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Spam

Mapping the Spam 292

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-thats-impressive dept.
demaria writes "The folks at cluelessmailers.org have made a map of spam. It shows the relationships among spammers and other entities (legitimate or not), including organizations that track spam, advertises with, shares addresses, emails through, and all sorts of other data. I can't imagine how hard it was to put this together, it looks like a giant circuit design layout, but shows just how big and interwoven the spam problem is."
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Mapping the Spam More

Mapping the Spam

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  • Linking to a page with a 870+KB image is really lame. Could have at least linked to a page that just described what the map was, so the user could click on to the map. Save cluelessmailers.org some big money.
  • ha! my favorite has to be the one at the top over towards the right... thefreesite.com. It was submitted to them by someone from that address! Spammers are even trying to advertise on spam maps... guess the really are a clueless mailer.
  • The only problem with this is that it lets the spammers know how much they need to change their MO to slide under the radar. I did get a warm feeling from seeing all of it though.

    "You are going to let them in here? They're gonna see everything! Waaaeeeh, they're gonna see the big board!"

  • Thanks (Score:2, Interesting)

    by cOdEgUru ( 181536 )
    For giving me all the domain names that I need to block out.

    Wish there was some way I could block out that stupid Hotmail email begging for money to increase account size.

  • Map of Spam (Score:5, Funny)

    by CaffeineAddict2001 ( 518485 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:34PM (#3780316)
    The country of spam is surrounded by the "White Gelatin Coast", it is divided into various sovereign mystery meat nations. How this country was formed is unknown and best left a mystery.
  • All the spam i get mapps through hotmail, and it's normally from msn
  • "I can't imagine how hard it was to put this together, it looks like a giant circuit design layout, but shows just how big and interwoven the spam problem is."

    The only problem I see here is understanding that damn giant thing! :))
    • "I can't imagine how hard it was to put this together, it looks like a giant circuit design layout, but shows just how big and interwoven the spam problem is."

      Truly spoken by someone who has never seen a sexchart.

  • When I first read the story title... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dmarien ( 523922 ) <dmarien@@@dmarien...com> on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:37PM (#3780342) Homepage
    I got this sick feeling of joy, and the hairs on the back of my stood up... Maps to the companies which send out spam?

    I'm driving to each and every one of em, and hurling bricks through their windows...

    errr wait...

  • Spam problem (Score:2, Interesting)

    by PhysicsGenius ( 565228 )
    There is no way to "fix the spam problem". Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications. Spam is noise on a data channel. Measurements suggest that the amount of spam we are seeing is slightly higher than the nlog(n) amount that Shannon predicted. This is probably due to people responding to their spam emails because, whether in jest or not, this relabels them as data instead of noise. The same goes for people who forward their spam to services like SpamCop--you are only clogging the network even more, please stop.
    • yeah, let's stop filing complaints about spam, let's just let them do whatever they want to abuse the network... you might as well have said "Just Hit Delete" like all the spammers want you to do.

      -----
      Apple hardware still too expensive for you? How about a raffle ticket? [macraffle.com]

      • Re:Spam problem (Score:2, Insightful)

        by doorbot.com ( 184378 )
        With a decent ruleset for Sendmail and an array of RBLs, I haven't gotten any spam at my "main" address in quite some time. Eventually I want to implement SpamAssassin for additional protection. The most important thing is to reject messages while in the SMTP conversation! Do not accept them and then forward to /dev/null.

        I'd like to thank Pacific Bell, however, for the barrages of spam I get there. I don't even bother to check the account more than once a week since I know it's just spam.
        • The most important thing is to reject messages while in the SMTP conversation! Do not accept them and then forward to /dev/null.

          I did that just last month. I modified my Sendmail server to analyze the content of incoming messages. It actually looks at the content of messages. It's amazing how predictable most spam is and how easily it can be tossed based on simple filtering.

          The main difference is that when Sendmail is in the "DATA" phase and detects filterable content it hangs up right then and there.

          My spam on my 8-year-old email account has dropped from like 40-50 per day down to about 5. Works great and looking at the Sendmail log to see how many times I hung up on spammers gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.

    • If we can't get rid of the noise, then we should at least change the nature of it. I'd rather not have SPAM noise which requires my active use of the delete function. Much better is line noise which can be automatically corrected by analysis of redundant information.

      So, don't be so fatalistic about spam. You should be actively working to convert the noise that is hard to deal with into noise that can be automatically dealt with.

    • Re:Spam problem (Score:5, Informative)

      by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:56PM (#3780493) Homepage
      Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications.

      He did no such thing. Shannon's law demonstrates that the information bearing capacity of a communication line is limited by the signal to noise ratio.

      It is quite amusing to see how such basic observations are transmorgaphied by the game of Internet chinese whispers.

      Spam will be addressed as a problem as soon as the pain barrier becomes high enough. With PKI it is possible to identify an email sender by means of a digital signature. The current problem being that there is no good way to locate public keys bound to email addresses. There is a lot of good work going on in this area, in particular the W3C XKMS group recently discussed a working draft that describes a mechanism for accessing public keys via DNS SRC records [w3.org].

      So under this system what would happen is that when you get email from them the email client would scan your address book to see if they were on your approved sender's list. This would probably include the individuals you know (Cmdr. Taco etc.) and also whole domains (ai.mit.edu) you might trust. if the mail is not in the list it goes into the 'low priority' pile.

      There are email clients that do this at the moment but the spammers are using counter measures, such as scanning email list archives and sending out SPAM with fake sender addresses taken from the archive. With PKI and a means of determining whether the person actually has a public key or not this type of filtering becomes much more robust. Incidentally the mechanism does not require S/MIME to work, it can also be used with PGP.

      To deploy the solution all we need to do is to persuade email client writers to support XKMS register and locate functions and ISPs to provide XKMS services along with their existing SMTP server. Oh yes and finish the XKMS spec I guess.

      • Re:Spam problem (Score:3, Insightful)

        by pjrc ( 134994 )
        ... when you get email from them the email client would scan your address book to see if they were on your approved sender's list.

        That's nice if you only communicate with people you already know. Not so good if you have a public website, a company, or you participate in public forums (like slashdot) and people you do not yet know will make contact with you.

        • That's nice if you only communicate with people you already know. Not so good if you have a public website, a company, or you participate in public forums (like slashdot) and people you do not yet know will make contact with you.

          That is a problem, however my first priority is to try to do what I can to take what we can definitively identify as signal.

          If you get a signed email from an unknown source it could be spam or it could be signal. In my corporate email client I would configure it to automatically presume that email with source addresses in the domains sun.com, microsoft.com, cisco.com, ibm.com etc. that is signed to not be spam.

          If an email came that was signed and was not from the whitelist it would be put into an 'unidentified' queue. Initially none of the spam would be signed and a signature alone would be sufficient authentication. However that is not going to last forever as a sorting mechanism.

          One thing that you could do is to reply to the sender with a note saying 'your email is in the pending queue, please return this confirmation message if you are not a spammer, i don't like scum who send spam'. Although a spammer could sign their messages and respond to the return messages doing so would be much more expensive and technically problematic, especially if we make it hard to automate the replies. It is also something that we could introduce a law to prohibit false replies.

          The other part of the puzzle is that commercial communications would be separately identified. So if IBM wants to send me an invoice for the web server service they provided me with their invoice is signed and marked as an invoice. If IBM want to then send me some information on some additional service they might want to offer me it would be signed and marked as SPAM but would also have a tag to indicate what sort of spam it was. So offers for HGH, penis enlargement, Breast enhancement, nigerian letters etc. can head straight for the bit bucket while I might actually read a PR newsletter that I signed up for from Microsoft or Red Hat. But those message would go into my 'low priority folder'.

          There are a bunch of other hacks that can be used. For example we might use PGP style community key signing to establish the authenticity of key holders. Or we might use commercial PKI CAs to authenticate key holders. While anyone can lie to a CA and get a certificate under false pretenses, it is also possible for CAs to revoke certificates.

          In the long run I think we will see people signing their email routinely to bypass spam filters. The cost of obtaining a certificate will be low enough not to notice because they will be issued in bulk through channels such as the ISPs, but people who want to use PGP will still have that option.

    • That's a terrible analogy.
      Why is spam 'noise'? Just because you don't want to see it? If that's the case, how is forwarding spam to spamcop any different than trying to apply a filter to a signal to try to cut out the noise?

      As for fixing the problem of spam via email, I use ASK [sourceforge.net], which has fixed the problem for me (to the tune of 99.9%).

    • Re:Spam problem (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @02:10PM (#3780594) Homepage
      There is no way to "fix the spam problem".

      There certainly isn't if you're fatalistic and don't look for solutions.

      Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications

      Ignoring the abundant misunderstanding of Shannon's research (hey, go read here [skypoint.com] and you'll already know more thant he poster), to call spam noise on the data network is an amazing stretch. Spam is not noise. Spam is data. If you took the spam off the network some other crap that nobody wanted wouldn't magically fill the spot.

      I also deeply question your off-the-cuff nlogn value for spam. Let's just take my Hotmail account as an example. It receives roughly 200 spam emails a day. They average 8k each. So that's 1.6MB of spam per day per user. Now, there's 118 million Hotmail accounts. Assume that a mere 1% of them get this much spam. That's 1,888,000 MB of spam. Daily. To Hotmail alone. That's nearly 2 terabytes of capacity. Daily .

      Now lets start throwing in Yahoo! mail, AltaVista mail, juno, excite, etc. etc. etc. and start counting numbers. It's scary. Very, very scary.

      If anyone can actually provide real numbers for how much bandwidth is consumed by spam, please do. I did a Google search a couple weeks ago and came up empty. Lots of sites referring to it consuming "great amounts of bandwidth", but no hard numbers.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @02:21PM (#3780712)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Spam problem (Score:2, Funny)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      Claude Shannon proved decades ago that noise is inevitable in communications.

      Heh, I love stuff like this. Someone needs to start a collection... Heisenberg proved you can't know anything, Einstein proved that everything is relative, Godel proved you can't prove or disprove blah blah blah. Just keep twisting and perverting it all until it gets unrecognizable. And just when it becomes so utterly meaningless -- it is then a perfect tool for any argument, a perpetual motion machine made out of spinning coffins.

    • The same goes for people who forward their spam to services like SpamCop--you are only clogging the network even more, please stop.

      I think you're just trolling, but in case you aren't, here's the difference:

      I go to a fair bit of trouble and expense to maintain my networks. I get to decide what happens with it. Spam is a parasitical use of that network, something I don't want. The reporting of spam is one of the things I do want. If I feel that it's clogging my network, I can stop anytime; I can't do that with spam.

      Spam is noise on a data channel.

      Uh, no. It's not like spam is some weird radio interference problem or some quantum effect. Real humans write and send every spam. They do it because they think they can make money at it.

      This is not an inevitable consequence of the existence of a communication channel. Spam was negligible for many years; it wasn't until around the time of September That Never Ended [tuxedo.org] or maybe the green card spam [eff.org] that I recall getting any. Since then it has grown explosively, so that for many people it outweighs regular mail [hiwaay.net]. Ignoring it in hopes that it will go away or level out is about as smart as ignoring a suppurating wound.

  • Where's the Asian spammers? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tshoppa ( 513863 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:38PM (#3780350)
    It's a fascinating site, a really cool map.

    But where are all the Asian spammers? I'd guesstimate that I get 30 or 40 foreign-language spams apparently from Taiwan, Malaysia, and India every day. It's more than half of all the spam I get now.

  • attention script kiddies, hackers, crackers, etc (Score:5, Funny)

    by paradesign ( 561561 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:38PM (#3780353) Homepage
    alright men (or otherwise) heres the battleplan,
    you have the map,
    weve located the enemy,
    now take them out!

    do it for the good of the net, and may the Force be with you.

    • Brilliant! Hacktivism! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by toupsie ( 88295 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:56PM (#3780495) Homepage
      I agree. Instead of pinging and scanning my servers 24/7, go after the real assholes of the Internet. Script Kiddies, you have the tools, you have the time, you have the disregard for the law, do something worthwhile for a change.
      • For the record, moderators, I am not Insightful, Informative or Interesting. If I appear to be, it is a complete accident. Just ask any of the college professors that passed me in college to get me out of their programs. I might have posed nekkid in Wired Magazine back in 1995 but that doesn't transfer those labels automatically to my postings.

        Moderating the parent post of mine was just a plain waste of moderation points that could have been used on truely Insightful, Informative and Interesting posts. It wasn't funny or insightful. It was three seconds of brain power.

        Hopefully, Meta-Moderators will correct this waste of moderation points.

    • The map looks like an electrical circuit.

      I know how to hook up wires. Big wires, lots of amperage. With high voltage.

      Just to be festive, let's charge the circuit on July 4th!

  • Damn, that's some map! (Score:3, Funny)

    by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:39PM (#3780360)
    Not only is it huge. Not only is it /.ed. But, it also made X11 run my CPU utilization up to a steady 97%.

  • Mirrior (Score:2, Informative)

    by Huogo ( 544272 )
    http://www.5light.com/spamdemicmap.gif [5light.com]
  • Wow, I do have to give props for the people that put this together. It is really well detailed. I don't quite understand exactly what they are trying to say about the relationships though. Are they just trying to say that these are the routes and sites that make spam possible? If so, it seems a little moot to me. Real world example: Hiways may make it possible for , but it isn't the highway's fault. We should target the people responsible. Perhaps we should also target the middlemen, but I prefer to go for the source.

    I personally use spamassasin to filter my mail. It works great for me, so my problem is solved. I suppose the ultimate way to treat spam is by getting the end consumer to ignore it. Oh well, just a thought.

    On a personal note, I have a new journal entry today [slashdot.org]. Take a look, it is about duplicity in a certain American law.

  • mirror, mirror, on the wall (Score:4, Informative)

    by tedtimmons ( 97599 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:45PM (#3780402) Homepage
    This site was pretty slow to respond- probably because the gif on that page is about 1MB.

    So I've mirrored it [perljam.net].

    -ted

  • It's a palindrome (Score:5, Funny)

    by squarefish ( 561836 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:49PM (#3780432)
    spam maps

  • This map is incomplete (Score:4, Funny)

    by dbc001 ( 541033 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:50PM (#3780444)

    The map is incomplete - I don't see Bernard Shifman on there anywhere
  • I'm serious. This would sell better than the poster of Tux made with Kenel Code!

    I'd buy one.

    It'd look great behind my desk at work...

  • Take Note - Overbroad, Yet Incomplete (Score:5, Interesting)

    by great throwdini ( 118430 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:53PM (#3780470)

    Taken from their own criteria wording (emphasis mine):

    INCLUSION CRITERIA (added 3/24/2002) -- Please note that criteria for inclusion on the Spamdemic Map are extremely broad... Domains, companies and even individuals are included there that have not spammed me. In fact, to my knowledge, many of them haven't spammed anyone. The purpose of the Spamdemic map is [...] to illustrate the *potential* for abuse that can arise when and if irresponsible policies are followed [...] [I]nclusion doesn't necessarily mean an included entity is a "black hat" [...] This is not an all-inclusive list, and the criteria may change at any time.

    Give me a break. With criteria as fast and loose as indicated on their site [cluelessmailers.org], we could all end up on the "map" through association. The project, as currently described may well be near useless with such lack of focus. There's an upfront message about not jumping to conclusions should you find yourself (or your firm) "mapped" ... but the whole map lends itself to misinterpretation.

    Surprisingly, the map isn't even close to being thorough given the collection of companies that are already represented. There's Doubleclick and Yesmail, but no Cheetahmail, Bigfoot Interactive, Whitespeed, etc. Broad criteria have somehow lent themselves to a terribly incomplete "map". Funny, that. Maybe I can't locate brethren firms in the tangle of presentation.

    • I saw prepaidlegal.com on that site.

      Pre-Paid Legal Services is an MLM that specifically forbids their associates from using spam to sell the product. If an associate does so and it's reported to PPL, they can and have put a stop on associate checks until the behavior is corrected.

      I know because I wrote the policy. (I don't work for them any more.)

      So calling them spammers is a bit like calling Microsoft spammers because of those guys who send out the "Microsoft Office - $29.95" spams.
      • Pre-Paid Legal Services is an MLM that specifically forbids their associates from using spam to sell the product. If an associate does so and it's reported to PPL, they can and have put a stop on associate checks until the behavior is corrected.

        I'm still getting three or four of those a week, so I think they need to work on their enforcement just a teensy bit. They need to change "can and have" to "always do instantly". The should also fine the spammer's uplines, so that their is some disincentive to recruiting members so slimy that they leave tracks across your linoleum.

        Maybe Pre-Paid Legal is an exception, but most MLMs couldn't give two shits about what their recruits do. Until they start passing responsibility and enforcement down the chain as enthusiastically as they pull money up it, most will continue to think of MLMs as scams.

  • Spam the spam domains (Score:5, Funny)

    by Subcarrier ( 262294 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:54PM (#3780476)
    I think every upstanding netcitizen should list at least 10 fabricated email addresses on their web pagse, pointing to some known spam servers. It would be a simple matter to collect spam domains from incoming spam mail. Let the spammers spam each other to oblivion.
  • that some people have way too much time on their hands

  • Thanks! (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:55PM (#3780484)
    I forwarded it to all my coworkers, plus a few people that I don't know, but I have their email address. ;)

    • Re:Thanks! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You send them that file to have their advice!
  • What a tangled web (sorry - had to). Not as pretty as Bill Cheswick's map, but certainly just as enlightening.

  • I mapped SPAM once... (Score:3, Funny)

    by huckda ( 398277 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @01:59PM (#3780516) Journal
    Turned out to look like 2 pieces of white bread with Miracle Whip spread on them, along with 2 pink colored, slightly rectangular shapes about 1cm think...unfortunately there is no screenshot or url to link to because the mapping was consumed shortly after constructed.

    --Huck
  • If I was into distrupting the peace and all I would take a good hard look at this map and determine which connections are the most fundamental.

    Generally in these types of partially connected maps, a few nodes exist without which the whole systems shuts down.

    Sort of makes one feel like the rebels when they got a map of the deathstar

  • VisualWare eMailTrackerPro

    http://www.visualware.com/emailtrackerpro/index. ht ml

  • Where can I buy a copy of this? Thinkgeek does not seem to have it yet...
  • ...gigantic black hole in the middle to illustrate the Slashdot effect!

  • how to avoid getting on The Map (Score:4, Interesting)

    by happyclam ( 564118 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @02:13PM (#3780626)

    OK, /., here's a question for you:

    I'm not a real network geek (just a regular joe programmer), but recently my email address has been co-opted by a spammer. That is, I've received spam from my own email address. (I of course did NOT send it.)

    The question is, how can a regular joe like me prevent this from happening in the future so my domain does not appear on some future version of The Map? I know about the guy who hacked into the spammer's laptop and got all their personal information, but I don't have the skills or access for that.

    • [M]y email address has been co-opted by a spammer. That is, I've received spam from my own email address.

      Many spammers now seem to put the recipient as the From address. Presumably this helps the mail to avoid certain filters. So in all probability, you're the only one being spammed from your address.

      • Many spammers now seem to put the recipient as the From address. Presumably this helps the mail to avoid certain filters. So in all probability, you're the only one being spammed from your address.

        The slimeball spammers will probably read this and steal my idea, oh well...

        I have implemented a filter check that will automatically pass things from my domain, but only if the Message-ID header contains my domain as well. I also automatically get anything with an In-Reply-To header which contains my domain.

        I guess I'll be updating this filter soon enough, as the spammers bypass it. I'm currently running a very restrictive 'whitelist' of people I want to hear of while I go on holiday, but the In-Reply-To header rule seems sane enough, and I hate 'Vacation' messages.
    • Most e-mail clients allow you to view IP addresses, hostnames, etc. to find out where the message actually originated. Give the spam itself a good, thorough reading. Then look up any domains on WHOIS, document and research any phone numbers or snail-mail addresses, etc. Basically, figure out how to get in touch with someone.

      And then call your cousin in the mafia. The spam will stop real quick.
    • If a spammer's just using your email in the "From" field of an email, there's not much you can do to technically stop them. There are great laws against it (forgery, fraud, misrepresentation, etc.) if you can find out who they are (try to get an IP address, then ask the police for help finding whose it is) but more often than not, you'll get nowhere.

      See the linux.org's site for a description of their similar problem (people using *@linux.org as a From address, and people complaining to linux)

      If people really do think emails are from you, get into a habit of PGP-signing emails. Let people know that if it's not signed, it's not from you.

      Perhaps you might also find a way to autoreply to the people who vent off at you about how evil spammers are. If you get an email with "Re: (your standard spam regexp filter here)", delete it and reply with an explanation. Kmail is good at this, and The Bat on windows (30-day trial) is even better.

      So, sign emails. Pity there's not more that you can do.

    • Joe-job (Score:3, Interesting)

      by KjetilK ( 186133 )
      Don't worry, anti-spammers are used to this happening, it happens all the time, and people are getting good at knowing when it has happened. In fact, if somebody does it really bad against you, you should be honored, because it means that you really annoyed a spammer. It's a called a joe-job. It's happened to me too. Somebody sent a pr0n-spam in my name.
    • how can a regular joe like me prevent [my email address being co-opted by a spammer] from happening in the future
      Never send anyone, anywhere, an email. Other than that, it's hopeless. Read RFC 822 [faqs.org]. Welcome to the Internet.
  • A new public blackhole list. There's a thought.

    Orbz seems to be over here [dsbl.org] now.

  • PMG (Score:2)

    by thesolo ( 131008 )
    I noticed that several portions of the map are dedicated to PMG and their spamming users. Also, as a subscriber to SpamCop [spamcop.net], if I report email that came from PMG, the report goes to a /dev/null'ed email address called "pmg_doesnt_care".

    Given just this information, I think one can logically come the conclusion that PMG is nothing more than a Spamhaus, and doesn't care about stopping spam at all.

    My question is, if we know for a fact that they allow spam, and probably even encourage it so long as they get paid nicely, isn't there anything we can do about it?! Can we not bring a class-action against them, or something? Surely there must be some recourse against a company/it's users that cost ISPs and end-users money.

    • PostmasterGeneral/Mindshare supposedly has two prominent ex-MAPS [mail-abuse.org] people working in their "abuse department" to "clean up" their spam problem. The only problem is that these people of previously sterling reputation in the anti-spam community have been there since last summer or fall (at least) and PMG is still spamming. Last I read the only thing these ex-MAPS people have authority to do is listwash -- they couldn't even manage to remove addresses that were bouncing with 5xx errors!

      Try doing a news.admin.net-abuse.email search on PostmasterGeneral, PMG and/or Mindshare "Subject:" headers. There you'll find all the sordid facts and all the high drama (including people breathlessly proclaiming undying loyalty to these obvious anti-spam turncoats).

      If you run a mail server you can blackhole PMG with this list of their IP blocks and domains:

      pm0.net
      mg00.net
      ms00.net
      mb00.net
      64.225.154
      128.121.122
      128.121.212
      128.121.214
      128.121.21 5
      130.94.149
      161.58.135
      161.58.160
      161.58.202
      161.58.239
      192.41.14
      192.41.38
      198.104.179
      19 9.236.1
      199.236.2
      199.236.3
      199.236.4
      199.236. 5
      199.236.6
      199.236.7
      199.236.8
      199.236.9
      199 .236.10
      199.236.11
      199.236.12
      199.236.13
      199.2 36.14
      199.236.15
      207.33.16
      209.133.65
      209.133. 67

  • Kevin Bacon (Score:4, Funny)

    by Static242 ( 124804 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @02:36PM (#3780854)
    Did anyone see Kevin Bacon's name on that map? I bet you could draw a link through association to him. Once that is done the map will be complete. Then we will know that Kevin controls that too.

  • did you know... (Score:2, Funny)

    by ||| ( 160483 )
    .. that 'maps' is 'spam' backwards?
  • Did anyone figure out what kind of software was used for the graph layout? Was it all done manually?

    I'm trying to create a project to automagically do some basic graph layout (and ideally export to PS/PDF or PNG) from a PHP script.

    I'm sure that was hand-tweaked, but has anyone found any graph layout tools for Linux? Free ones, or at least free-for-educational use, that is.

    --grendel drago
  • See: Blacklist [cluelessmailers.org]

    Under "Upstreams", for Freeze.com (listed as a backturner, listpooler, stonewaller):

    Rackspace.com > swbell.net

    "Rackspace auto-replies to abuse reports, then forwards the complaints to the mailer without taking action. Freeze is a long-time network marketing mailer. Tried to educate them, but they failed to get a clue, even after many emails exchanged, even with top management. So, they go straight to the Bit Bucket. Partner in spam: optinglobal.com (see their listing on this site).."

    Rackspace.. Rackspace..

    Where have I heard that name before?

    OH! I know!

    They advertise right here on /.

    Gee. I thought they were really cool-geek kinda people.

    Now it turns out they're whoring for spammers.

    Kinda makes ya wonder, don't it...

    t_t_b

    • From what I've read Rackspace has been cleaning up their act recently. I don't know that they've fully graduated from black to greyhat, but something is better than nothing...

  • isn't that the layout for the new intel chip?
  • I don't see no steeenking spam.

    http://pyzor.sourceforge.net/

  • Wow, a useful page that is actually larger than my 3 monitor wide desktop! Impressive!

    Travis

  • PNG beats GIF (again) (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Rock ( 16836 )
    As a certified PNG geek, I was obligated to convert their original image, "spamdemicmap.gif". Downloading it, I found the size to be 885,452 bytes. The image is 4442x2900 by 48 colors. As a PNG image, the file was losslessy converted to 585,548 bytes. What do you want to bet they would have loved to have this 33.8% bandwidth savings while being slashdotted?
    • If you were really a PNG geek you would have known about pngcrush which gets the file down to 540266 bytes.
      method 119 for my possibly old version.
  • I don't know about your, but most of my spam comes from the following places:

    Family
    Friends
    Pets
  • It's late. You are in the comfort of your home reading a book or watching TV e.t.c. You feel good, you are confident. Outside the comfort of your home, ah! ahem! things are a wee bit different. Dark clouds have gathered. The wind is howling like a crazed mongrel's ghost.
    Bam! The crack of lightning and the following thunderclap is sudden and fierce. A chill goes through your spine. Oh! Shit, You forgot to check you mail from your "anonymous" Yahoo web account. Damn. The last time you checked your Email was last night. In the past 24 hours enough spam would have passed through those filters you spent tedious hours creating.
    Those rules. Yeah The rules that you created were cool and you felt the power of God. You felt good. Until you found that some spam still crept though. Then more and then more.
    But now it's worse.
    24 hours have passed. Your web account has a Email limit of 6 MB. And your know that when your Email store is full - your Yahoo admin dude will just delete incoming emails. Just deletes them without a by-your-leave. And then - yes you know it, The one Email that you wanted is going to come in and get butchered, get shredded and you won't even read it, won't even see it, won't even know. Oh! The heart aches and the brain wants to sleep. Oh! The pain
    Shit. With trepidation you take baby steps to your computer. Your computer - that cool computer you bought 18 months ago. You were on the top of your game baby then. Whoa! A 933 Mhz/512 MB/40 GB HDD monster - a bad ass machine with 32 MB NVidia GeForce GTS and a kick ass Turtle Beach Sound Card. DVD and CD-RW and all. For a then justifiable 2 Large.
    Now 18 months hence with the latest update on Windows and Outlook, your bad ass monster might as well be a ugly P100 of the last ice age. You Email starts to pour in from the Yahoo account to Outlook. From Yahoo to Outlook. A minute goes by, another goes by. The bile rises within you...

    SHIT
    You see the last message downloaded. It is from the Yahoo admin. You don't even have to read it. The subject header says it all. Life sucks. Your computer sucks. You suck. The admin has warned you that all further messages will be deleted unless you free some of your precious mailbox space.

    Sweat beads form on your forehead. You healthy handsome complexion turn pink. PINK! Yeah pink. They say a man comes of age in adversity. When the tough get going, the going gets tough - or some such shit.
    You have a mission in life. Bring these miserable spammers to the public view.
    You shall not sleep. You shall get em. With your resolve steady and your mind whatever - you know. You make the switch.
    You get linux in - you get it in, takes 30 minutes. Hurrah! You connect to the web. Mutt shall save you. You surf.
    Slashdot shows up a site.
    A MAP OF SPAM.
    You knew what need to be done. Oh! Yes you did. Right about the time when those sweaty beads somehow got on your forehead and you became a pink chimp. Now you know how to do it. You are going to get all those miserable spam bast@#ds.
    The cat meows. Oh sorry. No cats. The dog barks - more like woofs. Yawn. It 1:30. Need sleep. Got a gawd awful meeting with that sales VP guy. Same old proposal.
    Some techie I am. Dirty old man, dirty old sales VP keeps getting personal with all and any chick, and hey even with the cute DBA gal. She sometimes looks at you - boss man. No wonder the company is going down the drain. Clients run away from this sales guy. Revenue is down. Your best buddies are thinking of leaving. DBA gal sometimes looks at you. Only sometimes. Life sucks.

    Need sleep. Got a gawd awful meeting with that sales VP guy.
    I will let some one else deal with that spam thing. Yeah. Someone else.
    Need sleep now. Meeting with bad sales guy. Someone will get those spam guys. Me sleep. Bad VP guy tomorrow.
  • That thing looks like the map Vaughn showed Sidney of SD-6!

  • privacy policies (Score:3, Informative)

    by Aanallein ( 556209 ) on Thursday June 27, 2002 @05:55PM (#3782315)
    Looking at some of the blocks on that map with most arrows poiting to them, I visited those websites and looked at their privacy policies.
    I wonder why they even bother having them, but it's a nice way to inform us of everything being done.

    For example: eScriptions.net [escriptions.net]:
    eScriptions.net reserves the right to post collected data on eScriptions.net's Web site, or share, rent, sell, or otherwise disclose data it collects to third parties. Any third party to which eScriptions.net shares, rents, sells, or otherwise discloses personal data will be carefully prescreened by eScriptions.net, determined by eScriptions.net to be reputable, and will use the personal data for marketing products and services which eScriptions.net determines, in its sole judgment, that visitors might find of interest.
    virtumundo.com [virtumundo.com]:
    The Company may receive information about individuals from third parties or from other sources of information outside of the Company including information located in public databases


    THE COMPANY MAY USE INDIVIDUAL INFORMATION FOR ANY LEGALLY PERMISSIBLE PURPOSE IN COMPANY'S SOLE DISCRETION. <snip> the Company may change or broaden its use at any time.

    THE COMPANY MAY SELL OR TRANSFER INDIVIDUAL INFORMATION TO THIRD PARTIES FOR ANY PURPOSE IN COMPANY'S SOLE DISCRETION.
    I particularly like the way they go through excruciating trouble to explain "webbugs" though:
    (b) Webbugs. A webbug is programming code that can be used to display an image on a web page (by using an programming function -- see www.www.org for more information), but can also be used to transfer an individual's unique user identification (often in the form of a cookie) to a database and associate the individual with previously acquired information about an individual in a database. This allows Company to track certain web sites an individual visits online. Webbugs are used to determine products or services an individual may be interested in, and to track online behavioral habits for marketing purposes. For example, Company might place, with the consent of a third party website, a webbug on the third party's website where fishing products are sold. When Joe, an individual listed in Company's database, visits the fishing website, Company receives notice by means of the webbug that Joe visited the fishing site, and Company would then update Joe's profile with the information that Joe is interested in fishing. Company may thereafter present offers of fishing related products and services to Joe. In addition to using webbugs on web pages, Company also uses webbugs in email messages sent to individuals listed in Company's database.
    *pats his Mozilla that displays html mails as plain text and will not load remote images in mail and news (two seperate functions)*
  • Does this map have GPS coordinates of the primary spammers for a cruise missile strike?

  • If you're serious about learning everything there is to know about the worst spamgangs be sure to check out Spamhaus [spamhaus.org]'s excellent Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) [spamhaus.org].

    Although the site comes complete with mug-shots for one spammer, nothing I've seen there compares (humor-wise anyway) to the hilarious Tommy Brock--Spammer, thug, exhibitionist [ste-marie.net] page.

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