How to Become A Spammer 460
permeablepdx points to this story in The Oregonian about
how to become a spammer. Summary: "Local Oregon boy makes big bucks after learning from the Spam masters."
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How to Become A Spammer
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It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. - Voltaire
Text of Article, In Case of Slashdotting... (Score:4, Funny)
1. Insert head in ass
2. Click "send"
3. Profit!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Text of Article, In Case of Slashdotting... (Score:5, Funny)
I thought the idea was to rid ourselves of spam! (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, the above poster is just being stupid.
I thought the goal was to give spammers incentive, whether negative or positive, to stop spamming.
How is abusing someone who gave up spamming going to help?
The message you are saying is:
"Once you've spammed, you're screwed. Doesn't matter if you stop or change."
That is plain stupid and the wrong attitude to take. If someone stops spamming, give them the pat on the shoulder and leave them alone. Move onto the next spammer. Why continue to harass someone who has gone legit?
If you abuse people because they spam and you abuse them if they stop, then you are basically telling them and anyone else that hey, once you have started to spam, there is no reason to stop.
I for one would like to see the spamming stop.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I thought the idea was to rid ourselves of spam (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I thought the idea was to rid ourselves of spam (Score:3, Insightful)
The article shows various interesting things, one of them being that spammers are hated like beelzebub himself. If that does not prevent one from starting it, what does?
I must admit I was tempted about the idea of "taking revenge" on a spammer, but no. Stop spamming and repent, that is good enough for me.
Alex
P.S.: Then again... he raked in $4.000/mo. Maybe he should donate some of that money to spamhaus.org
Vengence and getting back at someone who wrongs u (Score:4, Interesting)
Some people who posted responses made many good points. They mainly center around one of the following:
1) The person wronged the online community and profited from it. "Just" letting them go would be wrong!
We all want satisfaction. That is the difference between enforcement of Law and dealing out of Justice. Persons who abuse online resources would be in violation of the law. The anguish they cause people isn't as clearly defined by the Laws. That leaves us without satisfaction. Without closure.
Taking it unto yourself to right what you percieve to be a wrong by taking the law into your own hands is called vigilantism(sp?). Those actions typically land outside of what is condoned by the Law as it currently stands.
I do believe that people should be penalized for doing something which is wrong and costs everyone in the community. Spam and Spamming falls under this kind of community abuse.
If you want satisfaction, change the Laws so that Spamming and Spammers will be penalized and not just slapped on the wrists.
2) "Spammers will think it is okay to spam and quit when they have made their money if we take the 'give them an out' attitude!"
The real problem here is that there is the question of satisfaction of our sense of justice being served. When a person goes to prison and serves their term and are released, we believe them to have repaid their debt to society. If they are repeat offenders, we consider them to be lost causes. (Sorry, I'm generalizing here.) And then, there are those who commit crimes and get away with it. They decide to quit while they are ahead and try to be productive elsewhere. If they slip back into the lifestyle, they will eventually screw up.
I guess my point is: Here is an example of someone who tried it out. Saw it was profitable, but due to the stream of hate mail and just having to dodge the proverbial bullet, has decided to quit the lifestyle and earn a living in a more accepted way.
He's already quit the spamming life. Harassing him more doesn't make him quit spamming any more than he has. Nor will it set an example for others to quit. Quite the opposite.
Then, you have those who are career spammers. They are the ones raking in 5+ digit earnings per month and they escape the reach of the law. Given death threats and harassment, they continue on.
I see them as the repeat offender criminal. The lost causes. They will continue to commit crimes both legally and socially. They should be the ones hatred and "requests to stop" be directed at. Not at people who have already stopped.
When you try to bring someone out of a life of crime or who has taken the wrong path, you don't continually harass them after they have stopped. That just pushes them back into the life. You don't pat them on the back either. You watch them carefully to make sure they don't repeat their offense. They ask for forgiveness from the community and work to re-earn the communities' trust. They are in essence, the little fish who have a future.
The repeat spammers who have been at it for years are the ones which deserve a lifetime of punishment for the ill they have caused and willingly continue to cause.
What we all want is spam to go away. So give them a reason to stop if they are spamming. Give them a reason to stay stopped if they have decided to stop. And get the law/government in on it if they refuse to stop.
It doesn't seem terribly complicated (Score:2, Insightful)
Three types of spammers (Score:3, Informative)
1. The amature. This is some guy who runs a mail server out of their basement. Mostly just hawking for their own business of running a fraudulant store (ie selling HGH or viagra), or some sort of scam to get users bank accounts or credit cards. These are DEAD EASY to blo
Re:It doesn't seem terribly complicated (Score:5, Insightful)
> you either need to invest money or you need to figure out how
> to harvest e-mails from the web/usenet.
That part's trivial. You'll get 50% invalid addresses, but so what?
Step 3 is easier than you think: at this time, you don't have to
fool the filters of the 0.05% who use even moderately complex
filters[1]; all you have to do is get past the things that are
deployed ISP-wide, like psmtp.com's filtering service. (This is
trivial to get past: write three spams at random, and two of them
will get past. No cleverness required.)
If you have to get past word blacklists, then you also need to use
a thesaurus (or 1337 sp33k), but word blacklists are relatively
uncommon, because they get too many false positives. Really, all
you have to do is get past the filters that ISPs deploy, not the
ones individuals install. Remember, if you have to send twice as
many messages to get the same response, it doesn't cost you that
much more. (This is what makes spam so problematic. *Almost*
makes me want the estamps thing to succeed.)
The hard part is convincing businesses that have money (and are
therefore presumably profitable) that they can gain more than
they lose by investing in your services. I assume you send all
the businesses in the universe adverts for your services and hope
0.001% of them bite. I would like to think that more than 99.9%
of them know better, but... I know better. Fortunately each
spammer has to compete with all the others for limited business,
so the number of spammers who can make money spamming is finite.
Praises be.
As for point 4, finding a spam-friendly ISP is a real pain; it's
much easier to run port scans and find open relays, then test
them to see which ones *don't* do a reverse lookup of your IP.
Then you send to the open relay from a custom MTA that you run
on a dynamic IP in such a way that it randomly generates From
and Received headers and such for each message, thus making it
a real pain for the recipient to track down where the spam
*originated*. Finding out where it came from to your ISP is
easy, but that's an open relay in the APNIC block whose IP is
not reverse-lookupable (virtually *nothing* in APNIC supplies
PTR records), and so tracking down the owner of the relay is
hard, and they don't speak your language, and they don't give
a rodent's posterior about your spam problem. For extra bonus
points, get a hosting deal in Asia and run your MTA there, so
that tracing you back to your ISP in the US is basically
impossible, and if we *do* figure out who runs the MTA in Asia,
we'll assume it's an open relay, provided you insert the usual
forged Received headers. Yes, I've spent way too much time
looking at mail headers.
So in conclusion, the main thing preventing a lot of people such
as myself from becomming spammers is that we hate spam. That, and
it's so obviously *wrong*.
[1] e.g., people like me, who trained a naive bayesian mail
classification system (ifile) on a collection of tens of
thousands of well-categorised messages in 3 dozen distinct
categories, including several distinct spam categories.
But actually, with a modicum of cleverness, a naive bayesian
system can be easily defeated. As soon as I read how the
algorithm works, I realised inside ten minutes how they can
defeat it. Consequently, they can figure it out too; if
enough people start using such systems they'll do that, and
we'll have to get more clever with our mail classification
systems, taking context into account for tokens, at which
point they'll drag out the Markov chain generators, which
will be *hell* to try to filter against. At that point it
might be easiest to hire somebody in the third world (where
the ecconomy is suc
Re:It doesn't seem terribly complicated (Score:3, Informative)
Estamps are the most idiotic things ever thought up. They introduce so many new parties and variables into the equation it's not even funny.
Email is a relationship between two people. Estamps would require a relationship between the sender, the sender's bank, the receiver's bank, a central authority, etc. It's stupid.
The solution is sender-verification. If you get an email from someone you don't know,
does this really require a readme.txt?? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:does this really require a readme.txt?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:does this really require a readme.txt?? (Score:2)
You just did it to make some money? Spammers do it just to make some money, and if I trace them I'll sue their ass dry.
Re:does this really require a readme.txt?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:does this really require a readme.txt?? (Score:3, Insightful)
At least drug users voluntarily buy the drugs from the dealers.
Re:does this really require a readme.txt?? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's been a long time since I used the account regularly, but I still have that account. I use it when I'm out of town, because no matter where you are, you'll usually find an access number. Not for email though. Never for email. Sometimes I'll go into my inbox though to show people what eight years' worth of abuse from people like you has done to it...
I log in, and the box is full. Every time. I start my demonstration by deleting about twenty or thirty emails, and then we watch. After a minute, I refresh it. One or two more emails. Another minute, same thing. Wait five minutes and there are at least ten new messages. Wait half an hour, and the box is full again.
Thanks, asshole.
But I do admire your courage in posting non-AC that you used to do this. And I thank you for giving me an opportinuty to actually speak to one of you. I wish your email address wasn't hidden, but I do see a URL. In glancing at your page I don't see an email address, but I do see a form on your page for sending messages to your cell phone.
Fortunately, I don't care enough about it to do anything with that, but I did want to point that little detail out for every one of the good folks on Slashdot to see...
Re:does this really require a readme.txt?? (Score:5, Interesting)
You must have quite a few clients willing to pay you
for your "services".
Otherwise, every friend and coworker I have can be a spammer.
Each one of these persons have either a DSL or Cable modem
connection, and most are proficient with computers.
What they (my friends) lack are people willing to pay them for
sending out spam (oh, yeah, another thing working aginst their
success as spammers is morality).
To fight spam and spammers successfully, i think, we must
fight the source and not the messanger (= spammer). That
is finding out who is actually paying for the spam being sent
out and "pound" on them.
I've been fighting spam for several years now. I use RBLs
and ORDBs and even have blacklisted close to 14000 IP
addresses in addition to using spam-filters. But the spam
keeps coming in.
Re:does this really require a readme.txt?? (Score:3, Interesting)
This shows that an anti-spamming law would, in fact, be a lot easier to enforce than one might imagine. Troll the "spammer support" boards, answer an ad, and then:
(And, no, it would not be "entrapment" if
Re:does this really require a readme.txt?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. Morality. Any woman can be a hooker, they all have the tools... but that doesn't mean that every woman would be a hooker if they had a paying customer. Likewise, just because someone comes to me and offers $2k to spam 10 million addresses from my connection I'm not going to do it. It's not the lack of a paying customer, it's morality.
U
Re:does this really require a readme.txt?? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not forgetting that... But you have to remember it's a sales pitch. The more distorted and mangled the message looks, more people will just completely ignore it. Regardless of whether a message was spam or not, I would not take seriously any message that was sent to me in, essentially, SMS-speak. I certainly wouldn't refinance my home or accept medical advice from an organization that wrote me in that fashion.
Second, and more importantly, the majority of people do not wage a 24 hour war against spam and run a Bayesian spam filter. They just put up with it.
For now, that is true. But as time progresses more and more companies and ISPs will offer filters (perhaps Bayesian, others, or both) to their customers--perhaps defaulting it to "on." I wouldn't count on typical users making an effort to avoid spam, but I would expect more and more comapnies and ISP to do so.
If it was purely Bayesian filter vs spammer, spammer would win hands down.
I disagree, and I wonder if you have done much investigating with Bayesian? I've been working on it for the last 7 months and, believe me, Bayesian is surprisingly effective despite its simplicity. Messages I thought it wouldn't catch ARE caught with no special logic whatsoever.
Three things I would mention and which I advocate, especially as spammers try to outwit Bayesian.
1. Bayesian WILL catch their messages unless they munge their messages, which we must assume they will. They already do and, presumably, they'll do it more in the future. This is simple to address. Once your Bayesian corpus gets sufficiently large the expectation is that a typical valid email will not add a significant number of previously-unseen tokens to the corpus. If you have a corpus of thousands of messages and receive a new message of which 40% (for example) are new tokens, you may want to assume that's a spammer munging because a real mail is not going to have that many "new" tokens.
2. Even if you don't assign a cut-off point as in #1, you just make "characteristics" out of the number of new tokens. For example, if you have a message that contains 50-60% new tokens, that itself becomes a new Bayesian token. Perhaps, over time, Bayesian will find that "messages with 50-60% new tokens have an 80% chance of being spam." So the fact that they munge becomes a damning factor even if the computer can't identify the actual munging.
3. You add new characteristics as in #2. Perhaps another characteristic is "Messages that contain no body except for a URL." Perhaps 85% of those messages are spam, and Bayesian can count that as a damning characteristic. Or, perhaps, messages where over 50% of the body are devoted to URLs have a 90% chance of being spam. All these add new "characteristics" that can be used to calculate a spam probability for Bayesian.
So, the point is, Bayesian itself is very, very capable of solving the spam problem. I'm not saying that we write a Bayesian filter today and it never has to evolve. But now when spammers implement new countermeasures, we just have Bayesian do analysis that looks for those countermeasures and, when found, counts them as another characteristic. The algorithm remains untouched, but we have a growing number of characteristics that Bayesian is scoring--not just tokens (words) in the message, but characteristics OF the message.
Believe me, 7 months of research and development on this has convinced me that Bayesian is going to be the headache to end all headaches for spammers. Will it catch 100% of spam? No (more like 99.5%, actually |grin|). But will it catch enough so that the typical user isn't bothered by spam and to further reduce the response rate of spam to reduce the incentive to send it? Yes, it will.
And regardless of whether or not the w
Re:does this really require a readme.txt?? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think it's that easy. Bayesian filtering assumes each user has his or her own corpus of good and bad tokens. Taking dictionary words is not likely to find words that have extremely low Bayesian scores--they are
spam & mail (Score:2)
Re:spam & mail (Score:5, Interesting)
Not entirely true. Most cities (including mine) have a recycling program (and most likely a cost-per-bag for garbage); every pound of recycling will end up costing you something in your taxes somewhere, so the more you have, the more cost to recycling, the more of your money in taxes.
So while bulk mailers pay for sending it, it's still costing you to dispose of it.
Re:spam & mail (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, its not much, but at least I'm sending a little more $ to the USPS for the PP mail, and I'm having the sending company use their resources to dispose of the trash they shouldn't have sent me.
You're cheaping out - CRAFT TIME! (Score:3)
1 postage-paid return envelope
1 paper grocery bag
1 brick
some tape
1. Wrap brick in grocery bag (plain side out)
2. Tape postage-paid return envelope to outside of package
3. Drop into public mailbox
There ya go, an 8-dollar plea to stop bulk mail.
-72
Re:spam & mail (Score:2, Informative)
Furthermore, he doesn't seem to realize that Spam makes the entire infrastructure of the Internet more expensive.
I don't care if he got out of it because he couldn't stand the heat. Assholes like him, each getting into it for a year or two and then getting out, are what keeps the problem going. I would very much like to punch this guy in the throat.
Re:spam & mail (Score:2)
Email spam cost us money and bandwidth on our end, bulk mail dont.
No, you have your reasoning backward. Email spam doesn't cost us money any more than bulk mail does. Sure, if it fills up our pipe, or mailbox, we have to get a bigger pipe, or mailbox.
But the real difference between bulk mail and email spam is that the sender isn't paying any money. If the USPS delivered postal mail for free, it would be exactly the same situation.
Jeez (Score:5, Insightful)
And they wonder why they get death threats.
Re:Jeez (Score:3, Interesting)
These people have a HUGE call center in London. But they have a USA registered toll free number.
Interestingly though, the ring sounds like a European type ring (germany, russia, france), but not the Brr brr type OK ring.
After further inv
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
information wants to be free (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:information wants to be free (Score:2, Insightful)
DeCSS has legal uses... (Score:5, Insightful)
Before DeCSS you would not be able to watch a DVD on Linux. Before spamming it was possible to let kids use email with no fears of them seeing obscene things, you can't now. Which is the biggest menace, I'll let you decide.
How do you... (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe tie him up on a light post and throw AOL CD's at him?
Re:How do you... (Score:5, Funny)
In the article, it says... (Score:5, Funny)
"It costs money to be processed. And it's a waste of trees. It's intrusive as hell because you have to go through all of it. People don't get mad about that, and I don't understand why," he mused.
Is anyone else thinking what I am thinking?
Re:In the article, it says... (Score:2)
Re:In the article, it says... (Score:4, Informative)
whois defibworld.com says:
Re:In the article, it says... (Score:2)
Re:maybe ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks Slashdot! (Score:3, Insightful)
online clubs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where are these things? I'm sure tons of
Re:online clubs? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're implying some denial of service attack, I don't really think you're any better than they are.
Re:online clubs? (Score:3, Insightful)
I do not find your moral equivalence between an unprovoked attack on innocent bystanders (what the spammers are doing) and a retaliation/deterrent attack on perps (what a DoS on a spammer-support site would be) to be at all convincing.
here are some (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.spamfreedesign.com/
http://itsmyfranchise.com/sfop99/os.cgi
http://www.anconia.com/?r=1&s=email+advertising
http://www.allaccessmarketing.com/clients.htm
Some more by seaching on google where these scumbags advertise
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&ie=U
hmm (Score:5, Informative)
What I find most interesting about this is that the article says that Sheils made over $1000 a week. That just amazes me that there are that many stupid people out there, that actually purchase products from UCE.
I mean, just on principle alone, I will never purchase something that I get spammed about, and I would think that most people feel the same way, so that just makes me wonder, who DOES buy this stuff? It's those people that are to blame for the continued onslaught of spam. If no one bought their stuff, they wouldn't waste their time(and ours) anymore
Just a thought
Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
What I find more interesting is that trivial software was being sold for many many thousands of dollars. He must have spent $20K on software. Are spammers themselves that stupid?
Re:hmm (Score:2)
What we need now is a vertical marketing (i.e pyramid scheme) company to sell responses through a network,...
Re:hmm (Score:2)
Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe, but really i believe these guys about as much as those guys on late night tv with the yacht selling real estate advice.
If Sheils is really smart he is probably setting himself up so he can sell software/books to wannabe spammers. He can include articles like this and tell people "Work from home, make money like me."
Re:hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Somebody's eMail address gets abused as a spam reply-to (yielding a LOT of bounces, replies, etc.), sends it to a friend of mine who then goes on to investigate. Product being advertized is some kind of herbal that is supposed to give you more power, if you know what I mean.
Either way, site looks flashy (no flash though), with a snappy order-form, asks for cc number, etc. all through normal http. Now of course since you want to find out WHO is the perpetrator, you try variations on the URL, say, / instead of
(we did forward said information to mastercard and visa)
A few days after, we check back. That file has now grown to a couple hundred (!) lines, most of which look legitimate (all @aol addresses though), all ordering them herbal bottles for $50 a pop. Sucks to be them. I don't know whether or not others have found the same facts, but I'm rather sure there are more than one or two persons that have found this gaping hole.
Either way, spam works, unfortunately. Just think about it
Even if most people feel the same way as us, that leaves the 0.5% completely and utterly clueless and desperate for a longer version of a certain organ. Send enough eMails, find enough idiots.
Woohoo.
Re:hmm (Score:3)
First of all, how much does it cost to deal with spam? I bet someone has numbers, I bet the cost/ spam is much higher. But, consider this. Assume filters catch 90% of all spam, Then lets say it takes 1 second to delete the spam. At that rate, one person deletes 3600 spams an hour, or 36,00
I don't under stand why... (Score:4, Insightful)
As much as I hate to make it personal... (Score:5, Insightful)
There you have it. I wonder if there is a way of applying this cost to every spammer.
Server Crashes (Score:4, Funny)
Hmmm I guess the spam software is running on Windows.
How to stop it (Score:2, Funny)
Early adopter or bad reporter? (Score:5, Interesting)
Talk about fucked up facts! (Score:4, Informative)
WTF!? The 'internet' was available for outside use long before that. Intel.com was registered in 1989. There are other uses of the internet besides 'the web'. Like, I donno, email... Also, before the web, people used things like IRC, email, gopher, telnet, ftp, and Usenet (around since the mid-80s).
and not only that, mosaic wasn't the first web browser, it was just the first 'good' one. HTML and hypertext had been around (but in limited use) since 1989.
I'm not saying that this guy isn't full of shit. I'm just saying that you are as well.
What is truly amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
If he feels that this stuff is so legitimate, why is he using software that abuses open relays and proxies, and forges mail headers, instead of publishing the real address he is sending his spew from? Hmmm?
It's forgery, plain and simple, and there are laws that deal with it. Prosecute the fsckers on it already!!!
Re:What is truly amazing (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting Read (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought that was an interesting point. Although this article doesn't go into too much technical detail, it provided some insight into the business aspects of this which I don't particularly agree with ethically. Sure, it's a very easy way to make money if you know what you're doing, but it's still violating people's privacy by sending them unwanted messages.
Another thought... If your regulary Joe (the guy in this article) can find ways to become a spammer in 5-6 months of research, why can't the government do its own investigations and just put a stop to these facilitating network groups? I thought there were laws against spam in the U.S.
They do filter postal junk mail--if you ask (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, back when I only got a few spams a week, I used to read them. I never bought anything from them, but I would look at ones I found interesting. The problem is that we have gone from five to ten spams a week to hundreds. My yahoo account (which I mainly use for site registrations) collects hundreds of emails each week in its bulk (spam) folder.
There are several costs to me of that volume. One, I have to spend a certain amount of time checking for legitimate email. Two, what if I incorrectly classify a real email as spam. Three, I don't feel comfortable publishing my email address now, since I don't want to get more spam. In the normal course of business, I would want to publish my email (how much time is spent on taking anti-spam kludges out of email; how much server time is spent trying to send email to these invalid addresses). Four, since spam is sent indiscriminately, it drowns out legitimate uses; if it is a product in which I would be interested, I would like to learn about it. Unfortunately, very little spam is targeted towards my interests (science fiction, fantasy, etc.). Five, when I send email, I am subject to it being indiscriminately deleted because I am not a recognized sender.
Two thirds of the email traffic overall is spam. Without it (and the computationally intense filtering created by it), we could easily cut the infrastructure in half. Think about it. Half the email servers in use could become web servers, etc. instead.
By contrast, postal junk mail does not increase your delivery costs. In fact, postal junk mail fees pay a good portion of the cost of maintaining mail delivery to people. If postal junk mail stopped tomorrow, the post office would have to raise postage to cover the fact that they would then be running the same delivery routes with less mail. Even if there are disposal costs, these are offset by the savings in postage.
There are very few anti-spam laws in the US. The few that do exist are state laws rather than federal laws. Most anti-spam prosecutions are based on fraud and damage claims. Further, in the US, it is not really possible to shut down a group talking about doing something. It's not illegal to discuss how the law could be broken.
Re:Interesting Read (Score:3, Funny)
Hmm, could it be that, in amongst the real snailmail that I get, there might be, hmm, three? Four? pieces of junk mail per week. Those are easy to deal with - in fact, in Seattle, we have curbside recycling pickup.
Whereas, inamongst the spam I get daily (averages close to 90 pieces per day, and one day, when I was busy actually having a life, I didn't check
Conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
Best quote: (Score:4, Funny)
On another note, anyone got any idea where these "spammer clubs" he mentions might be? I got this new toy [slashdot.org] I wanna try out...
Controlling their money flow (Score:4, Interesting)
If someone receives spam for a product and it could be shown that the company that makes the product financed the spamming, then fine the company some big bucks. It might be hard to prove, but in a lot of cases the fear that it might happen would be enough to stop companies from doing it.
There were some figures in the article indicating how much the spammer got paid per sale or per inquiry about the product. That has to be showing up (probably under some other name) in some company's advertising budget. With the crackdown on corporate accounting I think some of this could be uncovered.
As usual, someone misread the article (Score:4, Informative)
Seems rather honest, and upfront. (Score:3, Insightful)
Also rather intelligent and well spoken.
While his previous 'career' is absolute scum, at least he took it seriously, as a legitimate business..
I'm impressed, too bad not most of the rest don't have his level of 'morality', and 'responsibility'.
As much as we all hate it, ( I know I do, both at home and due to my position at work ) as long as its legal, it will continue to be a large part of net-life.
This quote says it all (Score:2, Funny)
What total assholes these people are.
Re:This quote says it all (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Mugging them on the street (theft of service).
2. "Brrowing" their cars without permission to rob a bank even though they return them later, so what, difference does it make? (using someone elses mail server to relay spam).
3. Sending threats to politicians using your address as the return address (using some innocent person's email address as the return address for bounced spam).
4.
A clue about effective spam deterrence (Score:3, Interesting)
The most satisfying solution would be to hunt down and kill spammers myself, but some courts still erroneously think that spammers are human beings. We need to have more children of judges receive explicit XXX spam. If you know a judge and their kids' email address, you know what you have to do. :-)
Until then, we are forced to put down the ClueBat and resort to financial penalty for spammers and people hiring them.. The article says: Viagra distributors pay spammers per sale -- about $60 for every $150 order -- while financial companies typically pay for every consumer who requests more information -- as much as $12 for mortgage leads and as much as $5 for insurance referrals.
There is something to act upon here. It's already illegal to make a sell through a prohibited third-party. You cannot, say, give a commission to a guy who sells your stuff in Libya.
So how about giving the Federal Trade Commission the power to slap a fine on people who make sales on spam-acquired leads? Enforcement would be easy. Just answer mortage or insurance spam. The would-be insurance or mortagage broker contacts you, proving he has used the services of a spammer. Small claim court, or send the stuff to the FTC. Whammo, big fine, they won't do it again.And since they have a legal front-end in the financial world, they have assets to seize if they try to evade courts.
How to retaliate (Score:2, Funny)
Important information!!! (Score:2)
Now if you just happen to run into him on a lonely road, you know exactly what to do :-)
Oh no! (Score:2)
-Sean
Time for someone to go Cartman on him? (Score:5, Funny)
Weapons against Spammers: (Score:5, Informative)
For People with an *nix Account:
- Spamassassin [spamassassin.org] ruleset-based mail analizer. Detects spam quite well, especially if you enable access to Razor and Realtime-Blacklists. Newest release includes a bayesian filter.
- bogofilter [sourceforge.net] My favourite
bayesian spam filter. Pro: Very good detection rates after training properly. Con: Needs to be trained.
For everybodyWe'll Shock Your Heart ... For Pennies a Jolt! (Score:5, Funny)
> "Defibworld is an authorized provider
> specializing in state of the art new and
> pre-owned AED's and Defibrillators at
> the lowest prices!"
Just what I want some hospital to be shocking my heart with: a "pre-owned" defibrillator purchased "at the lowest price"!
Speaking as an EMS director (Score:3, Insightful)
He might be reformed, or he might not... but he clearly has not paid ANY of his debt to society, and his ethics are in question.
People tend to surround themselves with people of a similar stripe and philosophy (the old birds-of-a-feather argument). Just the presence of that questionable past makes me not want to do business with the company.
Fear a 30 day warranty on a Defibrillator... (Score:4, Funny)
Patients Loved One: "Oh no...
Doctor: "Don't worry, it came with a 30 day warranty, we will get our money back."
It's easy to become a spammer (Score:4, Funny)
Killing the demand (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply create ten million or so "honeypot" email addresses, and have an automated system have them all request information on the mortgage deal.
Once the mortgage company is on the hook for $50 million, they will think again before going to a spam outfit.
This will knock out the mortgage and credit card spams, but won't make a dent in the porn or Viagra spams, as those actually require an order.
Article author (Score:4, Funny)
A Warm, Fuzzy, Happy Feeling (Score:5, Insightful)
He quit because of hostile, harassing emails from the angry public! They work! Every email you've sent telling a spammer that they're a worthless turd of a human being had some miniscule effect!
Even now, the guy admits no moral qualms about his former job. He's still a thoughtless punk who sees nothing wrong with the practice, and I'd still like to punch him in the nose. But he QUIT, because we made his life miserable in return.
The lesson: keep giving 'em hell. It's not just gratifying, it sometimes works.
It amazes me... (Score:4, Interesting)
I still think the best possible defense against spam is to be self-hosted, server-wise. I would also be interested to know how often this guy had to change ISPs thanks to being (rightfully) shut down for abuse of resources.
Then again, if he were hosted on AT&T/Comcast, that might never have happened. AT&T likes spammer money too much.
Open proxies (Score:4, Interesting)
Meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Has Anybody Actually Checked This Out? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd want to take a look at his books, and his bank account. Get a list of his clients, and see how much stuff they're actually selling. "Spam on commission" sounds seriously odd.
Also keep in mind that $1000/week is $50,000/year -- not all that impressive.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly, I have to agree with him (Score:3, Insightful)
But you do get one benefit... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bulk unsolicited email is the exact opposite. It is an unnegotiated public bad- neither you nor your ISP negotiates that
Sentencing for Convicted Spammers (Score:4, Interesting)
1 second in prison, for every email that they've sent.
So if a spammer is caught, and after they raid his computers they figure he did 10 million emails that week, that would be...
10 000 000 / (24 * 3600) = 115 days in prison (roughly 4 months, for that week)
I think that would work out to a managable amount of time (ie something that won't overflow the prisons). It also would make things easier since the authorities would only need to analyze a relatively small set of data to get proof and sentencing (ie this month's ISP logs)
Or even if it wasn't prison-time, they could easily be forced to manual labour for the city the live in or something... (preferably something like cleaning sewers, but basically anywhere that manual labour is needed...)
sound like a good idea?
Re:Sentencing for Convicted Spammers (Score:3, Interesting)
So, is a life sentence a fair punnishment for one year of spamming?
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small social networks are vulnerable. (Score:4, Insightful)
A digital social network (in the form of bullitain boards, etc) through which people can trade information about addresses, software, and spamming methods should be a trivial thing for a large digitally sophisticated crowd (ie slashdot) to find and then attack, either by trolling/flooding, or more outright destructive means.
This dosent address the actual hardware involved in sending and receiving spam, but rather constitutes a multi-front assault against a subculture. Maybe it wont stop all spam, but it would make it harder for people to get into the spam business, by either exposing this social infrastructure and diluting it, or disabling it violently by disrupting the virtual real-estate it resides in.
Do the math (Score:5, Insightful)
He spent the first 5 months researching and one month of spamming
He spent $10.000 on spam-software
He claims he made $1000 a week.
4 weeks times $1000=$4000 income.
$4000 income minus $10.000 is -$6000. So, the guy loses $6000 on spamming.
Film at eleven...
Cable & DSL are geting BIIIIG here. (Score:4, Interesting)
This makes sense. In the past month or so, the amount traceable to DSL or cable clients has now pushed over 50% of my spam. I'm slowly automating turfing them to the abuse depts - but some don't even let you send directly - you have to go fill out a form. And they demand the full message- difficult when the email grabs an image as you open it - those don't stay. Seems the cable/dsl companies have this very low on their priority list.
Stuntman! (Score:3, Funny)
Screw spamming...I wanna know how to become a Hollywood stuntman!
Re:Do the math... (Score:3, Interesting)
It just occured to me, this could present the ultimate punishment for spammers... jail time for the amount of our time they've wasted. It's a numbers game...