and here's the text of the article, for those of you that don't have time subscriptions
Jun. 16, 2003
Cable-TV descramblers! FDA-approved diet pills! Viagra without a prescription! Instant access to XXX movies! Dramatically enhanced orgasms! If you have ever received e-mails advertising products and services like these -- some quite within the law, some clearly outside it -- chances are they came from a guy like Howard Carmack, professional spammer.
Using three computers and working out of his mother's home in Buffalo, N.Y., Carmack sent an impressive 857,500,000 unsolicited e-mails in one year, something that is perfectly legal in New York State. But Carmack crossed the line, according to EarthLink, his Internet service provider, when he set up 343 accounts using stolen credit-card numbers to send these e-mails.
EarthLink took notice and began a year-long cat-and-mouse game to discover Carmack's true identity. "My name's not on anything," he boasted at one point, according to investigators, when they reached him on his uncle's cell phone. "You'll never catch me." Fingered by his upstairs neighbor and a former employer, Carmack went to ground. A private detective was hired to stake out his mother's house. Carmack was finally caught running from his car to the front door and was served with a complaint. Now out on bail, he has been found liable in a $16.4 million civil lawsuit by EarthLink. Charges of criminal fraud filed by state attorney general Eliot Spitzer are still pending. "There are many more like Carmack," Spitzer warns. "This sends a message that we are pursuing them." Spitzer, a man who knows how to put himself in the spotlight, was the avenging angel of Wall Street last year. Now he is on a cybercrusade against spam.
And no wonder. In the space of a year, according to research firm IDC, the number of uninvited entries into U.S. In boxes has shot up 85%, to a total of 4.9 trillion. Driven by cheap technology and the promise of easy profit, spammers have gone from pests to an invasive species of parasite that threatens to clog the inner workings of the Internet. For the first time last month, according to MessageLabs, more than half the emails received by U.S. businesses were unsolicited. The time we spend deleting or defeating spam costs an estimated $8.9 billion a year in lost productivity. Sensing an enemy as unpopular as al-Qaeda, lawmakers are pondering a plethora of solutions -- some of which, spam watchers say, could end up doing more harm than good.
Why do spammers flood the Internet with ads nobody wants to read? Because some people do read them, and a tiny fraction actually respond -- which in the world of direct marketing is like money in the e-bank. Take former spammer Scott Hirsch of Boca Raton, Fla., who sold his e-mail marketing business last year for $135 million and retired at the age of 37. Florida is home to more spammers than any other state, and Hirsch -- who started his first bulk e-mail list way back in 1996--likes to take credit for helping make Boca Raton "the spam capital of the world." Hirsch filled his mailing lists with the e-mail addresses of people who had "opted in" by checking (or forgetting to deselect) one of those ubiquitous boxes on website order forms. "When people want to receive [e-mail]," he explains, "you get a much higher return."
But for an increasing number of Hirsch's imitators, spamming is a numbers game that rewards excess. "The more times they deliver the message, the more money they make," says Charles Curran, general counsel for America Online, which last week filed lawsuits against more than 100 spammers. "They all want to get as close to infinity as possible." This is getting easier all the time, as high-speed Internet access gets cheaper and computer processor power continues to double every 16 months. Meanwhile, the software tools for spamming continue to improve. Web crawlers harvest e-mail addresses en masse from chat rooms and newsgroups. Dictionary-attack programs string together words or names in multiple languages, random numbers, an "@" and
My boss, Bill, bashes spammers. No really, he does. We're one of the first ISPs to sue spammers. Check last months (2months ago? don't remember) Time magazine. Awwwh yeah.
Yeah, the 802.11b AP has enough bandwidth for videocasting, but who says that the pipe they've got going out to the internet has that kind of bandwidth? Especially if there's a lot of other people chewing off a chunk?
Actually, even the non 'Star Trek Mixes' of Futile have fun Star Trek samples in them. I'm a big fan of the genre, but unfortunatley that's about the only VAC song that I like. Funker Vogt and Wumpscut are a bit better, but that's my personal opinion.
At least in all the schools I went to, cell phones and pagers were already prohibited.. you get seen with one, regardless if it's ringing, or even turned on, and it got shipped right up to the principals office.
sounds like SpamAssassin I work at an ISP, and we have it filtering incoming mail for several thousand people, and haven't hit any kind of problem that wasn't very easily fixable
Re:always wondered how to suck the roms off....
on
KnoppiXMAME 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Back in the day.. in GamePro and the like, I kept seeing ads for a device for a genesis or SNES, that you would plug into the cartridge slot of your console, stick a floppy in to, and stick a cartridge into, and it would copy the cartridge to the floppy, and you could play it on the console, with the copier. IIRC (which I may not) several games spanned a couple floppies.. don't remember how you knew when to change, but I knew it worked. One of my friends came back from Japan with one for his SNES and it rocked.. so I grabbed my copy of gamepro, flipped through to the ad for the device, and saw the price tag.... nearly $300, which was a fortune for me at the age of 12 (and still is now, at the age of 21) Anyway, the floppies that these things wrote could be read in a PC. I recall that on some boards that had upload/download ratios, we always used to toss a couple SNES roms up for credits. Not sure if anyone else had the hardware to play them back, but it was fantastic.... until my friend took the gizmo back.
I can't say that this version does (Haven't DLed the whole thing yet) But I've never had a problem running standard issue Knoppix in VMWare..download the ISO, tell VMWare to boot off it, and away you go
Slashdot Mirror
>Important note: Patches are welcome! Bugreports without patches send directly to /dev/null :)
What's the deal with that? If you find a bug, and you can't write code, they don't even want to know the bug exists?
and here's the text of the article, for those of you that don't have time subscriptions Jun. 16, 2003 Cable-TV descramblers! FDA-approved diet pills! Viagra without a prescription! Instant access to XXX movies! Dramatically enhanced orgasms! If you have ever received e-mails advertising products and services like these -- some quite within the law, some clearly outside it -- chances are they came from a guy like Howard Carmack, professional spammer. Using three computers and working out of his mother's home in Buffalo, N.Y., Carmack sent an impressive 857,500,000 unsolicited e-mails in one year, something that is perfectly legal in New York State. But Carmack crossed the line, according to EarthLink, his Internet service provider, when he set up 343 accounts using stolen credit-card numbers to send these e-mails. EarthLink took notice and began a year-long cat-and-mouse game to discover Carmack's true identity. "My name's not on anything," he boasted at one point, according to investigators, when they reached him on his uncle's cell phone. "You'll never catch me." Fingered by his upstairs neighbor and a former employer, Carmack went to ground. A private detective was hired to stake out his mother's house. Carmack was finally caught running from his car to the front door and was served with a complaint. Now out on bail, he has been found liable in a $16.4 million civil lawsuit by EarthLink. Charges of criminal fraud filed by state attorney general Eliot Spitzer are still pending. "There are many more like Carmack," Spitzer warns. "This sends a message that we are pursuing them." Spitzer, a man who knows how to put himself in the spotlight, was the avenging angel of Wall Street last year. Now he is on a cybercrusade against spam. And no wonder. In the space of a year, according to research firm IDC, the number of uninvited entries into U.S. In boxes has shot up 85%, to a total of 4.9 trillion. Driven by cheap technology and the promise of easy profit, spammers have gone from pests to an invasive species of parasite that threatens to clog the inner workings of the Internet. For the first time last month, according to MessageLabs, more than half the emails received by U.S. businesses were unsolicited. The time we spend deleting or defeating spam costs an estimated $8.9 billion a year in lost productivity. Sensing an enemy as unpopular as al-Qaeda, lawmakers are pondering a plethora of solutions -- some of which, spam watchers say, could end up doing more harm than good. Why do spammers flood the Internet with ads nobody wants to read? Because some people do read them, and a tiny fraction actually respond -- which in the world of direct marketing is like money in the e-bank. Take former spammer Scott Hirsch of Boca Raton, Fla., who sold his e-mail marketing business last year for $135 million and retired at the age of 37. Florida is home to more spammers than any other state, and Hirsch -- who started his first bulk e-mail list way back in 1996--likes to take credit for helping make Boca Raton "the spam capital of the world." Hirsch filled his mailing lists with the e-mail addresses of people who had "opted in" by checking (or forgetting to deselect) one of those ubiquitous boxes on website order forms. "When people want to receive [e-mail]," he explains, "you get a much higher return." But for an increasing number of Hirsch's imitators, spamming is a numbers game that rewards excess. "The more times they deliver the message, the more money they make," says Charles Curran, general counsel for America Online, which last week filed lawsuits against more than 100 spammers. "They all want to get as close to infinity as possible." This is getting easier all the time, as high-speed Internet access gets cheaper and computer processor power continues to double every 16 months. Meanwhile, the software tools for spamming continue to improve. Web crawlers harvest e-mail addresses en masse from chat rooms and newsgroups. Dictionary-attack programs string together words or names in multiple languages, random numbers, an "@" and
Troll?! I wasn't trolling! Here's the link!!
My boss, Bill, bashes spammers. No really, he does. We're one of the first ISPs to sue spammers. Check last months (2months ago? don't remember) Time magazine. Awwwh yeah.
if so, then that (Score:4, Insightful) probally just got you flagged ;)
heh, I never liked Arizona anyway.
obligitory "they're sending a browser/database to Mars?!" comment
Yeah, the 802.11b AP has enough bandwidth for videocasting, but who says that the pipe they've got going out to the internet has that kind of bandwidth? Especially if there's a lot of other people chewing off a chunk?
Actually, even the non 'Star Trek Mixes' of Futile have fun Star Trek samples in them. I'm a big fan of the genre, but unfortunatley that's about the only VAC song that I like. Funker Vogt and Wumpscut are a bit better, but that's my personal opinion.
A substitute for heroine eh? So, a big cloud of methane is going to come on down and save the day?
with This Or, you can use the DevCluster at handhelds.org.
At least in all the schools I went to, cell phones and pagers were already prohibited.. you get seen with one, regardless if it's ringing, or even turned on, and it got shipped right up to the principals office.
find the people who sent it, and send them a message saying "I'm Ron Jeremy... I don't think you *want* me to have another 3 inches"
sounds like SpamAssassin I work at an ISP, and we have it filtering incoming mail for several thousand people, and haven't hit any kind of problem that wasn't very easily fixable
Back in the day.. in GamePro and the like, I kept seeing ads for a device for a genesis or SNES, that you would plug into the cartridge slot of your console, stick a floppy in to, and stick a cartridge into, and it would copy the cartridge to the floppy, and you could play it on the console, with the copier. IIRC (which I may not) several games spanned a couple floppies.. don't remember how you knew when to change, but I knew it worked. One of my friends came back from Japan with one for his SNES and it rocked.. so I grabbed my copy of gamepro, flipped through to the ad for the device, and saw the price tag.... nearly $300, which was a fortune for me at the age of 12 (and still is now, at the age of 21) Anyway, the floppies that these things wrote could be read in a PC. I recall that on some boards that had upload/download ratios, we always used to toss a couple SNES roms up for credits. Not sure if anyone else had the hardware to play them back, but it was fantastic.... until my friend took the gizmo back.
I can't say that this version does (Haven't DLed the whole thing yet) But I've never had a problem running standard issue Knoppix in VMWare ..download the ISO, tell VMWare to boot off it, and away you go