Spam Keeps Coming, but Its Senders Are Wary
Grok Headline matches for Spam Keeps Coming, but Its Senders Are Wary
Spam keeps coming, but its senders are
wary
Spam keeps coming, but its senders are
wary
01/07/2004 02:03 PMCNET Jan 7 2004 12:29PM ET
Making senders pay for spam
Making senders pay for spam
03/21/2003 07:03 AMMessenger Spam Senders Fighting Back
Against FTC
Messenger Spam Senders Fighting Back
Against FTC
12/09/2003 05:03 PMLast month the FTC decided that it was time to
crack
down on the issue of Windows Messenger spam - which had been
getting some attention lately. Messenger spam has nothing to do with
instant messaging, but with the Windows Messenger product that is used
by network admins and such to alert computer users of important things
("our network is going down for five minutes" or something like that).
Most home computers (and many work computers) have no need to have
this feature turned on - but many still do and spammers were
exploiting that. When the FTC decided to crack down they took action
against one company that had been known to send the messages every ten
minutes in some cases. It turns out the company is run by two college
kids who are now (surprisingly)
fight
ing back against the FTC. Part of the claim against them was that
their spam messages were touting software that could block these
messages. As someone points out, it's a bit like "vandals throwing
bricks through windows to sell home-security systems." The defense
from the kids is that (a) they weren't doing anything illegal by
sending out these spam messages (b) the messages did no damage and (c)
the software they were selling actually did block those messages.
Thus, they say that using messenger spam was actually a good way of
targeting customers who needed their software. Of course, they leave
out is that you don't actually need any software to turn off the
Messenger feature. Their lawyer is also painting them as "good kids"
who would never do anything harmful. They might have a case. As much
as I believe they knew exactly what they were doing in annoying the
hell out of a lot of people, it is questionable whether or not it was
illegal.
Stamping on spam Junk e-mail senders
targeted by Microsoft's Penny Black
project
Stamping on spam Junk e-mail senders
targeted by Microsoft's Penny Black
project
12/25/2003 11:20 PMBBC Dec 25 2003 10:52PM ET
Where is your spam coming from?
Where is your spam coming from?
09/16/2004 03:28 AMDid you ever wonder who sent you that spam? ESATInformer reports show
the country of the spam server. It’s a very interesting report.
Seeing the foreign country listing helps the end user to spot spam and
understand that his best friend’s address has been spoofed...Unless
the friend did move to Korea last night! [PRWEB Sep 16, 2004]
Spam Might Be Coming From YOUR Machine
Spam Might Be Coming From YOUR Machine
06/06/2004 11:38 PMZomb
ie PCs spew out 80% of spam: Turns out spam is coming from places
other than you might think. It's tempting to envision spam coming
from some centralized location so we can all sit around and complain
that they don't shut the loser off, but the reality appears to be
different.
Four-fifths of spam now emanates from computers contaminated with
Trojan horse infections, according to a study by network management
firm Sandvine out this week. Trojans and worms with backdoor
components such as Migmaf and SoBig have turned infected Windows PCs
into drones in vast networks of compromised zombie PCs. [...]
Sandvine's analysis, cross referenced with data from SORBS, to
determine what IP space is assigned to residential subscriber pools of
global service providers, shows most spam now originating from
residential broadband networks.
Click here to comment on this entry
VoIP spam--it's coming
VoIP spam--it's coming
09/09/2004 04:42 PMSpam: Problems Coming and Going
Spam: Problems Coming and Going
06/29/2004 01:38 PMInternet News Jun 29 2004 4:59PM GMT
Comcast looks to stop the spam coming
from its network
Comcast looks to stop the spam coming
from its network
05/24/2004 12:19 PMInfected PCs of Comcast broadband subscribers are one of the largest
sources of spam, sending upwards of 800 million e-mails daily. Now
Comcast is preparing to fight bac.
More Patent Battles Coming In The
Anti-Spam World
More Patent Battles Coming In The
Anti-Spam World
09/14/2004 12:29 PMAn anti-spam company has
purchased
an early anti-spam patent, which they now hope to use to collect a
bit of cash from plenty of other anti-spam firms. The concept seems
ridiculously obvious: monitor email, note emails that appear to be the
same, create a signature for that email and use it to pick out other
messages that match that signature. Why this should be patentable in
the first place is unclear. In the meantime, it's just going to make
it more difficult and more expensive to use this obvious technique to
stop spam.
Blog comment spam solutions and the
coming arms race
Blog comment spam solutions and the
coming arms race
05/14/2004 10:16 PMJeremy Zawodny recently
wrote something about weblog
spam. John Battelle picked up on it
today. Six Apart has just
released a centralized comment authorization system called TypeKey. I've been thinking about
comment spam for some time, and I've got a radical solution - one that
I believe is the only one that has a chance at working.
I think that all these blacklists,
etc are the entirely wrong approach. They will serve to create an
ever-escalating arms race between spammers and bloggers, resulting in
the wasteland that we have today with email and Usenet (anybody
remember Usenet?)
The problem is one of accountability. Whenever you have a system
where someone can insert an unaccountable message into a message
stream, abuse always follows. This has happened with Usenet, email,
and now blog comments. As long as people see some gain to be had for
perpatrating the abuse, and the abusers are unaccountable, they will
do so. The protocols are fundamentally broken: for example, they
allow spammers to forge From: addresses in email and they allow
comment spammers to add arbitrary content to arbitrary blogs. And the
authentication services only serve as a minor deterrent - spammers are
now using the prospect of free porn to get people to fill in the
"only-humans-can-decipher" image codes (captchas) that spam
blocking services are using, for example. It is a classic arms
race.
Here's my suggestion: Turn off comments altogether, and let people
who want to comment get their own blog. When they link to you,
they'll get picked up by services like Technorati which will
automatically show their comments whenever doing a search for your
post. This is what the folks at BoingBoing (and many other
sites) have been doing, and it eliminates spam because it enforces
accountability - you've got to have a publically addressable place on
the net where your words appear - and that place is owned by you. The
cost of setting up the blog lies with the commenter, which is the way
things ought to be. We're working on some ways to easily show the
number of people who have linked to a particular post, in real-time,
which will make it easy to show the interesting articles dynamically -
e.g. "Blogs Linking To This Post (15)" instead of just "Blogs Linking
To this Post". Stay tuned.
Now, this doesn't completely eliminate spam - for example, I could
set up a SPAM blog, and create links out the wazoo to all of
the major sites. For a while, the SPAM blog site will show up
in the Technorati Link Cosmos
of each site that it links to, but it soon becomes easy to eliminate -
for example, the SPAM site will never get an inbound link from
people who I care about, and that can be used as a filter on the
inbound links page. The spammer (and his site) would also quickly
gain a reputation as a spammer, and could therefore be easily tracked.
For example, a set of spam-hunting sites could link to the
SPAM site, and you could have a filter that only showed links
as comments if less than 2 of the spam-hunting sites linked to the
site, or any metric that you wanted. Think of it as a distributed slashdot karma
system, if you will. And you wouldn't be limited to using
Technorati for this, other sites could come about that do a better job
than we do, and you could use them.
Some might suggest that this is a bad system, because people who
wanted to remain anonymous couldn't comment. That isn't true -
Accountability doesn't mean the end of anonymity, take Salam Pax's blog as an
example of this. Of course anonymity (or perhaps pseudonymity?)
does bring a set of challenges, like "Why should I trust someone who
won't tell me his name?" but these can be worked through if the
pseudonymous blogger proves reliable and trustworthy over time.
Of course, you may ask yourself, "If this Sifry guy is so against
comments, why does he enable them on his own site?" I have employed
anti- comment spam measures in the past, which are working for now.
Since I don't get enough blog spam right now to make the tradeoff, but
I have no doubt that the day will come. I'm also technical enough to
know how to do all this stuff, and my goal is to fix the underlying
problem in the system, not to just patch things piecemeal. And I'll
admit to not being 100% convinced that this is the right way to go, so
I'm testing the waters of both approaches.
And besides, we'll get a whole bunch more bloggers in the world
this way. More permalinks are good. Comments and feedback are
welcome. :-)
Do senders have a right to your inbox?
Do senders have a right to your inbox?
06/07/2004 08:58 AMZDNet UK Jun 7 2004 12:48PM GMT
SMS FAQ: How do SMS Senders Calculate
Available Bandwidth?
SMS FAQ: How do SMS Senders Calculate
Available Bandwidth?
12/26/2004 05:16 AMSpam, spam, spam, spam ... Canada
targets unwanted email (AFP)
Spam, spam, spam, spam ... Canada
targets unwanted email (AFP)
05/12/2004 04:17 AMAFP - Canada unveiled a new action plan to combat unsolicited
commercial e-mail, nicknamed spam, which jams inboxes and clogs
Internet traffic worldwide.
Finance Spam Passing Drug Spam While
Porn Spam Is Washed Up
Finance Spam Passing Drug Spam While
Porn Spam Is Washed Up
05/24/2004 05:37 PMThe latest study on spam trends appears to show that
financial spam is outpacing pharmaceutical spam
- though, honestly, so much of both is coming out that it's really
hard to imagine that this matters at all. Meanwhile, it seems that
porn spam is increasingly less interesting to spammers as the numbers
have been on a noticeable decline for quite some time. No matter
what, though, it appears that CAN-SPAM has done absolutely nothing to
slow down the amount of spam sent.
Site-To-Site Communication with Senders
Site-To-Site Communication with Senders
01/17/2004 10:57 PMFrom spam drops to spam spray to spam
stream
From spam drops to spam spray to spam
stream
06/05/2004 07:31 PM I am now getting 2,000+ spams a day. There are 1,440 minutes in a day
The rate of incoming spams is therefore getting close to the interval
it takes me to check my email and dispose of a single spam: By the
time I'm done checking, more spam has arrived. That is the point at
which the spam droplets form a continuous stream. And that is the
point at which no interval of my life will ever be spam-free again....
Business wary of SP2
Business wary of SP2
04/04/2005 01:17 PMvnunet.com Apr 4 2005 5:11PM GMT
U.S. getting wary of electronic voting
U.S. getting wary of electronic voting
04/23/2004 06:59 PMglobetechnology.com Apr 23 2004 11:05PM GMT
Investors wary of Google IPO
Investors wary of Google IPO
08/01/2004 06:47 AMIndystar.com - Sun Aug 1, 08:23 am GMT
Google founders wary
Google founders wary
04/27/2004 08:50 AMGlobe and Mail Apr 27 2004 12:43PM GMT
U.S. must be wary of attacks -- on our
liberty
U.S. must be wary of attacks -- on our
liberty
07/04/2004 07:26 AMSiliconValley.com Jul 4 2004 10:42AM GMT
Hollywood still wary of Microsoft
Hollywood still wary of Microsoft
08/16/2004 05:52 PMFor a while now Microsoft has tried to get into the 'Hollywood'
market. By opening up its WMP9 codec and by making deals with popular
movie industries like Disney. Even after all of this Microsoft isn't
being welcomed with opened arms, and with good reason as the movie
industry continues to keep its suspicion on high alert.
In the past Microsoft’s business practices where questionable at best,
but since then Microsoft has developed new and better practices that
everyone will agree are better in at least one way or another. Still
Hollywood maintains caution when dealing with a company as powerful as
Microsoft. According to the Associated Press Hollywood maintains two
fears about Microsoft. The first fear is that Microsoft could buy out
the companies, while the second fear is that the PC market would hurt
the movie industry as it did the music industry. Not everybody agrees
with the movie industry. In fact Microsoft already has licensees for
its Windows Media digital rights software for Walt Disney, AOL, Dell
Inc., Samsung, and Movielink LLC. Proof that other companies are
willing to be the first to enter the new digital market.
The fact of the matter is the PC is the future, and like or not the
movement is coming. This can already been seen with the music
industry, but don't expect the movie industry to effected the same
way. Especially right now with the current size of digital movies,
but eventually both the movie and music industry will come to rely on
the PC. As time goes on the movie industry will probably warm up to
Microsoft (especially with its market share). Who knows in this time
frame other companies might come out with an even better format. I
guess well just have to wait and see where the movie industry is going
to go.
View:
More InformationRead full story...Secure Flight Gets Wary Welcome
Secure Flight Gets Wary Welcome
08/27/2004 03:48 PMWired News Aug 27 2004 8:25PM GMT
Be wary of IT 'solutions' that really
solve nothing
Be wary of IT 'solutions' that really
solve nothing
04/14/2005 10:04 AMglobetechnology.com Apr 14 2005 2:06PM GMT
Wary Iraqis Welcome the Handover but
Ask, Now What?
Wary Iraqis Welcome the Handover but
Ask, Now What?
06/28/2004 11:27 AMThere was no greater sign of the cautiousness of the Iraqi people
toward today's events than the quiet in Baghdad.
Businesses Still Wary of XP SP2 (PC
World)
Businesses Still Wary of XP SP2 (PC
World)
04/05/2005 12:10 PMPC World - Microsoft's security upgrade has been installed on less
than a quarter of XP PCs at the office, study finds.
Kidnap-wary Mexicans get chipped
Kidnap-wary Mexicans get chipped
07/14/2004 09:50 AMShot in the arm for RFID?
Small businesses wary of Microsoft
Small businesses wary of Microsoft
01/28/2004 02:33 PMZDNet Jan 28 2004 6:19PM GMT
Football: Neville wary of Ronaldo
Football: Neville wary of Ronaldo
06/23/2004 09:00 AMGary Neville says he will have to be at his best to cope with
Cristiano Ronaldo when England play Portugal.
FTC Officials Wary of Spyware Measures
FTC Officials Wary of Spyware Measures
04/30/2004 07:46 AMLegislators Wary of Electronic Voting
(AP)
Legislators Wary of Electronic Voting
(AP)
04/23/2004 01:46 PMAP - A growing number of federal and state legislators are expressing
doubts about the integrity of the ATM-like electronic voting machines
that at least 50 million Americans will use to cast their ballots in
November.
Iraqis Watch With Wary Pride as Little
Changes, and a Lot
Iraqis Watch With Wary Pride as Little
Changes, and a Lot
07/03/2004 01:25 PMThe transfer of formal sovereignty to an interim government of Iraqi
leaders seems to be working on the national psyche in subtle ways.
Rugby: Dawson wary of Scotland
Rugby: Dawson wary of Scotland
02/17/2004 11:49 PMMatt Dawson says England are expecting a tough test from Scotland at
Murrayfield on Saturday.
Legislators Wary of Electronic Voting
Legislators Wary of Electronic Voting
04/23/2004 02:48 PMAP via Daily Press Apr 23 2004 6:55PM GMT
Tech firms wary on biodefense
Tech firms wary on biodefense
06/18/2004 03:23 AMBoston Globe Jun 18 2004 7:14AM GMT
A wary eye on sites for music sharing
A wary eye on sites for music sharing
01/02/2004 02:27 PMCNET Jan 2 2004 1:45PM ET
Entertainment world still wary of
Microsoft
Entertainment world still wary of
Microsoft
08/15/2004 03:04 PMSan Francisco Chronicle Aug 15 2004 5:47PM GMT
Cricket: Ponting wary of England
Cricket: Ponting wary of England
03/30/2005 07:11 AMAussie captain Ricky Ponting says this year's Ashes will be the
closest in years.
Grok Description matches for Spam Keeps Coming, but Its Senders Are Wary
GrokA matches for Spam Keeps Coming, but Its Senders Are Wary
Spam Keeps Coming, but Its Senders Are Wary
