Spammers Busted 189
Scud_the_disposable_ writes "CNN has posted an article about the "shutting down" of several spammers who sell fake international driver's licenses. These licenses are supposed to win back suspended driving priviledges, and make holders immune to speeding tickets and other traffic violations." What makes me even more sad is that people fell for it. So far today is a slow spam day for me. Only 81 spam, but its only 9:30.
Lex Talionis is a morally bankrupt code (Score:2, Interesting)
Lex Talionis, the principle of an eye for an eye, is a morally bankrupt code of law we've been moving away from for the past few thousand years, thankfully. It can't deal with the complexities of the modern legal order, and it ignores all proper justifications for systems of punishment: rehabilitation, prophylaxis, etc. It makes an assertion of rigid judgment in an attempt to avoid judgment itself. We can't live in a world without judgment.
Ask yourself this: should we rape the rapist? If not, why not? (Ignore for a moment that we essentially do rape rapists by committing them to so-called "maximum security" prisons where they get systematically brutalized and raped by guards and other inmates.) It's not a morally tenable position to lower ourselves to the level of brutes just so we can vindicate some idea of retribution.
Therefore, ask yourself why we should be happy when the spammer gets spammed? No one should have to endure the pain and annoyance of spam: it's the scurge of the online world. Not even the spammer, who may be in his business because of factors outside his control like debt or bills for an illness in the family, etc. We should be outraged when anyone is spammed, and we should put the full force of the state and the law against the perpetrator no matter who the victim! Picking and choosing among which victims to protect is something the legal order of former barbaric times did. I'd be disgusted if our government returned to those days.
Spam == bad. Victimization == bad. Why do people conflate the two? What kind of giddy moral superiority to you get from seeing anyone hurt?
Re:Only 81 spam, but its only 9:30 (Score:2, Interesting)
Burn the spammers! (Score:5, Interesting)
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We have just released 2 Million freshly extracted Canadian email addresses.
Just for this week, you can download these for only US$29!
Now you can send emails to only people who reside in Canada.
To order yours, please fill in the form below and email it back to ***********@btamail.net.cn
Make sure you put "ORDER" in the SUBJECT line.
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(addressed blanked out, I don't want to send them more business!)
I know I've sent tonnes of complaints to the ISPs involved with btamail (though SpamCop), but I wonder if there's a more direct or effective approach... especially since I'm certain they're pimping out *MY* E-mail address in their "freshly extracted" batch.
Yeah. I'm bitter.
Spam should be 100% legal (Score:3, Interesting)
After that, they become a legitimate marketting force. Of course I don't expect SPAM to survive in such an environment, but I think it should be legal under those conditions.
Re:This is good, but.. (Score:5, Interesting)
IMO, what might work would be a redesigning of the STMP and possibly the POP3 protocols or an entirely new protocol. What I would suggest would be:
1. Client-server authentication for all outgoing mail transactions. This would help a great deal with the problem of open relays.
2. A specification to stop the masking of all headers, especially origination IP address and the senders e-mail address. This way, if spammers do continue their tricks, the recipients would have all their details to report to ISPs or local authorities.
3. E-mail applications which allow users to specify whether they want to receive mail using solely the new protocol, or whether the also wish to allow "old" POP3/smtp mail.
Any thoughts?
Tim
81 Spam Messages? (Score:2, Interesting)
The only email account I have that gets spam is my Hotmail account. I call this my "slutty" email because it's the one I use when I KNOW providing an email address will give me spam.
Re:This is good, but.. (Score:3, Interesting)
There are already limits on commercial speech. Truth in advertising laws, and laws against telemarketers calling cellphones to name a couple.
Not that I think making spam illegal will help anything. They'll just go offshore. But there's no First Ammendment issue with making it illegal.
Re:This is good, but.. (Score:3, Interesting)
POPFile [sourceforge.net]
After a bit of training it catches about 99% of the spam I usually get...
Re:I got one word for ya: (Score:3, Interesting)
And as I said, they would need more bandwidth to tailor the From address on every message they sent. Way more. Right now they inject a single copy of the message with a long list of addresses in the "RCPT TO" SMTP command, and the relay owner eats the bandwidth. Customizing the From address would require the spammer to send one full copy of the message for each recipient. I'm guessing that's a 10x or 100x increase in bandwidth demands, maybe more.
More significantly, whitelist-approved From addresses will not scale to the proportions of spammers' mailing lists. It's one thing to scrape a million addresses from usenet, it's another to discover a whitelist-approved From address for every victim's address. This does not worry me one bit.
Als for mailing lists, they are addressed up front in the procmail script that implements my whitelist system. They get delivered before the whitelist gets examined. I'm on more lists than I can count, and I have yet to send a confirmation request to a list or to someone on a list. The only errors so far have been in the form of mailing list messages erroneously delivered to my daemon folder.
If someone can't be bothered to confirm a message, I can't be bothered to read their message. That is a feature, not a bug.
I look at it this way... How much spam am I willing to put up with in order to prevent friends from having to (gasp) send one extra message when they switch email addresses? Answer: none.