Results tagged “spam” from The Daily Nugget

Thirty years ago the first spam email message (unsolicited commercial email) was sent to 393 researchers on the Arpanet network.  Nobody knew it was the first spam message and wouldn't call it that until 15 years later, but it was a harbinger of things to come.  Now there's formmail spam, comment spam, trackback spam, and every other form of spam imaginable.

Obviously, the peeps at Google have nothing better to do with their free email system. I don't know if the Gmail users out there noticed, but if you open your Spam folder and look below the Google search box at the top of the page, you'll see a link to a spam recipe. To the right of the recipe are arrows you can use to navigate through the selections. Among the yummies you can create: Spam Swiss Pie, Cricket's Spam Quiche, and Spam Vegetable Strudel. My fave, Spicy Spam Kabobs. Looks delicioso!

EDIT: I just discovered Gmail gives you recycling tips when you open your Trash folder. Sweet.

Due to "human error", a spam message sent to MSNBC was distributed to their breaking news subscriber list. MSNBC posted the usual apology online stating "[the company] regrets the error and is taking steps to make sure it does not happen again." This just goes to show that all the money in the world cannot cure stupidity.

The trial of spammer Jeremy Jaynes has revealed secrets of the trade. First off, Jaynes was able to run his business out of a small single family home outfitted with 16 high-speed (T1) lines, a multitude of servers, and little or no staff. Only his sister helped him run the operation at times. This server farm allowed him to send 10 million spam emails per day using stolen or purchased mailing lists. He would hawk porn and useless products and services, like an Internet history cleaner and work-at-home schemes that amounted to little more than a website for the buyers.

Most people ignore these emails, but even with a response rate of 1 in 30,000, he received $400,000 to $750,000 in credit card charges per month. His expenses for the high speed lines, servers, and electricity equated to roughly $50,000 per month. Which means that he was netting $350,000 to $700,000 each month!

This guys net worth is estimated at $24 million. He's living hip-hop video large with big mansions and Bentleys and stuff. This all from spam. But, at the end, spam doesn't pay. The judge in his case has recommended a nine-year sentence for him which is now under appeal. Due to the poor crafting of the anti-spam law and the first amendment, this guy may never actually see time behind bars.

Sadly, according to an expert witness in the case, there are more sophisticated spammers out there that use "zombie" servers off-shore to spam and are less likely to be caught. However, it is nice to know that we are finally starting to put pressure on spammers to stop.

I finally installed the MT-Blacklist plugin to my Movable Type installation. This plugin will automatically delete comment spam and will allow me to return to unregistered and unmoderated comments on the blog. Needless to say, comment spammers can now all pucker up and kiss my ass.

The comment spammers still haven't let up trying to post ads in the comments of the entries on the site. Configuring the site to approve comments just means that I have to sift through tons of comment spam and delete them before they hit the site. I really don't have time for that! So now I've setup comment registration in which users register through Movable Type's free service called TypeKey to post comments on the site. I think that this will be a much better solution to cut down on comment spam--let's see how this works.

Greetings to all! Melissa and I landed last night and are still suffering from a little jetlag. It's a ten hour time difference between San Francisco and Germany and we can definitely feel it. I was wide awake this morning at 3:00AM. Once I am fully recovered from the lag I will be back to regular posts, including the journal and photographs from the trip.

Thanks to Jimmy and Meerenai for keeping things running on the site while I was gone. Sadly though, I just spent about an hour and a half deleting comment spam from the site. The comment spammers had a fucking field day during my absence, but now all comment spam has been removed and the site has been completely rebuilt. Also, and I hate to do it, all comments must now be personally approved by me before they will appear on the site, this should eliminate comment spamming completely. Fuckers!!!

The vacation was great and very much needed. I found out about my promotion to the firm's management team right before leaving and I just found out my salary and bonus for the year. Things are well. Please look for the Europe trip entry after the decompression is over. Oddly, as excited as I was to leave, it's good to be back.

AOHell users are always wondering why they get so much spam. Well, one reason is because an AOL employee was selling the user list to fucking spammers! An AOL software engineer was arrested after it was found that he sold the entire AOL user list to a Las Vegas spammer for an undisclosed sum and later sold an updated user list to the same spammer for $100,000. Damn, I fucking hate spammers! We should all be happy that these bitches got caught.

After getting comment spammed earlier today with over 100 comments that said "Hmmmmn, interesting" on over 100 different posts on the blog, I broke down and upgraded to Movable Type 3.0D. The new software has the ability to edit comments en masse, and even allows for comment registration. It's amazing to me that people will spam blogs just to add links to their own site--it's sick!

Anyway, to the other authors, if you have questions regarding the use of the new software, just drop me a line. Oh, and if you received emails from the comment spammer, just delete them.

Governor Gray Davis attempted to redeem himself today by signing a new tough spam-busting bill into law. The new law allows civil damages against spammers amounting to $1,000 per e-mail and $1 million per incident. Kick ass! We're not fucking around here! Unfortunately, the law won't take effect until January 1st of next year.

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was perfect in the early days of Arpanet, when there were only about a thousand trusted hosts. That was back in 1981. Those numbers seem like nothing compared to the 170,000,000 domains that are currently registered. That's a potential 170,000,000 mail servers! When you think of those numbers, and the number of unscrupulous marketers and spammers, you can begin to see that the protocol has outlived its usefulness. I personally don't care if they make changes to the existing protocol or just start one from scratch, but let's make it happen--we're all tired of spam.