Another Millionaire Spammer Story 979
An anonymous reader writes "Here's another story about a millionaire spammer who thinks he is doing nothing wrong and can't wait to get his hands on the next generation of spamming software." See also the last installment.
Re:All spammers (Score:5, Insightful)
They cause people to distrust each other. I am very cautious about giving a web site my email address for fear that it will be abused.
They both make email less pleasant.
Their creators all seem to be unremorseful. If only we could send viruses and trojans to them all.
More of the same... (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently saw the "Bart gets a job as a bartender for the Mob" episode. The episode ended with
Bart: "I realize now that crime doesn't pay"
Fat Tony: "Yeah, I guess you're right"
At which point Fat Tony and his entourage leave in several strech limos.
The only point of posting stories like these seems to be:
1) enraging
2) proving that crime DOES pay.
Why bother?
Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
I like what I do, even though I have to hide from everyone, use unlisted numbers, and pretend like it's not bothering anyone. It's truly the greatest business in the world. And the dog feces that keep coming in the mail don't bother me that much, either.
It will continue as long as it works... (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as everyone complains about it, there are sufficient people who respond to the advertising and buy the products. As long as that happens, spam will continue.
Good to know he has money... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if tech isn't developed.... (Score:3, Insightful)
why hasn't there been software that would watch incoming messages, and say if > 10,000 messages come thru with the same subject line, flip those over to a "suspect" pile for administrator review, yeah yeah I know admins don't have the time to look thru the msgs, but there will either have to be a regulation on spam so its easily identifiable (header) or software to weed them out adequately, there are some out there.....but how well do they work?
otherwise, guys like this will cash in and live large while, we whine about what a scumbag he/she is.... :)
I'd like to see if this is *really* possible! (Score:3, Insightful)
"Isn't technology great?"
Firstly, can anyone envision what could possibly do this? Does your browser have to be trojoned to accomplish this feat? Could it be an IE-only kind of design bug?
Secondly, if he does manage this, he'd better do a better job of hiding his location, because he's about to piss off a *lot* of people with this stunt!
Is he *trying* to get arrested again? (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all no, this is not great. Second, as soon as he talks about intentionally bypassing a firewall, I start thinking that that sounds suspiciously like "circumventing an access control" which, I believe, is no longer legal.
It boils down to (Score:5, Insightful)
But this guy is so big an asshole that the goatse.cx guy must be feeling embarASSed.
The poster should be modded -1:troll for posting such goatse-cx like stories to
How to fight spam? (Score:2, Insightful)
In my humble opinion: No.
Possibly, spammers will continue to be creative and get across filters, security, etc. I think that a really effective way to fight spam is simply ignore it. By that I mean, never, ever answer a spam propaganda. Or even better, it would be very useful to "blacklist" all the companies which use spam as a means of advertising. Consumers in our capitalist society have to vote with their pocket... I see no other way.
In conclusion don't blame the spammer, blame the companies using spamming services. I would bet that spam would die a short death if all these unethical companies simply lost their businesses.
Re:damn spammers (Score:2, Insightful)
mind u lots of things are morally dodgy yet make lots of money - look at fags'n'booze.
(BTW. all you 'phobic colonists know fag is something different in the uk ? right ?)
Expensive House != Net Worth (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam is obviously a profitable activity and the writer of the article is trying to emphasize the "millionaire" aspect, but I doubt this guy is a true millionaire.
Re:I'd like to see if this is *really* possible! (Score:4, Insightful)
All you need is a certain popular insecure operating system, which has this "feature" turned on by default, so you can see when your network print job finishes, etc.
This is one of the many wonderful reasons why I run OS X and Linux at home.
I've decided SPAM isn't that bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
But at least I have to hand it to this person, at least he's got some morals, or so he says. And at least Spam is environmentally friendly -- it doesn't affect the groundwater or the air I breathe.
And that's a big point. It reminds me that yes, it's upsetting, but at least it's not a lingering mess, environmentally. It's not a SuperFund site.
I'm reminded of Air-Mail delivery in this country. Airplanes were paid by the pound for mail, so more often than not, they would stuff the US mail bags with rocks to make more money. That's the essence of the point: we realize that there is money to be made in bulk. Pay by the pound, all-you-can-eat, spam-o-rama, and hope that just one sucker is out there.
The other point this article brings to light for me is the fact that, for the most part, we humans are actually brighter than I thought. The spam rate is horrendous. Something like 2 in a big-freaking-number. So Spam is casting a very wide net to catch a few sardines. I think that is quite a boost to our combined egos. We aren't as dumb as we behave in traffic.
I know many will make the point that it's clogging routers, servers, and generally a waste of time, but it's a grey area whether that's hard or soft dollars. What's the cost of one more email?
But we can change this. Why can't email be like instant messaging where only those on my buddy list can email me. The Spammer would have to guess my email address and some complicated guid to send me email.
So for me, at least until they change the SMTP/POP RFC to allow for end-user authentication, I'm okay with spam
Re:More of the same... (Score:5, Insightful)
Truth, maybe? I don't like it, but it seems useful to know the old line "Spamming doesn't work" isn't true. It provides motivation to find a true solution to the problem. Spamming *does* pay, but as a phenominal pain in the tail, we should look for ways to make it uneconomical.
An ex-con telling us spam is good... no surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder how rich he'd be if he had to pay for all the bandwidth he's ripped from ISP mailservers.
spammers and drug cartels... (Score:5, Insightful)
does this remind anyone else of the columbian drug cartels?...sure drugs are everywhere, but a small number of columbian drug cartels are responsible for a large portion of the world's drug traffic...another similarity, we're fighting losing battles against spammers and drugs...we're not making up any ground...
seriously though, why can't some senator or congressman introduce a tough anti-spam bill...does spammers have a strong political lobby like the NRA or big Tobbacco does?...then again, i guess the result would be the same as in this article, spammers would just move more of their actual operations overseas...oh well...
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hate to say this, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
What have we accomplished? Well, we've made spammers' jobs very difficult. We've sown public discontent and developed an extreme social pressure against these activities. We've developed tools that cause large percentages of spammers' messages to fail, or even discover their activities and shut down their accounts. The job is hard, but it's still not hard to turn a huge profit doing it.
We have laws against disturbing the peace, solicitation, and harassment. Companies that use spammers should be fined heavily, to the point that there's no way they could reasonably profit from something like this. If a spammer is found out, the government should seize property and cash in the amount of their payment for this illegal act.
The problem is that while it's socially unacceptable, there is still an economic incentive. Remove it, and you can remove the problem.
Re:Spammers NEW address now available (Score:5, Insightful)
i thought that was hilarious too...the author is basically saying that he can't give it out, because Ralsky is afraid of people knowing where he lives...but, hey, if anyone wants to do a little research, here's where to look...classic...
Re:Ok, Step # 1 (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure I've got a spare $20 around here somewhere.
Though I would also be happy to see someone throw a firebomb in this guy's new house. This idiot is very pleased with himself, and is completely remorseless, maybe its time to show him why you don't piss off a mob.
Sadly, in the end I don't think there is anything we can really do to stop him. Sure, it might be possible to find and wipe his system, but what good would it do? I'm sure this guy backs up his lists constantly, and if he has half a clue, he probably has all of his servers imaged/ghosted. He'd be spamming again within the day.
As for the firebomb idea, while it would give me a warm fuzzy feeling to see this guy made to pay for being a parasite on the internet, please no one do it. All its going to do is hurt his home owner's insurance company, not him. Not to mention that it really is a bad way to deal with the problem.
What we need to do is start pushing laws that will prohibit this sort of BS. Sure it'll be an uphill battle, and there will probably be a large number of laws that get killed by the courts, but all we need is for 1 good federal anti-spam law to stick, and we win. Look at the fight to enforce filtering in libraries, they have lost a dozen times, but they keep passing more laws. Eventually, the courts are going to let one of them stand, its just a matter of time and patience. That is what we really need to do, we need to get us a couple of senetors to start introducing anti-spam legislation, and getting it passed. Eventually something will pass, and the courts will let it stand, then we'll be able to shut this idiot down.
So, instead of spending your $20 getting this idiot's system wiped for less than a day, we should start pooling that money to buy a senetor. It worked for Disney.
Re:file trading okay, spam not okay (Score:4, Insightful)
Last time I checked, nobody just sent me copyrighted software, music or movies without my permission or request. Maybe spammers should start mass-sending copyrighted materials, then at least we might find something useful taking up all our disk space...
Past anything (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm calling this BS. Isnt this just the windows messaging thing we've already heard about?
Re:So why isn't this fellow being ostracized? (Score:1, Insightful)
That's strange...I thought we just had laws against immolating people period. So if I burn someone alive not based on their skin color, it's fine by you?
Re:More of the same... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It will continue as long as it works... (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a feeling that if we ever bought a product from a telemarketer, we'd be put on the 'sucker' list and get bombarded with even more telemarketing. Maybe same thing with spam, if they could somehow track my purchase to my email address (harder than with telemarketers).
Of course, as it is now, telemarketers already establish your pattern of when you're in the house by when you answer the phone. Do you semi-regularly get phone calls with no one on the other line? Large chance that is usually a telemarketing autodialer. Maybe with a telemarketer to be eventually connected to you (have you noticed the few second delay before you get them online?), or maybe it's just the autodialer. There was a point last year where I was studying and didn't feel like getting the phone, and the thin literally rang once every 10 minutes, for over an hour and a half! Of course, my girlfriend's caller ID showed the standard 'out of area'.
Well, enough rambling, but I refuse to EVER buy from a spammer or telemarketer, no matter how good the deals seem to be.
Re:damn spammers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:cost per eyeball (Score:2, Insightful)
Contrast that with television commercials. No way to determine: a) how many viewers of the programs the adverstisements are interleaved into, b) no way to determine how many viewers didn't get up to take a sh*t during the commercial.
I know the rating services use sophisticated statistical analyses to extrapolate US viewing habits from a small set of data, but the spammer has a much better idea of the true "cost per eyeball" of his ad.
My 2c.
Re:What a crook (Score:1, Insightful)
Spam is bad, bad, bad. But...
When you turn off advertising including all banners, you are stealing from your favorite websites. How do you think THEY pay for all of their CPU time, RAM, etc?
You are pushing legitimate sites toward more annoying forms of revenue generation. Maybe Slashdot should refuse your non-requested site access.
He doesn't do anything illegal? What a crock. (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably doesn't want that one to become his third or fifth divorce if she started thinking he'd put her back to work on the king-size.
I get really, really disgusted by these people - especially when they've been criminals before and think they have "reformed" now. My skin crawled as I read through the article. It's like a multi-level marketer who keeps pushing until he's gotten everything he can from his mark; then moves onto the next scam. That's all it is - a scam. We shouldn't even call it spam email it should be scam email. I have nothing against legitimate advertisers but this sort of thing is just sickening. "I'm not doing anything wrong" yet everyone you come into contact with is repulsed by you. That calls for serious medication.
Re:file trading okay, spam not okay (Score:5, Insightful)
File-trading isn't intrusive. That's the difference. If P2P applications FORCED you to receive any file that anyone wanted to send you, then yes, people here would then lump it with SPAM.
It's not a question of legality, it's a question of access control to your system.
Interview Tactics.... (Score:2, Insightful)
"Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records."
While that condition was meet, the reporter took an underhanded approach and told the public where to get his address. Hell, the reporter should have had it posted on another website and linked to it.
Crap like this is why I don't trust reporters.
Email Spam prevention = low priority (Score:2, Insightful)
What bothers ME much more, are the advertising methods which force me to take time away from what I'm doing...such as door-to-door sales, and telemarketing. I'd much rather see these people put away for a couple years.....and these methods have been in use for DECADES.
leaning toward filters (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd still like to see some spammers go to jail, it's true, but I am getting happier and happier with filters -- and I'd much rather see the spam phenomenon answered that way. (OK, ok, I give, I give
I set my mom up with Mac OS X, and the famous junk mail filtering system within it really is great. I've been adding filters to PINE [slashdot.org]; they're not Bayesian or otherwise learning-type filters, but they cut down on the junk quite a bit. (Hey, I should add some screenshots to make that a better HOWTO
The increasing usefulness of filters (at various levels) is I think a good reason to be less hasty to call for legal remedies; I am starting to regret my former attitude about it. Yes, there should be laws that protect people from force or fraud, but they should be as limited as possible, should err in favor of free speech (not that most spam much deserves that label). Despite hating spam, I don't want email to have to pass an official censor board and be "approved as legitimate." My *own* censor board (filters), fine
This leaves people who are even further left than I am on the bell curve of computer savvy a little bit in the cold (because it takes some cleverness and free time to counter the clever malice of the spampigs), but on the other hand it gives good incentive to ISPs and other intermediaries (including makers of 3rd party software, mail clients) to make their products better and thus more popular. Popularity is important even when money is not the prime mover, as with Mozilla / Kmail, or Evolution.*
Cheers,
timothy
*Sure, Ximian is a company, and they would like money, but the fact is that you can use Evolution for free.
timothy
Re:ethical?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also remember Rule No. 2: Spammers are stupid. As such, spammer lies are always stupid.
Hey, nobody died (Score:3, Insightful)
proving that crime DOES pay.
It isn't a crime in most places. If everyone wants spam to be illegal, sure, I'll vote for it. But I really don't think it is the most serious antisocial behaviour on the Internet at present. I'd put viruses and DoS attacks a lot higher, for example, and I don't think I'm alone in this.
Spam is annoying, but is it actually that serious?
OK, spam is not a good thing, but aren't we getting a little carried away here? Personally, I find website pop-ups much more annoying than spam, especially when they crash Mozilla...
Re:The more I think about it.... (Score:1, Insightful)
I suggest that you join the military and get involved in a war (plenty of options coming up!).
This will give you some idea of what 'evil' actually means (and no, it doesn't mean irritating junk marketing).
No, no, no..Re:spam solution: charge for email? (Score:3, Insightful)
Charging for email is NOT the solution.
1. Even at a threshold of 1000. So he breaks up his sending into lumps of 999.
2. You then screw all the listservs, hobby groups, non-profits, etc, etc.
3. Junk snailmail costs, and you still get that, right?
4. So it costs. Cut down his profit by 50%, and he STILL makes money. And sends out twice as many.
5. He hijacks some unsuspecting user, and uses THEIR act to send it. THEY get the bill.
No. The answer is...get him on something else. Deceptive marketing, tax evasion, misuse of telephone services.
But charging for email screws US, not him.
How about something easier to outlaw... (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/principl.htm [dataprotection.gov.uk]
Note the
Theft of something as insubstantial as bandwidth and CPU time is difficult to build a case around, but what would happen to spammers if the USA had this sort of law? Never mind the spam, they obviously have a large pile of personally identifiable information - if selling your CDs of e-mail addresses is illegal (because they're being used for purposes other than the one they were collected for), there goes the address sharing for a start.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Another thing that could be done is to figure out where this guy's 190 email servers are and publish a block list for ISP's to simply refuse any data from the ISP's who are letting this man do what he is doing.
If ISP's start cutting off all data from known spam sources, that will help cut back on the problem greatly.
Re:file trading okay, spam not okay (Score:3, Insightful)
Communication between two consenting adults is different than unsolicitated advertisement.
True. Or is it?
Let's say you and I are friends, and I send you an email that says, "Hey, how are you?" Even if you're not expecting the email, that's surely communication between consenting adults, right? I mean, if you and I are friends, it's silly to think that I should be required to ask permission before sending you a social email, right? So that's okay.
Other end of the spectrum. I'm a spammer based in Hong Kong. I get your email address from a web-scraper, or other indiscriminate source. I send you a message, using carefully forged headers, advertising nasty kiddie-animal porn. That's not okay, right, because you never consented, even implicitly, to receive that email. And, given the choice, you never would have consented to receive it. So that's obviously bad and wrong.
Now let's blur the line a bit. Let's say we're friends, and I send you an email-- which you are not expecting-- that says, "Hey, how are you? I'm trying to sell my lawnmower; would you like to buy it?" That's obviously an advertisement, albeit an informal one between friends. You don't know that I'm selling my lawnmower; you've never expressed an interest in buying my lawnmower. My email to you was completely unsolicited. But it's still okay, because we're friends. You wouldn't try to get my ISP to shut off my email account for that-- unless you're just a complete and total asshole, a possibility based on your response that I'm not willing to rule out yet.
Now let's blur things a little more. What if I'm a friend of a friend. I don't know you directly, but I'm asking around about selling my lawnmower and a mutual acquaintance of ours says, "I don't want it, but my friend Henry V
What if our mutual friend had no particular reason to think that you'd be interested in my lawnmower? What if he just said, "Try Henry V
What if I'm simultaneously doing this same sort of thing with everybody I know? Is it spam then?
Some things are obviously spam. And some things are obviously not. But in the middle, you have lots of stuff that's not obviously either. In deciding which is which, you have to make a judgment call. Which, it seems, puts the lie to your statement that "communication between two consenting adults is different than unsolicitated advertisement." In some cases, communication between two consenting adults is, in fact, just barely distinguishable from unsolicited advertisement.
Ever been in Japan? Ever heard the vans with loud-speakers that go around town campaigning for a certain candidate? Notice how a politician in the U.S. would go to jail if he tried it.
Nobody would go to jail. Disturbance of the peace is not an offense that warrants being taken to jail. If you play your stereo too loudly-- either because you like loud music or because you want people to hear it-- you'll get a citation, nothing more.
This example, of course, has nothing at all to do with advertisement or communication. It has to do with the idea of the commons, over which society has jurisdiction. Same principle that makes littering on city property a crime. Because communication has, as you say, "certain safeguards of privacy and freedom," it's pretty tough to argue that the conduit of communication-- in this case, the network that connects computers via email-- can be treated as a commons by the state.
Re:It will continue as long as it works... (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember, they aren't payed by how many people actually follow up on the spam they send, they get payed for the number of people they send their spam to.
Re:file trading okay, spam not okay (Score:3, Insightful)
Just FYI, "SPAM" is a meat product sold by Hormel; "spam" is unsolicited junk email. The two terms can't be used interchangeably for trademark reasons.
That said, file trading is also intrusive. It's intrusive on the rights, granted by law, of the copyright holder. The only difference is that spam intrudes on you, personally, while file trading doesn't. But both are intrusive, and in the same way.
This is the irony that tickles my funny bone. The prevailing consensus of opinion on Slashdot is that file trading is okay because it only infringes on the rights of others, while spam is not okay because it infringes on the (notional, and in fact completely fictitious) rights of me.
Spam is annoying. But annoyances, in general, are not against the law. Trading copyrighted materials, on the other hand, is explicitly against the law. Yet one of these is morally okay, and the other is morally intolerable, by Slashdot standards.
Can you seriously tell me that this doesn't absolutely crack you up?
Ralsky on NPR in August (Score:3, Insightful)
Is it me, or does it seem that most spam pieces slant toward the "pro-business" aspects of it, and take everything they say at face value.
If a journalist wants to show spammers for what they are, just ask: "Do you relay your mail off of unauthorized open mail servers?" According to Ralsky's record on Spamhaus [spamhaus.org], he does, or did.
On Aug. 15, Ralsky was interviewed on NPR [npr.org]. It was the typical pary line, about how it's not illegal, and they don't send porn, and they honor removes, etc., all very cheerful. But, once, she asked whether he used "blind relays"....
Quietly, he answered, "I won't make a comment on that." I wish she would have elaborated on it, because most of the listeners wouldn't have understood that this means hijacking open mail servers, which is generally considered theft of service.
It's not the spammers fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way it will stop is when it quits working. The problem with that is people are generally stupid and trust others.
I have no hatred with spammers, I hate the dipshits that buy their sales pitch.
Actually... (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's face it: Anyone can spam if they have no compunctions and morals. I think it'd be a great stride forward if there were loads of entrepreneurial spammers, all making less than minimum wage for their efforts, rather than a small group making massive windfalls.
Re:spam solution: charge for email? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sadly, this is how the business world works.
Can't we all just be engineers?
Re:Interview Tactics.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ralsky hounds us all via our publicly-available e-mail addresses. Why shouldn't it be known that his personal information is a matter of public record, and enterprising people who want to obtain it and hound him in return can do so?
Re:All spammers (Score:3, Insightful)
To me spammers are as disruptive to internet growth and society as virus\trojan etc creators.
Actually, according to the article, I don't see much distinction:
And then later:
So, let me get this straight. This guy sends a trojan to 250 million people per day, is actively working on intruding onto protected computer systems, and he lives in a $750,000 house? People who do those things out of intellectual curiousity get incarcerated, but this guy lives it up!? WTF? Between this guy, MS, Cisco, et. al., I am beginning to wonder if it's even possible to make an honest living in this world anymore!
Re:All spammers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Right... (Score:3, Insightful)
WAKE UP!! All ISP's have no icentive to stop this! (Score:1, Insightful)
Why don't more people come out and say what this really is?..... this is stealing, plain and simple.
Bandwidth is a service that costs the user money. Hardware costs the user money. I can't use your pay cable TV service and I can't use your fridge whenever I feel like it...so why is bandwidth and hardware any different?
It doesn't matter that I let others in the public send me email or access my personal website. If I wanted to put my fridge on my front lawn so that anyone in my block could use it that is my business...it in no way means that I gave my permission to EVERYONE in the world to use it.
Stealing services or using someone's property is illegal...so why aren't spammers going to jail?
BECAUSE ISPs ARE MAKING MONEY OFF OF THEM!! Even the big players make money because the little players pay them for access (that means the spammer ISP and You)! If laws are going to be effective they have to target ALL ISP's...not just the ones that get the initial check from the spammer. They are ALL profiting.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
You seem to be assuming that these people WANT an un-spamable email protocol. Sure, the end users do, but probably not the ISPs. Verio, Sprint, AT&T, and Yahoo are (or were until fairly recently) quite spam-friendly. They were either aware of their spam problems and were happy taking the spammers' money, or they were not willing to spend the money to clean up the problem. It seems unlikely they will spend the time/money to use a new SMTP protocol.
And say this new protocol exists (and aren't there secure SMTP protocols already?) there will be a transition period of several years while it gets rolled out all over the world. At which point, it seems to me a mail server will have to either:
I'm not saying this is a bad or good idea. I just think that spam is a social problem more than it is a technical one, and solving it will require social solutions (new laws and files/jail for spammers) as well as technical ones.
Ralsky and Spam... no quick fixes here... (Score:5, Insightful)
In part, spam is a technological arms race: spammers use more sophisticated ways of getting their messages out, and anti-spammers counter by developing more advanced ways of blocking them. Building a better mousetrap will only force the mice to get smarter. Hacking is not part of the solution, either: if we complain about legislation permitting corporate hacking, we should refrain from doing it ourselves (it's a moral high ground thing...)
Part of the spam problem is money: at least a few people have mastered the "1. Send spam 2. ??? 3. Profit!" formula. An article describing "How I got rich in three easy steps" will, unfortunately, inspire at least a few wannabes, which leads to the next part of the problem...
People. The famous quote that "there's a sucker born every minute" is absolutely true. People can be dumb. People can be greedy. People can be unscrupulous. In an age where someone can blanket the planet with a new get-rich-quick scheme, a pill or cream to enhance sexual prowess, a free vacation to wherever, it's almost guaranteed that their message will find someone who doesn't even hesitate to sign themselves up.
The final part of the problem is something I've never seen mentioned anywhere else: ego. From the article, it sounds like Ralsky knows exactly what he's doing, and he's reveling in the fact that he's notorious/infamous for being one of the best at doing it.
So, how to fix the problem? Use not just one, but every tool at our disposal:
1. Continue developing more sophisticated ways of keeping spam from ever reaching user mailboxes and/or desktops, and try to anticipate how spammers will react in response;
2. Use the existing laws every country has to deal with fraud. Urge local and/or national prosecutors to go after the big fish, making them examples for the smaller ones. Develop international working groups to attack the problem when spammers move their operations overseas. (okay, that last one's a little optimistic, but hey, at least it's an idea...) Nail the fraudsters, shut down their operations, penalize their profits away. The less profit there is, and the harder it is to keep it, the less people will be tempted to try it;
3. Educate, educate, educate: spread the word on how to deal with spam (don't click the opt-out link, don't reply to unsubscribe, learn how to keep your e-mail address from being harvested, etc.) On another level, urge the (possibly clueless) people who think it's a good marketing technique that spam just makes them look like every other get-rich-quick artist they hate getting e-mail from.
4. Marginalize the big fish: the more someone like Ralsky reads about himself in the press or on the Web, the more it feeds his ego. The more dog poop he scrapes off his front steps, the more it eggs him on to keep spamming. Shame and guilt can still be two pretty powerful social-engineering methods, but allowing him to portray himself as a 'victim' of those nasty-evil hackers will only serve to help him and his cause.
Re:So let's do something (Score:2, Insightful)
>> The Bayesian people are on the right track. But this only solves the problem for you, and does nothing for the root problem.
I disagree. "The response rate is the key to the whole operation, said Ralsky." If enough people do not ever see the message, then Ralsky will have to move to a smaller house and declare bankruptcy again.
Paul Graham believes "All along the spectrum, if you restrict the sales pitches spammers can make, you will inevitably tend to put them out of business." (A Plan for Spam [paulgraham.com])
Re:All spammers (Score:3, Insightful)
We're geeks, let's use our brainpower to solve such problems... or at the very least our very sick and twisted imaginations.
Re:Can you imagine being the person... (Score:3, Insightful)
These numbers can't possibly be true... (Score:5, Insightful)
He's claiming that one out of three spams that are opened in something that renders HTML get a response. I always knew the unwashed web-browser-email masses were dumb, but not that dumb...
Re:ethical?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Duh, because a perfectly ethical and honest politician said that it was wrong. Don't let that nonsense about it being a transaction between two willing participants fool you. Uncle Sam knows best.
Re:Two words: (Score:5, Insightful)
Treat the cause, not the symptom (Score:3, Insightful)
I would think those companies would eventually get the message, and all of our spam trouble would eventually fade away.
Think someone somewhere would want to host a database of spam ads of products and services that we should boycott ?
Re:All spammers (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me paint a picture
Flyer....
Window.....
GLUE....
We don't need no more stinking laws. (Score:4, Insightful)
Do we really want to have our Congressmen/woman making laws regarding the Internet? They don't have a very good track record for making laws period, much less laws dealing with technology. Not to mention the fact that US laws usually only apply to the US, usually.
I think that the fight needs to be waged at the ISP level. ISP's need to be booting these lowlifes off of their networks. If these people are constantly forced to move servers and get new connections for their servers, it will become unfeasible. We can start with this guys T1. Who provides that T1? File complaints to that provider? Where are his email servers, someone has to be providing access to the 'net for those server. You will be suprised what a few letters can do?
We don't need to kill anyone or even work that hard to stop these pricks. Just find out where they live and kill them...um... I mean tell their ISPs to either start cutting off connections or else...
Re:Who are the idiots providing service? (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider that the spammer's tactic to avoide RBL-style blocking is to shift his services off shore aand then from ISP to ISP in China. This forces the rest of us (anti-UCE types) to play whack-a-mole with the spammer's email servers.
Why not take the game to his front door, quite literally? He pretends to be an ISP catering to customers (thereby excusing him for having 50 phone lines), so why not start a lobby with the state PUC (public utilities commission) against him as an abusive service provider?
Granted, the PUC moves slow (well, at least they do where I come from). It may take years for them to literally force the local telco to remove the lines to the spammers home. But that is exactly what they have the power to do. This guy has been at it for years; he says he won't quit, so let's sick the gov't at him in a way that we can.
If this guy was my neighbor, I'd be doing everything I could to give him the boot, and attacking his livlihood right smack at the telco box into his three-quarter million dollar home would be a good start.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Wrong town (Score:3, Insightful)
Hope you haven't already UPS'ed some dog doo...
Actually, the article gives plenty of info to find the house visually -- tells you the intersection it is near, and that it has a circular brick driveway and is being worked on. Someone who lives in that area could find it easily.