Following the Spam Trail 232
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC's Bob Sullivan doggedly follows a spam trail from Alabama to Argentina to find out who actually benefits from spam. The beneficiaries aren't necessarily the pasty faced, high school drop out industrial spammers we have gotten to know, but well known companies."
Re:Get Spammed Thru An Anti-Spam Article! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if they want to do a story on them, they might actually want to be able to CONTACT you. And let's hope that major news organizations require that people who report things to them are actually, REAL PEOPLE. Not just random e-mail addresses signed by Haha G. Ottcha
IC Marketing - InfoClear Marketing ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Infoclear immediately terminated its contract with IC Marketing when it heard about the spam offense, said Patrick Thurmond, who identified himself as a founder of Infoclear.
Doesn't it sound a lot like InfoClear and IC (coincidence?) are actually the same company, but can appear to 'sever ties' whenever anyone anti-spam starts nosing around.. sounds like a nice setup to me, and the investigators won't implicate poor infoclear when tracing this back.
Just my $0.02.
Thinko
"I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a bat'leth contest. They will not concern us again."
Backbones like spam? Whoa! (Score:5, Insightful)
What's that you say? Backbones don't police spam across their networks, spam that sucks up huge amounts of bandwidth, which they can charge people for? Whoa!
Next at 11, employees who are responsible for self-policing timecard policies are ripping off employers!
(seriously though- it's time we started taking major networks to task, like refusing to route packets coming from them, or refusing to send traffic to them. Watch how fast UUnet takes care of spammers, when customers find they suddenly can't get to sites. Pretty much the ONLY thing these days that separates backbones is how reliable they are- even a slight decrease in reliability, even just perceived or threatened, could have an astounding effect. Think of all the fuss SCO is causing to see the possibilities.)
Re:what I want to know is.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The way out is through? (Score:5, Insightful)
Facinating.
In the end it's the Consumers fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
That logic is hard to argue with, but I have an additional way to fault the consumer. Why does the consumer continue to tolerate the open sewer that is contemporary email? It's not just spam. Millions of these sheeple have been infected with viruses sent via email. Spam and viruses, and a seaming endless ability to tolerate large quantities of both...
One would think that after enough of this crap occurred, consumers would eventually consider dealing with it. RTFA to discover that you can't count on ISPs to deal with it. They value spammers and the extra money they're willing to pay. RTFA to discover that respectable companies participate via a web of indirection and plausible deniability. The only thing we have is the end user. If the end user isn't willing to deal with the problem, no one will.
If the end user was willing to deal with the problem, then it becomes a simple matter. All that would be needed is a requirement that senders provide a verifiable signature in all messages, and easy to use white lists to remember the 'ok' parties. If the end user were willing to a.) obtain a cert that allows them to sign and b.) tolerate the need to not blindly open mail that hadn't been placed on their white-list previously, spam would not exist.
The key here is the end user. Until they come around spam is inevitable.
Suprise... err ... no (Score:2, Insightful)
Take for instance when IBM launched a "edgy" campaign where peace signs were spray painted on the sidewalks of SanFran. Or some TV show that quietly advertised by sending a non-existant football team to various locations claiming to have one state finals, when in actuallity, it was a ploy to get name recognition.
Spam is simply a new form of information dissemination. It is not Microsoft or any other giant who is actively pushing this, but marketing and advertising firms who are supported by them. So you have to make a distinction because the big advertisers are linked to just about every big company.
Anyway...
Dream on.
Spam solution (Score:0, Insightful)
The problem NYC used to have is that they rarely caught someone in the act of posting the poster.
So they changed the law.
What NYC did, was make the company in the advertisement responsible for the fines for illegal posting.
Simple.
Effective.
So why can't we do the same for spam? While the real reason we have spam is that the big spammers, like aol, ms, time warner, and others are fiercly protecting their right to "email market" their companies, so they are deeply funding lobbyists to protect spam. So since you can't outlaw spam for one legit company, while allowing it for another (selling "viagra" isn't illegal for pharmacies), so we have an exploding spam problem, and legislators that don't give a shit, but "lament" about the problem in public, but resigning themselves that they can't do anything about it.
And that do not spam list is a sick joke. As one spammer actually testified in Washington, he would view that list as a "target rich environment". Which part of this don't the stupid legislators understand? Look, voters, I did something about spam. Yeah, I know you are getting even more now, but at least I did something. And I feel your pain.
What needs to be done: Make the companies mentioned in the spam responsible for stiff, per spam, fines.
Since we can't block all spam thanks to the deep pockets of ms, aol, tw and others, we can do it this way:
Make the companies and individuals advertising via spam (not the sender, the company benefitting from the actual spam) liable for $50 per spam x2, $500 per spam x2, collectible by both isp providers, and by the recipients. You can set a maximum fine, but make the fine high, and per day, not total. Then make the maximum as two seperate maximums, one for the isps, and one for the recipients, so the isps don't bankrupt the company by taking all the money.
Who gets fined? Any company/individual in the spam that relies on a spam mailer that uses a forged header, that uses an open relay, that uses a fake return email address, that uses a mail server that doesn't reverse resolve, that uses robots to harvest email addresses off the internet or usenet, that fails to immediately remove someone who opts out.
Make the company/individual in the spam the responsible party for the email list. If that company shares any opt out email recipient with another company (or the spam mailer, as the company's authorized agent), or another division, or for another product, after that recipient has requested removal, make it another violation, then double the penalties on any additional penalties that the spammer is charged with.
Fixing spam is easy. Nail the company/individual that benefits from the spam, regardless of who sends it. And forget about hiding. Any company has to be registered. Even those that wish to remain private, the government can find out the info. And individuals can be tracked down even easier.
Make the violations criminal as well as fines.
Then add the laws to treaties with every other nation.
At a minimum, this will drive out of business the spammers in south florida. And elsewhere in the US and other trading partners.
There's no excuse for spam. Something can be done. Saying nothing can be done, and you are part of the problem, not the solution.
one name like C...!
Re:what I want to know is.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Read that a couple times and think mafia, not spam.
A while back their was a poll on
Re:In the end it's the Consumers fault. (Score:2, Insightful)
Fortunately, she hasn't purchased any penis pumps or Russian brides yet. It can't just be the consumer solving this problem any more than we can ask every human to go certify organic farms or kosher sausage factories. It's a question of time, a question of costs to benefits, and with verifiable signatures, a question of creating a binding international law that would have most /.ers foaming over privacy concerns.
Awareness, education, and group pressure are the tricks we need here. Just as Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle" caused Teddy Roosevelt to investigate the sausage factories, saying that "radical action must be taken to do away with the efforts of arrogant and selfish greed," so we need powerful individuals and organizations to take committed stands on spam at the source. Otherwise our individual protection efforts will only divert the spam to the inbox of someone less savvy.
Re:Statement of the obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, yeah, we have already figured that out. But the article isn't for us, it's for the 85% or so of users who don't even know how to block spam or why they get any. I think Slashdotters take their computer literacy for granted sometimes. :)
Re:Obviously (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a number of possibilities. The most likely one being that the guy is either a crank or a hacker with a wierd sense of humor.
Another possibility is that there is some form of steganographic message being broadcast. This could be a signaling mechanism used to provide deniable communications from an 'owned' computer. Alternatively it might well be a genuine request for some form of parts. If you wanted to buy parts for some form of illegal weapon you might use this type of cimmunication to tell a quartermaster what is required.
The advantage of using a message that appears to bee from a kook is that people tend not to take kooks seriously (unless they get elected to office but that is another matter). On the other hand if you are serious about anti-terrorism you listen to so many kooks that it becomes a warning sign. The type of people who stick a bomb in a litter bin outside a McDonalds tend to be whacko jobs.
The Other Solution (Score:2, Insightful)
What should happen is that the companies that are ultimately hiring the spammers - Ameriquest, Quicken Loans, LoanWeb, and Ivy Mortgage - should be legally obliged to keep an audit trail for every contact email they send out on their "bought leads." Then if one of their "leads" complains, and they cannot provide a spam-free audit trail, they pay a fine.
As it is, they can say they have a "no tolerance" policy for spam (ha!), but there is no teeth to it; one person complains, and one relationship gets "severed", but no one really suffers, and the affiliate can pop right back up with another batch of "legitimate" leads the very next day. Once the companies have incentive to actually police their own affiliates, the profit margin for spamming goes way down.
-renard
Filters and blocks will never work (Score:4, Insightful)
The only way to deal with spam is at the source. The only way to stop spammers is to keep them from sending their shite in the first place. As soon as it leaves their computer, it becomes an arms race--we get better filters, they figure out a new way around them, we tweak our filters again. Eventually the entire email system worldwide becomes one big armed camp, and that's BAD! Worse yet, I see people proposing we go straight to that end right now, as a solution.
We have to stop spammers from being able to spam, not stop the spam from reaching us.
Re:Face it, its here for good.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fight spam by replying to it? (Score:1, Insightful)
Likewise when the new york times wants my info, or yahoo asks some questions I randomly give them answers. Of course, they could eliminate noise from people like me by asking the same questions again.
If everyone on Slashdot started to adopt these tactics, we would make all this personal information that has been harvested less valuble.