Time-travel Spammer Strikes Back 336
HopToit writes "Robby Todino is apparently upset about being outed a couple months ago as the source of all those wacked messages about 'Dimenstional Warp Generator Needed.' According to Wired, someone has pulled a major joe-job spam attack (forged 'From:' lines) on three popular sites in retaliation for making fun of Todino's goofy search for alien technology. Robby, if you're out there, you have ceased to be amusing."
Sore Loser? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Sore Loser? (Score:3, Interesting)
And, like all good Bond adversaries, this one has a nice secret hideout in Woburn. The 4 Oak St. address in his whois info is bogus. 4 Oak St. doesn't even exist [inertramblings.com]. Oh, no, I found his secret hideout [inertramblings.com] by scouring Google, showed up on his doorstep, and he denied being Robert Todino. Jim Todino, however, seemed to be quite perturbed by the fact that I was standing there.
It was amusing at the time but, now that you mention Bond, it's laugh out loud funn
spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:3, Insightful)
But it can't be true. Someone must be responding to this stuff by spending their money. Because for some reason, telemarketers and spammers stay in business. Somehow, it must be worth it for them.
If everyone hated the stuff as much as they say they do, if everyone hung up on the unwanted calls and deleted the unwanted mails in nothing flat, like they say they do, then the problem would fizzle out before long. No one could make money doing it, so there would be no reason to keep trying. And yet, the crap just goes on and on and on.
I've read rumors that a certain small percentage of the people called or mailed actually do respond and end up buying something; usually the figure is put about 10%, or something similarly low. Hard to believe that such a business would be worthwhile if the response rate is so low; but whatever it is, it must be high enough that the incentive for telemarketing and spamming is maintained. Otherwise, there'd be no such thing.
A national no-call list is a nice idea, but I can't see the problem going away altogether as long as the telemarketers and spammer still believe there's a chance to make money. Certainly the spammers are not going to let some trivial thing like a Federal law stop them. (They'll just go on spamming from Antarctica, or wherever.) If we really want the problem solved, once and for all, we have to ensure that there is no future for those businesses, and that would require educating the public, right down to the last man, woman and child, to always follow this rule without exception: If someone calls you or emails you to sell you a product, then whatever you do, don't buy that product!
Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:5, Informative)
when i was in school i took some pr course where it was presented that a direct mail campaign (snail mail, addressed directly to the recipient) with a response rate of 3% was considered a "roaring success".
spam can survive even with miniscule response rates (one hundredths of a per cent) because the actual transmission is free. direct mail has postage and printing costs. telemarketing needs actual wage-earning callers and phone connections. but spam once you find that open relay, spam is free.
with costs like that, revenue can afford to be low.
Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:3, Informative)
Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:2, Interesting)
One thing they got right in the second Matrix movie is the illusion of choice as a method for controlling human beings. Telephone marketing is intolerable since control is in the hands of the caller. Television marketing is tolerable because a small amount of control is in the hands of the viewer. Just enough control to watch ads on another channel.
Where's YOUR control? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:2)
Promises, promises...
Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:3, Interesting)
As the above rightly comments, the real problem here is people encouraging this business practise by sendi
Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:5, Informative)
I think it really depends on how you spin it. It goes without saying that someone has to be making money from spam, and also that there are gullable fools who buy the stuff on offer. The problem is that many of the gullable fools are not the same ones that actually buy the porn and pills being peddled, but those that by the spamming services too.
The spam "business" seems to be constructed in several levels. At the top you have the metaspammers (see the ROKSO [spamhaus.org] for a list) who don't really sell anything other than spamming tools and services. These guys are the ones raking in the bulk of the cash, and are probably the only ones with the werewithal and resources to run the global spamnets without getting nailed (so far). Underneath those is a mesh of "affliate programs" and small fry who do spam their own products and finally, at the bottom, are the dregs of humanity that actually buy the physical products.
The problem is, that everytime something like this comes up on Slashdot, Kuroshin, or even the "mainstream" TV and press media, there is a chance that someone has the following chain of "reasoning":
- There is money to be made in spam.
- Why shouldn't that be me?
- How do I spam?
And all this does is send another gullable fool off to the metaspammers that peddle the "guaranteed" opt-in address lists, bulk mailers and similar services. The money floats up to the top of the tree and the cycle perpetuates. Occasionally, I'm sure, one of these guys gets lucky and makes a decent amount of cash in exchange for thier soul, but I'll bet that the majority do not, and soon pull out of the game with a somewhat lighter bank balance. The spam business seems to be a pyramid scheme in all but name, if you ask me.Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:2)
Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, a few years ago, that someone was probably my father.
I got a clue that he was responding (if not buying) things from SPAMed adds when he started to ask about some super-fancy-printer utility -- exactly the thing he would never stumble uppon all by himself.
When I said he didn't need it, he said that it's cheap, and that he might just get it anyway. Curious -- since the program was such an odd thing -- I asked where he was getting the offer from. "I got this email." Do you know the company? "No." That's spam. Never EVER reply or buy ANY of that stuff. "Why? They're just trying to make a living, and who knows maybe I can use the program." (GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR...)
Well, after a talk with him he *said* that he didn't reply to the message and would take my advice to delete the messages unread...but I know my dad. After about 6 months he finally got a clue, and joined the annoyed masses who dispise and know what SPAM is. In those first few months, though, I can't tell you how many messages he replied to and if he bought anything.
Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a guy I know at work who has been getting telemarketing calls for DirecTV. He was actually going to call them back (the telemarketer) and take them up on their offer. No matter how many times I tried to explain it, he didn't think that:
a) he could probably get a better deal if he shopped around for like 5
Re:The customers are the companies. (Score:2)
Absolutely! Any effective anti-spam legislation or technique must target the companies who hire the spammers. So far, only the State of California appears to recognize this to any degree.
Wow... (Score:5, Funny)
Someone needs to get that guy on Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell/George Noory stat.
Knowing that show, there's someone else in the audience that actually does have all that equipment he's searching for. =)
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Informative)
Time travel (Score:5, Funny)
Time Cops (Score:5, Funny)
E-mail tax (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm torn about the idea of an email tax. While in general I don't like the idea too much, it does occur to me that this might be the only way of dramatically reducing spam.
Look at it this way: Even a wicked-busy web maven likely sends less than 1000 emails a day outside of their own company LAN (with a few exceptions I realise. Individuals likely send less than 100 per day in general.
So, say you put a tax, to be administered by your ISP on each email, of say 0.1 cents per email. Big Business guy gets charged $1/day, home user $0.10 per day. By no means big money. Johny McSuperSpammer, however, who sends out 10 million emails every day, gets a handly little bill for $1000. Kind of changes the economics of his penis enlarger ads.
Like I say, I'm not a huge fan of paying more, but it does seem like making emails cost per message sent might be the best/easiet/only way to dramatically reduce spam.
Furthermore (ideally), to make up for the cost, you ISP could take $5 per month off your bill, to make up for the extra you're spending to send email. They still make money, because of the tax, the financial hit for you is minimal, but the spammers get hosed.
Re:E-mail tax (Score:4, Insightful)
I subscribe to Dilbert and a couple of SuSE lists. That's about 150 messages a day. Do you expect SuSE to pay these? I'm sure that you scheme would be the end of such things.
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
This is a step in the right direction
Re:E-mail tax (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure. The honest ISPs will have to bear the burden of administering this tax (for which, they will have administration costs - passed on to users). But what about these Hong Kong spamming sources? Or anything outside the jurisdiction of the 'email tax law'? An email tax is both unworkable and ineffective
What is needed, and has been pointed out in many other places, is a reform of the SMTP method. SMTP was designed many, MANY years ago when the only people on networks were technicians, academics, etc. These people created a system for THEM to use. They didn't really anticipate spam, because for spam to become effective, email needs to be wide-spread to the point near ubiquity. When email services are as common, you are going to get a lot of simple-minded gullible people out there. And these are the people who click on those ads, and bring in the spam revenue.
So, I guess we either need to reform and properly lock-down email sending to show only accurate information, or require a simple I.Q. test before logging into email! ;) Of course, the latter opetion would surely bring about the swift demise of AOL...
Re:E-mail tax (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure spammers can get a key but if nobody signs their key, then they can't spam. So every time they want to spam they need to get a key signed. People who sign spammers keys regularly are going to get their signatures revoked.
This increases the "cost" of spamming by making it hard for spammers to get legitimate keys, but making it relatively cheap for joe bloggs who just has to create a key and perhaps get it signed by his ISP and a couple of friends.
ISP's signatures wouldn't mean much, but it would be enough to get you started on the web of trust, after a few people have signed your key your key will start becoming more important to more people.
So, step up and use GPG today!
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
Personally, I'd like to see SMTP moved to being over SSL. ISPs would get their certificates from some central signing authority, much in the same way SSL certificates are handed out already. Users would get an SSL certificate with their account, signed by their ISP, so they could send e-mail to the ISP's SMTP server, which then forwarded it on
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
Hash: SHA1
I agree with you on that point...I have often considered doing the
same.
There is one small detail holding me back...except for the Microsoft
security bulletins I get via e-mail, nobody I send/receive e-mail
with knows PGP/GPG/etc. exists.
My e-mail signature line is this:
- --
PGP Freeware is a free, easy way to secure your e-mail.
http://www.pgp.com
So I am trying to get the word out--I even sign e-mail with it,
knowing that whomever gets it won't know what the hell
Useless signature? (Score:2)
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
Taken from the excellent list You Might Be an Anti-Spam Kook If: [rhyolite.com]
the (Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem) [FUSSP] requires that anyone wanting to send mail obtain a certificate that will be checked by all SMTP servers.
the FUSSP involves certificates, but there is no barrier to spammers buying many independent certificates.
you know that certifying that a user legitimately claims a name and has never used some other name is
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
Some companies don't accept HTML-formatted emails anymore, because the BULK of all SPAM is HTML nowadays. I implemented for many companies an autoresponder which, upon recognizing HTML mail sends back a reply asking for users to
Re:E-mail tax (Score:5, Insightful)
Not going to work. I don't use my ISP to send mail, at least not in a way they can detect. I use my own server, instead.
Are you going to tax me to send email between the users on my machine? If so, how are you going to monitor the logs? Are you going to give government authorities permission to audit my machine whenever they see fit to? Looking kind of authoritarian, now, isn't it?
How about cron jobs sending me email? Do I get taxed for them, too?
Instant messaging? Tax for that? What about when people get fed up with your email tax and implement an email system over an IM service instead? Or just implement some other of email over any other protocol to bypass your tax system?
Filters are an effective way of combatting spam. Much better - and less oppressive - than a tax. SpamAssassin [spamassassin.org] catches 99% of the spam I receive. It, and other filters, are so effective that spammers are now changing the content of their text to attempt to bypass it. And when they do this, it reduces the effectiveness of their advertising, so in the end, they lose.
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
No, my box is the SMTP server. It sends out mail directly to the destination addresses. Therefore you have a choice of making me a tax collector (unworkable, due to the number of people also running boxes in such a configuration) or snooping port 25 and charging based on the amount of traffic that goes over that port (in which case you'd also be unfairly taxing people who are using port 25 legitimately for purposes other than SMTP. I have been known to run VPN links over port 25 because it was the only way
Re: (Score:2)
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2, Insightful)
Taxes only hurt the honest. They don't hinder the dishonest because they will find a way to keep from paying the taxes.
Government solutions typically fail utterly; only the "invisible hand" of the market can succeed.
Keep the gov out of all of this.
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
>This "the market is always right" theory is such bullshit.
The market is evenually right. In the short term there could be inefficencies.
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
You sound like one of those economists. So here's my lightbulb joke for those economists:
Q: How many economists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Economists don't change light bulbs, they sit theorizing
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2, Insightful)
Spammers will have their own SMTP servers, or find/use open relays.
Re:E-mail tax...Micropayments to Recipients (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, I would probably set my payment level at about 0.50 or $1.00, but if I stil get too many spams, then I would boost the charge to $2. I would also create a whitelist of people (friends, clients, mailing lists, and a few select businesses) who are automatically exempted. When somebody tries to send me an email, the MicroPayment Mail Transfer Protocol (MPMTP) would automatically inform the sender of the charge when they hit the send button. People not on the system would get automated return e-mail requesting that they join the system to complete the sending of their e-mail.
The point is that each person can decide how valuable their time is. Spammers (including those in Hong Kong) would be forced to target e-mails to only those people who would appreciate them.
Re:E-mail tax...Micropayments to Recipients (Score:2)
I microwave my e-mail before reading to kill anthrax. It also gets rid of all of the spam too!
Re:E-mail tax...Micropayments to Recipients (Score:2)
Why does it have to be the same for everyone? If I want to configure my mail agent to only accept email that:
then where is the need for any involvement of anyone else, including the government?
Using the force of government
Re:E-mail tax...Micropayments to Recipients (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree that government and law form the underpinnings of our economic system. But government did not create eBay or credit cards. Government is moderately good at creating a regulatory context in which rights and responsibilities are balanced for the average and common good. Government is generally bad at creating innovative systems that are customized to the needs of individuals. Finally, government is ill suited to standardizing/regulating international phenomena like spam and e-mail.
No, it's better to make it a government controlled operation from the start so that the standards are set the same for everyone.
The point is that not everyone wants the same standards. Some people may not value their time or not care about spam and thus chose a low hurdle (and a 0.01 tax is a very very low hurdle for spam, IMO). Others might place an extreme value on their time or loath spam so much that they place a high value of their time. So the recipient should set the payment.
Moreover, it is not the government that bears the cost of spam, it is the recipient. The recipient's "labor cost" far exceeds the cost to the internet infrastructure. Therefore the recipient should get the payment.
Since the recipient should set the payment and the recipient should get the payment and the issue is international, I would think an organization like VISA would be better at running the program than any of the Earth's 180-some-odd governments.
Re:E-mail tax...Micropayments to Recipients (Score:2)
Credit cards weren't setup by the government, but they were made possible by it - Lender A lends you the money, and refuse to pay, you go to jail. Without such a law credit cards would never work.
There's nothing like that for email. I'm perfectly at liberty to say 'anyone who sends me email must pay $1' but there's no law to enforce it... certainly not from the spammers - although 99% of spammers are US based they use open relays in korea/poland/russia to send their emails
Re:E-mail tax...Micropayments to Recipients (Score:2)
I agree, but it would not do much good. For better or worse, the curent internet does not require proof of identity to get an account, set up a server, or send e-mail. And I'm sure privacy advocates would never allow that kind of traceablity to happen.
But if e-mail senders were forced to deposit money into a escrow account prior to sending an e-mail, they would have to steal the money (a definite crime) or pay the money to get their spam
Re:E-mail tax...Micropayments to Recipients (Score:2)
Agreed! I am not 100% comfortable with the idea, either. The thought of Microsoft becoming the micropayment manager for the majority of the world's e-mail gives me the willies. I only think that private companies will do a better job than government -- whether they do a good job is another matter.
Perhaps private companies might form and administer these networks, but government might define minimum standards and c
Re:E-mail tax...Micropayments to Recipients (Score:2)
LOL! And then the lawyers would just bill the client for it.
On the other hand, they could just send you the C&D via snail mail. Also, any new friends that aren't yet on your whitelist might balk at putting up $50 just to send that first e-mail to you.
Re:E-mail tax...Micropayments to Recipients (Score:2)
I would imagine that the micropayment service provider would cap the max payment to reduce the chance of fraud or limit liability in the event of fraud. Or the service provider might cap the max payment on the sender's side -- not letting a sender send an email to a $500 address if the sender's credit is poor or their account is under-funded. On the other hand, I could see some interesting business models come out of this service -- the tech suppor
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
Nope, your idea is unacceptable. Amend it so that a project can have a "tax free" status and not be charged only when they send their email from the exact IP address specified in their application, or some other acceptable "out" for these users.
Re:E-mail tax (Score:2)
Easy Solution (Score:2, Funny)
Wait. Then he wouldn't need to kill their grandfathers. And then he would.
And...
And...
Excuse me.
[Opens Window]
I can fly!
This says it all? (Score:2, Funny)
Are spammers going to start pleading "insanity" when they get arrested? "The aliens made me do it!"
more tragic than funny (Score:4, Insightful)
(off topic, but you'd think it obvious that any time machine breakthrough would be all over the news right! ; i guess basic rationality doesn't come into this though. scary.)
Re:more tragic than funny (Score:2)
Sure. In a naive and innocent world. Even in a world that wasn't run by massive military industrial bodies with considerable interest in exclusive ownership of technology rights, actually telling the public as a whole that you've managed time travel (let along telling them how) would be too dangerous. Human beings can do enough damage without screwing around with causality as well.
Re:more tragic than funny (Score:2)
Just like the 50 MPG fuel-injectors?
Just like no-cost phone service?
Just like Al Gore winning the election?
Just like $10 super computers?
It's the greedy corporations keeping all of this out of the news, I heard it on Pacifica Radio, also being silenced by GreedyCorp!
Re:more tragic than funny (Score:2)
at least it went quite something like that. xmas episode.
Re:more tragic than funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Where to really look... (Score:4, Insightful)
The only thing that I can think of that potentially fits this bill is a total solar eclipse. Although there's some compelling evidence that life like ours can only evolve in a similar 'double planet' system like the earth-moon, there's really no reason to expect intelligent life to be around at exactly the same time as the apparent moon and sun size matches sufficiently closely to see a total eclipse. Indeed total solar eclipses have only been visible on earth for a hundred million years or so and will continue only for a few hundred million more - quite a small window in the history of our planet and something sufficiently rare that it may be worthwhile diverting a few light years to see.
So if I did want to find an alien or the like I'd look in the middle of a path of totality
Re:Where to really look... (Score:5, Insightful)
Space travelers would probably be unimpressed by an eclipse. I'll tell you the real draw: supermarkets. Don't believe me? Take a trip to Japan, then wander through a supermarket - you will be amazed at how fascinating it truly is.
Aliens would probably find most things here interesting because it would be so foreign - and that's all it takes to grab a "person's" attention, something he/she/it hasn't seen before.
Re:Where to really look... (Score:2)
The moon's shadow is always somewhere, just not always on the Earth's surface. If you have an advanced spacecraft, it ought to be easy to observe a total eclipse of any convenient star any time you want.
Re:Where to really look... (Score:5, Funny)
Statements like this are why I never lend money to anybody in Astronomy or Geology.
Let's review.. (Score:4, Insightful)
In the bizarro world of the internet, we likewise have broken locks. Email, specifically, is like a car with really, really shitty locks on it. However, instead of knowing about this problem for many years now and a few (some equally bad) proposals for fixing it, the main mode of dealing with the problem is:
Re:Let's review.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Cars have locks that are just fine when used properly. However, many people are very gullible, and if you go up and ask them, they'll let you borrow their car. You can steal their car after asking to borrow it, and most of them will be too embarrassed that they lent you their car in the first place to ever file a police report. The success ratio is high enough that every day multiple people will walk up to you and ask to borrow your car. To date, we've come up with no useful way of keeping these would-be thieves from taking up your time or your brainspace.
Re:Let's review.. (Score:2)
In your analogy cars == credit card details.
In the original post car locks == mail transport protocols.
Bad analogy... (Score:2)
In the bizarro world of the internet, we likewise have broken locks. Email, specifically, is like a car with really, really shitty locks on it. However, instead of knowing about this problem for many years now and a few (some equally bad) proposals for fixing it, (...)
The thing is, what lock I got on my car doesn't affect any other ca
Re:Bad analogy... (Score:2)
If you want to create a new mail system, you'd need the following to succeed:
Good post, Kjella. #1 is a given. #2, however, is your politics creeping into the game.
Your point about the fact that a systemic change is toughter than an individual change is spot-on. However, i propose that what's really needed for #2 is not one parti
Re:Bad analogy... (Score:2)
Good post, Kjella. #1 is a given. #2, however, is your politics creeping into the game.
I think it's more a valid point than simply politics. Open Standards are much more likely to be adopted if there is a BSD (or similar) licensed implementation.
Do you think TCP/IP would have caught on nearly as well as it did if everybody had to write their own network stack from scratch rather than simply copy the BSD one and modify it sli
Wouldn't do the car analogy (Score:2)
Re:Let's review.. (Score:2)
SMTP IS BROKEN!
Why don't you post your email address here and I'll show you how broken it is. Would you like mail from president@whitehouse.gov, or maybe brittany@spears.com?
Re:Let's review.. (Score:5, Funny)
The guy is mentally ill (Score:5, Insightful)
Barring that, the people being joe'd really need to follow up on this. Either this guy is an unrepentant spammer, in which case he needs to be made to pay the price, or he's mentally unstable, in which case he needs professional help. The latter possibility is really more serious, since Todino could conceivably go off the deep end and do something more serious. Possibly, the best approach would be for them to contact Todino's father and tell him that if he doesn't get his son some help immediately, they're going to pursue the case with law enforcement. Assuming the father's statements are true and that he gives a damn, this should at least get the ball rolling.
Re:The guy is mentally ill (Score:3, Insightful)
No offense, but that's a rather uninformed view of mental illness. I've been fighting depression for about half my life and I'm finally getting past it, and I've seen this attitude before. The world is not made up of sane people and loonies who are likely to go crazy at any moment and start killing people.
I admittedly did some rather odd things when I was in heavy depressive
No offence (Score:2)
A person that lived next to my parents developed a mental illness, schizophrenia to be precise. He coated all his windows in aluminium foil and was known to shout at nothing in
Re:The guy is mentally ill (Score:2)
Indeed. There is no actual evidence that the sane people exist at all...
Re:The guy is mentally ill (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait just a moment.
Do you really believe that?
I mean that, stop and think for just a moment at what kind of a world we would have to live in for that to happen. Physically torturing someone for sending spam?
You si
Re:The guy is mentally ill (Score:5, Informative)
Regarding this statement:
Possibly, the best approach would be for them to contact Todino's father and tell him that if he doesn't get his son some help immediately, they're going to pursue the case with law enforcement. Assuming the father's statements are true and that he gives a damn, this should at least get the ball rolling. It is *very* difficult to enforce medical treatment on someone who has NOT been legally declared mentally incompetent and assigned a guardian. This is why you have a situation where many clinically diagnosed schizophrenics, manic depressives, etc. can STOP taking their medication and going to treatments and they are perfecty within their rights to do so.
Note, I'm talking about mentally ill people referred to as "high functioning", meaning they are mostly normal acting or their quirks are not considered "dangerous" to society, i.e. wearing tin-foil because the "aliens are out there" is ok, but killing "all girls who look like Brittany Spears" is not.
In general, a high-functioning, but clinically mentally ill person is going to be very emotionally tiring to live with, but there's really nothing Todino's father can do. His son is an adult and therefore dad is no longer the responsible guardian. Filing a motion to declare his son mentally incompetent and assigning dad as the guardian has its own drawbacks, not to mention earning the unending emnity of the very person you are trying to help. It's just too much of a lose, lose situation.
On to something strange and new? (Score:2)
...Not that I would condone anything like this. My e-mail box gets full enough as it is and eventually the effectiveness would wear off as spam filters started getting more examples of the stuff. However, this illustrates just how wild the internet still remains - even with all of the legislation and le
Anti-spam laws are very dangerous (Score:2, Interesting)
Challege/Response systems are very dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm using an ASCII terminal. Or a PDA with a small screen. Or VoiceXML over a telephone. Or I'm sight-impared. Or my ISP bounces your ISP's coded-number-in-a-distorted-image with request that they respond first with a coded-number-in-a-distorted-image, rinse, repeat. Or I have my filters set to autotrash any graphics in email because 99% of the time it's for penis pills. Or it was a Joe-job and your ISP sent me 20,000 coded-number-in-a-distorted-image challenge emails.
Now what?
Re:Anti-spam laws are very dangerous (Score:2)
Bouncing is moronic. Stop it. (Score:5, Insightful)
What strikes me is that the major problem is not the spammers doing direct DoS attacks on the targets, but that they're using brain-dead behavior of mail servers to pull off DDoS attacks. If you control an MX, please configure it to issue a 550 error during the connection if you can't deliver the message instead of accepting it and then bouncing to what you almost certainly know is an innocent party. A party who is not the sender of the message, by the way, which means you anal types who say "RFC says I must bounce" have to note that it also says you must not lose a message, which is what a bad bounce does. Please be a friendly network neighbor and stop bouncing spam.
Re:Bouncing is moronic. Stop it. (Score:2)
Re:Bouncing is moronic. Stop it. (Score:2)
Not that easy.. (Score:4, Informative)
If you control an MX, please configure it to issue a 550 error during the connection if you can't deliver the message instead of accepting it and then bouncing to what you almost certainly know is an innocent party.
I can tell you that the problem is all but easy to fix.
Not only do our Postfix servers (On the DMZ) have to accept mail to Exchange accounts (Servers on a different inside-DMZ) without knowing what accounts exist, but also for other mail servers we have no control over. For example, we send incoming emails back out over VPN tunnels to Japan, Germany and Washington without having the slightest clue or control over what accounts exist over there.
Before, I used to work for a big ISP that only serviced companies and the setup was similar there, we had this huge Sun Enterprise cluster to accept incoming email for our clients, and then sent the emails to each customer's dedicated server without having any control over them.
Re:Bouncing is moronic. Stop it. (Score:4, Informative)
Many Internet-accessible MX hosts are not also running delivery services (POP, IMAP, etc.) They often relay the mail to a non-internet-accessible SMTP hub for the domain, which in turn relays the mail to the hosts running the delivery agents. There's usually no way the Internet MX host can know which users are valid.
Don't try to pass this off on mail admins. We're doing what we can, spending way more time setting up ways to filter out this crap than we should have to. Direct your bile at the spammers.
which means you anal types who say "RFC says I must bounce" have to note that it also says you must not lose a message, which is what a bad bounce does.
I do not think "lose a message" means what you think it means. I like the RFCs. I just don't think your little suggestion does much good except for the poor joe-jobbee. I've been joe-jobbed. Yeah, it sucked. But I'd rather delete a couple thousand messages once in a blue moon than ask every admin on the Internet to set up their mail servers so that the spammers can more easily validate their address lists.
it's not all bad (Score:2)
In fact, I would go so far as to say that if every spam that I received was that entertaining, I probably wouldn't mind receiving spam at my current rate.
This guy is a fake! (Score:4, Interesting)
Heh (Score:2)
In other news Slashdot user, HopToit, has become the target of the most massive recorded spam attack in 3,000 years.
Poor guy :)
Spam can be as serious as Murder. (Score:5, Interesting)
Spam is the senseless waste of millions upon millions of tiny fractions of a human life.
There comes a point where the few seconds that each of us without spam filters spend deleting this crap adds up to the average lifespan of a human being.
If someone has sent that much spam, why should they not be treated in the same way as a murderer?
Re:Spam can be as serious as Murder. (Score:2)
The guy's crazy -- like a fox (Score:2, Interesting)
Vincent "The Chin" Gigante wandered around Greenwich Village in a bathrobe, pretending to be crazy, to escape a murder conviction. Robby "Captain Time" Todino covers his slimy business with feigned nuttiness.
They both deserve the needle.
How long until e-mail is replaced by M$ mail? (Score:4, Interesting)
I predict that Microsoft will come up with a new, better secured way of transferring mail messages over the Internet. It will be a closed architecture that requires Windows on all client and server systems. It will take over from e-mail overnight. In about a year's time, you will get more and more comments like "Oh, you still have such and old-fashioned mail address, one with a @ in it?" from most of your mail partners, certainly in business uses of mail...
Why? Because the advocates of open standards only talk about the problems of migrating to a new standard, and don't actually start designing and migrating.
This is a good point (Score:2)
If a new email system is created by a non free/open group. It could really put the FOSS community back a more than a decade or more.
ON THE OTHER HAND if the FOSS community was to introduce a email standard it could give us a boost of a year of so, if not more.
(The difference is that we will not (and can not) prevent then from using our methods))
This is a place where the EFF or FSF could make a big contribution to the process. If respected group was to
naa, not him (Score:3, Interesting)
Its probably a double joe job - Robby doesn't wanna annoy random website users, he just wants to get out of this time frame!
Here's the time-travel spam I got in 2002 (Score:4, Interesting)
For your viewing pleasure:
This one a month earlier:
(Yes, I deleted e-mail addresses to protect the guilty, but hey, it's principles.)
Another interesting note: The first time I tried to submit this: Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
So, at least we know he's lame.
Re:Question (Score:4, Informative)
I've been "Joe'd". (Score:2, Interesting)
i kind of feel slightly better now. knowing there's a name for it.
definition linked to in Wired article: http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,si d 19_gci917469,00.html
part of the problem (and i feel like i should be careful what i say eh ain't this silly) is that man
Re:Question (Score:4, Informative)
Joe Job [joa~juhb]
A Joe job is an e-mail spoofing exploit in which someone sends out huge volumes of spam that appear to be from someone other than the actual source. A Joe job is sometimes conducted as an act of revenge on someone who reports a spammer to their Internet service provider (ISP) or publicly advocates anti-spam legislation. The perpetrator is said to be Joeing the legitimate owner of the e-mail address they use. The Joe job is one of the oldest spamming operations in existence, and one of the simplest ones to carry out: the spammer may not have to do anything more than change the "Reply To" address in their e-mail program.
Re:Question (Score:2)
Sorry for not having Joe's full name handy. Coffee load just started.
Re:You know who we need right now? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You know who we need right now? (Score:2)