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Russia's Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Jul 25, 2005 12:48 PM
from the but-what's-the-motive-detective-columbo? dept.
from the but-what's-the-motive-detective-columbo? dept.
Karellen !-P writes "Vardan Kushnir, a notorious russian spammer who headed the English learning centers, the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head."
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That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, this message is about all the empathy and concern I can work myself up to. Good riddance to bad trash.
Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Funny)
It should be!
Sic semper spammeris!
^_^
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Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Funny)
I guess people just did as instructed...albeit with a 30lb 'mouse'
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Re:That shouldn't happen. Likely just new owners (Score:5, Funny)
It was Bill Gates. He couldn't figure out what CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet did, so he "bought them out" to avoid competing with them.
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Re:That shouldn't happen. Likely just new owners (Score:5, Funny)
And who among us is not a nerd? Let him be cast out.
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Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
If only the spammers would read that and realize the truth of it. I'm sure many of them think what they're doing is harmless and no one could possibly be bothered by it, but as you pointed out when you irritate millions of people chances are at least a few of them we be complete raving psychos.
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Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, things may be more complex then they seem...
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Re:Why would it be the mafia? (Score:5, Insightful)
People are beat to death by mafia goons all the time.
The "single pistol shot through the eyeball" execution is the stuff of movies. Mob thugs are no better at crime than regular thugs, they just have infrastructure in place to make it easier.
Yes there is a russian mafia, but if this is the most profitable spammer in russia its simply illogical for them to kill their cashcow.
Now it's my turn to get all Hollywood:
"You're only as good as your last brown envelope."
Parent
Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Informative)
That's not quite true. The Russian culture is certainly full of corruption given that the KGB effectively became the Mafia, but Moscow has become a booming city ripe with economic opportunity. New freeways, inexpensive cars, waterparks, big businesses (Sun's Russian HQ is right across the street from my father-in-law!), and Aerospace technologies are just a few areas where Moscow has been booming. Another big area is restaurant chains. There are now more international food chains in Russia than ever before!
Russia is something of a third world country that's pulling itself back up into an economic power. Along the way there will be TONS of greed and corruption, but don't confuse that with the honest growth that is occurring.
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Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Funny)
Please, don't spoil everything. As a fellow russian, I find this +5 informative posts about white bear mobs walking around here drinking vodka, making botnets from Comcast customers and firing AKA-47's at one another highly amusing.
Anyway, how about making Jul 25 an international anti-spam day? It just writes itself in the calendar, really it does...
Parent
Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. I'm not Russian. My wife is. :-)
Well, it's the same in my book, so I more or less guessed right. ;-)
2. That's a bit more extreme than I was trying to communicate.
I know. I commented on grandparent poster's take on my country's internal affairs which usually gets modded up to eleven by same thinking moderators. I read a lot of this post-apocalyptic nonsence here, basically in every thread about Russia, cracks me up every time.
Besides, what other country allows its Presidential candidates to be kidnapped? (Or perhaps allows it's candidates to spin believable stories about kidnapping. You decide.) ;-)
Heh. And what country allows its military-industrial complex to buy out the president elections and generally pwn the public as it pleases?
I think, it's the same shit everywhere, only the level of general, um, civility differs. We lag for about fifty-sixty years, so our bandits are more rough. Bandits of "first world" countries are more civilized, but the principle stays the same.
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Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Informative)
Just being unbearably pendantic.
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Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sure there is... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's actually a "Khah" sound (e.g. loch ness), not a hard 'H' sound.
A hamburger cost a month's salary, and the only reason there was a long line several hundred people in length is because the Russian people were so supressed that they desperately [y]earned to try something they only read about or seen on TV.
Ehh... that's somewhat true. McDonalds was simply something new and cool at the time. A bit like when the Apple Store opened here in Chicago. Were people lined up at the Apple Store because they were oppressed? Me thinks it had more to do with the Apple Store being new and cool.
It was the same thing with McDonalds. After it existed for a while, it became a much more normal part of Russian life.
I bet you'd find it "progress" if I told you that the cost of the hamburger since then has gone down from a month's sallary to a week's sallary.
I think you're a little behind on the times. Several years ago, the Russian government reissued new currency that has a much better parity [google.com] when compared to the Dollar. Eating at McDonalds isn't cheap, but it doesn't cost a weeks salary, either.
Sure, there are a handful of millionaires here and there, the vast majority of whom earned their wealth by "stealing" the property and industries that the government abandoned after instituting a more free market.
1. These are generally called "New Russians".
2. Many New Russians obtained their wealth through perfectly honest means. For example, a friend of my wife's family made a killing by starting a door repair/replacement business. Not something you'd think would be a big money-maker, but apparently he became quite weathly from it. Which just goes to show how important property is to Russians now that it's private instead of public.
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The important thing is ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
About 10 years ago (and if it's a lot better there now, sorry for outdated information), the NY Times had two articles summing up the new Russia.
One was on business practices, with the comment, "to enforce a contract, you often have to take out a contract".
The other was on a clinic doing heroin detox. The basic system was thugs would patrol the streets, find people doing heroin, club them into submission, drag them to the clinic and chain them to a bed, and then let them dry out cold turkey. The Doctor in charge said, "of course this is not the optimal treatment, but here
Looks like our spammer's fate falls under one of those two categories of "solutions". As others have said, it probably wasn't the spam, it was, "just business".
Parent
Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, the majority of people here probably could just turn their filters on, but don't act like the technology to block annoying behavior like the spammers' just falls from the sky. Someone has to make it, and that's their time that the spammer is taking up.
There are a lot of people with legitimate grievances about unwanted bulk email, some greater than others. But when you get a lot of people together who each have a small grievance...it's probably not enough to cause any of them to actually go out and kill the person responsible, but don't expect them to act all sad about it when somebody else (assumedly for their own, probably nefarious reasons) does.
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Re:That shouldn't happen. (Score:5, Funny)
On the other hand, I'm having a hard time resisting the urge to make a crack about how the repeated blows to the head came from an enlarged penis.
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You know what they say... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure there will be plenty of people thinking that somebody got a little too pissed off with spam, but try and remember that these types of spammers associate with organised crime (e.g. by hiring virus writers to get them bot nets).
Re:You know what they say... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is retribution and murder
Retribution? Do you know something that the authorities don't?
has fuck all to do with Karma
Karma [wikipedia.org]: According to the Vedas, if we sow goodness, we will reap goodness; if we sow evil, we will reap evil.
If you add up all the hours people spend deleting spam, filtering spam, missing important emails because of spam filters etc, then that's a hell of a lot of time this spammer has taken away from people. You take away somebody's time, you are taking away part of their life. I'd say that's sowing evil, wouldn't you?
This is one less person that can have his day in court
Spamming is legal in Russia.
Parent
Re:You know what they say... (Score:5, Funny)
you had better know Russian if you go there, tavaresh, because random passers by will beat you if you don't
No they will not (at least in Moscow). If you do not speak Russian, most people will think you are either a rich tourist or someone in politics. In either case you may be too important to get into a fight with. However, they will steal your wallet.
Parent
Because of spamming? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Because of spamming? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Here it comes... (Score:5, Funny)
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Makes you wonder (Score:5, Funny)
Why must we be animals? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why must we be animals? (Score:5, Funny)
Ummm... because we are?
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Wouldn't it be funny.. (Score:5, Funny)
Should have opted out. (Score:5, Funny)
From a hidden microphone at the scene of the murder:
"You are receiving *WHAM* this blow to the head *WHAM* because you are part of a *WHAM* specially-selected list of *WHAM* people who agreed to receive *WHAM* blows to the head *WHAM*.
To stop *WHAM* receiving these *WHAM* blows to the head, please *WHAM* email us at no-more-please@optout.blowtothehead. com and *WHAM* we will remove you from our list of *WHAM* blow-to-the-head-club members *WHAM* (heh, we said "club"!) *WHAM* within 24 to 48 hours."
The jokes write themselves (Score:5, Funny)
-In New Jersey, killing a spamlord is only a class B misedemeanor . .
-Whatta you call a spammer with a crushed skull lying in a pool of his own blood?
A good start!
Seriously though that's pretty f*cked up. Spammer or not, no one deserves that.
blunt object (Score:5, Funny)
incredible (Score:5, Funny)
Whoever did it must have some strong lungs.
Such a tragic waste... (Score:5, Funny)
Dying in tiny slices (Score:5, Interesting)
On topic Soviet Russia joke? (Score:5, Funny)
Opt-out (Score:5, Insightful)
They must have purchased a list with his name on it, and he failed to opt-out, so they had every right to offer their product to him.
After all, we wouldn't want to deny those people who WANT to have their heads beaten in the opportunity, just because some whiny anti-battery types want such lists to be double opt in.
He should have taken more care with his head - kept it in a metal helmet, only showing it to his friends, changing it periodically. Instead, he had his head out in the open where anybody who wanted to could beat it in.
It's all his fault, and the DMA (Dastardly Murder Association) bears no responsibility for this incident.
Spam (Score:5, Insightful)
my take on this is that we shouldn't blame spammers for spam, we should blame the MOTHER-FUCKING BRAIN-DEAD IDIOTS who actually BUY from them, giving them an economic incentive to fuck the rest of us over.
Honestly, if you know anyone who buys that shit, please kick his ass for us, they support spammers, and are more to blame than 100 whatever-this-guys-name-was.
hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
(x) Wow, this might work!
Murder weapon (Score:5, Funny)
This just in! Police have release a photo of the murder weapon! [www.sci.fi]
I can see it coming now... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, I have an idea!
DEAR SIR,
ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF. I AM MR. VLADIMIR NATREVSKY, COUNCIL TO ONE MR. VARDAN
KUSHNIR. I HAVE IN MY POSESSION FOURTY-TWO MILLION US DOLLARS ($42,000,000.00) IN VARIOUS
BANK ACCOUNTS, FROM MR. KUSHNIR'S ASSORTED BUSINESSES. Due to the violent nature of Mr. Kushiner's
death, his reletives do not wish to attract attention to themselves by claiming the money. they
have enlisted my aid in finding someone outside of russia to help them. the money will be deposited into
a bank account of your choosing in the unites states. once this has been accomplished, and with great
sadness, Mr. Kushiner's family will flee the russia that they love to start a new life. the money,
less your commission, will them be transferred to them in their new homeland.
FOR YOUR HELP, YOU WILL RECEIVE 30% OF THEIR FORTUNE ($12,600,000), AND 10% ($4,200,000) WILL BE SET ASIDE FOR
EXPENSES.
YOURS FAITHFULLY,
Mr. VLADIMIR NATREVSKY
Numbers, and points to ponder (Score:5, Interesting)
Say I spend 10 seconds managing my spam every 2-3 days. That's 28 seconds a week. No big deal right?
Say I've been doing it for the last 5 years and will continue to for the next 55.
(5 + 55) * 52 weeks * 28 seconds a week = 87,360 seconds (24.266~ hours). Still not that bad, just one day.
Someone who lives 80 years only gets 700,800 hours to live.
That means spammers only have to annoy 28,879 people ( 700,800 / 24.266~ = 28,879 ) before they've wasted an entire (long) human lifetime worth of time. Now I know it's a bit of a stretch to equate a human lifetime worth of time to the life of an actual human being, but I begin to wonder. My time is very valuable to me and I'd rather not waste a single second of it deleting unwanted advertisements from my inbox.
But let's take it a little further. According to this [census.gov] there are 6,454,864,470 people on earth at the time of this writing. Say spammers only annoy 5% of them (a low estimate I would guess) for their entire lives. That's still 322,743,223 people who lost a day's time to spam.
24.266 hours per person * 322,743,223 people = 7831902223.6 hours wasted.
That's 11,175.66 human lifetimes!
If you want to equate those to actual deaths here are some comparisons:
"British Medial Journal indicating that passive smoking kills over 11,000 people in UK." (http://www.sdlp.ie/pr2march2005.shtm [www.sdlp.ie]).
"To take prostate cancer as an example, although it kills over 11,000 men a year..." (http://www.icr.ac.uk/press/releases/cancerchip.h
"Gun violence kills over 11,000 Americans every year..." (http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2002/1
These were extremely low estimates, the world's population is growing, and the amount of spam is growing.
Still think the punishment didn't fit the crime? I'm not sure anymore myself.
Re:Three Cheers! (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, I expected to see a bit more tempered response from a reasonably sensible user community.
Parent
Re:Three Cheers! (Score:5, Funny)
You're new here, aren't you?
Parent
Re:Three Cheers! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm, a single post to Slashdot being compared to some professional asshat who spammed millions of people and mail servers around the world. Now THAT'S Slashdot for you.
As for the spammer, I gave you this abridged Clerks retort [whysanity.net]:
Blue-Collar Man: Excuse me. I don't mean to interrupt, but what were you talking about?
Randal: The ending of Return of the Jedi.
Dante: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels.
Blue-Collar Man: Well, I'm a contractor myself. I'm a roofer... (digs into pocket and produces business card) Dunn and Reddy Home Improvements. And speaking as a roofer, I can say that a roofer's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing jobs.
Randal: Like when?
Blue-Collar Man: Three months ago I was offered a job up in the hills. A beautiful house with tons of property. It was a simple reshingling job, but I was told that if it was finished within a day, my price would be doubled. Then I realized whose house it was.
Dante: Whose house was it?
Blue-Collar Man: Dominick Bambino's.
Randal: "Babyface" Bambino? The gangster?
Blue-Collar Man: The same. The money was right, but the risk was too big. I knew who he was, and based on that, I passed the job on to a friend of mine.
Dante: Based on personal politics.
Blue-Collar Man: Right. And that week, the Foresci family put a hit on Babyface's house. My friend was shot and killed. He wasn't even finished shingling.
Randal: No way!
Blue-Collar Man: (paying for coffee) I'm alive because I knew there were risks involved taking on that particular client. My friend wasn't so lucky. (pauses to reflect) You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault. A roofer listens to this... (taps his heart) not his wallet.
The spammer should have listened to the roofer.
Parent
Re:Spam mob? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's zero chance that there's not a relationship between Russian-based spam and their thriving organized crime culture. Those guys are completely in bed with each other, which also means that when you make a mis-step, you get your skull beaten with whatever is the Russian equivalent of a baseball bat. Do they play cricket, there, or what? Probably a hockey stick.
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Re:In modern Russia... (Score:5, Funny)
He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.
Sounds like he finally got the bounces that were coming to him.
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Re:All those Punch the Monkey solicitations... (Score:5, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, monkey punches you?
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