Category Archives: spam

Spam is not protected free speech

spam

We all knew it, and now the Virginia Supreme Court has confirmed that spam does not count as protected free speech. Jeremy Jaynes, a prolific spammer sentenced to 9 years prison had appealed on constitutional grounds claiming that denying him the right to spam violated his 1st amendment rights. If this appeal had been granted it would have forced states to rethink their anti-spam laws.

Not that this will really mean much for the volume of spam on the Internet. The advent of the laws in the US simply meant the portion of spam that was being produced by American ‘business men’ moved to former Soviet and Asian countries. At least the control of the spam has. The origins of the actual messages are wherever there are people with bots on their systems. The dispersal of these closely matched to distribution of Internet users, unsurprisingly.

Points for Ingenuity

spam

It disturbs me that I might say something positive about a spammer, but I must admit that I respect the ingenuity of this.  Reported by the BBC, spammers have invented a windows game that progressively displays more of an image if the player correctly decodes a distorted phrase.

The image is tuned to the male libido (of course) and the phrase to be decoded is a Captcha from a free email or comment entry window.  The Captcha is collected by an automated bot that tries to post or register at a protected site.  It sends the Captcha back to the player of the game and if the player correctly guesses it, they get to see more of the image and the bot gets past the protection.

From the report this system is not particularly prevalent at the moment, and hopefully the anti-virus vendors will treat this as a threat and block it, even though it poses no risk to the computer it is installed on.  It is yet another demonstration though that there is no protection that can stop human resourcefulness.  Shared access and protection are mutually exclusive.

The only way to stop spam is if we can find a way to stop it working.  If everyone just deleted it there would be no reason for it to exist.  It will be interesting to see if the increased IT literacy over time changes the efficacy of spam.

Google Apps for Your Domain!

Commerce, google, spam, Virus, , ,

GoogleappsAs many of you know that listen to my show you have been hearing me complain about the amount of Spam I have been getting. I have been looking all over the net for a solution and those that I found where either too expensive or they were made for people with small volumes of mail.

As I was talking to Angelo he and I decided to try a Google Service that has been around for a while in beta testing. We both have used Gmail quite a bit and I know it is as good or better than the Spam checker we have been running on our own servers. Up to this point we have been using Qmail with Spamd and several others utilities to filter the mail and scan for viruses.

I decided to take the plunge and applied for a couple of domains tonight and within about 20 minutes I had the mail moved over to Google and was down-loading it into outlook like I always do. I logged into the very familiar Gmail interface and instead of a Gmail.com domain I was not on my very own geeknewscentral.com domain.

So I have been watching the filtering here for a couple of hours, and can tell you so far I am very happy, the true test will come in the morning when I down-load my mail as normal, and then cross check on the Google site to see how much Spam it has caught that I have not had to deal with it. If it works out we are going to see if we can move over a few more domains.

What amazed me was how easy it was to setup, Google has done a really good job here, I am sure that some people would be very worried about having Google host their e-mail and I am not a 100% sure how I feel about it yet. One thing for sure,  I feel pretty good that none of it will go missing. [Google.com]

Judge may ask ICANN to shutdown SPAMHAUS domain!

Crime, ICANN, spam, ,

Spam In what I can only describe as sure stupidity on a judge’s part it seems that one of the organizations that keep a lot of Spam out of your inbox may be in trouble over a recent lawsuit. It seems after being sued by an accused spammer and then not showing up for the court case they lost by default.

Spamhaus is a volunteer group that is well respected but if this judge shuts them down it could spell big trouble for ISP’s worldwide that rely on them to curb the amount of Spam in your inbox. It’s really sad that apparent spammers have more rights to abuse people than those of us that are not abusing the Internet! [Techdirt] [Ambersail]

Spam is out of Control!

Commerce, spam,

We have been using all of the regular stuff you use on ones own dedicated server but I will be honest the Junk mail is killing me. I have started to hunt for a solution out there that will help with the situations. What I would like to use is a service like JunkMailFilter.com but there site design is such I cannot even figure out how to sign up with them. Pretty sad when the site is not intuitive enough to figure out how to setup an account.

I also don’t care for how their pricing is tiered I will need more than a thousand inbounds a month but I need a lot less than there next level of service. If you have a good solution that you are using I really would like to here from you as I am about to get a solution that will help me deal with all the junk coming in.

How much of your e-mail is going lost?

Security, spam,

I often ponder that exact question when I hit send. The majority of time I think the e-mail makes it but there have been times when e-mail just goes missing. Last night I sent out over a 100 invitations to podcasters I have been following online inviting them to to become content producers on the Podcaster News Network how many of those went missing is unknown but it can be scary.

Next week I send out over 500 e-mail to parties that have been clamoring for information about a new podcast site we are launching called Blubrry I am very concerned that some of those e-mails will just get sucked up and destroyed by Spam filters. But in the case of one company that was bidding on a school contract the school awarded a contract that cost them $250,000 more because a spam filter tagged a inquiry the school had sent out on the bid. Bad news for the contractor, bad news for the taxpayer and with both parties headed to court more money will be lost.

So just how much e-mail is your company loosing? [www.ajc.com]