Public Address | System (Home)

Posted at 11:11AM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

Wow - I had no idea Juha was this famous and a superhero for the rest of us interweb mortals.

I salute you! (nice meeting you the other day, too)

Posted at 11:16AM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

I have my mail filtered through Spamcop - which means I don't get the spam in my inbox - only the mail on my whitelist (very nice) but lately have had at least 20 messages - and often more - in my held mail - many of which appear on a regular basis. Penis enlargement is usually on offer along with Viagra - they don't seem to have twigged to my gender. Does anyone know how effective Spamcop is as a spam cop? From my experience, it would seem, not very.

Posted at 11:17AM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

33% of users say that their use of the Internet has increased their sense of identification with New Zealand (4% report a decrease). This is greatest amongst Asians (50%) and Māori (43%)

Certainly I've discovered a patriotic streak I didn't realise I had after participating in online communities where the default assumption was that you were American. Which, statistically was a very fair assumption, but irritating all the same.

Posted at 11:41AM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

Not famous nor a super-anything... just a little tired. :)

Shane assured me at the time that he was through with spamming. The reaction to his activities was that intense, and I actually believed him.

However, it seems Rule No 1 still applies... sigh.

Thanks Russell, for posting about this.

Posted at 12:07PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

World famous and well done.

If only you were still a blogger, eh? Ah well. Middle management has it rewards, I'm sure.

Posted at 12:14PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

With any luck, we'll no longer hear from the likes of "Elite Herbals", inviting the obvious Lolcat:

Invisbl Herbalz

Posted at 12:21PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

xtra screens my spam for me except for some fake Trade Me stuff. Of course only God knows what else is not getting through... Oh what the hell probably only endless forwarded jokes and baby pictures only the mother could love

Posted at 12:27PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

Shane assured me at the time that he was through with spamming. The reaction to his activities was that intense, and I actually believed him.

What do's he look like? I imagine he's in the scull cavity of a gigantic robot that's making it's way down the Terrace.

Posted at 12:29PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

xtra screens my spam for me except for some fake Trade Me stuff. Of course only God knows what else is not getting through... Oh what the hell probably only endless forwarded jokes and baby pictures only the mother could love

Ihug have been "fixing" their spam filter for about 4 months now, and you can no longer check the filtered emails online, they're just gone forever...

What I *would* like to see filtered though are those insidious chain emails that promise good luck if you forward some trite garbage to every contact you have, and dire consequences for people who don't. I've received them from supposedly intelligent people, who would throw a physical chain mail in the bin, but who somehow seem to disconnect their brains when dealing with emails

Posted at 12:33PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

oh juha you are so a superhero
in fact i bet you even have a snazzy costume with gadgets for fighting geek crime all over it

Posted at 12:46PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

Actually, his super-hero costume looks more like this

Posted at 1:15PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

Just got this from a media organisation:

I've just sent a reporter around to what we believe is the master spammer's home address.

Bugger me if he doesn't have a NO HAWKERS sign on his door and a NO JUNK MAIL sign on his mailbox!

LOL.

Posted at 1:34PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

Actually, his super-hero costume looks more like this

Welcome to Wellington over Easter

Have a good christmas folks

Posted at 1:34PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

I've just sent a reporter around to what we believe is the master spammer's home address.

Bugger me if he doesn't have a NO HAWKERS sign on his door and a NO JUNK MAIL sign on his mailbox!

LOL.

Well, he's a busy man. I expect he doesn't want to be receiving unnecessary time-wasting junk if he doesn't have to.

Posted at 1:45PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

Can we have his email & snail mail addresses? I think that would be nice.

Posted at 2:02PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

And his phone number! Please!

Posted at 2:32PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

Can we have his email & snail mail addresses? I think that would be nice.

That Andrew Llewellyn. Sends a Christmas card to anyone, full of holiday greetings. What a great guy! Feel the love.

Posted at 2:52PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

I'm not entirely convinced that it's worth the trouble of passing a law (I've no idea what that costs - millions?) to catch a single person. Spam filtering technology seems to work (my Gmail is about 99% accurate). I'm sure it costs money, but isn't that a reasonable expense of doing business?

If somebody's using a botnet (giggle) they're breaking more serious laws than anti-spam in any case.

Having said that, the anti-spam law would be more useful if they'd outlawed fax spam and phonebanks at the same time. The former in particular is using an expensive resource (paper and toner) as well as just time. And the "Sensible" Sentencing Trust is an egregious offender - though with only $120k to spend all next year, that should clip their wings a bit.

Posted at 2:53PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

That Andrew Llewellyn. Sends a Christmas card to anyone, full of holiday greetings. What a great guy! Feel the love.

I think he may end up to be the first person to be spammed with nuts.

Posted at 2:58PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

And the "Sensible" Sentencing Trust is an egregious offender

And I think that the media should be banned from using the terms "sensible" and "Garth McVicar" in the same breath.

Posted at 3:17PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

Ihug have been "fixing" their spam filter for about 4 months now, and you can no longer check the filtered emails online, they're just gone forever...

that seems a little dangerous. I've noted a number of isp's are filtering out legitimate mail and dumping it in the spam box.

who knows why this happens but the end result is that email is becoming an unreliable means of communication

Posted at 3:41PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

I'm not entirely convinced that it's worth the trouble of passing a law ... to catch a single person. Spam filtering technology seems to work

sigh

Posted at 3:48PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

If somebody's using a botnet (giggle) they're breaking more serious laws than anti-spam in any case.

Though it appeared in Juha's 2003 report that this aspect was contracted out to 15 year olds. While it would be hard to argue you were niave at the use of botnets by said 15 year olds, i imagine with a good enough lawyer it's entirely possible.

Posted at 3:59PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

I'm not entirely convinced that it's worth the trouble of passing a law (I've no idea what that costs - millions?) to catch a single person. Spam filtering technology seems to work (my Gmail is about 99% accurate). I'm sure it costs money, but isn't that a reasonable expense of doing business?

You're kidding. According to this year's report from Barracuda Networks, nearly all email is now spam; ie: 90-95%.

That's up from 5% in 2001. It's a grotesque theft of resources. Yes, Gmail is holding up fairly well (although I had to switch back to Ihug's smtp recently because Gmail kept failing on me), but if you want to run your own mail server, it's a crippling drain on your time.

Most times your ISPs email service fails, it's because of spamload. It's an expense that's passed on in your bill even if you're not using those mail services.

And then there are the false-positives you never receive or even know about. And the blowback spam because some piece of filth has spoofed your domain into a million email messages. The collateral damage when whole IP ranges are blocked because someone's detected an open relay. The porn spam your kids get when they check their email. The comments spam that means you have to make it harder for people to post comments on your site.

I don't think you can separate botnets and phishing from ordinary spam either -- it's the same people doing it. And legalising it ain't an option: that would really open the floodgates.

It not a matter of "one person" -- it's one person directing the dispatch of 100 million junk messages a day. That's what the suspect in this case has admitted to doing previously.

I also get a special kind of spam that's basically impossible to block -- except perhaps by maintaining some kind of ultra-anal personal filtering, which I don't have time for. It's PR spam -- not emails from local PR companies, but random messages from global IT flacks who have bought some list with my address on it.

I like what Chris Anderson at Wired did when he couldn't stop the PR spam coming: published all the source addresses.

Posted at 4:38PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

I like what Chris Anderson at Wired did when he couldn't stop the PR spam coming: published all the source addresses.

I did that for a while, before spam software stopped sending it through. At one stage I had a web page which had a list of about 200 email addresses, solely there so they could pick each other up.

After a while the job of adding to it go to be too much.

Posted at 4:50PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

According to this year's report from Barracuda Networks, nearly all email is now spam; ie: 90-95%.

Barracuda sell security software, so couldn't be called impartial - having one's marketing staff upgrade themselves to "security consultant" and produce press releases about the battle for computer security seems to be the fashion these days (hey, it works for Sophos). And that 95% figure (which doesn't match any of my experience) appears to be by message count - it's handling the *volume* that's expensive (most spam doesn't carry much in the way of attachments).

Most times your ISPs email service fails, it's because of spamload. It's an expense that's passed on in your bill even if you're not using those mail services.

I've never had Gmail fail on me. When my corporate email fails, it's mostly due to incompetence. If email service was a big component of ISP costs, surely you'd be able to buy IP-only service at a discount. AFAIK, you can't.

And then there are the false-positives you never receive or even know about
I scan my Gmail spam folder occasionally. The odd mailing list message gets canned, but I've never seen anything more than that get misidentified.

The comments spam that means you have to make it harder for people to post comments on your site
Not illegal in NZ, I think. Nor is spamming Arsebook and the like (in fact, I think that's encouraged by the site owners as it boosts their stats).

I don't think you can separate botnets and phishing from ordinary spam
The law does though. Botnets are computer misuse, phishing is fraud. Arguably both have been illegal since before the Internet was ever invented, in the same way as phone freakers used to be prosecuted for "theft of electricity".

I'm not advocating for spammers here, I'm even open to convincing that anti-spam laws are useful as part of a global framework. But I'm not convinced that every minor nuisance requires new laws.

Posted at 5:50PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

Barracuda sell security software, so couldn't be called impartial ...

The Mesaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, which tracks more than 100 million mailboxes, reported an 80-85% figure for the proportion of spam in all email, and that was for Q4 2005. It's huge.

I've never had Gmail fail on me. When my corporate email fails, it's mostly due to incompetence.

That's simply not correct. When the guy from SpamAssassin has his server taken down, it's hard to deny that it's a real, objective problem. I sat through Steve Champeon's email workshop at the last Webstock. It was unbelievable.

If email service was a big component of ISP costs, surely you'd be able to buy IP-only service at a discount. AFAIK, you can't.

Perhaps someone who knows the detail could comment (Peter Belt?) but Ihug's big email collapse was a result of the previous owners being unwilling to make another large capital investment to cope with spam loads when they knew they'd be selling up. It's a significant cost.

Gmail's spam load does seem to be levelling out -- but do you really want Google to be the only people in the world who can run a mail server?

The Wikipedia article on email spam is running an estimate of 90 billion messages a day for 2007. That's insane.

The problem with dealing with spam as a technical, rather than a social or legal problem, is that it always bites you back. There are still small hosting companies in New Zealand who are having their customers' emails undelivered to Xtra addresses because Yahoo's system doesn't like them.

Even if you could fix email and be able to authenticate all sender addresses, you'd still need laws to deal with it. Just letting it get as big as it wants and hoping you can keep up is not a solution.

Posted at 5:59PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

</aside>

Freely-exercised contempt

When I first saw the title I thought this was a blog about the Peter Stewart case. Obviously not, but I wondered if you were planning to blog on it RB?

I have heard a version of events from the Stewart side that made me shiver. Because the victim's name is supressed (automatic in sex cases) the public are not privvy to her identity and if they were it may give some people pause for thought. Obviously the jury knew the victims identity and heard Mr Stewart's defence, and still found him guilty. I'm not so sure I would have.

And since I'm not going to break the supression order (although TradeMe readers evidently had alot of fun laying breadcumbs to identify Mr Stewart -- will they now 'out' the victim?) it's really difficult to explain my concerns about the verdict. It seems, based on the published facts, that this case came down to she said/he said (since there is no corroborating evidence, given the length of time since the abuse) and the jury sided with the victim (can't call her or the abuse 'alleged' now) and found Mr Stewart guilty.

I wonder what bearing the 'Louise Nicholas Affair' (running simultaneously as the Stewart case) had on the verdict? During the ChCh Civic Creche case we were told that children wouldn't lie about the abuse they alleged, and Peter Ellis was found guilty. I wonder if this verdict isn't any more/less PC.

NB - I acknowledge that my comments may/will upset abuse survivors, particularly those who were unable to secure a conviction against their abuser despite knowing with certainty that what happened to them did happen, regardless of 'corroborating evidence'.

Posted at 6:22PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

When I first saw the title I thought this was a blog about the Peter Stewart case. Obviously not, but I wondered if you were planning to blog on it RB?

I hadn't planned to. I didn't know anything about the case until today, and I don't have anything to go on anyway.

Posted at 6:29PM on 20 Dec 07. Permalink.

But I'm not convinced that every minor nuisance requires new laws.

It may be a minor nuisance for you, but it is a major cost for anyone who runs a mailserver. ISPs and businesses and other organisations have to budget large sums of capital expenditure for servers and salary expense for staff to stay on top of it.