On The Trail Of Super-Zonda

Dynamoo writes "BBC Radio 4 has been on the trail of the notorious Super-Zonda spammers and crackers, according to this article. Super-Zonda's trick is to find insecure hosts and pressgang them into webservers for mail order brides, viagra and other spam favorites. In this case a server is traced back to a hacked machine at a major international airline. The BBC investigate some of the people allegedly behind the spam in an investigation starting on the Spamhaus houseboat in London and ending in the Netherlands via Moscow. The BBC point the finger at Martijn Bevelander of MegaProvider as being not the innocent party he seems. The BBC provide some evidence to back this up, and are not known for rash accusations."

Hooray!

[sbszine (633428)]

Finally, investigative reporting that is actually helpful and interesting. Go the Beeb : )

Re:Hooray!

[tqft (619476)]

Hmm...

"...investigative reporting that is actually helpful and interesting..."

Wouldn't have anything to with them being publicly funded and not beholden to corporate interests?

Re:Hooray!

[56ker (566853)]

They're not publicly funded (from tax pounds). If you want to choose not to receive television pictures at home, then you don't have to pay a licence fee (which goes to fund the BBC). They get their money from television licences (about approx US$160/year for colour). There used to be radio licences too (years ago). They still have their own agenda though - although you're right - they aren't as concerned with profit as a business would be. The C in BBC does stand for Corporation though....

Re:Hooray!

[whoever57 (658626)]

They're not publicly funded (from tax pounds)

In name only. The license fee is effectively a tax on ownership of a television, since every owner of a television must pay it and persistent failure to pay can result in jail time. If it walks like a duck.....

I believe that even if one can only receive satellite broadcasts, one still has to have a license fee.

If one could own a television, and avoid the license fee by not watching BBC channels, then it would not be a tax.

Re:Hooray!

[Gordonjcp (186804)]

I believe that even if one can only receive satellite broadcasts, one still has to have a license fee.

Well, duh! The BBC produces about 12 satellite TV channels, which (like all other BBC TV and radio channels) carry no advertising. Do you think they give them away for free too?

BBC funding

[evilandi (2800)]

Their satelite channels run adverts as well

The channels aimed at British audiences (ie. for those who pay the licence fee) do not carry adverts. These are BBC1, 2, 3, 4, Children's BBC, CBebbies (for toddlers), News 24 and BBC Parliament. Same goes for audio services Radio 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, Asian Network, BBC Cymru (Welsh language), BBC Local Radio etc. These are almost entirely funded by the licence fee [bbc.co.uk].

In the case of advert-free satellite signals these are quite literally "aimed"; the BBC broadcast advert-free from a satellite with tight coverage [digitalspy.co.uk] of the UK mainland with only very minimal bleed into the rest of Europe.

The channels aimed at international audiences (ie. for those who do not pay the licence fee) are funded by a mixture of foriegn office taxpayer's money, adverts and in some cases subscriptions. These include BBC World, BBC Prime and BBC America and are handled by a slightly seperate commerical company called BBC Worldwide [slashdot.org] and are broadcast on a number of satellites with coverage for most countries.

The international audio stations such as BBC World Service and BBC English By Radio are funded solely by the foreign office [bbc.co.uk] (similar to the funding for the Voice of America).

British viewers can also see BBC programming on non-BBC channels with advertising such as S4C (Welsh language), UK Gold (comedy & soap repeats) and UK History (documentary repeats). Some of these channels are entirely funded by advertising, some also have small injections from various government departments such as the Welsh Office, Scottish Office and European Union, in the case of regional language programming such as Welsh or Scots Gaelic. For instance, the popular Welsh soap opera Pobl Y Cum (Valley People) is made by the BBC but broadcast on independent station S4C supported by both advertising and government funding [PDF, Welsh and English] [s4c.co.uk].

Re:Hooray!

[aziraphale (96251)]

I think it might have more to do with the unique and peculiar phenomenon called 'Radio 4'. You have to understand, this is a radio station like no other in the world. Its news coverage makes most broadsheet newspapers of international standing look like supermarket tabloids; its factual programming ranges from farming to education to natural history to technology to science to history to art without missing a beat; it has been the starting point for some of the most innovative comedy ever to come out of britain; it broadcasts a daily soap opera set in a small country village that has been running for over 50 years (and whose theme tune can mysteriously be instantly recited by any british person even if they've never heard it); it carries the shipping forecast of the british meteorological office; and it features no advertising or jingles at all (unless you can call the sound of 'big ben' chiming the hour, or 'the pips' (a strange sequence of electronic beeps that mark the hour), or the national anthem at closedown, jingles...)

The point is, investigating internet spam is as much to be expected from radio four as interviewing a man who's devoted his life to the study of finches, or broadcasting a group of grown men sitting in a theatre reciting the names of london underground stations in accordance with some arcane set of rules.

They probably followed the investigation with a reading from a novel by Hanif Kureishi and a half hour documentary on the history of beekeeping. And then the shipping forecast.

Dogger, Fisher, German Bight.... easterly, becoming more northerly later, rising.

Re:Hooray!

[tqft (619476)]

"If you want a good example of a bad publicly-funded media, look no farther than the US's PBS. It is corrupt, biased, and often times not very interesting or helpful"

Never seen PBS except for the odd "special" that gets repeated here. Maybe they are. But at least it is balance to the Rupert and Kerry (Packer) worldview we get shoved in our faces in Oz. If I want real news I go to Reuters, Bloomberg, maybe a speciality site (Jane's for mil stuff, /. for SCo vs IBM), maybe a Google search or two and a few

Re:Hooray!: inaccurate though

[by Anonymous Coward]

First, it was not a "hacked" web server.
Second, it appears that Super-Zonda just recently moved the actual host (well, it too was a proxy) to CyberAngels (they had been on servepath.com for a long time, then ev1 [I think it was] for a weekend, then ...

The spammer uses network scanning tools to find an open web proxy. A system where, with the proxy located at {PROXY_IP} as its IP address,

telnet {PROXY_IP} 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.nytimes.com

gets the front page of the NY Times.

He then does the following.

He uses something like the following:

telnet {PROXY_IP} 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: [a_hostname_of_his_own]

and looks at his nameserver's records to see whence came a request to resolve his hostname. Now he knows the location of the nameserver/resolver used by the open proxy. He does this a few times (the proxy may use several nameservers - just as in configuring your windows system for the 'net, you enter two nameservers in the settings). He also checks at his web server to see whence comes the connection (the proxy may or may not make its outgoing connections using the same IP address).

Now he sets his nameserver to do the following:

1: It responds to requests to resolve his spam site which come from the nameserver(s) used by the proxy with the correct IP address (of his spam site).

2: It responds to ANYONE else with the IP address of the open web proxy.

He then sets up his web server itself to drop all packets to port 80 (maybe to all other ports as well) EXCEPT packets to his port 80 *which come from the abused proxy*.

The result? Everyone resolves his spamvertized host to the abused, hacked, illegally accessed web proxy and sends HTTP packets thither. That server/proxy attempts to get and serve up the pages by getting the IP address from its resolver which then gets the IP address of the hacker/spammer's actual site and accesses it and gets the page to return to the victim. Even if one happens to guess at the location of the actual spammer's machine, one cannot verify it since it appears dead to anyone except the proxy.

The trick to locating him is to find out what resolver the proxy is using and have your resolver, nslookup or dig in Linux, say, do a lookup, but not via your ISP's nameserver - instead use the proxy's nameserver/resolver. Then you find whence the proxy got what it served up.

[By the way, this is a pro-spam operation and the spammer's site may host some clients' stuff and in some cases, at least, it actually proxies the pages from another site.]

It is not a matter of the spammer "hacking" anything. It is simply his hijacking web servers which serve as proxies but which allow anyone to use them as proxies.

Why "super-zonda"? The names he used for his nameservers were ns1.super-zonda.com, etc. For other spamertized domains he registered different names for the nameservers, but they were located at the same IP addresses/locations.

One of the web servers/open proxies he hijacked was a British Airways travel shop server. He also hijacked a mideast bank web server. A K12 server in Colorado, I think it was. Several in Korea. He would spam for many clients at once, hijacking several web servers (one for every one or two of the hostnames).

The article on the BBC says:

"When Paul and Matt looked up which computer the website was using to host its service, the IP address belonged to British Airways."

Wrong. That was what it appeared to be. The pages were not there.
That site was proxying them.

Oh, oh yeah?

[Faust7 (314817)]

But it is a crime that is very difficult to police, and a crime that is growing daily, as spammers find ever more inventive ways of staying ahead.

Well, now Microsoft is on the case. So they'd just better watch out.

Super-Zonda?

[levik (52444)]

Wasn't that one of the characters in the original Street-Fighter 2 arcade?

Sure ;-)

[Faust7 (314817)]

A special investigation by the BBC has revealed that British Airways was used without its knowledge to host a website advertising Russian mail order brides.

As if the BBC would ever admit its nation's premier airline was desperate for some hot Siberian lovin'.

Re:Sure ;-)

[AndroidCat (229562)]

I once received Russian mail order bride spam from an open proxy on the firewall of the South Korean Naval HQ. I almost fell out of my chair.

I think I'd like to be the first to say...

[fireboy1919 (257783)]

kill.

KILL!!

KIILLLL!!!!

Rid the world of the filthy disgusting spammonger! Use his vile machines to broadcast a message to the world that spam shall not go unpunished! The land shall be purified!*


*This rant curtesy of having just watched Boondock Saints and Dune.

Is that a dagger in your pocket

[seismic (91160)]

Many have tried but its proven very difficult to get really up close to the viagra spammers.

Confused...

[by Anonymous Coward]

I thought the mail order bride email were jokes, not SPAM.

<russian accent>
"Hello, My name is Tania and I have executed 18 years of age. I love ...."
</russian accent>

Hang 'em high

[The Tyro (247333)]

This is computer cracking/fraud at its seedy worst.

Are these the jokers responsible for the Pornographic spam and Mail-order brides dreck that fills up my inbox? And they are using hacked commercial webservers as relay points for this cruft?

Anyone who assists these guys is guilty of multiple computer crimes, at least as an accessory if nothing else (unless they are in a country that HAS no such laws, or doesn't honor extradition requests from foreign nations). Nobody can claim this is innocent "hacking" for education, curiousity, or "helping out" the victim by showing them what holes they have... this is outright exploitation of someone else's property, equipment, bandwidth, etc for your own financial gain, via spam, no less.

This is fraud, any way you slice it... somebody needs to go to jail.

Hate the sin, Love the sinner

[ObviousGuy (578567)]

Spam is another form of Speech. Yes, it is grossly abused and outright annoying, but it is still protected here in the U.S. (except for pending anti-spam legislation).

But the actions of the spammers (Super-Zonda in this case) are reprehensible. They are clearly breaking the law in hacking into people's computers in the manner that they are, and they should be punished appropriately for that.

Here is one aspect of the DMCA that is very important to retain even if the rest is done away with. If you have a system with some sort of "protection" and someone deliberately circumvents that protection to use your system for illegal activities, that someone should be punished for not just the illegal activities but also for the circumvention of the protections you set up. While I don't advocate the creation of laws for it's own sake (like many gun laws), I think that having a law in place that punishes criminals not just for the crime itself but also for the method of the crime is important in cases like this.

Re:Hate the sin, Love the sinner

[ShaiHulud-23 (632290)]

Oft-quoted blurb from NYTimes article "Tangled up in Spam [noblit.com]" (PDF) by James Gleick:

Many people who hate spam believe, honorably enough, that it's protected as free speech. It is not. The Supreme Court has made clear that individuals may preserve a threshold of privacy. ''Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit,'' wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger in a 1970 decision. ''We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another.''

Re:Hate the sin, Love the sinner

[schon (31600)]

Spam is another form of Speech.

No, it's another form of harrassment.

it is still protected here in the U.S.

Really? Cheif Justice Berger, of the US Supreme Court disagrees with you.

"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. We categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."

Are you a supreme court justice? Are you a even a lawyer? No, you're just a lousy /. troll.

So, what, exactly, gives you the authority to claim that the harrassing actions of spammers are "protected"? Please list any relevant quotes that say that harrassment and theft are legal.

Legislation Is Needed

[by Anonymous Coward]

People that run open SMTP relays are part of the problem. Just as pawn shops that accept goods of dubious origin serve as fences and bear some responsibility for the problem of burglary, so do administrators that run open SMTP relays, either maliciously or out of stupidity, bear some responsibility for the spam problem.

I'd like to see owners of open SMTP relays be liable.

No!

[Fastball (91927)]

Reform SMTP or do away with it all together, and this problem likely goes away or becomes a non-issue. Legislation on technology is too often a concession to failure. My God, we haven't even tried an alternative to SMTP, and you're talking about passing laws. There's countless gun control laws at every level of government in the U.S., and does that absolutely prevent people who should not have a gun from getting one? No.

When applied to crises, legislation rarely affects changes as intended. Please, people

What about replacing SMTP?

[egg troll (515396)]

I know it may not be accurate in this particular case, but would overhauling SMTP help reduce spam and other UCE? STMP was built for a more, erm, polite era and seems like its failing in this day and age with regards to spam.

Replacing SMTP won't really help

[dmeranda (120061)]

That wouldn't really solve the problem, unless the replacement was effectively to not have worldwide email. It really comes down to a problem of authenticating the source of the mail, and even then you need some way to know if that source is acceptable. Both of those are really tough problems when applied to a worldwide scale.

Think about secure TLS/SSL websites. The authenticity check is dependent upon the trustworthyness of the root CAs. The respectable CAs must do a lot of manual checking of the registrant's identity before signing a certificate. And that costs a lot of time and money and infrastructure. And even then the certificate-based system we have for webpages is not all that great, it's still relatively easy to hijack websites or even run it yourself (who besides me actually bothers to look at the certificate details when they go to a secure site, or even removes some of the root CAs from their browser's builtin list?).

Now, there certainly should be a way to get the domain name registration information as verifyable as certificate registrations; because the whois databases right now are laughably corrupt, not even the most fundamental checks are performed to insure that the data is correct. But even then, that doesn't stop spam, although it may help you track them down better.

And asuming you have perfect authentication, knowing the source is authentic still doesn't determine whether you consider the source to be a spammer or not. A certificate only proves identity, it doesn't say anything about the type of content being sent. You certainly wouldn't be able to know the millions of different potential email sources, nor keep up with the minute-to-minute changes. And if you're a business you can't use a known sender whitelist; or you may never get job resumes, sales inquires, and so forth. So someone would have to build a list of all "good" non-spammer certificates.

But then you're back to the same situation we have now. You'd just be using certificates or something like that instead of IP addresses as the "identity" you'd be matching against some database, like the many blackhole lists. And given how easy it is to hijack insecure computers, there would certainly be holes around that type of system too.

Now true, the insecurity of vanilla SMTP is an issue for confidentiality purposes, but you can't really blame spam on that. And if you use the already standardized SMTP extensions, such as STARTLS or S/MIME, then SMTP can be pretty secure. Spam is a social problem, not a technology problem.

Hit squads.

[nettdata (88196)]

Paypal donations to hi-tech hit squads, a la Tom Clancy and his Mr. Clark, to track down and eliminate, with EXTREME prejudice, any and all spammers, anywhere in the world. I'd give them $5/month, easy. Hell, film it and broadcast it like COPS. It's not like the embedded media have any real use for those handy portable vidcams they were sporting recently. Now _THAT'S_ a pay per view!

These guys don't care about laws, and any and all fines they MAY receive are just a cost of doing business and a lesson learned on how NOT to do it next time. Mind you, I think they'd start caring if they starting being hurt and/or killed.

And I'm only half kidding...

Anyone wishing to apply for such a squad, please email to...

If Reporters can

[mudpup (14555)]

If reporters can find these spammers who break the law why can't law enforcement do the same?

Open HTTP Proxies

[kiolbasa (122675)]

The trick they use, as I understand it, is to rig their DNS servers to respond differently based on the IP address querying the spammed domains. The DNS responds with the address of an open HTTP proxy normally, and when the open HTTP proxy does the lookup, it gets a different address - the spammer's webserver. That webserver then only responds to those open proxies. The moral of the story is to be more careful when you put any proxy on the internet.

Someone get an address and phone number

[Omkar (618823)]

And we'll finally find a good use for the (offline version) Slashdot effect.

Get the spammer's customers!

[HiKarma (531392)]

Why do commercial spammers spam? Well, for the ones who try it more than once, it's because somebody pays them to do it. Who pays them to spam you? The suckers who buy from them pay them to do it. Without that money the spammers would have little reason to spam.

So what you need to do is punish the spammer's customers, find them, out them and make them afraid.

The way to do this is simple. Just send out some really attractive spams. Offer legit products at irresistable prices. Have legit sites to back up that the offer is real and not too good to be true. Anybody who responds, however, is an evil spam funder, and they will give you all their ID information, which you can use to punish them for funding spammers!

That will stop 'em.

(For the satire impaired, that's what this is.)

You do not go far enough sir

[xant (99438)]

Surely you can find a use for the lovely credit card information they used to purchase these irresistable products from you.

In a perfect world

[by Anonymous Coward]

These spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged thier penises, taken viagra, and are looking for a new relationship. Now that would be poetic justice.

Is it time to start shooting spammers yet?

[Mike Van Pelt (32582)]

I'm serious.

Today, I was working on a problem with our spamassassin server running out of memory, and saw something scary in the log file - email from <one of our biggest customers> to <executive who reports directly to the CEO>, subject "Legal action started", marked as spam.

Very bad to get false positives like this!

However, on tracking it down, it was....

You guessed it....

An ad for an herbal product to "Enlarge your P3n1s!!"

Can we start hunting them down and shooting them yet? Please, pretty please?

http://scs.northwestern.edu/nuilr/peer-net/media 2k /fraud.html

Dead[?] CyberAngels

[AndroidCat (229562)]

Just today (Tuesday July 1st) Telefonica announced that they had dropped Cyberangels as a client for breach of their terms and conditions regarding unsolicited bulk e-mail.

I think they also got dropped from another provider as well. There was some speculation that they were using a hijacked IP block.

There's betting on NANAE about where he pops up next.

Legislate Out The Source

[by Anonymous Coward]

I'm really sick of hearing how the way to take the money out of spam is to charge for e-mail.

Instead of attacking the supply side, attack the demand side. Forget the fact that most of these spammers are outside the US. The fact is, most spam *advertisers* are in the US.

If the law allowed companies/people to be sued for using a service that has been convicted of using illegal means to send spam (invalid return address, hijacked systems, forged headers, etc), it would take about one or two high publicity lawsuits against a couple of spam buyers (lower mortgage rates! viagra! enlargement!) to curb the problem.

This legislation to kill spam by going after the senders will work for all of about a day, until all the buyers start buying service from someone offshore.

This would be self-regulating, market driven phenomenon if played out properly. Legitimate mailing companies could advertise their "legitimacy" and real companies could use those services for real, honest-to-goodness marketing. If someone used a shady mailing company, then they expose themselves to damages.

Whatever. Spam will not significantly decrease until the companies that contract out the services of these mailers have the screws put to 'em.

Rash Accusations?

[EnglishTim (9662)]

"The BBC ... are not known for rash accusations"

I'm not sure Alastair Campbell would agree... ;-)

IT prostitute

[pigeon (909)]

IT's no big surprise, this Bevelander was a well known young internet interpreneur, who became famous in the Netherlands because he represented the internet boom. But he didn't do anything special, and he is the kind of guy who would do anything for money.

Martijn Bevelander's history

[by Anonymous Coward]

I'm a network engineer for a medium-sized ISP in The Netherlands. Martijn Bevelander has been operating in de dutch ISP world for years now. Previously most people saw him as a huge clown; his daddy (some chief somewhere) seems to always fund his playing in the internetworld while he manages to get all his companies to go broke.

His staff continues to show their good knowledge on the Internet: see this mail [cctec.com] where one of his noc monkeys notifies the operators on the Amsterdam Internet Exchange of a new announcement from Bevelander Internet Services: 192.168.0.0/16. Perhaps this was just a sneak preview into the future?

The dutch media have reported on several occasions on him: check this [webwereld.nl] link from Webwereld.

Insiders still laugh on his ignorance regarding security. He used to have his printers wide open connected to the internet, resulting people to send complete black pages to it. Another great story is how he continued to buy new 3com switches after he failed to change the administrators access to them and someone from the outside shutdown't his uplink port. Yeah Martijn, they were all broken.

So far he was just a joke. The troubles started when his company Bevelander Internet Services got broke and he quickly setup a new company called Megaprovider. After most of the customers were transferred, he sold the empty remains to Concepts ICT. Appearantly Megaprovider is not doing to good as well, seeing his Cyberangels adventure.

One of his well-known associates, Joshua Dodds, is known as a true DDoS-kiddo, DoS'ing everyting and everyone who says a bad thing about him on IRCnet. I guess they will never learn...

Let's hear it for the BBC

[Simon Brooke (45012)]

OK, we're seeing a lot of whinging here about whether the television license fee is actually a tax. Well, it sort of is, of course, but it also in important ways, sort of isn't. If it were a tax - a grant from the treasury - then the BBC could easily be forced to toe the government line. It's because the license fee is 'hypothecated' - i.e. dedicated to a particular purpose, in this case the BBC (a thing the treasury really hate) that the BBC is independent from government.

It's because the BBC is independent from Government that we can get spats like this [bbc.co.uk], where the BBC very publicly say, in effect, that the Prime Minister lied to Parliament about Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction, and it's because of the BBC's independence that it can refuse to back down despite the most severe pressure from the government.

So, you know, let's hear it for the BBC and let's hear it for the License Fee [bbc.co.uk]. It's because the license fee is hypothecated - a tax paid by the people directly to an independent organisation - that we have at least one high quality media publisher with the utmost journalistic integrity which can call a sleazy and corrupt government to account, as it is doing now over the lies which led us into an illegal and unjustified war, and as it did under the Tories about MPs taking bribes.

A government run broadcaster could not do this, because the government could tell them to shut up, and cut off their funds if they didn't. A commercial broadcaster would find it much harder to do this, because the big commercial interests which pay for advertising don't want the boat to be rocked.

The BBC is, let's face it, one of the most independent, one of the most honest, one of the most fair broadcasters in the world. In a world where most media is in the hands of a very few commercial interests, mostly with fairly noxious political agendas, having one which is answerable only to the public is a very good thing in my opinion.

Long live the license fee!

Re:Solution to all spam

[JimmytheGeek (180805)]

Sorry - that's dumb. They send 1 million emails per sale. They would send 1 billion if it were an order of magnitude cheaper. There must only be 1 idiot to make it worth annoying 1 million people. The problem is not resolvable with market solutions.

vigilantism, yeah.

yeah, that'll work

[autopr0n (534291)]

Look idiot. How easy to you think it is to convince everyone to stop paying for stuff they get in spam. It's not even possible to get everyone to stop murdering people and molesting children. (I'm not saying that buying something from a spam is as bad as that, of course)

But seriously, these spammers only need to get .001% in order to make money.

Re:Solution to all spam

[nettdata (88196)]

How about people just stop buying the junk the spammers are selling? I guarantee you it will all disappear overnight if everyone does. Thats the beauty of the free market- its only around if it remains desirable.

I doubt that will work out all that well... according to the article, spammers rely on 1 sale per million spam emails. I personally know that the "stupid" or "has-a-clue" ratio is WAY lower than that.

My personal observations are that it's closer to being 1 in a hundred people are "stupid" or "c

Re:Solution to all spam

[brooks_talley (86840)]

Yeah, and likewise with con artists. If all 7 billion people on the planet agreed that they would no longer be conned, there would be no scammers left.

The problem with spam is that it exploits statistics: Even if 99.99% of people just delete it, that .001% represents something like 5,000 internet users, which can be enough to make the whole thing profitable (since sending the spam is free, using stolen resources).

Cheers
-b

Re:UK?

[shadowcabbit (466253)]

Damn, here I was hoping there would be a chance of prosicuting in a country that still has the death penalty. Preferably something slow.

Have you watched British television lately?

Re:rash accusations

[Stephen Samuel (106962)]

yeah, but some Israelis think that anybody who doesn't proclaim that shooting kids for throwing rocks is OK (er, sorry -- shooting Palestinian kids for throwing rocks) is a nazi.
As far as I'm concerned, there is a big difference between being critical when Israel does something stupid/nasty and being anti-semitic -- especially if you're just as critical of Palestinian stupidity.

Re:rash accusations

[aziraphale (96251)]

The BBC sees its role as providing balance. You have to view its output in the context of the overall media environment in the UK, and indeed globally.

The BBC may appear to only present one side, or to push one perspective at the expense of others in its own coverage, but generally this will be because the side it is presenting is not otherwise represented in the mainstream media. So, for example, its presentation of Israeli issues is meant to add information to the debate within the UK on Israel/palestine

Re:rash accusations

[EnglishTim (9662)]

"Let us also recall the recent guilt of Great Britian in Northern Ireland using very similar methods as the Israelis"

While it is true that the government of Great Britain did commit some despicable acts in Northern Ireland, they were nothing like the methods that Israel is using against the Palestinians.

At no point did the British Army start blowing down the doors of civillian houses with explosives, or bulldozing houses while the occupants were still inside. They never laid seige to Jerry Adam's house and bombarded it. They never prevented Jerry Adams from travelling abroad. (Although for a while they did band him from speaking on TV...). They never had a policy of assassination against IRA memebers, and they never used helicopter gunships to attack IRA members and their families, blowing up anybody else who happened to be nearby.

During the whole period of the troubles, the British Government probably only killed about 40 people. The Israeli government has killed something like 3000 palestinians.

Now, it is also true while that the IRA did kill a lot of people, (several hundred), The palestinian terrorist organisations have killed considerably more (probably getting near 2000 people now)

Personally I think that if both sides in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict had taken a few leads from the way things are being solved in Northern Ireland, hundreds of people would still be alive today.

Get your facts straight...

[WIAKywbfatw (307557)]

I'm sorry that the BBC being a truly independent news organisation ruins your enjoyment of the suffering of the Iraqi people.

Perhaps you prefer getting all your news from "patriotic" broadcasters, like FOX News, who won't bring you anything that doesn't paint the US/UK/other invasion in anything apart from a positive light. Good for you - if you want your news censored by a broadcaster who's more interested in keeping you watching at any cost that it is in the truth then that's your perogative. But some of

Re:Make those who benefit...

[Stephen Samuel (106962)]

It's not just sending a bit of email... It's hijacking the proxy server at a place where I worked, and spending about $800/month in bandwidth before they found out about it. Luckily all they had was a lowly ADSL line (1.5 megabit). Do that to a few thousand people and you've got more than a million dollars worth of scammed bandwidth under your collar.

That is worth sending someone to jail for. Given that we've got these sledgehammer anti-hacking laws on the books, we might as well put them to a good use.

Which reminds me: is hacking for profit considere an extraditable offence??

Re:Make those who benefit...

[dubl-u (51156)]

Repeat after me: your life, just like mine and most everyone else's, is inherently meaningless.

Hi! Philosophers know this as the naturalistic fallacy. The way the world is implies nothing about the way we should choose to make it. You are welcome to choose a zero value for human life. I pick bigger ones, as do most people.

Spam is annoying. Spam is nothing more than that -- it does not deserve "hard jail time".

No, Britney Spears is annoying. Spam is a major societal problem.

From the estimates I've seen, the worldwide cost of spam is$10-$50 billion/year, and it's still growing unchecked. As this article suggests, it seems to be moving from the control of low-lifes to outright criminals. I guess that's not surprising, given how much of the stuff advertised via spam is either fraudulent or illegal.

When you compare the costs of spam to some of the recent large business bankruptcies [bankruptcydata.com], it's clear that spam in in the same league. People are clamoring for jail time for the recent set of CEOs/con-men; why shouldn't spammers, who cause a similarly big problem, face similarly big sentences?

Re:Open Relays?

[AndroidCat (229562)]

Mainly these days, it's open proxies. Open relays leave a trail in the headers, proxies don't. Outgoing filters won't help in that case because it's not going through the ISP's mail server.

Administrators can't do anything in cases where management doesn't mind pink spammer money, or where the sales guys are clueless about known spammers.

For plenty of block lists, start at sprews.org and follow the links. Eventually you'll find one of the flavour you want.