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Meet the Spammers
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Aug 07, 2002 07:30 AM
from the ask-them-for-viagra dept.
from the ask-them-for-viagra dept.
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."
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Meet the Spammers
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Re:Basic math (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I feel so sorry for this guy (Score:4, Interesting)
Relentless anti-spam vigilantes have hounded the 35-year-old head of Empire Towers Inc., plastering Cowles' home address and phone number all over the Web. Spam recipients call to tell Cowles how they feel.
"These people will go to the lowest depths," said Cowles, of Bowling Green, Ohio. "I have some phone clips that would make you sick."
Ahem...
You want to talk about going to the 'lowest depths'?
Re:Death penalty for Spammers (Score:4, Funny)
You know we couldn't pass a law like that. Well, maybe in Texas.
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.
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: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:This is *why* we need laws! (Score:4, Funny)
Kinda like the kids who wrote DeCSS?
Re:You poor baby..... (Score:4, Funny)
"Well, things are not so bad; I can manage to unglog 25 outhouses per week nowadays, and business is actually booming, thanks to all that junk food", said Balan, a former spammer and junk e-mailer.
The only problem, he says, "up here in the muskeg, are those damn black flies and those drunken prospectors who shoot at me even if I have an appointment to unclog his outhouse". That's because he's forced to change truck every week because he cannot afford a new one.
But that's not his least of worries. Every so often, the bomb squad has to be flown-in because of a suspicious package destined for Balan arrives in the Post-Office. They are usually packages of dead rotten rats or opossums, but sometimes there is some catshit or worse. Everytime, the community points at him because the Post-Office has to be cordoned-off, which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't also the local watering hole. And, everytime, the municipality has to pick-up the bill, so, for a few time, Balan had to fend-off some angry sober prospectors with prized bottles from his private collection.
Re:is it Legal to Stalk Spammers? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't see a problem with it. They're in the business of unsolicited harassment too. Tell you what: if they want to opt-out of being stalked, I've got a fake email address that they can write to, and I guarantee that I'll take them off my stalking list.
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:And yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not exactly. You won't see well established companies sending spam (ever received spam from IBM?). Spam is most of the times for fraudulent/make money quick products. If 1/10000 people fall for it these companies still make a profit and they don't care if they piss off the other 99.99% since they wouldn't be buying anyway.
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes.
Ok, it was the internal newsletters when I worked for them, but I didn't want them...
Maran
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but you understand that businesses have a fundamental right to high profits. If we don't buy the pills or videos these guys will band together with other content providers (RIAA/MPAA) and buy legislation forcing us to prop up their failing business models. I see a convergence with MS and Intel, where your upgrades of Windows will read your spam and send money from your credit card to the spammers if you don't buy enough penis pumps. I for one don't want to see this happen, which is why I buy at least one degree from a prestigious non- accredited university a week.
I feel so low (Score:4, Funny)
You reaally oughta love this quote from a friggin' spammer of all people.
The Origin (Score:5, Informative)
This AP article has been making the rounds. It's rather shoddy journalism in that it takes the words of the spammers completely at face value. Seeing as how Rule #1 is "spammers lie" you can imagine how well this approach works. [google.com]
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: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.
I got a great idea! (Score:3, Funny)
Lets put the spammers website addreses in a alshdot story.
The site gets slashdotted
The Router goes bust
The chips are fired
Repairing becomes a must
The Site gets slashdotted
Packets get a wannderlust
costs go high and high
and spamming becomes bust!
So no sweat guys its easy
What really needs to be done (Score:5, Funny)
is to not increase their costs but eliminate their profits.
What we should really do is start posting lists of the people who buy from spammers. Betcha you'd think twice about that penis enlarger then, wouldn't ya?There ought to be a law... (Score:3, Interesting)
The article claims this... and yet we see big spam houses fighting anti-spam laws left and right everytime they're proposed in the legislature for a state. And I seriously doubt they comply with the current anti-spam laws in the few states that have them -- since all they have is an email address and no state of residence information.
Frankly, I'm for a reasonable anti-spam law (one similar to the junk fax law, which has worked well). Obviously it's not as clear cut as junk faxes -- with them you can find out who sent you the junk. Spammers routinely obfusacate their information as mentioned in the article. I'm tired of the amount of spam I get, and unless you run your own mail server (something not viable for the vast majority of the Internet populace, and not even viable for the majority of the geeks) there's no way to block it.
Not that blocking really helps -- the bandwidth has already been consumed. The only thing blocking does is automagically delete it for you. I'd like the bandwidth back personally.
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.}