on their ISP to change their spamming policy or
b: find another way of sending email to that person?
Let's think about it for even fifteen nanoseconds. Who's using SPEWS here? If your ISP is using SPEWS, then mail from addresses listed in SPEWS will be dropped. Mail TO addresses in SPEWS generally won't. SPEWS is used to prevent spammers sending crap to you, not to prevent you sending crap to spammers!
In the case you describe, it's YOUR provider that is listed in SPEWS and that needs to change its ways. I would therefore say that (b) is your best choice - find another way of sending them email. That other way would be to send it from an address that is not listed in SPEWS - i.e. switch to a non-spamming ISP. That way ISPs find that hosting spammers is bad for business, and spammers find that they are no longer welcome. Which is the idea.
SPEWS are not the federal government. SPEWS have no power to do anything save the power that their users grant them. If SPEWS begin abusing their power, then the mail admins who at present use SPEWS will decide it is no longer useful, and they will use something else. It's a perfect democracy, a government who rules solely with the consent of the ruled, and a population who have the power to remove that government at any time they like. If you don't like SPEWS, fine, don't use it. If you don't like the federal government, I suppose you can vote, but even that won't help if you're in the wrong part of Florida...
4. SPEWS sends warning to your ISP
6. SPEWS blocks small IP range, sends second warning
8. SPEWS blocks larger IP range, sends third warning
When SPEWS mails people, I doubt they do so saying 'We're SPEWS and this is an official warning.' They'd do it saying 'This spammer at aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd hit my account this morning, please remove him'. This would have two advantages:
1) SPEWS remains anonymous - this helps, because by now there are an awful lot of spammers screaming for blood
2) ISPs have to treat every spam complaint seriously, because they have no way of knowing which ones are from SPEWS and which are from ordinary users
If SPEWS sent complaints in their own name, then ISPs would simply ignore all non-Spews complaints. An anonymous SPEWS leads to ISPs reading their abuse@ mailboxes with much greater care...
There aren't that many spammers. Most of the spam comes from a relatively small number of well-known spam gangs (check out http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso); the rest comes from fools who've bought a Millions CD and don't realise the magnitude of their folly, or who've bought into a pyramid scheme of some kind.
If an ISP signs up a newbie, who then for some reason begins spamming, then they can't be expected to pre-empt that. How could they have known? If they close them down promptly, this is not a problem for most people.
If an ISP signs up one of the career spammers listed in ROKSO, then they shouldn't be surprised if a good proportion of the net blocks them off in self-defence even before the first mail is sent. These people are block-on-sight.
There's no way anyone will find five thousand new spammers a day without recycling. If you sign the same spammer back up after having deleted him once already, you deserve everything you get.
Usenet went down because ISPs stopped caring about it. As the Web ballooned into the monster it is today, Usenet became a neglected backwater, where once it had been the core of an ISP's business. Suddenly the threat of a UDP isn't so terrible; most of your customers won't even notice. So why bother dealing with your Usenet spammers?
By the way, Usenet isn't such a desolate wasteland as it's often depicted. The problem is that old newsgroups never die - alt.current-events.desert-storm for instance (although that one could well see a renaissance in the very, very near future...) - so a group that has outlived its usefulness lives on as a ghost town, accumulating the occasional spam. The big groups - alt.fan.[someonepopular], sci.[subject], alt.religion.[insertflamewarhere] are still going strong, because there'll always be more people interested in that topic. Odd little net.cults like alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb, though once a part of the geek experience, are faded away like Mahir.
The same thing will (has already?) happened with email - as long as the cost of exploiting it is less than the percieved profit opportunity, it will be exploited. Given the costs of sending email, it's unlikely to stop being exploited - ever.
Email isn't looking like being superseded by anything in the way that the Web eclipsed Usenet. A listing on a major blacklist (Spamcop, SPEWS, whatever) is a big threat that strikes at the core of an ISP's business, just like the UDP was in the Elder Days, and so rogue ISPs can be bullied into submission by a sufficiently large boycott. Spam will always be with us as long as the economics make it worth doing, but the economics of the email business make it worthwhile for an ISP to fight email spam. Sadly, Usenet is no longer financially worth that kind of effort...IIRC, by default, SpamAssassin has 'listed in SPEWS' as one of its rules. Not weighted heavily enough to mark a message down as spam in itself, but certainly enough that it doesn't take much additional spammishness to send a message over the limit.
You mean I almost lost customers because of a problem that had nothing to do with me and over which I had no control, along with a few thousand other completely innocent people, and the bad guy is still in business?
The spammer is still in business, and still blacklisted by SPEWS, as are those who shelter him. The spammer is no longer on your ISP, who are no longer on the blacklist (though the record is still there for reference). The spammer's life is made far more difficult; his mails bounce, his ISP finds that their other customers are complaining about their mails too, and then finds out why... The career spammer becomes a Jonah, whose presence at an ISP has the potential to sink it. That's the idea.
SPEWS aren't in this to make friends. They're in this to inflict damage on spam-friendly ISPs, and force them to change their ways. And it's working. Check the original record on the spammer who caused all this trouble: he's been thrown off Rackspace and Cavecreek, two of the blackest hats on the net. They ignore every abuse@ email they get, but they can't pretend SPEWS doesn't exist.
As for you? You're a customer of an ISP who is sheltering spammers, and unfortunately you're likely to be collateral damage when the daisycutters come in. Too bad. Be glad your ISP killed the spammer, and that you only suffered for a week. Some people decide to make a fight of it, they posture grandly in news.admin.net-abuse.email ranting on about their upcoming lawsuite and their right to frea speach, and meanwhile the list stays there, denying them mail access to a large slice of the net... Your ISP is hopefully now on the side of the angels, and will be sure not to let this happen again. If it does happen again, I suggest you look for a different provider.
Have a private detective check on any potential clients to make sure they have no connection with the spamming trade?
In this case, the spammer seems to have been an Aussie porn spam gang with a truly abominable record; no private detective needed, just type the guy's name into Google and see if there's anything in news.admin.net-abuse.sightings.
The /16 block thing didn't work either, the support guy basically said 'the people refusing your mail are cretins, they'll probably get over it'. Which they did.
Going by your website, I assume the problem was http://www.spews.org/html/S1995.html - this was reduced to level 2, which is a 'yellow alert' which people don't generally use for blocking. The spammers were booted by hosteurope.com, the listing reduced to a level 2 instead of level 1, and your email started getting through again. The listing worked exactly as intended.
Replying to a complaint about a spammer with 'just use the spammer's remove link' is unhelpful in the extreme. I'm not surprised your provider was listed.
You certainly don't complain based on the From: header; those are almost always faked. Sometimes, they're addresses taken from the famous List of Anti-Commerce Radicals Who Want The Net For Themselves... You go through the Received: headers to find where the mail really came from. Also, if the spammer is actually trying to sell something, he has to give a genuine contact somewhere. Maybe it's a website - so complain to whoever hosts it. Maybe it's an email address - complain to the provider. Maybe it's an 0800 phone number - call out of office hours and complain at length to the answerphone at the spammer's expense, preferably filling the tape so that if anyone calls to actually order anything there's no room.
Who am i going to contact? Some innocent person that has NOTHING to do with it?
If it's been bounced from somewhere else, then someone's mail server is an open relay, usually without their knowledge. Korean high schools are particularly careless in this regard, for some reason. Certainly you should complain to the admin of that machine - nobody wants spammers abusing their bandwidth. They're innocent, perhaps, but they certainly have something to do with it, and they can stop it happening again.
If it's come from China, they don't seem to prioritise spam complaints very highly. Put something like 'Thank you for your support for the Free Tibet Movement' in the complaint just so it gets flagged up as high priority ;-)
The idea of SPEWS is not just to block spam, but also to force ISPs to terminate their spammers. Blocking only the spammer's IP is pointless; too many providers just move the spammer about in their IP space, and the world has to play whack-a-mole. SPEWS' policy is that if an ISP decides it wants to keep its spammer online in the face of repeated complaints, fine; but then SPEWS don't want to receive any email from such a network.
Now, the question is: do you agree with SPEWS' policy? If you do, great! Use SPEWS' blacklist to filter incoming email. If you don't, no problem; there are plenty of other blacklists, some more lenient, some far more radical. Pick one or more, or none if you want to accept everything. It's a free internet.
The great advantage of SPEWS is that it _really_ hurts to be listed. It's the email version of the UDP, and has the power to hit rogue ISPs where it hurts, strongly encouraging them to rethink their policies.
Would your ISP have terminated their spammer if SPEWS hadn't escalated their listing to the whole /16? I doubt it... SPEWS normally start with the single IP, then incrementally expand the listing (as further complaints are ignored, most likely). If it took a /16 block to force them to terminate him, then certainly no number of polite mails to abuse@ would have worked.
As for big spammers who can change ISP frequently: if the threat of a SPEWS listing is so terrible, what ISP is going to sign up Empire Towers as a customer? Nobody in their right mind. Alan Ralsky spams from China these days, I gather, because nobody in the West will touch him. ISPs must decide whether they want spammers or humans as customers; those that choose the spammers will surely be listed by SPEWS, and so real humans won't have to receive their crap. Those that choose humans will not be listed, for they will terminate their spammers promptly and will not play silly buggers with IP numbers. If this means that the internet fragments into the spamnet and the nospamnet, fine - who wants to hear from the spamnet anyway?
Using a user-friendly tool like Photoshop would defeat the whole geeky purpose! He was able to use the words "custom program" and "hacked" in the same sentence -- a prerequisite for recognized by slashdot.
OK, shall we compromise? Someone get them a copy of the Gimp...
Yes, very much like them. And not so very different from the ones in Britain and Germany, and in Canada pointing across the pole. Not that anyone ever had a double standard...
Yes, the intelligence pics that proved the Soviets had missiles in Cuba were taken by U2 spy planes. They were published immediately - if you're trying to force the Russians to remove their missiles, you don't keep it a secret that you know about the missiles. You tell the world.
:-) Planes were getting much better material then.
In the early sixties, satellite reconaissance was primitive - it was still at the stage of ejecting the film in a little capsule to be picked up on the ground
As any fule know... :-)
If we're postulating mass space tourism, we can probably get away with postulating efficient solar or fusion power to go with it... they're both pipe-dreams hovering somewhere in the technological middle-distance. Then you can have your hydrogen by electrolysis without trouble.
To make space tourism economic, we need to either (a) make it possible to get into orbit using far less energy, or (b) make energy available much more cheaply. So nobody's going up there without some major breakthrough that would massively reduce the resources required.
I hear there's an old law in Hereford making it legal to shoot a Welshman provided he's inside the city walls on a Sunday. Am I the only one that thinks the SAS could take advantage of this for training purposes?