Spammer Hangout's Membership Roster Left Exposed

MikeCapone writes "According to an article at Wired News, spammers feel the need to be part of a community too. The Bulk Club is one such community. A message on the site states that it offers, for a $20 monthly fee, a variety of how-to articles, spamming software, a members' message board area, and 300,000 FRESH e-mails/week. Unsurprisingly, the 'Law & Ethics' section is 'Members Only.' The good part is that, because of a glitch, the membership list of this charming organization was left exposed on the website."

The disturbing thing is...

[wirelessbuzzers]

s/spammer/dissident/ig && redo;

If this data were left exposed, collected and put online about most any other group, be it alcoholics or political dissidents, you people would all be appalled, talking about 1984, dissing Microsoft for bad security even though they have nothing to do with it...

But instead, one of the first comments is a calculation of how much ammo we'll need...

Have a heart, people! Sure, spammers are jerks, we can laugh at them and make fun of them, but don't you have any sense of decency?

Re:Spam Nazis

[Anonymous Coward]

This man must be the actual incarnation of Hell's suffering and evil.

Re:Naughty!

[marko123]

There is an ethical justification in being given no option (by the enemy) to defend yourself in ways other than using unethical means in order to protect yourself and your loved ones. These particular types of enemy tend to be called "truly evil" because they make you break your own morals to fight them.

e.g. having to shoot a person so that he doesn't shoot you.

"Turn the other cheek" doesn't cut it with certain types of enemies. They know this, and you know this.

Has Slashdot finally matured?

[Anonvmous Coward]

I'm a little surprised nobody pointed out that their webserver is running on Windows 2000 + IIS 5.

Re:Send them some mail

[rzbx]

I thought about that, but then I figured it would be insane. We would be supplying them with our email addresses. I get spam, but I don't get that much. A move like this would surely increase the spam in my box.

Re:The disturbing thing is...

[seanadams.com]

Yes, such an apt comparison! I can't tell you how irritated I am with alcoholics harvesting my personal information from web sites and mailing lists - why should spammers suffer a harsher penalty? Thanks for pointing out our hypocrisy. Gosh, do I feel bad for the spammers now.

Re:The disturbing thing is...

[Drakon]

will people please stop generallizing? There is more than one person posting on /., and I guarentee there are more than two opinions about any topic.

Regardless,

Have a heart, people! Sure, spammers are jerks, we can laugh at them and make fun of them, but don't you have any sense of decency?

I beg your pardon?
This is the Network that belongs to the People. These are the people that are abusing the network.

I don't have a sense of decency when it comes to dirty, nasty, polluters that break laws or attempt to break laws.

If it had been a list of alcoholics or political dissidents no one would have any business posting their names anywhere. This is a list of people who can each be charged with trespassing or attempted trespassing, and our government refuses to charge them with these crimes. Now I'm not saying I'M going to go vigilanti on their collective ass, but I'm more than willing to turn a blind eye to anyone who does.

Re: no :(

[Triggersite]

Want to frame some jerk for murder? Run around shooting people with his gun!

Sure, spammers are jerks...

[Infonaut]

Spammers are more than jerks. A jerk is someone who honks at you for only going 70 mph in the slow lane. A jerk is someone who throws trash on the street or makes a big scene in a restaurant when the wine isn't to his liking.

A spammer is someone who comes to your house every day and rings the doorbell every 37 seconds. He makes it difficult for you to go outside because when you do, he'll pin advertisements for Viagra and get-rich-quick schemes all over your clothes. After a while, your mail carrier may not even show up at your house, for fear of this miscreant.

Spammers hide behind legalities, but they are profoundly immoral, in the sense that they don't give a damn about what their actions do to the larger community. The irony is that they are busy bringing down the very edifice that allows them to conduct these activities.

Alchoholics are sick people who can be cured.

Political dissidents may have views I disagree with, but they're not forcing me to listen to them.

Spammers are just people who don't give a damn about anyone else, and are willing to make money off of crippling a mechanism that millions of people depend on every day.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The disturbing thing is...

[swordgeek]

"No, they're not. As long as they don't forge headers or falsely advertise (under the false advertising laws), they're not breaking the law."

Yes they ARE! Clearly, using an open mail relay is theft, no matter how irresponsible the mail admin is (and this is still how most spam gets sent today). However, even if they're not...

Your ISP is paying real amounts of money for bandwidth. Not dial-up or DSL connections, but really big pipes that they share amongst their subscribers. They're also paying for disk space to store their customers' mail.

Now if spam takes up 20% of their bandwidth and 40% of their mail spooler's disk space before they have an opportunity to filter it, who do you think pays for it?

You do. And I do. Our monthly costs are in effect renting a tiny fragment of the resources of the internet, and roughly a third of the internet is now spam. (email and newsgroups, which translates to bandwidth, time, computing power, and storage)

Spammers do NOT pay for their bandwidth! If they did, then spam wouldn't be a problem.

Re:The disturbing thing is...

[wirelessbuzzers]

There are some people who hate alcoholics. There are many people who hate left-wing dissidents. There are people who would kill them given the chance. Many of these people would regard spammers as a minor annoyance, and, say dissidents as a Great Evil.

Or suppose it were a peer-support group for closet gays or something. Living in a state where the KKK still holds rallies, I would guess there would be considerable illegal action resulting. Heck, even at Harvard there were several hate crimes against gays last year. And I consider my life a sheltered one.

I certainly dislike spammers much more than any of these other groups, and I don't sympathise with them much at all. I don't mind laughing (or cursing) at these spammers, especially when their server gets compromised. I don't mind if you write enraged letters to them. But remember that they are still humans, if disagreeable ones. It is a very disturbing sign in a community when something like this comes out and people treat it as a list of where to send mail bombs.

Re:I have a solution

[buck_wild]

Nah. I'd rather use the chainsaw from the original Doom.

Terrorist Cell

[mabu]

What is interesting is that if this site/membership list had any relation to Islamic terrorist organizations, the argument over whether people were guilty by association wouldn't even come up.

Ironically, I'd argue that more people are terrorized by spam.

Re:What a disappointment:

[piranha(jpl)]

That would be wrong.

Of course it would be wrong!

while [ true ]

[ true ] returns 0 because true is indeed an existent argument to [. Which is really not the intended application of [. while true is much more to the point. while : makes you look even more savvy.

wget -O - URL > /dev/null

[Shakes head] Why not wget -O /dev/null URL ? Or better yet, curl -o /dev/null URL ?

Let's look at this again:

while :; do curl -o /dev/null http://www.thebulkclub.com/; done

Ahh, much better!

Re:Send them some mail

[Stephen Samuel]

I think that it would be more fun to have the FROM addres be one of the other spammers -- at least that way, they get a valid email address :-)

Re:What a disappointment:

[blibbleblobble]

Who's going to admit they've not got Bash, and post the "Control Panel -> Scheduled tasks -> Every 1 minute -> wget --recursive..." recipe?

antispam spam

[RisingSon]

Amazingly enough, a fairly high percentage of my spam (30-40%) is for antispam software.

When I'm truly bored, sometimes I'll whois interesting spam, and quite often the registrar of the domain is in the anti-spam software business.

Charge your customers to irritate other people into being your customers. Great business. You're going to hell.

Why lower yourself?

[jamehec]

I mean, why not take the higher ground and just continue fighting spam? I know it's tempting, but paying back evil for evil is VERY bad karma.

Boycott spam, file abuse reports, blackhole .cn/.ru/.su/.kr, institute Bayesian(sp?) filtering, do challenge/response, sue when you can. These things work - and best of all, you don't have to worry about spammers recieving unwarranted sympathy.

Just my USD$0.02, of course.