The Russian Mafia Doesn't Like Spam Either 451
wattrlz writes "Apparently the current champion of v1*gr4 spamming solicited some of the wrong email boxes. Alexy Tolstokozhev was recently found murdered in his palatial spam-bought estate near Moscow. The implications of this hands on method of system administration are staggering." Update: 10/12 15:28 GMT by Z : Good story. Unfortunately, probably a fake.
real reason (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is good...why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I should feel the same way.
However, I'm only slightly surprised to find that my conscience doesn't have any problem at all allowing me to feel happy at the news of this man's death.
The implications are staggering? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And this is good...why? (Score:0, Insightful)
Big mistake (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And this is good...why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Cause for a Bullet (Score:3, Insightful)
Eh, one more to the pile of dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, some ass hole spammer is dead. Is it sad? Eh, it is sad in the way that anyone dying is sad, and well, people dying is not that sad. We manage to make it through each day cheerfully despite the massive amounts of death going on the world. So one guy who has made a name for himself by being a complete asshole is dead. It is hard to drum up any sort of negative feelings when plenty of completely good humans dropped dead within hours of his doing so and most people didn't shed a tear for them either.
Re:Not the first time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And this is good...why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:real reason (Score:5, Insightful)
The Russian Mafia, like all such organisations, love sharing profits. In fact they love it so much, they'll come round from time to time to your place of business, for a friendly discussion about sharing profits and why it's a great thing to do.
I suspect the late spammer was not the sort of person who liked sharing profits, alas.
Re:What is the deal with spam? (Score:4, Insightful)
I go to the USPS website and look up any address in the US. Does that mean I should send random people loads of crap they don't want? According to you, that's the fault of the USPS since the mail isn't traceable -- just like e-mail. E-mail was modeled after post: both are more or less untraceable. Just because e-mails are untraceable doesn't give others the right to abuse that.
Unsolicited paper mail, phone calls, or e-mail are all in the same category. They are rude, disrespectful annoyances. If you want to get that crap fine; in your case, the advertisements, spam, and phone calls at dinner time would be solicited.
To live in a free and peaceful society, people have to respect the privacy and rights of others. We should not purposefully annoy our neighbors or cause them harm. These are basic rules of social conduct.
I hope that I never have to be your neighbor. Your reckless disregard for the well-being, time, and privacy of others is shocking.
Re:Good. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think about the millions of hours wasted every year in my country by mail admins on dealing with this crap, the huge amount of money spent on unnecessary bandwidth and mail server capacity, the unimaginable amount of time spent trying to block owned pcs, or clean them of their spam-spewing infections.
Yes, he was no eponymous third world dictator torturing and murdering his citizens. And yet, given the millions of lives he's stolen so much time from, the massive waste of billions of pounds to support his millions in profit extracted from a handful of idiots. I'm not sorry he's dead.
Re:And this is good...why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, but "should" doesn't have the force of law everywhere.
They used to hang horse thieves, I hear -- interruption of someone's only means of communication. And that was for just one horse. Property is defended by force, whether or not that force is legal, because people will react emotively, not always rationally, to things that affect them directly.
So -- is an attack on your bandwidth, your personal inbox, annoying? Say that it is, for a few million people. What percentage of those people are not merely annoyed, but enraged? And of those, who with the will and the means will carry out a vengeful act?
The point is if you annoy enough people, you can expect common justice, rough or smooth.
Direct correlation (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, he wasn't murdered because of spam. He was murdered because he was a anuscluster who crossed the wrong people.
Though, I do think it would be wonderful if Don Boris' 18 year old nephew, who is also the "company's" sys-admin, came to him one day and said "Hey, you know what I want for my graduation present? {type type typitty type whois reverselookup tap-type-print} That snogmuffin off the Internet."
Re:And this is good...why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not the first time (Score:3, Insightful)
Scientology, Spam, ripped of employees
No I don't feel sorry for him
Re:Not the first time (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't get much spam do you? I administer a business network. We can't use draconian spam filtering to just drop it all at the MTA because one false positive and I'm out of the job. SPAM is a huge pain in my ass on a daily basis. I don't advocate vigilante justice but it seems in this case it's only fair. Spammers get fat and rich by being lazy and incompetent. They get others to make their botnets, they use software that's written for them. They only have to type ONE email at practically zero cost to receive a million hits.
Now, let's see more spammers taken down this way. It might be an incentive for them to stop.
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That explains it - vigilante justice (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually it is easy to argue with the results. This is not justice, but a crime. We must be wary about attitudes which condone vigilante justice. When justice escapes from the hands of the state, and becomes a matter of criminal organizations or private individuals to administer, to the cheers of the mob, society will become dangerous not only for those who find themselves target of this sort of justice, but also those who cheer.
anon
Re:FAKE NEWS? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That explains it - vigilante justice (Score:4, Insightful)
That's true. That is why government must be effective at protecting the public. Otherwise, as the Founders of the U.S. noted, it is the right of the people to change their government.
Vigilantism is a horrible, frightening thing, and you have to ask yourself if you want to live in that kind of world. But, there comes a point, when someone has been abused enough, that vigilantism is the lesser of the evils.
We must have a way to tell people to stop that will make them stop.
Re:Not the first time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay...
So wasting a bit of time deleting unwanted email is somehow equivalent to... torture? How do you figure that? How is that "just"? If you really think deleting spam from your inbox is somehow equivalent to being tortured continuously for "as far beyond a normal human life span as possible" then you must live a highly charmed life, indeed. Either that or your email client really, really sucks.
Re:Not the first time (Score:2, Insightful)
A just punishment would be to seize his assets and garnish whatever honest salary he is capable of earning and attempt to use them to undo the economic damage he did. You could use the money to fund small business loans or something. Doing anything with the money is better than allowing someone who sells fraudulent products by wasting lots of people's time to have it.
Re:Death Penalty (Score:4, Insightful)
Not so much.
In England around 1800, picking pockets was a capital crime. (As were more than 200 other offenses.) Yet, pickpockets routinely worked the crowds at public hangings. [ssrn.com]
Time was - back in the 1600s - in Russia, you could be summarily executed for possession of tobacco. Didn't stop people from smoking.
Executions, public or not, are not a significant deterrant.
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Insightful)
Things like this are the natural result of civil authority failing to reflect the public's values. Most people want spammers stopped and very few ever even hear from law enforcement. Vigilantism always comes along to fill the gap.
I'm not at all sympathetic towards the dead dirty spammer. I sincerely hope they desicrated his corpse and put it on display as a warning to others. My only fear is that sooner or later an innocent will be killed in a case of mistaken identity. Due process and a fair trial are important.
As for the punishment fitting the crime, it's a tough judgement. Spammers willfully waste the time of millions of people daily and drive up costs for everyone. They are slowly rendering email useless. They have forced truly massive expendatures worldwide to upgrade mail servers just so they can keep up with their crap. I have to wonder how many children have received penis pill and sex toy spams?
beyond that, they pay other criminals to exploit millions of PCs to continue their harassment of the entire online world.
I don't know how many misdemeanors it should take to equal a capital offense but these guys are racking up a million a day.
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Insightful)
At a rate of 1 email per second they could get through around 40k emails per day. You'd definitely think twice about spamming if your example 330 million emails equated to 20 years hard slog.
Re:Not the first time (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe you're a sick bastard that needs help (Score:2, Insightful)
So the next time I get stuck in a traffic jam for hours with thousands of other people because some poor bastard in a beat up el Camino knocked off on the freeway, I'm free to shoot him? I don't think it works that way. I think you're just a sick fuck. No, really, you need help. People like you end up doing crazy shit like bombing olympic events and such. If unsolicited email advertising bothers you that much, you are in serious need of psychological evaluation and some kind of anxiety medication. You should see a shrink. Soon.
But first, why don't you go read the 8th Amendment of the US Constitution [usconstitution.net] while I quote a few words out of your own hypocritical mouth: [brouhaha.com]
Re:Not the first time (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not the first time (Score:4, Insightful)
So why do you think it is less bad for the spammer to waste 385 person-years distributed amongst many people?
Re:Maybe you're a sick bastard that needs help (Score:3, Insightful)
I was pointing out the logical conclusion arising from someone else's suggestion that the punishment should fit the crime. I'm not claiming that our current laws would actually allow such a result, nor am I inciting anyone to apply "vigilante justice" (though that's apparently already happening).
right (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, do the math, add them up for all the people on the world receiving the spam.
He must've been really dumb (Score:2, Insightful)
Spammers don't deserve death. They deserve a punishment that will strip them of their property and most of their money, put them in jail for running botnets (theft of someone else's online connection fees), and forever bar them from using PCs under pain of further prosecution, and subject them surveillance to make sure they stay compliant with the terms of their convictions.
Loss of wealth and property is torture enough.
Re:Not the first time (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, no, that's not good at all. That's positively evil. My school email address is short, so I get a crapload of spam bounces. At least they're mostly trivial to filter on.
Re:Not the first time (Score:2, Insightful)
Suppose I raped you with a banana. Would I deserve to be tortured for that? Quite probably, depending on your moral code. But I haven't done so, so what the fuck has that got to do with anything?
Possibly not, but you've completely changed the scenario. If he was MAKING me do that for my whole life, then he'd have to be physically and violently enforcing it, because it's not something I would choose to do without some very strong persuasion. But then, he'd be doing a lot worse than merely using a botnet to send a whole bunch of emails, making it a completely different situation. Thus, my flippant rebuttal above.
Partly because for each of those people it's a much smaller burden than that, and partly because nobody is MAKING anybody do anything. If the burden of deleting a couple of spam a day is too much for you, then find some software to help manage it, or stop using email. I don't like wasting my time watching ads on TV either; just think of the person-decades (centuries?) that have been wasted by advertising! Should everyone that pays for ads to be put on TV and radio be subject to torture for the rest of their lives, too?
Overwhelmingly though, the reason is because I'm not a psychopath. While I might be persuaded that society would be overwhelmingly better off if a particular individual was put to death, torturing someone for as long as possible -- even working very hard to keep them alive so they can be tortured for longer -- is completely fucking sadistic. What kind of human actually wants to inflict such things on another, especially for something so trivial as wasting a bit of their time? Or even a lot of it?
Plenty of people waste my time. Marketers calling up to try to sell their product. Users who ask me to show them how to do something for the 100th time because they're too fucking thick (or lazy) to remember how. Hell, you're wasting my time right now! By the far the biggest waster of my time though is me. It's just not that big a deal. Certainly I'd prefer not to receive spam, and not to have to spend time devising methods to make my computers not receive spam on my behalf, but it's not enough to turn me into a psychopath.
In closing, I would just like to say -- and this is coming from a guy who's posting in an utterly pointless thread on /. on a Friday afternoon while the rest of his co-workers have either left or are at the sundowner doing whatever it is normal social people like doing, and who's great plan for the weekend is to play IL-2 -- if you really think that the inconvenience of "having" to delete a bunch of unwanted email every day is somehow comparable to the horror and inhumanity of subjecting someone to torture for their entire life (and some of their unnatural life), then you REALLY need to get a fucking life. Either that, or you need some kind of counselling.
Sure spam sucks, but it's a pretty insignificant price to pay for the convenience and luxury of having something like email in the first place. I definitely advocating measures to catch the spammers; seizing their assets and ensuring they can't spam again (monitoring, imprisonment maybe) is a smashing idea. But torturing them is pretty sick.
Re:Not the first time (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not the first time (Score:2, Insightful)
...They are slowly rendering email useless...
I don't know how many misdemeanors it should take to equal a capital offense but these guys are racking up a million a day.
Great points. I offer two corrections.
1. Email is not being slowly rendered useless. It happened quickly and quite some time ago.
2. The computer crimes spammers commit are all felonies not misdemeanors.
Hoax, and Possible Malware Vector (Score:3, Insightful)