Meet the Spammers 750
DaveAtFraud writes: "It took a little digging to find an on-line copy of this article that I first saw in my treeware daily newspaper. Thanks to the Salt Lake City Tribune for having it on-line. According to the Spamhaus project, a handful of people are responsible for 90% of the spam that clogs you in box. This is your chace to hear from them and what they have to say is quite interesting. If you don't think the filters and blacklists work, one spammer whines, "My operating costs have gone up 1,000 percent this year, just so I can figure out how to get around all these filters." Stopping spam is simply a matter of economics. When its uneconomical to send spam, people will stop sending it."
This is *why* we need laws! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, intelligent filters and the like are the best way to treat the symptoms, but they don't treat the problem.
Economic (Score:2, Insightful)
Die capitalism die!
And yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet he persists.
In the great tradition of slashdot, I haven't read the article, but I assume he's making enough money to cover his costs and then some, else he wouldn't continue. Now, I'm also assuming that companies are paying him to send spam - there's no way he'd make enough of responders.
This has probably been said before, but why are we getting pissed off at spammers? It's the companies we need to "educate" as to the evils of unsolicited e-mail. That's where the money and motivation comes from. Maybe we should e-mail every company in the world and explain to them why they shouldn't spam...
Maran
Re:Basic math (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is *why* we need laws! (Score:2, Insightful)
Must.....Stop....Fist..of.......Death.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets see:
1) you send mail people don't want.
2) they have to pay for it
3) it's legally questionable
4) (if you send porn) objectionable stuff will end up in front of children
5) And you're confused when we get pissed off.
DUH!
{goes rummaging for his clue-by-four and for the sourcecode for spamassasin... I need to tune my procmail filters anyway.}
Excellent news! (Score:5, Insightful)
WHAT!!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Try telling that to a mother whos 5 year old son has just opened a "Chicks with d**ks" spam e-mail and followed the friggin link!!!!
These people make me sick!
Re:I feel so low (Score:3, Insightful)
And Thomas Cowles isn't exactly of "high moral fibre", even setting aside his spamming.
If it pays that much (Score:2, Insightful)
Tom Cowles, who heads one of the world's largest bulk e-mail, or spam, businesses, ought to be a happy guy. By his account, his company makes $12 million a year e-mailing billions of advertisements, mainly to folks who don't want them. It's an easy job, the way Cowles and others describe it:
12 Million? I am in the wrong business. Amazing that there are actually that many stupid people in the world that these guys can make a living off of sending out crap....well, wait a minute....we have politicians who do the same....
I think a law needs to be established that if a person DOES NOT want to receive this garbage, they should not receive it. All these "so-called" businesses should HAVE to be registered and LEGITAMIZED to where there CAN be legal recourse. I know for a fact that I bounce hundreds of "Bad Spam Email" from my server, and that and the residue left from Nimda taxes what limited bandwidth I have.
(Insert Schoolhouse rock theme here) "You are right, there oughta be a LAW!"
Re:Economics (Score:2, Insightful)
1,000 percent? (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone has a spam filter in place, there is not *way*
they're going to buy your unsolicited crap. There's no point!
From the article... (Score:3, Insightful)
A "paltry $250"!? That's more than most programmers (the ones who can still find jobs) make. The really sick part of this is that these guys are complaining that they're making only 90k a year sitting on their ass when hard working programmers can't find jobs.
Re:Basic math (Score:2, Insightful)
It should really be illegal to send you marketing information without telling your real identity, may it be a corporation. It must be everyones right to get a proper person or organization to sue if for example the information is illegal in your country.
Maybe not... (Score:1, Insightful)
How I would like to fight spam (Score:2, Insightful)
Have everyone snail mail them one bag of kitchen garbage. 4th class mail. Once a month.
parents shouldn't have to (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Basic math (Score:3, Insightful)
Or the sheer of having to have an unlisted number with privacy options and even then having to constantly change your number.
Ever call Alan Ralsky? You have to leave a 5 second message(only your name) just to get him to answer his phone.
How exactly do you get new buisness when your affraid of who the next caller might be?
Expensive? VERY. It only looks cheap when you don't look at the hidden costs.
Enforce existing laws; get more support (Score:4, Insightful)
So is there any reason why we can't use existing laws against them? It may not be a federal crime, but at least under some state laws, it's a crime to show objectionable material to minors. Get the information on the spammer and report it to your local law enforcement authorities.
What about wire fraud or mail fraud, or just plain old fraud? If these spammers are registering for accounts under false names, why can't they be prosecuted under fraud laws?
Vigilante tactics have their place too, of course. Any ISP that claims to have an anti-spam policy but in reality cooperates with these spammers should have their entire IP range blacklisted. After their legitimate customers (if they have any) can't get to websites or send e-mail, and cancel their accounts, those ISPs will either go out of business or rethink their policies.
Finally, grass-roots operations are all well and good, but the anti-spam movement won't make any serious progress until we get some money in our corner. Find some large corporation that hates spam as much as we do. You can't tell me that workers in these corporations aren't getting spam - some of them are probably even reading it. In an era where every dollar counts (especially if you overstated profits for the last two years), some corporation somewhere must want to put an end to this as much as Joe Everygeek does.
Reply to the "stalker" comment in article (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Origin (Score:4, Insightful)
Weeeeelll..., not quite.
It does, as you noticed, quote exactly what the spammers say and claim. It does not explicitly call them liers. It does not extensively detail the position of the anti-spammers. All that lends itself to an article that primarily informs the reader of the position of the spammer.
But, it does not actually say that what the spammer is doing is right, legal, moral or anything else. It simply passes along their views. That is what unbiased reporting is about. If I read an article that outright calls spammers scum and claims they should DIE DIE DIE, I'd read that as a biased article.
There are plenty of articles around that detail how spammers annoy people, how they should be stopped, how they cost money, and on and on. most of these articles do not provide voice for the other side (the spammers). Would you call them bad reporting because of that?
Bias is not about supporting your position. Bias is about supporting any one position over another. Just because it doesn't support your bias does not mean it has the opposite bias. The middle ground usually looks hostile from either end, sort of the "If you're not for us, then you're against us" mentality.
Re:This is *why* we need laws! (Score:2, Insightful)
The AC doesn't realize that this is completely different from, say, fighting corrupt senators in the U.S. A law against spam is a law to prevent these pathetic creeps from forcing their nonsense down our throats. "Our" being the people. The law would be to protect people from companies/corporations and their greed. This, as opposed to huge corporations trying to push through laws that restrict people's rights to, for example, do whatever they please with things they have bougt.
The bottom line is that they aren't even accepting the fact that people filter them out. They want to force us to receive and read their spam.
Re:This is *why* we need laws! (Score:1, Insightful)
Lock 'Em Up For Fraud (Score:4, Insightful)
Dave Codding, president of Internet Direct, an Ohio-based ISP, said his company struggled for a year to get Cowles off his network. Codding said Cowles used a false name to open an account and threatened to sue if he was cut off.
It is well-established law in the US, and probably most civilized nations as well, that using a false name for a fraudulent purpose is illegal. Specifically, it's illegal to use a false name to hide relevant information about your past (e.g. lousy credit, criminal record), which is precisely what these slimeballs are doing.
Somebody needs to convince a local DA to make an example of one of these crooks. Once it becomes too risky to use a pseudonym, it will be a simple matter of convincing ISPs to black-list them.
Re:This is *why* we need laws! (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely agreed. I believe 90% of the unwanted spam we all hate so much could be stopped with a short list of simple guidelines.
1) If you apply an e-mail to an officially sanctioned opt-out list, it is illegal and subject to fines to e-mail an unsolicited e-mail to that address.
2) Make it illegal to send solicitations for age-restricted products (pornography, cigarettes, gambling, katmandu temple kiff...) to minors. Don't give me a free speech spiel. Go try and put up a billboard for hot rape sex porn. And for the people that bust this one: don't bother with the fines. Send 'em to jail.
3) Make it illegal for any business to solicit without providing as part of the solicitation a valid contact for feedback, or to misrepresent their identity by using false addresses/spoofed headers, or to provide an opt-out/emoval link that feeds into anything other than a sanctioned opt-out list.
4) Finally, and here's your free speech, make it illegal for ISPs to dump any spammer that complies with these laws, but also illegal to knowingly serve any spammer that does not.
There's not much point in moaning about these spammers being nasty clueless jerks. Listen: several THOUSAND members of the Municipal Credit Union, ordinary people from all walks of life, stole about $15 MILLION (!) from ATMs. They knew it was wrong. They knew they were taking advantage of the tragedy of the attacks on the WTC towers. At least some of them must have known they at least stood a chance of being caught. But they did it anyway. Because they could. People are greedy and always ready to make a special moral exception for their own crummy behavior.
BUT...
Because there are rational theft and fraud laws in place, something can be done about it... Like throwing the most egregious offenders in jail, and forcing the rest to pay back what they stole. With a little common sense legislation we can do the same to spammers.
Re:The Origin (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's the TV's fault. Maybe you've grown used to think about Dan Rather or Barbara Walters as journalists. They're not. They're celebrities. A journalist walks his beat, watches, listens and reports the facts. Just the facts.
I've interviewed murderers and rapists. I've also interviewed way more politicians than you'd ever care to meet. And when I come back to my desk and write the story, I simply report what they said. Nobody cares what I think about it; my job is to tell you what they said.
So, taking their words at face value is NOT shoddy journalism. It's real journalism. You, the reader, should decide what to make of their words.
Shoddy journalism would be to assume spammers lie, and mocking them, distorting what they said. It would be a lot more gratifying for antispammers, yes, but it would also be the worst kind of journalism: A distortion of the truth.
Re:WHAT!!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Try telling that to a mother whos 5 year old son has just opened a "Chicks with d**ks" spam e-mail and followed the friggin link!!!!
Actually, I wonder what mother in her right mind would let a preschooler use a computer with a network connection and email. The TV is not a babysitter, and a PC is definitely not built for users without judgement.
If parents would take an active role in raising their kids, then they wouldn't fall victim to the entropy of exposure to inappropriate subjects.
The problem is not the porn on the net, it's the parents who don't take responsibility for their children.
What the internet is supposed to be? (Score:2, Insightful)
Funny, I thought it was a communication tool and a network infrastructure. I had no idea that it was to sell prick embigenator cream.
Re:This is *why* we need laws! (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with everything you said, except for this point. In my opinion, that violates the ISP's freedom of speech/association. Brick-and-mortar stores aren't required to allow customers to scream as they browse the aisles; it's an annoyance to the staff, and disconcerting to the other customers. Spammers use an incredibly high percentages of shared resources (those thousands of lines of Bcc:'s don't just transmit themselves, after all), and I don't think that ISPs should be made to host them, and really doubt the constitutionality of such a law.
Re:And yet... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is *why* we need laws! (Score:3, Insightful)
1.) They usually just send the spam from somewhere that the laws do not apply to (like China).
2.) Much of the (currently) illegal spam I get advertises things which are either illegal, questionable, clearly scamming or already fall under faulty advertising laws.
3.) We already have laws, and they have done nothing to stop spam.
4.) Most spam is sent anonymously anyhow to protect the spammer, making it illegal won't change the dificulty of finding and prosecuting the spammers.
I think you should make any Company found advertising by use of spam pay a massive fine. Sure, there would be abuse when a competitor sends spam in another company's name, but that would be rare and not enough to keep the spammers in business.
Re:This is *why* we need laws! (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, all they should have done was expand the illegal FAX law, and increase the fines (and index link the fines so they go up year by year).
Re:This is *why* we need laws! (Score:2, Insightful)
For good reason.
You can't make someone work who simply doesn't want to or doesn't care.
I used to administer community service orders for a municipal government. Take it from me - it ain't easy.
Some people honestly don't know how to work. I assigned one fellow in his early 20's to paint the traffic markers at the fire hall. I handed him the paint and the brush and told him what to do and he just looked at me. He honestly didn't know how to paint - he had never done it before.
Other people have never actually worked at anything at all, so just try to get them to do something. It can take all day to pick up one-half bag of trash in the park. I assigned a half-dozen people together to pick up trash one day. I saw the work started and then left to do other things. When I returned in a couple of hours, they whole bunch of them were sleeping under a tree.
Finding a job for people that is within their abilities can also be a true challenge. Can't put some into an office because they haven't' got enough education to understand what needs to be done and you can't trust them enough to leave them alone in a room anyway. Can't put them on a roadside work crew because they haven't got the physical strength or stamina to do the work. Can't put them to work painting because there is nothing that needs to be painted at the moment that is not already assigned, plus the painters union is up in arms because all municipal painting is their job! Convince the union that they are not supposed to be painting X, then when X next needs to be painted suddenly you have no community service clients to do the work for some reason.
The basic problem, though, is motivation. In most cases, community service clients drag their way through any job in the slowest, least-enthusiastic manner possible. This is disheartening to anyone else around them, for one, and in some cases I could literally have done a community service job personally in less time and with less hassle to me(!) than what I had to go through to get some community service clients to accomplsih anything that required more effort than sleeping under a tree or giving me a blank look -- "You expect me to do that? Riiiight..."
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)