Category: The Internet

I read this morning that a Virginia judge sentenced a spammer to nine years in prison for spamming. He was clearing about 750k a month in income from his spam business, using multiple T1’s and many networks of computers (obviously), and apparently sending out tens of millions of e-mails a day. The law he was convicted under is only two weeks old and is under serious question for constitutional implications.

I have no idea, based on the articles I’ve read, what kind of spammer this person was. If he was sending out phishing e-mails, then nine years is a fitting and lenient sentence. However, if he was simply sending typical porn, prescription drug, refinancing (etc) spam, then I think this sentence is heavy-handed and ignorant. His co-defendants both were acquitted of similar charges. Either they rolled over on the guy or, the charges were too weak to stick so, they went after the money.

I hate (no, loathe) spam as much as anyone. I have been fighting it for well over 8 years now as an email administrator and user. I can’t stand what has happened to email as well as the burden it has placed on the the internet in terms of bandwidth. But, nine years of a mans life for exploiting known weaknesses in email standards and filtering technologies? Thats just far too harsh for my taste. If the terms of this law aren’t defined clearly in a technologically responsible manner, then the next time your mom sends you a chain letter, she may become a federal criminal. Typically and historically, this is not the case when politicians try to legistlate technology crimes. We’ve been subjected to judicial branch and law enforcement foolishness so many times, I’d think we’d have established a mechanism to ensure these laws are reasonable and sound. Not that we have a history of doing that either.

I still can’t fathom how unsolicited email can be thought of as different from unsolicited regular mail. Except that a government employee hand delivers it to me. I’m not sure how they differ to this day. Well, don’t get me wrong here. If this person was trying to get people to update their bank accounts, paypal accounts, ebay accounts, retirement accounts, etc… then stealing their money, data, or identities, then I can see such as sentence.

What happens if you combine Google Maps and Craig’s List housing listings? Something smarter than us.

I’m keeping an eye on Jotspot.

Okay, I’m game, let’s try it out. (via linkfilter)

Watch as little Dean learns to play well with telemarketers. It’s not going very well…
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Earlier today, I was updating my copy of Adaware, a spyware protection tool. When visiting the mirror sites to download the program, I was confronted with more pop-up ads than I could deal with. The one site that they list as a mirror launched 8 of them by the time I got to the file.

Sad endorsement indeed.

Find out what the marketroids think of you.

The Complete Bushisms has quietly started updating again. Apparently they took from Late August 2001 until May off. I never noticed the gap.

I guess that I’m not better than they are. I collected 36 megabytes of video, 11 megabytes of audio, 6 megabytes of texts and links, and probably one of the most comprehensive photo collections around, for the geedubbya.com project. If you recall, I registered the domain just prior to his election intending to put together yet another Bush bashing site.

I scrapped the project after Sept. 11.

I figured this was one instance where “If you haven’t anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” was most appropriate.

The mozilla launch party, celebrating the launch of 1.0 (finally), is being held at the DNA Lounge. Which is quite strange as the owner of the DNA lounge (in S.F.) is none other than JWZ who advocated the project, helped found and convince Netscape/AOL to fund it, and then very publicly quit the project.

I’ve always thought that the Mozilla art was a bigtime ripoff of the “Obey Giant” art meme. I mean right down to the star in the logo and everything. But, something that obvious can’t be a complete ripoff? I mean, it’s so close that I would think they have permission? Not sure.

Well, there was a great deal of truth behind the fraud e-mail that Gary recieved last month (the old post is here). I have also seen about 3 of these since he got his. It seems that a group of Nigerians has been arrested for fraud, allegedly members of a “419 email fraud gang” which is thought to have tried to con thousands of dollars out of their victims, according to the report. Police seized a large amount of drugs, as well as computer equipment and false dentification papers.

So, sometimes when you can imagine the worst… it’s not even close to how awful the truth really is. I guess it really wasn’t a good idea for us to set up a dummy account… they would have just taken the money and we would have been stuck looking at one another saying, “Yep, they took the money…” “Yeah, they sure did, didn’t they?” “Yep.” I can’t imagine the time we would have had trying to explain this to the Flint police… riiiiight.

The e-mail that comes from ICQ support that asks users for their UIN and passwords is in “the wild” again (here’s a screen capture of the e-mail). The Register picked up on the story a few weeks back but, shed no real light on it. Also, they speculate what could be behind the hack but, offer nothing very definitive.

Some may remember late last year, someone was able to nab my UIN. Not in this manner. Rather, they merely were able to guess my embarrassingly easy password. After numerous requests, I got no help from ICQ support but, I was able to retrieve my UIN myself, in my own way. Later that week, I got this e-mail asking me for my UIN and password too. I forwarded the message to ICQ support which actually prompted a reply. They thanked me for the e-mail and header but, sternly warned me that in the user agreement, ICQ agents will never ask for user passwords… duh.

My belief is that there are people who are willing to hack UIN’s that are in the 9,999,999 range and below in which to sell at eBay. For example, here’s one (5555071) for bid for $9.00. Here another one (164834) that’s going for $30.00. Now mind you there isn’t many right now on eBay but, wouldn’t it make sense to lay low for a couple of months? Anyway, it makes perfect sense to me that if they browsed ICQ’s user directories, they would get the e-mail addresses of the UIN in question. Takes some legwork but, if you can peddle the UIN for a few bucks, it’s quite a nice little hack.

Well, it looks like BMG will buy Napster after all. At half the price that was offered Monday. BMG put a $16 million offer on the table that Napster’s board (mostly made up of venture capitalists, I’m sure) squabbled over and then rejected. This prompted the CEO Konrad Hilbers and founder Shawn Fanning to resign. Now, BMG will have Napster for $8 million and the two Napster wheels will return. Well, at least what few employees of Napster left clutching their hearts in their cubicles can breath a sigh of relief. For a little while.

So, is this how it was supposed to work? RIAA smacks the first user friendly digital music system down into the dirt. Loads them down with litigation. Then Big Brother and his Media Matrix swoops in and buys them for a song? Not exactly, Napster has cost BMG a lot more than 8 million. So far, from what I can add up from the various reports that figure is closer to 200 million. It still doesn’t “add” up to me.

Perhaps a better question is to ask would be: “Why would BMG want to pay 20(8) million dollars to prop up Napster?” Are they hoping to use the patents Napster filed for to beat down some of the technologies that Napster competes against? Do they think that the name alone is worth the trouble?

Funny, when you look back… what happened to this rosy outlook of MP3’s and the effect they would have upon the music business? Meanwhile the gnutella clones march onward, the million FTP servers still offer a lot, and the newsgroups are as active as they ever were.

I’ve listened to people complaining about SPAM for about 5-6 years now. I’ve heard every side of the argument as to why it exists and why it still works. I have heard every reason why SPAM is bad. I think back to the utopian (pre-web, pre-AOL) days when one could roam freely and without much hindrance, I can remember a (largely) SPAM free internet. I’ve watched SPAM fighting initiatives come and go. And I’ve watched SPAM creators build more sophisticated ways to SPAM people. In fact, there are probably as many anti-spam resources and discussions as there are anti-virus resources and discussions.

After all of this, I’ve come to the conclusion that SPAM (next to MS Word viri) is the most highly-hyped plague of our generation. Really, I mean, what is the big deal for an average internet user to have to deal with SPAM? For most of us, SPAM represents at least 60% of our e-mail. Especially web-based e-mail such as Yahoo! or Hotmail users. During a single day, I average 200 e-mails at all of my accounts, of those 200 mails at least 70% of them are SPAM. How difficult is it for me, as an average Joe internet user, to simply delete them? Not very. After 17 years of having an internet e-mail address, I’m getting pretty darn good at it.

To be fair to the people that loathe SPAM with every aspect of their being, I’d like to clarify a bit. A person who takes the time to establish a domain name such I do here at paxtonland, should not be too surprised when they get gobs and gobs of it. You want to be known on the internet with a nice vanity domain, you want people to see that you have a cool e-mail address, you’ll have to take SPAM as it comes, which is quite frequently. To business users who maintain an e-mail account their business provides them, I consider it the cost of doing business, like it or not it is the same basic premise as above. For free web-based e-mail subscribers such as Netscape, Yahoo! and Hotmail users, what do you expect for free? C’mon, really?!? Do you honestly expect that these companies won’t sell your name to everyone that will buy it? They do, that’s business in the revenue hungry internet. If you don’t like it, change e-mail addresses frequently, people have been using e-mail long enough now to follow an address change. If they can remember “nastygirl_in_detroit2002@yahoo.com” then they can remember “nastygirl_in_detroit2003@yahoo.com” too.

The real victims of SPAM are the average internet Joes that pay a service provider such as AOL, Prodigy, Earthlink, MSN, etc… These people (most of us) pay a nice chunk of change each month for their internet access. They actually pay someone to sell them down the river to god knows what marketing company. Who, in turn, will sell their lists to marketers… That is a real shame. It’s not like expecting to see free television programming without commercials. Those people pay for the service they are being provided with. They should not have to suffer unwanted marketing advances from their ISP’s. However, AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve set the standard rather low, very early on in this area of expectation. When @home went under and Comcast took over the network service, my SPAM quotent increased 600%. The only e-mail I get from this account is SPAM. No one knows the address, I’ve never sent mail from it, I’ve never used the e-mail address to identify myself for any service or account, and I still get 10-25 SPAM e-mails a day there.

So how do I think one should handle SPAM? Here’s my ten point list of what I think:

1. If you are in possession of a domain name like I am… live with it.
2. If you are employer provides you with an e-mail account… live with it.
3. If you are a web-based e-mail subscriber… live with it.
4. If you use your e-mail address to get free stuff… live with it.
5. If you surf for pr0n and use your e-mail for that… live with it.
6. If you are an average Joe AOL/Prodigy/Comcast/ forward all of your SPAM to “abuse@[whateveryourserviceis].com” let them read it too. Maybe there is a secret “nospam” list they can put you on if you scream loudly enough.
7. If you want to cut down on the amount of SPAM you receive, stop using your e-mail address to register for services such as game sites, product websites, etc… set up a Yahoo!/Hotmail account and point that crap there.
8. If you are a web-based e-mail subscriber, change your address once a year or, more. You won’t upset the balance of nature. The people who really care to e-mail you will know where to send your e-mail.
9. Be careful where you send e-mail from your “good” accounts. Never subscribe to lists at your “good” account. Use your web-based “dummy” e-mail for that.
10. If you absolutely have to use your “good” e-mail account for a service, look for the “opt-out” check boxes before you submit and READ the user agreement and privacy statements, by all means. Then, use your web-based “dummy” account anyway!

SPAM is indeed a common part of life today, I don’t think it deserves 2nd. amendment protection yet, I do believe that even scamming porno site have a right to earn a living. As an internet user, you control almost as much as they do, how much SPAM you’ll have to suffer.

First-quarter Internet sales better than expected

The first quarter, usually a sleepy time in the retail business, turned out to be unusually busy for online merchants.

The pace of Internet sales, which picked up momentum after Sept. 11, further accelerated in the first three months of 2002, fed by an improving economy, an influx of new shoppers on the Web as well as increased spending from previous customers, according to company reports released this week.