That depends what you mean by "more damage" now doesn't it.
I wont agree on Drug dealers... unless you are talking about when they cheat people out (making them fradulent) or engage in turf wars - all things that are products of prohibition, not the actual profession of selling drugs (pharmasists are in the same buisness)
However the others... does a single murderer or rapist who commits a single murder or rape do more harm to society than a single con artist who fraudulently cheats 1 "dupe"?
Ok yes, in that case I would agree with you. However, while a murderer may kill one person (usually out of rage; few murders are actually planned acts) or a rapist may rape a few before he is caught.... a con artist will go on ripping off person after person. Its a willfull, planned, calculated act
Thes particular con artists ripped off 12,000 people, in a rather trivial manner. If unpunished, they could easily do it again and again. I can't remember the last time 12,000 people were killed all in one act, at least not without the sanctioning of some government.
Should rapists and murderers be let go free? Hell no. They are horrid crimes that should not be allowed, but neither should fraud be allowed. They are theives.
Fraud... willfully disseminating false information for the purpose of doing or aquiring things that you are not entitled to?
As for drug production and moving... I see no reason to jail them, they are just filling a profitable market. I think they should have the FDA sent after them and be forced to slap ingredients labels on their products and do real quality assurance testing.
I think these con artists, because thats what they are, are the "Real Criminals". They are offering a product that they do not provide, they are stealing resources from ISPs and the rest of the net. They ARE cheating and swindling people out of their money, and giving headaches to admins in the process.
They are leaches on society. At least drug producers are providing people with a product that they actually want! Spammers force their junk on everyone, and use stolen resources to do it.
Imagine you walk into a store and purchase a large peice of furnature...they take your money and say "Just drive around back to the loading dock and we will load it on your vehicle"...then when you drive around noone is there and upon going back into the store, the clerk claims that he never saw you before and has no idea what your talking about. Are you saying this man would not be a "Real criminal" worthy of jail time? Thats effectivly what many of these spammers are doing.
Its fraud. Advertising using forged headers and obfuscating where your comming from... thats fraud too. These people are "Real criminals".
I would prefer that noone "Pushes through" legislation at all. I want every voice to be heard...I fully believe in free speach. However, legislation is not free speach.
I don't want a theocratic state. Your gods law has no place in the "Law of the land". No religion has any right to push its views and restrict the actions of people who are not adherents to its faith.
Chruch and state must be kept seprate. COmpletely seprate. I am a firm believer that ANY argument that has anything to do with religion should immediatly be rejected when it comes to whether or not a law should be passed. Mythology has no place in the halls of congress (unfortunaly, it finds its way there all too often).
I completely forgot about Dark City...never made the connection. That was a great film. It wasn't until you mentioned it now and I started thinking about it that I realised what a ripoff the matrix was.
The Matrix was still a good story...and had lots of neat eyecandy and even some passable dialog. However...it was lacking something... the real character development...the real story of it.
Episode I had the same problem. It was all flashy CGI and cool effect...with little to no real character development and real plot.
After some conversations I have had...I wonder. The real question... Aniken Skywalker must become Darth Vader. Can Lucas pull THAT off? Can he turn Cute little "Ani" into "Lord Vader" who ruthlessly hunts down and kills ALL of the Jedi Knights (well ok, all but Obi-Wan and Yoda, who manage to escape).
I can excuse the watered down Drivel that was Episode I, if they can do that. Ok... We are introduced. We have Aniken brought into the story. Can they do the followthrough that they need to?
This has the potential to be one of the best movies in QUITE a long time, or it has the potiential to be no better than the usual hollywood crap. I don't see it landing inbetween.
I can go down the street to Davis Square and there is a huge store that JUST sells old used books. Its all they do...buy em and sell em.
Sure, the text may be there, but that doesn't matter. It is a well established practice for people to sell old used books. It has been going on for years and years.
Lawsuits have been brought on similar grounds before, and they always lose. Just because its written doesn't make it true. Many MANY things written in copyright statments are just as much works of fiction as any story of the bible. (which is a really good analogy, IMHO, since its fiction that some people read and actually believe is truth)
I hearby forbid everyone from driving a car. Now can you figure out why thats a silly thing for me to do? I do it anyway. Does it stop you?
Whenever a spammer sends me a spam with a toll free number in it, I always am sure to call it a few times.
Usually leaving a message saying how much I hate spam and letting them know that I keep track of the companies that spam me, so I can avoid doing buisness with them in the future.
Then I usually call again and do it 3 or 4 more times, just to use up some more of their voice mail system space and add to the phone charges.
Noone has complained yet... I think they actually practice what they preach...they just hit delete.
Unfortunaly I have to disagree here. This can and will work. For several reasons actually. This isn't like drugs.
See with drugs, they are fairly easy to produce (even the toughest once require little more than a diligent chemist or botanist and a little inginuity - above the ability of the "average man" but not the average "trained chemist")
This means you have laws aimed at stopping the supply and distribution. That never works. You simply can not stop people from obtaining goods that exist, or can be made in sufficient quantities from distributing them.
However, in this case its different, only slightly, but still different. It is a long term process to be done in stages see...because this isn't the law stopping distribution, its the producers.
This is just the first step. They start with little copy protections things. They seem "token" and silly. Easy to bypass, hardly a threat.
Next thing you know, VCRs are a thing of the past, noone makes them. DVDs and DVD recorders replace them. The same for hard drives without copy protection etc.
As time goes on, the switch to HDTV, your VCR dies out, VCRs are no longer produced etc etc. Next thing you know, the majority of devices automagically respect the copy protect bits. You can't even find hardware that doesn't. Old hardware that doesn't is no longer produced...and so supplies will begin to dwindle.
its a stepwise process...eventually it leaves the producer in control. Fair use is gone, not by law but by media control. Check mate, in fact thats a good analogy, cuz its alot like chess....
You can move around, but slowly, your world gets smaller and smaller, they move in, and the next thing you know, your trapped, check mate.
The ONLY things that can stop this are renegade hardware manafacturers. Individuals doing things like "fixing" their own hardware will always be far and few between, wont even show up on the radar.
If they do it slowly enough, then they win, because people will just get used to it, and will just accept the limitations...slowly. People tend to be accepting of slow changes and react violently to fast ones.
Its not always obvious who has the "authority" to say its ok. Obviously the student was misled by the teacher. He was led to believe that he had permission.
If I am talking to you on the phone and I say "Hey why don't you come over later. I am stopping at the store on my way home... they key is under the mat, so if I am not there yet just go in"... then you would have every right to do so...
However, if I give you the address of someone else, and tell you that its my place, and to do that - thats another story. Is it your fault for doing what you thought you had permission to do?
A better example would be the teacher offered a challenge to students to break into his own office.
I realize this is an old discussion but.... I just read it and noticed this. Maybe someone will care (I am posting anonymously so that noone can trace back what I have to say to the institution that I speak about).
I worked at a hospital. A big one that did alot of research. The security there was absolutely disgusting. Some things were secure... fairly so. Many things were not.
Firewall? Yea...but it had more ways into it than you can count. They are never hard to get through. Patient data was going out in plain text on many segments. They were just starting to install switches (which fixes the problem somewhat).
No exageration at all...I was talking with a friend at the helpdesk (I was a tech; so we worked somewhat closely at times to coordinate problem fixes). We were talking about the patient care system (the system used for assigning beds to patients check-ins etc), ran on some obscure unix flavor. We had a root shell on the machine in about 30 seconds because the limited access account for the helpdesk was setup in a really stupi dmanner (root login, with a restricted menu shell - run from the.login rather than setup as the shell)
It was really disgusting - lots of systems with easy to guess or even default passords. It was just amazing the stuff I saw (as a tech who bounced from system to system and problem to problem, I saw ALOT).
Of course, physical security was a joke too, Firewall? what firewall? Wouldn't take much to walk in and connect a laptop up to a network jack if you were even mildly cluefull.
The number of murders per 100,000 people skyrocketed from 1920 to 1933 and then drops off sharply. It took more than 50 years for the murder rate to reach that level again.
> I wonder what would have happened if liquer
> could not be acquired from our neighbors?
A moot point, since it is, and always will be. No drug can ever be prohibited sucessfully. There will always be a way to either make it, or smuggle it in. ALL prohibition EVER does is create wealthy black markets, and put non-violent people in jail.
Even in Iran, where all of the liquer stores were burned to the ground when the shah came into power, and alcohol was immediatly outlawed.... still today you can buy liquer. Its available to anyone who wants it. (A good friend of mine was iranian). The ONLY efect that it had was to increase the number of people who went blind from methanol consumption (some of the people making the alcohol didn't know what they were doing).
You know... I never thought of it from that angle.
I mean, certainly - I hate censorware. I think the very idea of even TRYING to stop a person from accessing information that is available to the world is wrong.
However, this could be quite interesting. Thinking back, yea - kids raised around such things always find out how to get around them. Subverting authority, in even the most slight and novel way is definitly a kids major past time.
Kind of reminds me of when I found out how to subvert foolproof on the Macs at school (easy -... by clicking and holding in the right places at the right times, one could keep elevated priviliges to make modifications to restricted files)
I used to use it to change all of the icon colors (with labels)... just for shits and giggles. Then there was that one time that I littered the box with porn in mischievous ways (last day of class for us seniors).
Ahh.... school was fun. Maybe its good that the kids are getting a new toy to play with. It truely does facilitate learning... learning how to get around restrictions, and make the best of a bad situation:).
While many forms of socialism have used institutionalized information blocking, I wouldn't exactly call it "the first step to a socialist environment".
Information blockage is hardly a basic tennet of "Socialism". Many systems, socialist and not, have used such things over the years. Many continue to use them.
Now, if you had said "First step towards a totalitarian system" (which may or may not be socialist)...then I would agree that it is one, but disagree that its the "first" step - as the first steps happened a long time ago;)
It was, perhaps, a well-intentioned idea. That doesn't make it a "good idea".
Like this, well intentioned, but just plain bad. Yes... they want to prevent harm and do "good". However, they don't realize that the solution does more harm than it can possibly do good.
That makes it a bad idea, no matter how well intentioned it is. Just like prohibition did not work, and continues to not work today (only 1 form of it actually ended).
The sad thing is what prohibition teaches us. Whilke individuals may learn from their mistakes, they may even make mistakes with such consequences as they serve as warning to others, Governments and societies do not apear to learn from their mistakes.
> And while you're at it, rattling all the doors
> and windows to see if everything's locked. Oh
> yeah - and let's not forget to check those
> common hiding places for a spare key. You use a
> Schlage lock? Cool - I've got a Schlage master
> key.
Port scanners do one thing...they scan ports. Ocasionally, with features like ident lookups and OS detection...but in essece they just scan ports and say what they can about them.
Tool sthat actually try to exploit vulnerabilities are a whlol enother story. A PORT SCANNER just "looks". It doesn't try to actually "Open the window and crawl in" or to "pick the lock". Thats a wholly different tool. (the two can be integrated, of course - but I wouldn't call the resulting "automated cracking tool" a "port scanner" any more than I would call a leatherman "a pocket knife").
> As you might guess, I don't like deliberate
> portscanners. My network is MY NETWORK. It's
> here for my convenience, not yours, and I don't
> particularly appreciate you poking around on
> my boxes.
Whether or not you appreciate it, its going to happen. No amount of whining, complaining, or even legislating is going to stop it.
All services that a person CAN connect to from the outside should be considered "public". People WILL find them, so they had better be secure.
Which would really truly suck ass. It would make me have to switch ISPs.
I often use my hom emachines to port scan machines that I have on other networks to see what can get through, what is running etc. Port scanners are GREAT tools.
Sure, its nothing that can't be culled from netstat and other things, but port scanning is fast and effective. It also is great for testing ipchains rules etc to block port access.
Besides... port scanning is not malicous. Sure, it is often a prelude to an attack, but it is not, itself an attack.
Port scanning is just a useful tool. If you don't want people using a service, then don't set it up so that the entire world can access it. If you don't want people connecting to a port, then don't run anything on that port, or block it off with ipchains rules.
If its available to the world, then assume that it is public...because it is. I mean really... looking in the window of your car is a prelude to stealing your stereo... but does that mean we should outlaw looking in through the windows of parked cars?
However, is Georgi Guninski the ONLY person finding vulnerabilities? This isn't abotu microsot, this is about ANY vendor and every vendor who would want to do it. Frankly, MS can go to hell for all I care, their vulnerabilities effect me in 1 way only: humor value
What about when the vendor finds the issue? Or someone finds it and reports it only to the vendor? This happens often enough. Yes, right now this is a minor issue, where only 2 or 3 vendors are doing it. This is the time to nip the issue in the bud - before it becomes a problem.
Secondly, what about the imortality of the information? A year or two years down the road, after the website has been reorganized and all the links arew broken - guess what... any archives are useless. And if it was a problem that the vendor found, or wasn't very popular and talked about - then fuck the archive is useless.
> I'll tell you exactly why this is dangerous. It
> allows the vendor to add/edit or delete the
> advisory *without* telling anyone.
While the most obvious problem, its not the major issue in my mind.
When a message goes to bugtraq, it is immortal. It never goes away, ever. Even if the BUGTRAQ main archives are wiped out, its replicated in so many place, under so many different points of control.
When its on a website, if the company folds, or redesigns their website, or has a hard drive failure and finds their backups weren't working...
The adviseries are gone. So in the future, if anyone has a reason to need them for any reason, they simply are not available.
Thats only part of the problem. Its an annoyance. BUGTRAQ is a single point of information. I go there and I can find out about all sorts of security problems, with in-depth information (usually) on how I can assess my vulnerability and reduce or eliminate exposure.
If one company (like M$) starts releaseing no content adviseries, and making me go to their website for the info (M$ is a bad example of course since NO M$ advisery could possibly effect a UNIX sysadmin like myself;)), thats annoying. However, if several companies start doing it - it essentially makes BUGTRAQ useless - I now have to spend more time bouncing from source to source.
It discourages active security monitoring. It makes more work for me...and the end result 90% of the time is finding out that its not a problem that affects me anyway (either due to specific version issues, or not being software I am actually using, or depending on features that I am not using).
This is just bad all around. It decreases the value of the list. It makes it harder and more time consuming to keep current - which translates directly into more people deciding that they just don't have the time/energy to do it. Not all of us have infinite time to keep up with this stuff.
My point was that these same people, if the profit motive is taken away, if they CAN'T profit by doing bad things - then they wont do them.
People don't spam, steal cars, or break into houses because they like doing it (ok, some punk ass kids steal cars for the purpose of joy riding and such... same goes for things like vandalism, but thats about the extent of it). They do it because they can profit by it.
Putting them in prison? what does it solve? When they come out they are just as unskilled as when they started. Still, ALL they know how to do is steal. They are put back on the street, worst off than they began.
Fuck prisons. They solve nothing. You want to get rid of the crime, make sure they don't profit by it. Make sure they don't make a dime off their spam or stealing, and then give them options for how to better themselves.
Your not going to reform a theif by slapping them on the wrist and saying "No, bad". You need to teach them how to get it in the socially acceptable and productive manner. How to earn it.
otherwise, when they get out, still all they know how to do is exactly what they were in for in the first place.
I think the real crime is the cost of living in our society. Its insane. I work a pretty good job as a sysadmin. I don't make top dollar, and am not interested in doing so. However, my budget gets tight! After rent and bills, I really don't end up with too terribly much...but I still live a comfortable life.
I have known people who work unskilled labor jobs. They don't make anywhere near what I do. Constantly struggling to keep their head above water. Working long hours, and ending up with nothing to show for it... just the bare minimums of a roof over their head and hopefully enough gas in the car that they can't really afford but can't get to work without.
At least where I am (Boston area) the cost of living is horrendous. It is, in and of itself, a crime. And people wonder why there are tehives and drug dealers. I wonder why there aren't more of them!
A good friend of mine did alot of bad things in his youth. I know he knows how to steal a car. He has come to me in the past for the consolation... cuz he works 80 hours a week, works his fingers to the bone. Can barely make rent half the time.
He knows he could steal a few cars and make some quick cash, pay that rent and make the car payment and still leave him with plenty of leisure time. He wont do it, cuz he knows its wrong - he doesn't want to go back down that path. Can you imagine the temptation? How many others are there like him?
Its alot easier to talk about morals and "bad people who steal" when you know where you rnext meal is comming from and that your going to have a roof over your head next month.
Do I think its ok to steal? Hell no. Its not. However, I don't think that stealing is the problem. I think its the symptom. Its a symptom of a larger problem. A social and economic one. I don't think putting people in jail or "Making examples of them" is going to solve anything at all. I don't think it reforms people. I think it does simple dis-service to our entire society.
Even if we had a system where by every persons needs were taken care of (and food, water, and shelter arn't the only needs, I count free time to persue a life outside of work is a fundamental need) we will still have stealing and crime... tehere will always be those few who do "bad things" just because they like it... fine, when we have such a system - put them in jail. For anyone else, jail does more harm than good.
For whatever else they may have done, they are still human beings. Hell, I don't even like the idea of holding animals in cages without a good reason. (not to open another can of worms but yes, I think medical testing is a good reason)
Actually... ive never really seen the whole point of keeping a lover "locked up"....
I mean... sex is fun right? If you love someone, why would you want them to not engage in it? Can't they have fun with another person? Should they not be allowed to play poker with a friend or play video games?
Really...its just sex. Sex is fun, sex is natural. A person is not property, trying to lock them up and keep them to yourself is silly.
but yes... its true intrusion does cause headaches. As an admin who has had to deal with them in the past, I can attest to this. However, as far as I can tell, ethical hacking doesn't really happen anyway. Every time we have caught it, it has been some script kiddie who wanted to setup an IRC bouncer so they could be a nuisencse or to deface a web page.
Quite frankly, I have a problem with punishing people for mere curiosity. A person is curious, they reach out and touch and try to identify, they try to ifind out how something works or what they can do.
Is it always right? no. But I think intent DOES matter. Accidental harm is not the same as malicous harm. Really, a 7 year old can tell you that. There is a difference between misjudging how far away someone is and hitting them with a board you are moving, and purposfully knocking them in the head with it.
Intent of action means just as much to me as any other factor. Certainly killing a person through negligence is very bad. However, its nowhere near as bad as killing them with purpose, with intent.
Quite frankly, I don't think it even really matters. I think you will find that if the legal system or whatever one wishes to use for dealing with social ills is pointed at thos who are malicous and harming through willfull negligence and intent, that is plenty of work and those who screw around out of curiosity are much less of a problem, and tend to fall to the level of simple infrequent annoyance.
In theory the whole point of a jail is not just containment, but to "reform" a person so that they can be let out and once again become a productive member of society. However, the only real effect that jails have is mixing criminals together and leaving them worst off, and more likely to commit crimes when they get out than ever before.
Quite frankly, I want to know... how do you translate some monetary amount of damage, or loss of life into "X years"? How is this "crime" worth 5 years of a persons life, and this other crime 10? How do you make that translation?
I think throwing a person in a cage is an EXTREMELY HARSH punishment, any way you slice it. As such I think the use of such a punishment should be weighed very heavily.
> As for stopping it by removing any "profit"
> incentives, profit is not merely monetary.
No its not, but in many cases it is. In this case it is. People don't spam for the fun of it. They don't spam to annoy people. They spam because it is profitable. They spam because its free advertising for whatever their money making scheme is.
Do coke and heroin dealers cut their product with everything from baking soda to lidocain because they LIKE seeing people take impure drugs? Hell no...they do it because it increases their profit margin. It takes their product, which is worth
more by weight than gold, and raises its return
on investment even more.
Spammers are the same thing, people who know how they can make money, and are doing it. Its free advertising man. Or for the more "sophistocated" ones, its free advertising that they are selling to someone else. Not just stolen network and CpU resources, but stolen and sold.
Do you really think that criminals comit crimes "because they are bad people"? Ive known people who were "criminals" in their past, made their money stealing and cheating. They weren't "bad people", they were people doing what they knew how to do because they could make more money doing that than any legitimate job that they were qualified for.
If you take away the profit motive, then the few trouble makers who like hurting people aside, you force them to look towards legitimate work. The vast majority of the problem goes away.
Frankly there would be a hell of alot more trolls on slashdot if one could make money by trolling.
Well how about I find a bank whose checks are extremely easy to forge because of something that they could easily fix (of course the truth is that any checks are easy to forge...since a forgery doesn't even have to be good enough to fool a bank in most cases)
So I forge a check for $0.01 (or $0 if possible...or some token amount) and immediatly have the money deposited back into the account that I forged it to be from.
The point of "ethical" hacking is exploiting the system, not for personal gain, but to expose the problem and get it fixed. Check out the story in the jargon dictionary "The Meaning of Hack" and read the last story.
It was about some motorola engineers in the 70s who found a severe security bug in their OS, they couldn't get the vendor to fix the problem, so they used it to gain access to the vendors system and placed an "example" of the problem there.
Now....ill admit the example was one where the people went quite oveboard and did do some damage (making a card stacker shuffle peoples punch cards is just plain mean!)
Of course...I guess the thing is... when it comes to actually hacking in the "break in" sense, for it to really be a hack it has to be novel, it has to be original, it has to have style.
Pounding a system thousands of times over to send out mails, and not a single one of them being to postmaster telling them that their system is open? Thats not original, its not novel, and it completely lacks style.
Its more than an offense of stolen resources, its an offense against good taste.
Harm alone isn't the real issue. Forgeing a check is not just stealing money. Its forgery.
It means you are impersonating a person. You are willfully claiming to be another person for the purpose of gaining access to something. You are lieing.
Is 7 years too harsh....ok yes it probably is. Then again, I am not a fan of jail per se anyway. I don't think that even a week in jail is warrented for almost any crime (including murder). Tho, its mostly because I have a problem with putting people in cages, against their will.
However, i think he should be punished. It should be made DAMNED SURE that he doesn't profit from what he has done. Steps should be taken to make sure that he is watched and not able to do it again anytime soon.
Something must be done to reform him, and show him that what he has done is wrong. A message must be sent to show that this type of behaviour is not tolerated and every step will be taken to make sure that its practitioners will NOT profit from stolen resources.
Unfortunaly, jail is the only real method we have for doing this. its sad but true. Its harsh but, its all we have right now. So... send him away and hope it sets an example. being a parasite is just wrong.
I agree that its sad that people are punished less for rape than for fraud. However, I will not agree that this is too harsh of a punishment for fraud.
> How would you like it if a hacker got 7 years
> for breaking into a computer system?
Its not about breaking in. Its about exploiting a flaw for personal gain. Its about breaking in thousands upon thousands of times over and over and using it to promote your own financial gain.
A person who "hijacks" a system once to demonstrate that it CAN be done, and makes a point to not hurt anyone in doing it - has done little wrong in my book. Simple tresspass maybe, perhaps foolish, but nothing truely and fundamentally evil.
A person who "hijacks" a system directly for the purpose of furthering their own personal goals and to assign the blame away from himself? a Person who "hijacks" a system specifically for the purpose of committing FRAUD. This is much worst than the simple act of "tresspass".
I am sorry but... if its new and original, or if its done to demonstrate the possibility or just to learn about the system and to teach oneself what can be done...that is hacking. Just taking a well known problam and pounding it to death because you can or using it for personal gain, that is not hacking, its exploitation.
I see, fundamentally, no difference between forging a check to steal money from a persons account, and what spammers do.
They connect to another host, and exploit a configuration flaw to send mail through it. They masquerade as a legitimate user (just as a check forger masquerades as a legitimate check writter for an account) to achieve their end.
Now hacking is another story. I see no problem with "hacking". Exploiting holes to gain elevated privilidge for the sake of doing it...and then closing those holes and helping those who run the system to fix the problem...thats another story.
There is quite a difference between breaking in as an example, the so called "ethical hacking", like what happend to slashdot a few weeks/months back, and exploiting a hole for personal gain.... over and over again.
Spammers are the most unethical creatures! They join online services with full intention of violating the Terms of Service. They search for "weak" hosts and then use them to launch their spam.
They remove all of the grief onto others. They cause the admins of the systems (who are not totally without blame usually) to get floods of abuse reports and cause them lots of greif. They then just open another account and do it all over again - closing their account doesn't even slow them down! As an added bonus, their mail floods slow down the hosts that they are using - causing mail delays and resource issues for legitimate users of the machines.
It is simple theft of resources, and they do it over and over again. Reaping the rewards at essentially zero cost to themselves. They can send out thousands upon thousands of messages for mere pennies.
If they setup their own domains, with their own legitimate mail servers, and used those to spam from - then I wouldn't have a problem with them. Of course, every mail server and ISP in existance would have them blocked at the boarder router within a week, and they know it - so they act like parasites, feeding off weak systems - and transfereing all of their costs to others.
They change their usernames and things often (want to see my spam message folder? Its interesting to see the tiny changes they make to things - one has to imagine specifically to get around blocking filters)
Make an example of the bastards I say. They are parasites.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends what you mean by "more damage" now doesn't it.
I wont agree on Drug dealers... unless you are talking about when they cheat people out (making them fradulent) or engage in turf wars - all things that are products of prohibition, not the actual profession of selling drugs (pharmasists are in the same buisness)
However the others... does a single murderer or rapist who commits a single murder or rape do more harm to society than a single con artist who fraudulently cheats 1 "dupe"?
Ok yes, in that case I would agree with you. However, while a murderer may kill one person (usually out of rage; few murders are actually planned acts) or a rapist may rape a few before he is caught.... a con artist will go on ripping off person after person. Its a willfull, planned, calculated act
Thes particular con artists ripped off 12,000 people, in a rather trivial manner. If unpunished, they could easily do it again and again. I can't remember the last time 12,000 people were killed all in one act, at least not without the sanctioning of some government.
Should rapists and murderers be let go free? Hell no. They are horrid crimes that should not be allowed, but neither should fraud be allowed. They are theives.
Excuse me but... fraud isn't a real crime?
Fraud... willfully disseminating false information for the purpose of doing or aquiring things that you are not entitled to?
As for drug production and moving... I see no reason to jail them, they are just filling a profitable market. I think they should have the FDA sent after them and be forced to slap ingredients labels on their products and do real quality assurance testing.
I think these con artists, because thats what they are, are the "Real Criminals". They are offering a product that they do not provide, they are stealing resources from ISPs and the rest of the net. They ARE cheating and swindling people out of their money, and giving headaches to admins in the process.
They are leaches on society. At least drug producers are providing people with a product that they actually want! Spammers force their junk on everyone, and use stolen resources to do it.
Imagine you walk into a store and purchase a large peice of furnature...they take your money and say "Just drive around back to the loading dock and we will load it on your vehicle"...then when you drive around noone is there and upon going back into the store, the clerk claims that he never saw you before and has no idea what your talking about. Are you saying this man would not be a "Real criminal" worthy of jail time? Thats effectivly what many of these spammers are doing.
Its fraud. Advertising using forged headers and obfuscating where your comming from... thats fraud too. These people are "Real criminals".
-Steve
Which of course just points to the fact that not every term in a contract is actually enforcable.
Many states have lots of laws WRT apartments and renting to prevent landlords from doing nasty things, and to protect tennants.
In NY state a perdson cannot be evicted between the months of November and April (I think, Its most of the winter and a little more anyway...).
Most places have whole hosts of silmilar regulations, that no agreement can legally do away with.
-Steve
I consider myself fairly left....
I would prefer that noone "Pushes through" legislation at all. I want every voice to be heard...I fully believe in free speach. However, legislation is not free speach.
I don't want a theocratic state. Your gods law has no place in the "Law of the land". No religion has any right to push its views and restrict the actions of people who are not adherents to its faith.
Chruch and state must be kept seprate. COmpletely seprate. I am a firm believer that ANY argument that has anything to do with religion should immediatly be rejected when it comes to whether or not a law should be passed. Mythology has no place in the halls of congress (unfortunaly, it finds its way there all too often).
-Steve
Wow....thats right.
I completely forgot about Dark City...never made the connection. That was a great film. It wasn't until you mentioned it now and I started thinking about it that I realised what a ripoff the matrix was.
The Matrix was still a good story...and had lots of neat eyecandy and even some passable dialog. However...it was lacking something... the real character development...the real story of it.
Episode I had the same problem. It was all flashy CGI and cool effect...with little to no real character development and real plot.
After some conversations I have had...I wonder. The real question... Aniken Skywalker must become Darth Vader. Can Lucas pull THAT off? Can he turn Cute little "Ani" into "Lord Vader" who ruthlessly hunts down and kills ALL of the Jedi Knights (well ok, all but Obi-Wan and Yoda, who manage to escape).
I can excuse the watered down Drivel that was Episode I, if they can do that. Ok... We are introduced. We have Aniken brought into the story. Can they do the followthrough that they need to?
This has the potential to be one of the best movies in QUITE a long time, or it has the potiential to be no better than the usual hollywood crap. I don't see it landing inbetween.
Then explain why used book stores exist.
I can go down the street to Davis Square and there is a huge store that JUST sells old used books. Its all they do...buy em and sell em.
Sure, the text may be there, but that doesn't matter. It is a well established practice for people to sell old used books. It has been going on for years and years.
Lawsuits have been brought on similar grounds before, and they always lose. Just because its written doesn't make it true. Many MANY things written in copyright statments are just as much works of fiction as any story of the bible. (which is a really good analogy, IMHO, since its fiction that some people read and actually believe is truth)
I hearby forbid everyone from driving a car. Now can you figure out why thats a silly thing for me to do? I do it anyway. Does it stop you?
-Steve
hmmmm I dunno....
Whenever a spammer sends me a spam with a toll free number in it, I always am sure to call it a few times.
Usually leaving a message saying how much I hate spam and letting them know that I keep track of the companies that spam me, so I can avoid doing buisness with them in the future.
Then I usually call again and do it 3 or 4 more times, just to use up some more of their voice mail system space and add to the phone charges.
Noone has complained yet... I think they actually practice what they preach...they just hit delete.
-Steve
Unfortunaly I have to disagree here. This can and will work. For several reasons actually. This isn't like drugs.
See with drugs, they are fairly easy to produce (even the toughest once require little more than a diligent chemist or botanist and a little inginuity - above the ability of the "average man" but not the average "trained chemist")
This means you have laws aimed at stopping the supply and distribution. That never works. You simply can not stop people from obtaining goods that exist, or can be made in sufficient quantities from distributing them.
However, in this case its different, only slightly, but still different. It is a long term process to be done in stages see...because this isn't the law stopping distribution, its the producers.
This is just the first step. They start with little copy protections things. They seem "token" and silly. Easy to bypass, hardly a threat.
Next thing you know, VCRs are a thing of the past, noone makes them. DVDs and DVD recorders replace them. The same for hard drives without copy protection etc.
As time goes on, the switch to HDTV, your VCR dies out, VCRs are no longer produced etc etc. Next thing you know, the majority of devices automagically respect the copy protect bits. You can't even find hardware that doesn't. Old hardware that doesn't is no longer produced...and so supplies will begin to dwindle.
its a stepwise process...eventually it leaves the producer in control. Fair use is gone, not by law but by media control. Check mate, in fact thats a good analogy, cuz its alot like chess....
You can move around, but slowly, your world gets smaller and smaller, they move in, and the next thing you know, your trapped, check mate.
The ONLY things that can stop this are renegade hardware manafacturers. Individuals doing things like "fixing" their own hardware will always be far and few between, wont even show up on the radar.
If they do it slowly enough, then they win, because people will just get used to it, and will just accept the limitations...slowly. People tend to be accepting of slow changes and react violently to fast ones.
-Steve
Well....
Its not always obvious who has the "authority" to say its ok. Obviously the student was misled by the teacher. He was led to believe that he had permission.
If I am talking to you on the phone and I say "Hey why don't you come over later. I am stopping at the store on my way home... they key is under the mat, so if I am not there yet just go in"... then you would have every right to do so...
However, if I give you the address of someone else, and tell you that its my place, and to do that - thats another story. Is it your fault for doing what you thought you had permission to do?
A better example would be the teacher offered a challenge to students to break into his own office.
-Steve
I realize this is an old discussion but.... I just read it and noticed this. Maybe someone will care (I am posting anonymously so that noone can trace back what I have to say to the institution that I speak about).
.login rather than setup as the shell)
I worked at a hospital. A big one that did alot of research. The security there was absolutely disgusting. Some things were secure... fairly so. Many things were not.
Firewall? Yea...but it had more ways into it than you can count. They are never hard to get through. Patient data was going out in plain text on many segments. They were just starting to install switches (which fixes the problem somewhat).
No exageration at all...I was talking with a friend at the helpdesk (I was a tech; so we worked somewhat closely at times to coordinate problem fixes). We were talking about the patient care system (the system used for assigning beds to patients check-ins etc), ran on some obscure unix flavor. We had a root shell on the machine in about 30 seconds because the limited access account for the helpdesk was setup in a really stupi dmanner (root login, with a restricted menu shell - run from the
It was really disgusting - lots of systems with easy to guess or even default passords. It was just amazing the stuff I saw (as a tech who bounced from system to system and problem to problem, I saw ALOT).
Of course, physical security was a joke too, Firewall? what firewall? Wouldn't take much to walk in and connect a laptop up to a network jack if you were even mildly cluefull.
-Steve
However the murder rate skyrocketed.
The number of murders per 100,000 people skyrocketed from 1920 to 1933 and then drops off sharply. It took more than 50 years for the murder rate to reach that level again.
> I wonder what would have happened if liquer
> could not be acquired from our neighbors?
A moot point, since it is, and always will be. No drug can ever be prohibited sucessfully. There will always be a way to either make it, or smuggle it in. ALL prohibition EVER does is create wealthy black markets, and put non-violent people in jail.
Even in Iran, where all of the liquer stores were burned to the ground when the shah came into power, and alcohol was immediatly outlawed.... still today you can buy liquer. Its available to anyone who wants it. (A good friend of mine was iranian). The ONLY efect that it had was to increase the number of people who went blind from methanol consumption (some of the people making the alcohol didn't know what they were doing).
-Steve
You know... I never thought of it from that angle.
... by clicking and holding in the right places at the right times, one could keep elevated priviliges to make modifications to restricted files)
:).
I mean, certainly - I hate censorware. I think the very idea of even TRYING to stop a person from accessing information that is available to the world is wrong.
However, this could be quite interesting. Thinking back, yea - kids raised around such things always find out how to get around them. Subverting authority, in even the most slight and novel way is definitly a kids major past time.
Kind of reminds me of when I found out how to subvert foolproof on the Macs at school (easy -
I used to use it to change all of the icon colors (with labels)... just for shits and giggles. Then there was that one time that I littered the box with porn in mischievous ways (last day of class for us seniors).
Ahh.... school was fun. Maybe its good that the kids are getting a new toy to play with. It truely does facilitate learning... learning how to get around restrictions, and make the best of a bad situation
-Steve
While many forms of socialism have used institutionalized information blocking, I wouldn't exactly call it "the first step to a socialist environment".
...then I would agree that it is one, but disagree that its the "first" step - as the first steps happened a long time ago ;)
Information blockage is hardly a basic tennet of "Socialism". Many systems, socialist and not, have used such things over the years. Many continue to use them.
Now, if you had said "First step towards a totalitarian system" (which may or may not be socialist)
-Steve
Prohibition was a good idea?
It was, perhaps, a well-intentioned idea. That doesn't make it a "good idea".
Like this, well intentioned, but just plain bad. Yes... they want to prevent harm and do "good". However, they don't realize that the solution does more harm than it can possibly do good.
That makes it a bad idea, no matter how well intentioned it is. Just like prohibition did not work, and continues to not work today (only 1 form of it actually ended).
The sad thing is what prohibition teaches us. Whilke individuals may learn from their mistakes, they may even make mistakes with such consequences as they serve as warning to others, Governments and societies do not apear to learn from their mistakes.
-Steve
> And while you're at it, rattling all the doors
> and windows to see if everything's locked. Oh
> yeah - and let's not forget to check those
> common hiding places for a spare key. You use a
> Schlage lock? Cool - I've got a Schlage master
> key.
Port scanners do one thing...they scan ports. Ocasionally, with features like ident lookups and OS detection...but in essece they just scan ports and say what they can about them.
Tool sthat actually try to exploit vulnerabilities are a whlol enother story. A PORT SCANNER just "looks". It doesn't try to actually "Open the window and crawl in" or to "pick the lock". Thats a wholly different tool. (the two can be integrated, of course - but I wouldn't call the resulting "automated cracking tool" a "port scanner" any more than I would call a leatherman "a pocket knife").
> As you might guess, I don't like deliberate
> portscanners. My network is MY NETWORK. It's
> here for my convenience, not yours, and I don't
> particularly appreciate you poking around on
> my boxes.
Whether or not you appreciate it, its going to happen. No amount of whining, complaining, or even legislating is going to stop it.
All services that a person CAN connect to from the outside should be considered "public". People WILL find them, so they had better be secure.
-Steve
Which would really truly suck ass. It would make me have to switch ISPs.
I often use my hom emachines to port scan machines that I have on other networks to see what can get through, what is running etc. Port scanners are GREAT tools.
Sure, its nothing that can't be culled from netstat and other things, but port scanning is fast and effective. It also is great for testing ipchains rules etc to block port access.
Besides... port scanning is not malicous. Sure, it is often a prelude to an attack, but it is not, itself an attack.
Port scanning is just a useful tool. If you don't want people using a service, then don't set it up so that the entire world can access it. If you don't want people connecting to a port, then don't run anything on that port, or block it off with ipchains rules.
If its available to the world, then assume that it is public...because it is. I mean really... looking in the window of your car is a prelude to stealing your stereo... but does that mean we should outlaw looking in through the windows of parked cars?
-Steve
Very true.
However, is Georgi Guninski the ONLY person finding vulnerabilities? This isn't abotu microsot, this is about ANY vendor and every vendor who would want to do it. Frankly, MS can go to hell for all I care, their vulnerabilities effect me in 1 way only: humor value
What about when the vendor finds the issue? Or someone finds it and reports it only to the vendor? This happens often enough. Yes, right now this is a minor issue, where only 2 or 3 vendors are doing it. This is the time to nip the issue in the bud - before it becomes a problem.
Secondly, what about the imortality of the information? A year or two years down the road, after the website has been reorganized and all the links arew broken - guess what... any archives are useless. And if it was a problem that the vendor found, or wasn't very popular and talked about - then fuck the archive is useless.
> I'll tell you exactly why this is dangerous. It
;)), thats annoying. However, if several companies start doing it - it essentially makes BUGTRAQ useless - I now have to spend more time bouncing from source to source.
> allows the vendor to add/edit or delete the
> advisory *without* telling anyone.
While the most obvious problem, its not the major issue in my mind.
When a message goes to bugtraq, it is immortal. It never goes away, ever. Even if the BUGTRAQ main archives are wiped out, its replicated in so many place, under so many different points of control.
When its on a website, if the company folds, or redesigns their website, or has a hard drive failure and finds their backups weren't working...
The adviseries are gone. So in the future, if anyone has a reason to need them for any reason, they simply are not available.
Thats only part of the problem. Its an annoyance. BUGTRAQ is a single point of information. I go there and I can find out about all sorts of security problems, with in-depth information (usually) on how I can assess my vulnerability and reduce or eliminate exposure.
If one company (like M$) starts releaseing no content adviseries, and making me go to their website for the info (M$ is a bad example of course since NO M$ advisery could possibly effect a UNIX sysadmin like myself
It discourages active security monitoring. It makes more work for me...and the end result 90% of the time is finding out that its not a problem that affects me anyway (either due to specific version issues, or not being software I am actually using, or depending on features that I am not using).
This is just bad all around. It decreases the value of the list. It makes it harder and more time consuming to keep current - which translates directly into more people deciding that they just don't have the time/energy to do it. Not all of us have infinite time to keep up with this stuff.
-Steve
My point was that these same people, if the profit motive is taken away, if they CAN'T profit by doing bad things - then they wont do them.
People don't spam, steal cars, or break into houses because they like doing it (ok, some punk ass kids steal cars for the purpose of joy riding and such... same goes for things like vandalism, but thats about the extent of it). They do it because they can profit by it.
Putting them in prison? what does it solve? When they come out they are just as unskilled as when they started. Still, ALL they know how to do is steal. They are put back on the street, worst off than they began.
Fuck prisons. They solve nothing. You want to get rid of the crime, make sure they don't profit by it. Make sure they don't make a dime off their spam or stealing, and then give them options for how to better themselves.
Your not going to reform a theif by slapping them on the wrist and saying "No, bad". You need to teach them how to get it in the socially acceptable and productive manner. How to earn it.
otherwise, when they get out, still all they know how to do is exactly what they were in for in the first place.
I think the real crime is the cost of living in our society. Its insane. I work a pretty good job as a sysadmin. I don't make top dollar, and am not interested in doing so. However, my budget gets tight! After rent and bills, I really don't end up with too terribly much...but I still live a comfortable life.
I have known people who work unskilled labor jobs. They don't make anywhere near what I do. Constantly struggling to keep their head above water. Working long hours, and ending up with nothing to show for it... just the bare minimums of a roof over their head and hopefully enough gas in the car that they can't really afford but can't get to work without.
At least where I am (Boston area) the cost of living is horrendous. It is, in and of itself, a crime. And people wonder why there are tehives and drug dealers. I wonder why there aren't more of them!
A good friend of mine did alot of bad things in his youth. I know he knows how to steal a car. He has come to me in the past for the consolation... cuz he works 80 hours a week, works his fingers to the bone. Can barely make rent half the time.
He knows he could steal a few cars and make some quick cash, pay that rent and make the car payment and still leave him with plenty of leisure time. He wont do it, cuz he knows its wrong - he doesn't want to go back down that path. Can you imagine the temptation? How many others are there like him?
Its alot easier to talk about morals and "bad people who steal" when you know where you rnext meal is comming from and that your going to have a roof over your head next month.
Do I think its ok to steal? Hell no. Its not. However, I don't think that stealing is the problem. I think its the symptom. Its a symptom of a larger problem. A social and economic one. I don't think putting people in jail or "Making examples of them" is going to solve anything at all. I don't think it reforms people. I think it does simple dis-service to our entire society.
Even if we had a system where by every persons needs were taken care of (and food, water, and shelter arn't the only needs, I count free time to persue a life outside of work is a fundamental need) we will still have stealing and crime... tehere will always be those few who do "bad things" just because they like it... fine, when we have such a system - put them in jail. For anyone else, jail does more harm than good.
For whatever else they may have done, they are still human beings. Hell, I don't even like the idea of holding animals in cages without a good reason. (not to open another can of worms but yes, I think medical testing is a good reason)
-Steve
Actually... ive never really seen the whole point of keeping a lover "locked up"....
I mean... sex is fun right? If you love someone, why would you want them to not engage in it? Can't they have fun with another person? Should they not be allowed to play poker with a friend or play video games?
Really...its just sex. Sex is fun, sex is natural. A person is not property, trying to lock them up and keep them to yourself is silly.
but yes... its true intrusion does cause headaches. As an admin who has had to deal with them in the past, I can attest to this. However, as far as I can tell, ethical hacking doesn't really happen anyway. Every time we have caught it, it has been some script kiddie who wanted to setup an IRC bouncer so they could be a nuisencse or to deface a web page.
Quite frankly, I have a problem with punishing people for mere curiosity. A person is curious, they reach out and touch and try to identify, they try to ifind out how something works or what they can do.
Is it always right? no. But I think intent DOES matter. Accidental harm is not the same as malicous harm. Really, a 7 year old can tell you that. There is a difference between misjudging how far away someone is and hitting them with a board you are moving, and purposfully knocking them in the head with it.
Intent of action means just as much to me as any other factor. Certainly killing a person through negligence is very bad. However, its nowhere near as bad as killing them with purpose, with intent.
Quite frankly, I don't think it even really matters. I think you will find that if the legal system or whatever one wishes to use for dealing with social ills is pointed at thos who are malicous and harming through willfull negligence and intent, that is plenty of work and those who screw around out of curiosity are much less of a problem, and tend to fall to the level of simple infrequent annoyance.
-Steve
In theory the whole point of a jail is not just containment, but to "reform" a person so that they can be let out and once again become a productive member of society. However, the only real effect that jails have is mixing criminals together and leaving them worst off, and more likely to commit crimes when they get out than ever before.
Quite frankly, I want to know... how do you translate some monetary amount of damage, or loss of life into "X years"? How is this "crime" worth 5 years of a persons life, and this other crime 10? How do you make that translation?
I think throwing a person in a cage is an EXTREMELY HARSH punishment, any way you slice it. As such I think the use of such a punishment should be weighed very heavily.
> As for stopping it by removing any "profit"
> incentives, profit is not merely monetary.
No its not, but in many cases it is. In this case it is. People don't spam for the fun of it. They don't spam to annoy people. They spam because it is profitable. They spam because its free advertising for whatever their money making scheme is.
Do coke and heroin dealers cut their product with everything from baking soda to lidocain because they LIKE seeing people take impure drugs? Hell no...they do it because it increases their profit margin. It takes their product, which is worth
more by weight than gold, and raises its return
on investment even more.
Spammers are the same thing, people who know how they can make money, and are doing it. Its free advertising man. Or for the more "sophistocated" ones, its free advertising that they are selling to someone else. Not just stolen network and CpU resources, but stolen and sold.
Do you really think that criminals comit crimes "because they are bad people"? Ive known people who were "criminals" in their past, made their money stealing and cheating. They weren't "bad people", they were people doing what they knew how to do because they could make more money doing that than any legitimate job that they were qualified for.
If you take away the profit motive, then the few trouble makers who like hurting people aside, you force them to look towards legitimate work. The vast majority of the problem goes away.
Frankly there would be a hell of alot more trolls on slashdot if one could make money by trolling.
-Steve
Ethical check fraud?
Well how about I find a bank whose checks are extremely easy to forge because of something that they could easily fix (of course the truth is that any checks are easy to forge...since a forgery doesn't even have to be good enough to fool a bank in most cases)
So I forge a check for $0.01 (or $0 if possible...or some token amount) and immediatly have the money deposited back into the account that I forged it to be from.
The point of "ethical" hacking is exploiting the system, not for personal gain, but to expose the problem and get it fixed. Check out the story in the jargon dictionary "The Meaning of Hack" and read the last story.
It was about some motorola engineers in the 70s who found a severe security bug in their OS, they couldn't get the vendor to fix the problem, so they used it to gain access to the vendors system and placed an "example" of the problem there.
Now....ill admit the example was one where the people went quite oveboard and did do some damage (making a card stacker shuffle peoples punch cards is just plain mean!)
Of course...I guess the thing is... when it comes to actually hacking in the "break in" sense, for it to really be a hack it has to be novel, it has to be original, it has to have style.
Pounding a system thousands of times over to send out mails, and not a single one of them being to postmaster telling them that their system is open? Thats not original, its not novel, and it completely lacks style.
Its more than an offense of stolen resources, its an offense against good taste.
-Steve
Harm alone isn't the real issue. Forgeing a check is not just stealing money. Its forgery.
It means you are impersonating a person. You are willfully claiming to be another person for the purpose of gaining access to something. You are lieing.
Is 7 years too harsh....ok yes it probably is. Then again, I am not a fan of jail per se anyway. I don't think that even a week in jail is warrented for almost any crime (including murder). Tho, its mostly because I have a problem with putting people in cages, against their will.
However, i think he should be punished. It should be made DAMNED SURE that he doesn't profit from what he has done. Steps should be taken to make sure that he is watched and not able to do it again anytime soon.
Something must be done to reform him, and show him that what he has done is wrong. A message must be sent to show that this type of behaviour is not tolerated and every step will be taken to make sure that its practitioners will NOT profit from stolen resources.
Unfortunaly, jail is the only real method we have for doing this. its sad but true. Its harsh but, its all we have right now. So... send him away and hope it sets an example. being a parasite is just wrong.
-Steve
I agree and disagree.
I agree that its sad that people are punished less for rape than for fraud. However, I will not agree that this is too harsh of a punishment for fraud.
> How would you like it if a hacker got 7 years
> for breaking into a computer system?
Its not about breaking in. Its about exploiting a flaw for personal gain. Its about breaking in thousands upon thousands of times over and over and using it to promote your own financial gain.
A person who "hijacks" a system once to demonstrate that it CAN be done, and makes a point to not hurt anyone in doing it - has done little wrong in my book. Simple tresspass maybe, perhaps foolish, but nothing truely and fundamentally evil.
A person who "hijacks" a system directly for the purpose of furthering their own personal goals and to assign the blame away from himself? a Person who "hijacks" a system specifically for the purpose of committing FRAUD. This is much worst than the simple act of "tresspass".
I am sorry but... if its new and original, or if its done to demonstrate the possibility or just to learn about the system and to teach oneself what can be done...that is hacking. Just taking a well known problam and pounding it to death because you can or using it for personal gain, that is not hacking, its exploitation.
-Steve
I disagree.
I see, fundamentally, no difference between forging a check to steal money from a persons account, and what spammers do.
They connect to another host, and exploit a configuration flaw to send mail through it. They masquerade as a legitimate user (just as a check forger masquerades as a legitimate check writter for an account) to achieve their end.
Now hacking is another story. I see no problem with "hacking". Exploiting holes to gain elevated privilidge for the sake of doing it...and then closing those holes and helping those who run the system to fix the problem...thats another story.
There is quite a difference between breaking in as an example, the so called "ethical hacking", like what happend to slashdot a few weeks/months back, and exploiting a hole for personal gain.... over and over again.
Spammers are the most unethical creatures! They join online services with full intention of violating the Terms of Service. They search for "weak" hosts and then use them to launch their spam.
They remove all of the grief onto others. They cause the admins of the systems (who are not totally without blame usually) to get floods of abuse reports and cause them lots of greif. They then just open another account and do it all over again - closing their account doesn't even slow them down! As an added bonus, their mail floods slow down the hosts that they are using - causing mail delays and resource issues for legitimate users of the machines.
It is simple theft of resources, and they do it over and over again. Reaping the rewards at essentially zero cost to themselves. They can send out thousands upon thousands of messages for mere pennies.
If they setup their own domains, with their own legitimate mail servers, and used those to spam from - then I wouldn't have a problem with them. Of course, every mail server and ISP in existance would have them blocked at the boarder router within a week, and they know it - so they act like parasites, feeding off weak systems - and transfereing all of their costs to others.
They change their usernames and things often (want to see my spam message folder? Its interesting to see the tiny changes they make to things - one has to imagine specifically to get around blocking filters)
Make an example of the bastards I say. They are parasites.
-Steve