As a patent holder myself, and having had to have discussions with the examiner from "law office 12" at the USPTO about my application, they are lawyers. Government employees, but lawyers to be sure.
By the sounds of the guy's voice on the phone a young and inexperienced lawyer. Working as a patent examiner, causing problems and mischief for us all due to that youth and inexperience.
Those emoticons made from parenthesis and colons started on AOL in about 1992.
Remember Bill Gates's first book, which "ignored the internet"?
The idea that Microsoft invented any such thing is preposterous, and if the USPTO lawyer drones actually issue such a patent it will completely prove how totally clueless they are.
We always knew it, but this will PROVE IT.
I actually hope they do, because it will bring to light the importance of the REAL reform that is needed at USPTO. Even congress will recognize it.
If you are actually looking at the situation you might realize the problem stems from the government granting monopolies initially.
Close, but not exactly right. The government granted monopolies to the phone company, the electric company, the gas company for good reason. We really didn't want 17 sets of electric wires on the pole out back, did we? Nope.
So what we as a society did was HIRE those companies and gave them a special position in society as regulated utilities.
We paid them to build those networks. The money they used, it wasn't their money, it was OURS. Remember the "Rate Cases" they had to file with the PUC to get a rate increase? "We had to build new wires here, we built a central office there, it cost this much." They were then granted rates as the exclusive provider for those services that guaranteed them a certain ROI (return on investment).
Now there's the "special" position they got, what business is guaranteed to make a certain amount of money, if they lose money somehow they would magically get new increased rates to guarantee that ROI I mentioned? All the while being protected from competition? Not too many.
But now they are big companies and they don't wanna be protected anymore, at least in their "new media" divisions, but there's no real competiton there either.
Think about it: Seen those AT&T ads for $12.99 DSL? After a 1 year term they raise that to $26.99. The $12.99 price is only for "new customers". After you have had them for a year you are no longer "new" so they jack the prices up.
What can you do? Not much, since they have put most of their competitors out of business by overcharging them to use the copper wires that go out to your house and the space in the CO to where they were losing money.
The few competitors that are left are selling DSL on much the same terms but you can't really switch from AT&T to them since AT&T is using your copper pair to provide that DSL service to you, the one they just jacked up the rates on. If you want to switch you have to first cancel the AT&T DSL and wait 2 months for them to "release the line", after which the competitor can hook you up.
You get 2 months downtime. So no real competition.
Back to the "net neutrality" argument. Here's what's really going on:
The phone company wants to screw up the packets of their competitors. Mostly VOIP packets, but they are not proud, they will figure out more mischief that they can use to cheat us.
If you get VOIP phone service from one of their competitors they will delay every fouth packet 950 ms. So the phone calls would arrive out of order. Choppy, digital distorted calls. You couldn't use their competitors, only them. Nothing else would work.
If you get VOIP phone service from them it will work great since they control the network and they will then let the packets go on through.
Their argument is they want to provide service to *their* customers. If you are someone else's customer, you will be screwed with. Now they aren't really going to use their scarce resources to serve their own customers instead of YOU, they are going to screw you up deliberately. They have plenty capacity and you are paying them anyway.
When you call them to complain about your bad internet connection that won't work for the services they want to sell you they will say "switch to us and you will then get good service."
The ideal of "hands off the internet" is a completely bogus argument dredged up mostly by the same phone companies. It's mostly fake. A smokescreen.
They don't want to have to provide the service YOU are paying them for. They WILL, but only as long as you keep paying them.
If you want to use a competitive service they will screw it up so you will come back to them.
I'm guessing the real money issue is that the ISPs don't want to (or don't have the resources to) help their users clean up their infested machines.
That's likely a big part of the reason big ISPs fail to monitor for botlike traffic, they are too cheap. Last night I had to call AT&T about an email sending and usenet authentication issue affecting my wife. I first had to hurdle the tech support in India with a pretty hard to understand accent who didn't know what usenet was. I was finally escalated to a guy in Texas with another heavy accent, but at least I could understand the Texas drawl! They haven't yet solved the usenet issue but at least they were able to understand it and duplicate it.
These ISPs are trying to save money by using India to provide support to their US customers, no wonder they are trying to save money on monitoring for bots and excessive spamming by their customers. The funny thing is they have to spend money to block spam for their customers, but they spend none stopping it from being sent. And they don't get paid for the extra bandwidth used by the botnets.
They are the cause of the botnets success at causing chaos on the internet. If they would act in a reasonable reputable way and monitor that traffic, cut off infected accounts and demand their customers avoid running bots for Russian spam gangs it would go far toward reducing the spam in the world.
Sedo.com says "We have more than six million domains for sale," said Jeremiah Johnston, Sedo's general counsel. "It's impossible for us to proactively filter sales."
Sounds like the approach many companies take when they find wrongdoing.
Like when I called the SBC datacenter in Texas and asked them if this was their IP address, and if they were hosting the website for Paypal.com. "yes, it is" and "no", the guy said. "well, you are now" I replied. He wanted to know what I expected him to do about it.
Or when an internet company is found to be hosting a spammer sending 45 million spam messages about VlhAGRA or VleAGRA, and when told ask "what do you want us to do about it?".
You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.
Those kinds of lax companies who are not good net neighbors and take little or no responsibility for acting in an ethical manner get listed in SPEWS. Then they whine and complain about THAT.
I for one don't want their internet connection to have routing to ME.
SEDO needs to get some integrity.
The market is NOT sick at all - it's working precisely as markets should work. You said yourself "glut of DVDs". The DVDs are selling so cheap because there is massive oversupply. That's what's supposed to happen in a free market when there is massive oversupply of a good.
Nah. There is a glut of DVDs at Walmart and Target, but you don't find them competing on price to the extent they sell them for 50 cents. They can't. The only reason that stuff is so cheap on ebay is because people get them for free. That's the only possible explanation.
A healthy market would be like at Walmart and Target. They don't have to find things in dumpsters or otherwise get them free. They buy them in regular channels.
Note this ignores the people who just want that crap out of their garage at any cost, and are too greedy to do the right thing and donate them to charity.
I realize all that, corporate buyers buy new from CDW because of the easy ordering, easy terms and it's new. And I wouldn't buy a used linksys switch off ebay either - they're too cheap.
But how about this? I sold a Cisco 5513 for $399. Fully loaded. Now that's just ridiculous. But it sure is a valid reason to buy on ebay, don't you think? I can't imagine how much a replacement for that might cost at CDW or direct from Cisco, but at that price you can buy a few extras for cards.
I didn't however rush to sell the rest of those that I have in my inventory. Waste of time. Weighs 140# to ship.
And I did guarantee it, I tested it and I knew it worked OK.
or their asking price is simply too high based on simple supply/demand. Capitalism works and is quite simple: If supply rises higher than demand, the price will go down or you won't sell anything.
After all, isn't that why people BUY on ebay, to save money? The sheer volume of people who are trying to sell new goods for the exact same price (or higher) than I can buy on NewEgg or other sites is amazing. Same for used goods, where sellers are reserving the price at 80%-90% of new price. The market is simply catching up and normalizing.
You CAN'T sell commodity items on ebay successfully unless you get them for free.
I sell computer and network equipment on ebay. I think it's pretty telling that I can't sell something for $200 that CDW is selling for $3000, and they have 130 of them in stock- so they must be selling.
Ebay is a very sick marketplace today, prices too low to sustain any sort of valid business.
Selling things for 95% off- you would have to be working on your kitchen table! 60 or 80% off, fine.
To sell as low as some categories are on ebay you would have to get everything for free. Not that it doesn't happen, I work for a company that gets lots of our ebay items for free. But I have a policy against selling things so cheap they foul up the market- If I can't get anything reasonable for it I just scrap it.
I wish some of the other ebay sellers would think about that. Selling a $3000 item for $10 hardly contributes to business success. You can't even get lunch after your ebay and paypal fees.
FTFA:
In this instance, however, the mass mailing was readily apparent to all because the "To:" field of the e-mail was populated by 116 clearly visible names -- our 11 staffers, the three exes, and 102 other journalists.
And if that wasn't enough to convince every targeted scribe that he or she was getting a less-than-exclusive interview opportunity, there was this personalized method of address:
"Hello [RecipientFirstName]:"
So, PR n00b sent this e-mail to every address he could scrape off their website (whether it was related to anti-spamming or not), then couldn't be bothered to properly personalize the vaguely targeted e-mails.
So, aside from the fact that 116 messages were actually sent out, at least some of the people at NWW received unsolicited and unwanted e-mail (aka spam).
You're right, I didn't read that.
That does stink.
But heck, the spam problem is pretty bad today. I have to say this doesn't qualify as anything near the worst.
I think Network World's complaint is completely overblown. They guy sent 11 messages to various writers at a publication that is completely on-target.
OK, maybe he could have done some research as to whom at that publication might write about their product, but heck, it's completely related to their business.
And 11 messages is completely different than sending out 4.8 million ads for V1agrka.
FWIW, I read about Singlefin.com some time ago, I signed up (free, forever, up to 10 mailboxes) to test it for clients, (but never did).
One thing interesting: On signing up on their site, I clicked submit for my registration, and almost immediately the phone rang. Allan from Singlefin. I have to say they are right on top of their business, and even though I haven't yet tried it I think it's very nice of them offering free service for a small number of mailboxes. The way it works is you redirect your MX to them, they filter the mail and send it on to your mailserver. Pretty nice. If you have the guts to let someone else be your MX, that is.
Actually, today I wouldn't count on that. That used to be true.
My research indicates that the largest junk faxers faxing stock touts are actually the company involved or closely related, in at least some cases.
The pink OTCBB stocks are not well regulated, so what those companies apparently do is just issue more stock to cover whatever is sold. It's fake.
They apparently make millions doing it, or at least thousands.
One player is reportedly named Tom Heysek. Google that name and you can read all about it.
http://www.junkfax.org/fax/profiles/wsp/wsp.htm
The SEC. Ha. A worthless three letter agency, if you ask me.
The SEC's lawyers wanted my help on stock tout junk faxes. I told them I had the information they wanted and I could get the rest and testify- but only if they were going to put the junk faxers out of business. They had no intention of doing anything. They are just going through the motions, drawing government salaries. I declined to help them.
Like the FCC, another worthless three letter agency. They fined Fax.com $5.4 million for sending out junk faxes. The FCC's lawyers wanted my help too, if I had bothered with them the fine would have been $240 million. I have files full of those junk faxes.
The FCC did nothing whatsoever to collect. NOTHING If you or I owed the government money I can assure you they would be collecting from us.
I'd gladly lose wanted messages in order to never see unwanted messages.
Not a good solution. Overzealous (=poorly designed) spam blocking is a very big problem today. There are techniques that result in little or no false positives.
But time and again, we have people blocking on domain name in the from: address.
If that were a good way to block spam you would only have to block Yahoo.com to get rid of most of it. But it's not a good way.
I have analyzed thousands of spam messages, and it is fairly rare for the sending IP the connection came from to compare favorably with the domain in the from: line.
The techniques that result in few false positives do let some spam through. It's the cost of spam blocking. You can get rid of 90-98%. The last 2% - 10% is where you block legit mail.
Not quite like it's costing the spammer a lot , but on the other hand he probably would rather have that infrastructure being used for other things.
Not so sure about that. I have had actual examples of bounce messages generated by the spammer's own server because the recipient server was down, for 2 years, and they kept pounding away. They never ever took the bad domains out of their spam list. And this was a pseudo legit spammer. (Snotty Scotty)
Obviously at least some spammers can't be bothered to even remove invalid addresses. Bandwidth to burn.
Actually it was pretty conclusively said in the last Slashdot article on this topic that Blue Security wasn't compromised, what happened is that some spammer (which apparently they know but aren't releasing? That doesn't make much sense...anyway) took their spam-list, ran it through Blue's list-cleaning program which removes all BS subscribers, and then ran a diff on the result in order to get a list of people who'd signed up for Blue Security.
In other words, the spammers harvested the contents of the Blue Security server.
Which explains why people don't leave VRFY on anymore, nor do they send more than a few NDRs (non delivery reports). To prevent that. Oops.
Even if that's not the case here, it's certainly possible for someone malicious to subvert Blue Security's agent in such a manner.
It seems blue security has been compromised by the spammers.
I can't see why blue security should be blamed- except for their security problem. The problem is spam and spammers, and it is ludicrous to think otherwise.
I have been working on the spam problem for >10 years.
The problem is lax ISPs and network operators who don't pay attention to their mail. Who don't jump on the trojaned machines on their network that are causing >90% of the spam problem in the world.
I have had the same trojaned machine sending me the same spam every 15 minutes, from a school district. It took me days to finally get a shitty response out of the network operators there to get that machine shut down until it could be cleaned. They didn't seem concerned at all, it was like I was "bothering them" to ask them to stop that machine from spamming. I bet it was sending 150,000 messages between the ones I received. Obviously a major problem. They couldn't care less.
Now THEY should have been DOS'd.
Ya know, several years ago I asked one of the principles of Akamai to get involved, to provide some of the bandwidth and hosting in a fault tolerant fashion, which they reportedly are in a unique position to provide on their monitored distributed network. Practically cannot be effectivedly DOS'd. They thought my proposal "interesting" but didn't want to get involved for the good of the internet, because they didn't want to attract attention from the bad guys. It wasn't 5 or 6 months before they were DOS'd and extorted.
EVERYONE is involved now. We are all being extorted by the spammers. If you cross them they will attack you, even if you just ask them to please stop spamming you.
The only possible answer is responsibility. Networks being responsible for what goes on over their network. Shut down spammers. Don't rent them servers. Don't sell them bandwidth. Jump on problems, even on weekends and holidays, and you have to do it FAST.
Nothing is going to stop spam completely, we can only increase the cost to spammers, and increase the costs for networks to sell to spammers. Make it uneconomical to have spammers as customers.
When the cheapest T-1 a spammer can find is $250,000 a month, spam will stop.
The best way to eradicate spammers would simply be to go after their clients.
That hasn't worked yet. If you have some idea how that could be accomplished and effective against spam and spammers, please feel free to elaborate.
Blue security seems to be causing pain to spammers, enough to get a rise out of them at least. Aren't they actually reflecting the spam back to the source? I think that was their tactic.
If they are effective, that's a net positive in the spam fight.
Caller ID is a paid service. The telcos make millions a month selling that and other "services", all of which come with the switching equipment, it costs them nothing to give it to you, but they get paid by you. It might be bundled but it is never free. One way or another they are getting paid.
Now it is found to be unreliable. It turns out the telcos have an insecure system. They've known about it for years, they haven't done anything whatsoever to secure it, and they are still cashing their customer's checks for caller ID service which can be completely subverted for $10.00 to http://spoofcard.com/
Wouldn't the correct response be to make it ILLEGAL for anyone to spoof caller ID, and for any telephone provider to provide false caller ID data to any subscriber?
If that were the case and their were civil and criminal penalties for providing false Caller ID data one or maybe two things would happen:
The telcos would stop providing unreliable data by stopping selling Caller ID, or they would finally take the effort to secure their own systems. They would probably do both. Shut it down and then secure it.
They shouldn't have to be forced to do either of those things but apparently they need to be.
Slashdot Mirror
As a patent holder myself, and having had to have discussions with the examiner from "law office 12" at the USPTO about my application, they are lawyers. Government employees, but lawyers to be sure.
By the sounds of the guy's voice on the phone a young and inexperienced lawyer. Working as a patent examiner, causing problems and mischief for us all due to that youth and inexperience.
I was wrong._ prior_to_invention
It was maybe 1972.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticons#Background
Those emoticons made from parenthesis and colons started on AOL in about 1992.
Remember Bill Gates's first book, which "ignored the internet"?
The idea that Microsoft invented any such thing is preposterous, and if the USPTO lawyer drones actually issue such a patent it will completely prove how totally clueless they are.
We always knew it, but this will PROVE IT. I actually hope they do, because it will bring to light the importance of the REAL reform that is needed at USPTO.
Even congress will recognize it.
If you are actually looking at the situation you might realize the problem stems from the government granting monopolies initially.
Close, but not exactly right. The government granted monopolies to the phone company, the electric company, the gas company for good reason. We really didn't want 17 sets of electric wires on the pole out back, did we? Nope.
So what we as a society did was HIRE those companies and gave them a special position in society as regulated utilities.
We paid them to build those networks. The money they used, it wasn't their money, it was OURS. Remember the "Rate Cases" they had to file with the PUC to get a rate increase? "We had to build new wires here, we built a central office there, it cost this much." They were then granted rates as the exclusive provider for those services that guaranteed them a certain ROI (return on investment).
Now there's the "special" position they got, what business is guaranteed to make a certain amount of money, if they lose money somehow they would magically get new increased rates to guarantee that ROI I mentioned? All the while being protected from competition? Not too many.
But now they are big companies and they don't wanna be protected anymore, at least in their "new media" divisions, but there's no real competiton there either.
Think about it: Seen those AT&T ads for $12.99 DSL? After a 1 year term they raise that to $26.99. The $12.99 price is only for "new customers". After you have had them for a year you are no longer "new" so they jack the prices up.
What can you do? Not much, since they have put most of their competitors out of business by overcharging them to use the copper wires that go out to your house and the space in the CO to where they were losing money.
The few competitors that are left are selling DSL on much the same terms but you can't really switch from AT&T to them since AT&T is using your copper pair to provide that DSL service to you, the one they just jacked up the rates on. If you want to switch you have to first cancel the AT&T DSL and wait 2 months for them to "release the line", after which the competitor can hook you up.
You get 2 months downtime. So no real competition.
Back to the "net neutrality" argument. Here's what's really going on:
The phone company wants to screw up the packets of their competitors. Mostly VOIP packets, but they are not proud, they will figure out more mischief that they can use to cheat us.
If you get VOIP phone service from one of their competitors they will delay every fouth packet 950 ms. So the phone calls would arrive out of order. Choppy, digital distorted calls. You couldn't use their competitors, only them. Nothing else would work.
If you get VOIP phone service from them it will work great since they control the network and they will then let the packets go on through.
Their argument is they want to provide service to *their* customers. If you are someone else's customer, you will be screwed with. Now they aren't really going to use their scarce resources to serve their own customers instead of YOU, they are going to screw you up deliberately. They have plenty capacity and you are paying them anyway.
When you call them to complain about your bad internet connection that won't work for the services they want to sell you they will say "switch to us and you will then get good service."
The ideal of "hands off the internet" is a completely bogus argument dredged up mostly by the same phone companies. It's mostly fake. A smokescreen.
They don't want to have to provide the service YOU are paying them for. They WILL, but only as long as you keep paying them.
If you want to use a competitive service they will screw it up so you will come back to them.
They hate competition.
I'm guessing the real money issue is that the ISPs don't want to (or don't have the resources to) help their users clean up their infested machines.
That's likely a big part of the reason big ISPs fail to monitor for botlike traffic, they are too cheap. Last night I had to call AT&T about an email sending and usenet authentication issue affecting my wife. I first had to hurdle the tech support in India with a pretty hard to understand accent who didn't know what usenet was. I was finally escalated to a guy in Texas with another heavy accent, but at least I could understand the Texas drawl! They haven't yet solved the usenet issue but at least they were able to understand it and duplicate it.
These ISPs are trying to save money by using India to provide support to their US customers, no wonder they are trying to save money on monitoring for bots and excessive spamming by their customers. The funny thing is they have to spend money to block spam for their customers, but they spend none stopping it from being sent. And they don't get paid for the extra bandwidth used by the botnets.
They are the cause of the botnets success at causing chaos on the internet. If they would act in a reasonable reputable way and monitor that traffic, cut off infected accounts and demand their customers avoid running bots for Russian spam gangs it would go far toward reducing the spam in the world.
Yes, but it has not been established that they do anything reactively either. Do they?
Sedo.com says
"We have more than six million domains for sale," said Jeremiah Johnston, Sedo's general counsel. "It's impossible for us to proactively filter sales."
Sounds like the approach many companies take when they find wrongdoing.
Like when I called the SBC datacenter in Texas and asked them if this was their IP address, and if they were hosting the website for Paypal.com. "yes, it is" and "no", the guy said. "well, you are now" I replied. He wanted to know what I expected him to do about it.
Or when an internet company is found to be hosting a spammer sending 45 million spam messages about VlhAGRA or VleAGRA, and when told ask "what do you want us to do about it?".
You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.
Those kinds of lax companies who are not good net neighbors and take little or no responsibility for acting in an ethical manner get listed in SPEWS. Then they whine and complain about THAT.
I for one don't want their internet connection to have routing to ME.
SEDO needs to get some integrity.
The market is NOT sick at all - it's working precisely as markets should work. You said yourself "glut of DVDs". The DVDs are selling so cheap because there is massive oversupply. That's what's supposed to happen in a free market when there is massive oversupply of a good.
Nah. There is a glut of DVDs at Walmart and Target, but you don't find them competing on price to the extent they sell them for 50 cents.
They can't. The only reason that stuff is so cheap on ebay is because people get them for free. That's the only possible explanation.
A healthy market would be like at Walmart and Target. They don't have to find things in dumpsters or otherwise get them free. They buy them in regular channels.
Note this ignores the people who just want that crap out of their garage at any cost, and are too greedy to do the right thing and donate them to charity.
I realize all that, corporate buyers buy new from CDW because of the easy ordering, easy terms and it's new. And I wouldn't buy a used linksys switch off ebay either - they're too cheap.
But how about this? I sold a Cisco 5513 for $399. Fully loaded. Now that's just ridiculous. But it sure is a valid reason to buy on ebay, don't you think? I can't imagine how much a replacement for that might cost at CDW or direct from Cisco, but at that price you can buy a few extras for cards.
I didn't however rush to sell the rest of those that I have in my inventory. Waste of time. Weighs 140# to ship.
And I did guarantee it, I tested it and I knew it worked OK.
or their asking price is simply too high based on simple supply/demand. Capitalism works and is quite simple: If supply rises higher than demand, the price will go down or you won't sell anything.
After all, isn't that why people BUY on ebay, to save money? The sheer volume of people who are trying to sell new goods for the exact same price (or higher) than I can buy on NewEgg or other sites is amazing. Same for used goods, where sellers are reserving the price at 80%-90% of new price. The market is simply catching up and normalizing.
You CAN'T sell commodity items on ebay successfully unless you get them for free.
I sell computer and network equipment on ebay. I think it's pretty telling that I can't sell something for $200 that CDW is selling for $3000, and they have 130 of them in stock- so they must be selling.
Ebay is a very sick marketplace today, prices too low to sustain any sort of valid business. Selling things for 95% off- you would have to be working on your kitchen table! 60 or 80% off, fine.
To sell as low as some categories are on ebay you would have to get everything for free. Not that it doesn't happen, I work for a company that gets lots of our ebay items for free. But I have a policy against selling things so cheap they foul up the market- If I can't get anything reasonable for it I just scrap it. I wish some of the other ebay sellers would think about that. Selling a $3000 item for $10 hardly contributes to business success. You can't even get lunch after your ebay and paypal fees.
Now, the Internet is NOT some kind of truck you can just dump stuff onto, so if you want to get the data you're going to have to come to my house.
No, I understand the internet is actually a series of tubes, and there will be hell to pay if they get "full".
FTFA:
In this instance, however, the mass mailing was readily apparent to all because the "To:" field of the e-mail was populated by 116 clearly visible names -- our 11 staffers, the three exes, and 102 other journalists.
And if that wasn't enough to convince every targeted scribe that he or she was getting a less-than-exclusive interview opportunity, there was this personalized method of address:
"Hello [RecipientFirstName]:"
So, PR n00b sent this e-mail to every address he could scrape off their website (whether it was related to anti-spamming or not), then couldn't be bothered to properly personalize the vaguely targeted e-mails.
So, aside from the fact that 116 messages were actually sent out, at least some of the people at NWW received unsolicited and unwanted e-mail (aka spam).
You're right, I didn't read that. That does stink. But heck, the spam problem is pretty bad today. I have to say this doesn't qualify as anything near the worst.
I think Network World's complaint is completely overblown. They guy sent 11 messages to various writers at a publication that is completely on-target.
OK, maybe he could have done some research as to whom at that publication might write about their product, but heck, it's completely related to their business.
And 11 messages is completely different than sending out 4.8 million ads for V1agrka.
FWIW, I read about Singlefin.com some time ago, I signed up (free, forever, up to 10 mailboxes) to test it for clients, (but never did).
One thing interesting: On signing up on their site, I clicked submit for my registration, and almost immediately the phone rang. Allan from Singlefin. I have to say they are right on top of their business, and even though I haven't yet tried it I think it's very nice of them offering free service for a small number of mailboxes. The way it works is you redirect your MX to them, they filter the mail and send it on to your mailserver. Pretty nice. If you have the guts to let someone else be your MX, that is.
Can Google Auctions be far away? I doubt it, and glad when they finally get that up and running.
Actually, today I wouldn't count on that. That used to be true.
My research indicates that the largest junk faxers faxing stock touts are actually the company involved or closely related, in at least some cases.
The pink OTCBB stocks are not well regulated, so what those companies apparently do is just issue more stock to cover whatever is sold. It's fake.
They apparently make millions doing it, or at least thousands.
One player is reportedly named Tom Heysek. Google that name and you can read all about it. http://www.junkfax.org/fax/profiles/wsp/wsp.htm
Let the SEC do it.
The SEC. Ha. A worthless three letter agency, if you ask me.
The SEC's lawyers wanted my help on stock tout junk faxes. I told them I had the information they wanted and I could get the rest and testify- but only if they were going to put the junk faxers out of business. They had no intention of doing anything. They are just going through the motions, drawing government salaries. I declined to help them.
Like the FCC, another worthless three letter agency.
They fined Fax.com $5.4 million for sending out junk faxes. The FCC's lawyers wanted my help too, if I had bothered with them the fine would have been $240 million. I have files full of those junk faxes.
The FCC did nothing whatsoever to collect. NOTHING
If you or I owed the government money I can assure you they would be collecting from us.
I'd gladly lose wanted messages in order to never see unwanted messages.
Not a good solution. Overzealous (=poorly designed) spam blocking is a very big problem today. There are techniques that result in little or no false positives.
But time and again, we have people blocking on domain name in the from: address.
If that were a good way to block spam you would only have to block Yahoo.com to get rid of most of it. But it's not a good way.
I have analyzed thousands of spam messages, and it is fairly rare for the sending IP the connection came from to compare favorably with the domain in the from: line.
The techniques that result in few false positives do let some spam through. It's the cost of spam blocking. You can get rid of 90-98%.
The last 2% - 10% is where you block legit mail.
Not quite like it's costing the spammer a lot , but on the other hand he probably would rather have that infrastructure being used for other things.
Not so sure about that. I have had actual examples of bounce messages generated by the spammer's own server because the recipient server was down, for 2 years, and they kept pounding away. They never ever took the bad domains out of their spam list. And this was a pseudo legit spammer. (Snotty Scotty)
Obviously at least some spammers can't be bothered to even remove invalid addresses. Bandwidth to burn.
Uh, the welcome greeting from my inbound server:
"250 xxxxx.net there will be a $9.78 charge for spam attempts, continued attempts confirms your agreement" Or some such.
Actually it was pretty conclusively said in the last Slashdot article on this topic that Blue Security wasn't compromised, what happened is that some spammer (which apparently they know but aren't releasing? That doesn't make much sense...anyway) took their spam-list, ran it through Blue's list-cleaning program which removes all BS subscribers, and then ran a diff on the result in order to get a list of people who'd signed up for Blue Security.
In other words, the spammers harvested the contents of the Blue Security server.
Which explains why people don't leave VRFY on anymore, nor do they send more than a few NDRs (non delivery reports). To prevent that. Oops.
Even if that's not the case here, it's certainly possible for someone malicious to subvert Blue Security's agent in such a manner.
It seems blue security has been compromised by the spammers.
I can't see why blue security should be blamed- except for their security problem.
The problem is spam and spammers, and it is ludicrous to think otherwise.
I have been working on the spam problem for >10 years.
The problem is lax ISPs and network operators who don't pay attention to their mail. Who don't jump on the trojaned machines on their network that are causing >90% of the spam problem in the world.
I have had the same trojaned machine sending me the same spam every 15 minutes, from a school district. It took me days to finally get a shitty response out of the network operators there to get that machine shut down until it could be cleaned. They didn't seem concerned at all, it was like I was "bothering them" to ask them to stop that machine from spamming.
I bet it was sending 150,000 messages between the ones I received. Obviously a major problem. They couldn't care less.
Now THEY should have been DOS'd.
Ya know, several years ago I asked one of the principles of Akamai to get involved, to provide some of the bandwidth and hosting in a fault tolerant fashion, which they reportedly are in a unique position to provide on their monitored distributed network. Practically cannot be effectivedly DOS'd. They thought my proposal "interesting" but didn't want to get involved for the good of the internet, because they didn't want to attract attention from the bad guys.
It wasn't 5 or 6 months before they were DOS'd and extorted.
EVERYONE is involved now. We are all being extorted by the spammers. If you cross them they will attack you, even if you just ask them to please stop spamming you.
The only possible answer is responsibility. Networks being responsible for what goes on over their network. Shut down spammers. Don't rent them servers. Don't sell them bandwidth. Jump on problems, even on weekends and holidays, and you have to do it FAST.
Nothing is going to stop spam completely, we can only increase the cost to spammers, and increase the costs for networks to sell to spammers. Make it uneconomical to have spammers as customers.
When the cheapest T-1 a spammer can find is $250,000 a month, spam will stop.
The best way to eradicate spammers would simply be to go after their clients.
That hasn't worked yet. If you have some idea how that could be accomplished and effective against spam and spammers, please feel free to elaborate.
Blue security seems to be causing pain to spammers, enough to get a rise out of them at least. Aren't they actually reflecting the spam back to the source? I think that was their tactic.
If they are effective, that's a net positive in the spam fight.
Is Blue Security going public with who's behind it?
He should, so we can put on the pressure.
I charge $475 an hour to watch ads like that.
Do you think they will send a check?
That's just not the point at all.
Caller ID is a paid service. The telcos make millions a month selling that and other "services", all of which come with the switching equipment, it costs them nothing to give it to you, but they get paid by you. It might be bundled but it is never free. One way or another they are getting paid.
Now it is found to be unreliable. It turns out the telcos have an insecure system. They've known about it for years, they haven't done anything whatsoever to secure it, and they are still cashing their customer's checks for caller ID service which can be completely subverted for $10.00 to http://spoofcard.com/
Wouldn't the correct response be to make it ILLEGAL for anyone to spoof caller ID, and for any telephone provider to provide false caller ID data to any subscriber?
If that were the case and their were civil and criminal penalties for providing false Caller ID data one or maybe two things would happen:
The telcos would stop providing unreliable data by stopping selling Caller ID, or they would finally take the effort to secure their own systems. They would probably do both. Shut it down and then secure it.
They shouldn't have to be forced to do either of those things but apparently they need to be.