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Spam It's funny. Laugh.

Time-travel Spammer Strikes Back 336

Posted by CowboyNeal from the attacks-from-the-future dept.
HopToit writes "Robby Todino is apparently upset about being outed a couple months ago as the source of all those wacked messages about 'Dimenstional Warp Generator Needed.' According to Wired, someone has pulled a major joe-job spam attack (forged 'From:' lines) on three popular sites in retaliation for making fun of Todino's goofy search for alien technology. Robby, if you're out there, you have ceased to be amusing."
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Time-travel Spammer Strikes Back More

Time-travel Spammer Strikes Back

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  • Like all good bond adversaries, this one won't die.

    • Re:Sore Loser? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by `Sean ( 15328 )

      Like all good bond adversaries, this one won't die.

      And, like all good Bond adversaries, this one has a nice secret hideout in Woburn. The 4 Oak St. address in his whois info is bogus. 4 Oak St. doesn't even exist [inertramblings.com]. Oh, no, I found his secret hideout [inertramblings.com] by scouring Google, showed up on his doorstep, and he denied being Robert Todino. Jim Todino, however, seemed to be quite perturbed by the fact that I was standing there.

      It was amusing at the time but, now that you mention Bond, it's laugh out loud funn

  • spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cft ( 715198 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @05:50AM (#7370264) Journal
    It seems that everyone in his right mind despises telemarketing. Spam too. Ask anyone, and they'll tell you that there are few things they hate more in life. It seems as if there are no exceptions to this rule -- everyone, bar none, hates telemarketing and spam.

    But it can't be true. Someone must be responding to this stuff by spending their money. Because for some reason, telemarketers and spammers stay in business. Somehow, it must be worth it for them.

    If everyone hated the stuff as much as they say they do, if everyone hung up on the unwanted calls and deleted the unwanted mails in nothing flat, like they say they do, then the problem would fizzle out before long. No one could make money doing it, so there would be no reason to keep trying. And yet, the crap just goes on and on and on.

    I've read rumors that a certain small percentage of the people called or mailed actually do respond and end up buying something; usually the figure is put about 10%, or something similarly low. Hard to believe that such a business would be worthwhile if the response rate is so low; but whatever it is, it must be high enough that the incentive for telemarketing and spamming is maintained. Otherwise, there'd be no such thing.

    A national no-call list is a nice idea, but I can't see the problem going away altogether as long as the telemarketers and spammer still believe there's a chance to make money. Certainly the spammers are not going to let some trivial thing like a Federal law stop them. (They'll just go on spamming from Antarctica, or wherever.) If we really want the problem solved, once and for all, we have to ensure that there is no future for those businesses, and that would require educating the public, right down to the last man, woman and child, to always follow this rule without exception: If someone calls you or emails you to sell you a product, then whatever you do, don't buy that product!

    • Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:5, Informative)

      by Frymaster ( 171343 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @05:56AM (#7370274) Homepage Journal
      10%?

      when i was in school i took some pr course where it was presented that a direct mail campaign (snail mail, addressed directly to the recipient) with a response rate of 3% was considered a "roaring success".

      spam can survive even with miniscule response rates (one hundredths of a per cent) because the actual transmission is free. direct mail has postage and printing costs. telemarketing needs actual wage-earning callers and phone connections. but spam once you find that open relay, spam is free.

      with costs like that, revenue can afford to be low.

    • 10%? A bit much. Last numbers i've heard was less than 0.01% respond. Much less that actually buy's someting of falls for the scam. But when you think of the number of spam messages sent 0.01% adds up.

    • Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Can't stand to be called on the phone but will sit for hours on end in front of the television allowing brains to be stirred by the marketer's electronic spoon.

      One thing they got right in the second Matrix movie is the illusion of choice as a method for controlling human beings. Telephone marketing is intolerable since control is in the hands of the caller. Television marketing is tolerable because a small amount of control is in the hands of the viewer. Just enough control to watch ads on another channel.
    • But the real problem is, that Businesses see this as a legitimate practise. They convert real world business ideas and apply them online : example : Marketer comes up to you in the street and asks you if you would like a demonstration of Super Blobs magic washing up liquid. Now, ok, not everyone does say yes (one fingered salute from me :D) but many lonely housewives do! (sorry about the stereotype).

      As the above rightly comments, the real problem here is people encouraging this business practise by sendi

    • Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:5, Informative)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @10:12AM (#7370669) Homepage
      Somehow, it must be worth it for them.

      I think it really depends on how you spin it. It goes without saying that someone has to be making money from spam, and also that there are gullable fools who buy the stuff on offer. The problem is that many of the gullable fools are not the same ones that actually buy the porn and pills being peddled, but those that by the spamming services too.

      The spam "business" seems to be constructed in several levels. At the top you have the metaspammers (see the ROKSO [spamhaus.org] for a list) who don't really sell anything other than spamming tools and services. These guys are the ones raking in the bulk of the cash, and are probably the only ones with the werewithal and resources to run the global spamnets without getting nailed (so far). Underneath those is a mesh of "affliate programs" and small fry who do spam their own products and finally, at the bottom, are the dregs of humanity that actually buy the physical products.

      The problem is, that everytime something like this comes up on Slashdot, Kuroshin, or even the "mainstream" TV and press media, there is a chance that someone has the following chain of "reasoning":

      1. There is money to be made in spam.
      2. Why shouldn't that be me?
      3. How do I spam?
      And all this does is send another gullable fool off to the metaspammers that peddle the "guaranteed" opt-in address lists, bulk mailers and similar services. The money floats up to the top of the tree and the cycle perpetuates. Occasionally, I'm sure, one of these guys gets lucky and makes a decent amount of cash in exchange for thier soul, but I'll bet that the majority do not, and soon pull out of the game with a somewhat lighter bank balance. The spam business seems to be a pyramid scheme in all but name, if you ask me.
    • Not only that, but telemarketers pay good too, so there are plenty of employees to work through. I worked for 3 hours for a telemarketer (calling for PBA) just calling to confirm orders and I was getting twice minimum wage. That was fantastic, considering it was $7 an hour, in the late 80s, and in a college town with 60,000 students wanting part time jobs.

    • Re:spam is beginning to be a real problem (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @11:08AM (#7370806) Homepage
      But it can't be true. Someone must be responding to this stuff by spending their money.

      Unfortunately, a few years ago, that someone was probably my father.

      I got a clue that he was responding (if not buying) things from SPAMed adds when he started to ask about some super-fancy-printer utility -- exactly the thing he would never stumble uppon all by himself.

      When I said he didn't need it, he said that it's cheap, and that he might just get it anyway. Curious -- since the program was such an odd thing -- I asked where he was getting the offer from. "I got this email." Do you know the company? "No." That's spam. Never EVER reply or buy ANY of that stuff. "Why? They're just trying to make a living, and who knows maybe I can use the program." (GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR...)

      Well, after a talk with him he *said* that he didn't reply to the message and would take my advice to delete the messages unread...but I know my dad. After about 6 months he finally got a clue, and joined the annoyed masses who dispise and know what SPAM is. In those first few months, though, I can't tell you how many messages he replied to and if he bought anything.

    • Many people are too stupid to understand that responding to telemarketing or spam for an item that they *do* want will only encourage more telemarketing and spam for items that they don't want.

      There is a guy I know at work who has been getting telemarketing calls for DirecTV. He was actually going to call them back (the telemarketer) and take them up on their offer. No matter how many times I tried to explain it, he didn't think that:

      a) he could probably get a better deal if he shopped around for like 5

  • Wow... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jin Wicked ( 317953 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @05:54AM (#7370269) Homepage Journal

    Someone needs to get that guy on Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell/George Noory stat.

    Knowing that show, there's someone else in the audience that actually does have all that equipment he's searching for. =)

  • Time travel (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02, 2003 @05:56AM (#7370272)
    The very fact that we received spam proves that time travel is impossible: If it was possible, someone would invent it, travel back in time and beat up all the spammers so that they would never have sent any in the first place.

  • Time Cops (Score:5, Funny)

    by t0ny ( 590331 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @06:00AM (#7370282)
    we need to send Van Damme after this guy.

  • E-mail tax (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cft ( 715198 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @06:02AM (#7370286) Journal
    DISCLAIMER: I am not trying to be flamebait here, this is my honest opinion:

    I'm torn about the idea of an email tax. While in general I don't like the idea too much, it does occur to me that this might be the only way of dramatically reducing spam.

    Look at it this way: Even a wicked-busy web maven likely sends less than 1000 emails a day outside of their own company LAN (with a few exceptions I realise. Individuals likely send less than 100 per day in general.

    So, say you put a tax, to be administered by your ISP on each email, of say 0.1 cents per email. Big Business guy gets charged $1/day, home user $0.10 per day. By no means big money. Johny McSuperSpammer, however, who sends out 10 million emails every day, gets a handly little bill for $1000. Kind of changes the economics of his penis enlarger ads.

    Like I say, I'm not a huge fan of paying more, but it does seem like making emails cost per message sent might be the best/easiet/only way to dramatically reduce spam.

    Furthermore (ideally), to make up for the cost, you ISP could take $5 per month off your bill, to make up for the extra you're spending to send email. They still make money, because of the tax, the financial hit for you is minimal, but the spammers get hosed.

    • Re:E-mail tax (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bhima ( 46039 ) <(Bhima.Pandava) (at) (gmail.com)> on Sunday November 02, 2003 @06:16AM (#7370309) Journal
      How do make mailing lists work with scheme?

      I subscribe to Dilbert and a couple of SuSE lists. That's about 150 messages a day. Do you expect SuSE to pay these? I'm sure that you scheme would be the end of such things.

    • Re:E-mail tax (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MarkJensen ( 708621 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @06:21AM (#7370317) Homepage

      Sure. The honest ISPs will have to bear the burden of administering this tax (for which, they will have administration costs - passed on to users). But what about these Hong Kong spamming sources? Or anything outside the jurisdiction of the 'email tax law'? An email tax is both unworkable and ineffective

      What is needed, and has been pointed out in many other places, is a reform of the SMTP method. SMTP was designed many, MANY years ago when the only people on networks were technicians, academics, etc. These people created a system for THEM to use. They didn't really anticipate spam, because for spam to become effective, email needs to be wide-spread to the point near ubiquity. When email services are as common, you are going to get a lot of simple-minded gullible people out there. And these are the people who click on those ads, and bring in the spam revenue.

      So, I guess we either need to reform and properly lock-down email sending to show only accurate information, or require a simple I.Q. test before logging into email! ;) Of course, the latter opetion would surely bring about the swift demise of AOL...

      • Re:E-mail tax (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Isomer ( 48061 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @07:45AM (#7370443) Homepage
        Shrug, if you want to stop people sending forged email then use PKI. Don't accept mail from people unless it is signed by someone you trust. It's easy to implement, it's reasonably secure. It doesn't change any of the protocols on the internet today, all you need to do is set up a key and start signing email.

        Sure spammers can get a key but if nobody signs their key, then they can't spam. So every time they want to spam they need to get a key signed. People who sign spammers keys regularly are going to get their signatures revoked.

        This increases the "cost" of spamming by making it hard for spammers to get legitimate keys, but making it relatively cheap for joe bloggs who just has to create a key and perhaps get it signed by his ISP and a couple of friends.

        ISP's signatures wouldn't mean much, but it would be enough to get you started on the web of trust, after a few people have signed your key your key will start becoming more important to more people.

        So, step up and use GPG today!
        • The problem with this is that you need to be able to get the public key of whoever is sending you e-mail, in order to verify that e-mail. That's going to get complex.

          Personally, I'd like to see SMTP moved to being over SSL. ISPs would get their certificates from some central signing authority, much in the same way SSL certificates are handed out already. Users would get an SSL certificate with their account, signed by their ISP, so they could send e-mail to the ISP's SMTP server, which then forwarded it on
          • Once you say the magic words "central signing authority", you're putting dollar signs in someone's eyes. Verisign charges what, $900 for an SSL cert? And what does it get you? You're added to a stupid database. Browsers won't bitch about an invalid cert just so you can get https working. That's all. Because there's no way to get the security of https without the authentication.
          • What about people who have their own domains, like me, and can't afford to pay the ~$1000 someone like Verisign is likely to charge for this service? Suddenly I have to drop the domain I've been using for years and get an Earthlink account just to send email?
        • -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
          Hash: SHA1

          I agree with you on that point...I have often considered doing the
          same.

          There is one small detail holding me back...except for the Microsoft
          security bulletins I get via e-mail, nobody I send/receive e-mail
          with knows PGP/GPG/etc. exists.

          My e-mail signature line is this:
          - --

          PGP Freeware is a free, easy way to secure your e-mail.
          http://www.pgp.com

          So I am trying to get the word out--I even sign e-mail with it,
          knowing that whomever gets it won't know what the hell
        • Shrug, if you want to stop people sending forged email then use PKI.

          Taken from the excellent list You Might Be an Anti-Spam Kook If: [rhyolite.com]

          the (Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem) [FUSSP] requires that anyone wanting to send mail obtain a certificate that will be checked by all SMTP servers.

          the FUSSP involves certificates, but there is no barrier to spammers buying many independent certificates.

          you know that certifying that a user legitimately claims a name and has never used some other name is

    • Re:E-mail tax (Score:5, Insightful)

      by The Fanta Menace ( 607612 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @06:26AM (#7370326) Homepage

      Not going to work. I don't use my ISP to send mail, at least not in a way they can detect. I use my own server, instead.

      Are you going to tax me to send email between the users on my machine? If so, how are you going to monitor the logs? Are you going to give government authorities permission to audit my machine whenever they see fit to? Looking kind of authoritarian, now, isn't it?

      How about cron jobs sending me email? Do I get taxed for them, too?

      Instant messaging? Tax for that? What about when people get fed up with your email tax and implement an email system over an IM service instead? Or just implement some other of email over any other protocol to bypass your tax system?

      Filters are an effective way of combatting spam. Much better - and less oppressive - than a tax. SpamAssassin [spamassassin.org] catches 99% of the spam I receive. It, and other filters, are so effective that spammers are now changing the content of their text to attempt to bypass it. And when they do this, it reduces the effectiveness of their advertising, so in the end, they lose.

    • Re:E-mail tax (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Sexy Bern ( 596779 )
      Surely this falls down when the spammer bypasses a legitmate (ISP's) SMTP server?

      Spammers will have their own SMTP servers, or find/use open relays.

    • Re:E-mail tax...Micropayments to Recipients (Score:5, Interesting)

      by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @09:26AM (#7370583)
      Instead of a tax (why do some people always look to government for everything), why not use a micropayment system in which the sender must pay the recipient for delivery. If the sender is a friend or the e-mail is truly worth it, then the recipient rebates the sender's money. The recipient would set the payment level and publish it to the public.

      For example, I would probably set my payment level at about 0.50 or $1.00, but if I stil get too many spams, then I would boost the charge to $2. I would also create a whitelist of people (friends, clients, mailing lists, and a few select businesses) who are automatically exempted. When somebody tries to send me an email, the MicroPayment Mail Transfer Protocol (MPMTP) would automatically inform the sender of the charge when they hit the send button. People not on the system would get automated return e-mail requesting that they join the system to complete the sending of their e-mail.

      The point is that each person can decide how valuable their time is. Spammers (including those in Hong Kong) would be forced to target e-mails to only those people who would appreciate them.
      • Micropayments? NO! Microwaves!

        I microwave my e-mail before reading to kill anthrax. It also gets rid of all of the spam too!
    • SO therefore in the end, the kernel mailing list, and the mailing lists for all the large and high activity + high member count projects now no-longer can afford to operate.

      Nope, your idea is unacceptable. Amend it so that a project can have a "tax free" status and not be charged only when they send their email from the exact IP address specified in their application, or some other acceptable "out" for these users.
    • If authorities were able to track email well enough to levy and enforce a tax, they'd be able to track it well enough to outlaw, and prosecute those who send, spam.
  • Why doesn't he travel back in time and kill all of their grandfathers? They would cease to exist.
    Wait. Then he wouldn't need to kill their grandfathers. And then he would.
    And...
    And...
    Excuse me.
    [Opens Window]
    I can fly!
  • Todino's father, Robert Todino Sr., previously told Wired News that his son has psychological problems and earnestly believes in the possibility of time travel.

    Are spammers going to start pleading "insanity" when they get arrested? "The aliens made me do it!"

  • more tragic than funny (Score:4, Insightful)

    by real_smiff ( 611054 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @06:13AM (#7370303)
    i'd never heard of this but after reading the two wired articles i feel sorry for everyone... really, the guy needs medical help, and probably shouldn't be allowed onto a public network (computer, mail, whatever).. and the people taking the piss, well.. it teaches you to be careful, there really are nutters out there, and the internet just lets them fulfil their full nutty potential :o

    (off topic, but you'd think it obvious that any time machine breakthrough would be all over the news right! ; i guess basic rationality doesn't come into this though. scary.)

    • "you'd think it obvious that any time machine breakthrough would be all over the news right!"

      Sure. In a naive and innocent world. Even in a world that wasn't run by massive military industrial bodies with considerable interest in exclusive ownership of technology rights, actually telling the public as a whole that you've managed time travel (let along telling them how) would be too dangerous. Human beings can do enough damage without screwing around with causality as well.
    • (off topic, but you'd think it obvious that any time machine breakthrough would be all over the news right! ; i guess basic rationality doesn't come into this though. scary.)

      Just like the 50 MPG fuel-injectors?

      Just like no-cost phone service?

      Just like Al Gore winning the election?

      Just like $10 super computers?

      It's the greedy corporations keeping all of this out of the news, I heard it on Pacifica Radio, also being silenced by GreedyCorp!
    • "comedy is a dead art form. tragedy, now that's funny!" - bender.

      at least it went quite something like that. xmas episode.
    • Paranoia doesn't work that way, though. He saves the phenomena by convincing himself that the time travelers are prohibited from interfering, and are surveilled for violations, and so have to be very careful about how they use time travel. He also believes he is being surveilled, either by the contemporary government or the time cops.

  • Where to really look... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cruachan ( 113813 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @06:17AM (#7370310)
    For fun putting aside the 'do they exist?' and 'can they get here easily?' questions I've often thought that if you really want to find visiting Aliens and the like then you have to find something on earth that would be worthwhile coming to see - an alien tourist honeypot if you will.

    The only thing that I can think of that potentially fits this bill is a total solar eclipse. Although there's some compelling evidence that life like ours can only evolve in a similar 'double planet' system like the earth-moon, there's really no reason to expect intelligent life to be around at exactly the same time as the apparent moon and sun size matches sufficiently closely to see a total eclipse. Indeed total solar eclipses have only been visible on earth for a hundred million years or so and will continue only for a few hundred million more - quite a small window in the history of our planet and something sufficiently rare that it may be worthwhile diverting a few light years to see.

    So if I did want to find an alien or the like I'd look in the middle of a path of totality

  • Let's review.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mumblestheclown ( 569987 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @06:22AM (#7370318)
    In the real world, badly-designed car locks would make cars easier to steal. To combat this problem, people would insist that a) the locks be re-engineered to be better and b) people who steal cars be treated as criminals who, when caught, get strict punishments.

    In the bizarro world of the internet, we likewise have broken locks. Email, specifically, is like a car with really, really shitty locks on it. However, instead of knowing about this problem for many years now and a few (some equally bad) proposals for fixing it, the main mode of dealing with the problem is:

    • threads on slashdot where everybody bitches about how bad the locks are or what jerks the thieves are
    • general discussion that technological problems need strictly technological solutions. even if this we're true (it's not), the fact of the matter is that lack of effective communication is a social problem.

    • Re:Let's review.. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by thoughtcrime ( 524620 ) <<moc.bmob-krof> <ta> <ezos>> on Sunday November 02, 2003 @07:02AM (#7370387) Homepage
      If you really want to use the car analogy, I'd say it's more like this:

      Cars have locks that are just fine when used properly. However, many people are very gullible, and if you go up and ask them, they'll let you borrow their car. You can steal their car after asking to borrow it, and most of them will be too embarrassed that they lent you their car in the first place to ever file a police report. The success ratio is high enough that every day multiple people will walk up to you and ask to borrow your car. To date, we've come up with no useful way of keeping these would-be thieves from taking up your time or your brainspace.
    • In the real world, badly-designed car locks would make cars easier to steal. To combat this problem, people would insist that a) the locks be re-engineered to be better(...)

      In the bizarro world of the internet, we likewise have broken locks. Email, specifically, is like a car with really, really shitty locks on it. However, instead of knowing about this problem for many years now and a few (some equally bad) proposals for fixing it, (...)

      The thing is, what lock I got on my car doesn't affect any other ca
      • QUOTE:

        If you want to create a new mail system, you'd need the following to succeed:

        1. A system that is in fact well designed, user-friendly and effective on a large scale.
        2. A BSD-licenced server implementation that can work on all the major platforms.

        Good post, Kjella. #1 is a given. #2, however, is your politics creeping into the game.

        Your point about the fact that a systemic change is toughter than an individual change is spot-on. However, i propose that what's really needed for #2 is not one parti

        • A BSD-licenced server implementation that can work on all the major platforms.
          Good post, Kjella. #1 is a given. #2, however, is your politics creeping into the game.

          I think it's more a valid point than simply politics. Open Standards are much more likely to be adopted if there is a BSD (or similar) licensed implementation.

          Do you think TCP/IP would have caught on nearly as well as it did if everybody had to write their own network stack from scratch rather than simply copy the BSD one and modify it sli
    • Car security is abysmal. Car locks (and most other locks) are trivial to bypass with just a little knowledge. I've personallly watched a trained locksmith enter a car in under 45 seconds without a key.

  • The guy is mentally ill (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 02, 2003 @06:26AM (#7370325)
    In the article, the reporter states that Todino's father says his son has mental problems. OK, fair enough. Then his father needs to step up to the plate and get the guy some help.

    Barring that, the people being joe'd really need to follow up on this. Either this guy is an unrepentant spammer, in which case he needs to be made to pay the price, or he's mentally unstable, in which case he needs professional help. The latter possibility is really more serious, since Todino could conceivably go off the deep end and do something more serious. Possibly, the best approach would be for them to contact Todino's father and tell him that if he doesn't get his son some help immediately, they're going to pursue the case with law enforcement. Assuming the father's statements are true and that he gives a damn, this should at least get the ball rolling.

    • Re:The guy is mentally ill (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The latter possibility is really more serious, since Todino could conceivably go off the deep end and do something more serious.

      No offense, but that's a rather uninformed view of mental illness. I've been fighting depression for about half my life and I'm finally getting past it, and I've seen this attitude before. The world is not made up of sane people and loonies who are likely to go crazy at any moment and start killing people.

      I admittedly did some rather odd things when I was in heavy depressive

      • But your particular experience with mental illness doesn't extroplate to the population at large. Different people will react different ways. Many, if untreated, will end up at a level such that they hurt themselves and/or others. To your stastically invalid personal experience I can relate an equally invalid but opposite experience:

        A person that lived next to my parents developed a mental illness, schizophrenia to be precise. He coated all his windows in aluminium foil and was known to shout at nothing in
      • his attitude before. The world is not made up of sane people and loonies

        Indeed. There is no actual evidence that the sane people exist at all...

    • Re:The guy is mentally ill (Score:5, Informative)

      by bluesangria ( 140909 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @10:29AM (#7370700)
      A decent post, why anonymous? Oh well.
      Regarding this statement:

      Possibly, the best approach would be for them to contact Todino's father and tell him that if he doesn't get his son some help immediately, they're going to pursue the case with law enforcement. Assuming the father's statements are true and that he gives a damn, this should at least get the ball rolling. It is *very* difficult to enforce medical treatment on someone who has NOT been legally declared mentally incompetent and assigned a guardian. This is why you have a situation where many clinically diagnosed schizophrenics, manic depressives, etc. can STOP taking their medication and going to treatments and they are perfecty within their rights to do so.
      Note, I'm talking about mentally ill people referred to as "high functioning", meaning they are mostly normal acting or their quirks are not considered "dangerous" to society, i.e. wearing tin-foil because the "aliens are out there" is ok, but killing "all girls who look like Brittany Spears" is not.

      In general, a high-functioning, but clinically mentally ill person is going to be very emotionally tiring to live with, but there's really nothing Todino's father can do. His son is an adult and therefore dad is no longer the responsible guardian. Filing a motion to declare his son mentally incompetent and assigning dad as the guardian has its own drawbacks, not to mention earning the unending emnity of the very person you are trying to help. It's just too much of a lose, lose situation.

  • Imagine if activists started doing this. I could see some of the nuttier protesters trying to get away with similar antics (black bloc [infoshop.org]?). Politispam? Anti-e-spamlishment? Anything to disrupt normal business.

    ...Not that I would condone anything like this. My e-mail box gets full enough as it is and eventually the effectiveness would wear off as spam filters started getting more examples of the stuff. However, this illustrates just how wild the internet still remains - even with all of the legislation and le

  • earthlink.net seems to have a pretty good way of dealing with spam - when you send an email to an earthlink account for the first time it gets put in the user's "suspect" folder, then you immediately get an automated response with a url, you go to the page and enter the standard coded-number-in-a-distorted-image and can optionally add a short request message and your name, then the recipient can accept you and all further emails go straight through with no problem. You would only need to check the suspect f

    • Challege/Response systems are very dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AndroidCat ( 229562 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @09:39AM (#7370609) Homepage
      enter the standard coded-number-in-a-distorted-image

      I'm using an ASCII terminal. Or a PDA with a small screen. Or VoiceXML over a telephone. Or I'm sight-impared. Or my ISP bounces your ISP's coded-number-in-a-distorted-image with request that they respond first with a coded-number-in-a-distorted-image, rinse, repeat. Or I have my filters set to autotrash any graphics in email because 99% of the time it's for penis pills. Or it was a Joe-job and your ISP sent me 20,000 coded-number-in-a-distorted-image challenge emails.

      Now what?

    • The system you describe is something called "Challenge-Response", which is vastly broken in a number of ways. Sure the recipient isn't bothered by spam, they just offload the problem to everyone else, like blind people, email helpdesks (at one job I typically just binned customer support emails from people using Matador) and forged sender addresses -- every single C/R system I've seen is stupid enough to send challenges to people in the From: line, either message or envelope. More than one C/R vendor has

  • Bouncing is moronic. Stop it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by droleary ( 47999 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @08:01AM (#7370459) Homepage

    What strikes me is that the major problem is not the spammers doing direct DoS attacks on the targets, but that they're using brain-dead behavior of mail servers to pull off DDoS attacks. If you control an MX, please configure it to issue a 550 error during the connection if you can't deliver the message instead of accepting it and then bouncing to what you almost certainly know is an innocent party. A party who is not the sender of the message, by the way, which means you anal types who say "RFC says I must bounce" have to note that it also says you must not lose a message, which is what a bad bounce does. Please be a friendly network neighbor and stop bouncing spam.

    • Yeah, I'm going through this right now... but oddly enough I don't seem to be getting all that many bounced spams. Maybe their lists are fairly accurate? I don't know, I'm only getting about 25 or 30 per day and they're filtered out fairly easily. I do wish the sender wasn't using random usernames for each address, that would make it easier to deal with. Oh well.
    • The problem with your suggestion is that spammers will then use the accept/reject mechanism as a means of verifying email addresses, something equally bad.

    • Not that easy.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by AftanGustur ( 7715 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @12:32PM (#7371122) Homepage


      If you control an MX, please configure it to issue a 550 error during the connection if you can't deliver the message instead of accepting it and then bouncing to what you almost certainly know is an innocent party.

      I can tell you that the problem is all but easy to fix.

      Not only do our Postfix servers (On the DMZ) have to accept mail to Exchange accounts (Servers on a different inside-DMZ) without knowing what accounts exist, but also for other mail servers we have no control over. For example, we send incoming emails back out over VPN tunnels to Japan, Germany and Washington without having the slightest clue or control over what accounts exist over there.

      Before, I used to work for a big ISP that only serviced companies and the setup was similar there, we had this huge Sun Enterprise cluster to accept incoming email for our clients, and then sent the emails to each customer's dedicated server without having any control over them.

    • Re:Bouncing is moronic. Stop it. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Linux_ho ( 205887 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @12:57PM (#7371246) Homepage
      If you control an MX, please configure it to issue a 550 error during the connection if you can't deliver the message

      Many Internet-accessible MX hosts are not also running delivery services (POP, IMAP, etc.) They often relay the mail to a non-internet-accessible SMTP hub for the domain, which in turn relays the mail to the hosts running the delivery agents. There's usually no way the Internet MX host can know which users are valid.

      Don't try to pass this off on mail admins. We're doing what we can, spending way more time setting up ways to filter out this crap than we should have to. Direct your bile at the spammers.

      which means you anal types who say "RFC says I must bounce" have to note that it also says you must not lose a message, which is what a bad bounce does.

      I do not think "lose a message" means what you think it means. I like the RFCs. I just don't think your little suggestion does much good except for the poor joe-jobbee. I've been joe-jobbed. Yeah, it sucked. But I'd rather delete a couple thousand messages once in a blue moon than ask every admin on the Internet to set up their mail servers so that the spammers can more easily validate their address lists.
  • I tend to, at least, glance at every email that I receive (spam included) and I have to say that they're not all bad. Some spam is actually pretty amusing (the time travel spam was a good example.

    In fact, I would go so far as to say that if every spam that I received was that entertaining, I probably wouldn't mind receiving spam at my current rate.

  • This guy is a fake! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AstroDrabb ( 534369 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @08:41AM (#7370502)
    Everyone knows that the *real* time traveler is named JOHN TITOR [johntitor.com]!

  • Heh (Score:2)

    by chrae ( 159904 )
    ... spam attack on three popular sites in retaliation for making fun of [...] Robby, if you're out there, you have ceased to be amusing

    In other news Slashdot user, HopToit, has become the target of the most massive recorded spam attack in 3,000 years.

    Poor guy :)

  • Spam can be as serious as Murder. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Andy_R ( 114137 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @09:16AM (#7370560) Homepage Journal
    Murder is the senseless waste of a human life.

    Spam is the senseless waste of millions upon millions of tiny fractions of a human life.

    There comes a point where the few seconds that each of us without spam filters spend deleting this crap adds up to the average lifespan of a human being.

    If someone has sent that much spam, why should they not be treated in the same way as a murderer?

  • The guy's crazy -- like a fox (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Did anybody open the HTML attachments with the time travel spam? They were advertisments for penis pills, viagra, and all the usual suspects. The weird-ass messages simply spoofed spamAssassin, et al., into passing this rubbish along...

    Vincent "The Chin" Gigante wandered around Greenwich Village in a bathrobe, pretending to be crazy, to escape a murder conviction. Robby "Captain Time" Todino covers his slimy business with feigned nuttiness.

    They both deserve the needle.

  • How long until e-mail is replaced by M$ mail? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pe1chl ( 90186 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @10:22AM (#7370687)
    How long will this "we need a new e-mail system" go on? The discussion about a new protocol to replace SMTP has gone on for ages, but nothing has happened.

    I predict that Microsoft will come up with a new, better secured way of transferring mail messages over the Internet. It will be a closed architecture that requires Windows on all client and server systems. It will take over from e-mail overnight. In about a year's time, you will get more and more comments like "Oh, you still have such and old-fashioned mail address, one with a @ in it?" from most of your mail partners, certainly in business uses of mail...

    Why? Because the advocates of open standards only talk about the problems of migrating to a new standard, and don't actually start designing and migrating.
  • This is the kind of thinking that we need to be doing.
    If a new email system is created by a non free/open group. It could really put the FOSS community back a more than a decade or more.

    ON THE OTHER HAND if the FOSS community was to introduce a email standard it could give us a boost of a year of so, if not more.
    (The difference is that we will not (and can not) prevent then from using our methods))

    This is a place where the EFF or FSF could make a big contribution to the process. If respected group was to

  • naa, not him (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Snaller ( 147050 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @12:18PM (#7371069) Journal

    Its probably a double joe job - Robby doesn't wanna annoy random website users, he just wants to get out of this time frame!

  • Here's the time-travel spam I got in 2002 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kymermosst ( 33885 ) on Sunday November 02, 2003 @03:30PM (#7372032) Journal
    It was so interesting I never deleted it.

    For your viewing pleasure:


    Time Travelers Please help! 22353

    Hello,
    I am a 21yo M offering a $50,000 reward to help me take my life back. If you are a Time Traveler who has the Dimensional Warp Generator #52 4350a wrist watch, the XK memo replica or similar technology I need your help.

    I must return my mind to my former self so that I can take back my life which has been destroyed by the evil aliens. They have done Terrible, Terrible things to me starting with nanaprobe tracers, mind-transducers that she slipped into my
    food, and now I am fighting and dying of CJD. I have known two others who were messed with by these same evil beings, returned to there former self, foiled their schemes and successfully taken there life's back. If you can help please email me at: [EMAIL DELETED]

    Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by
    ([EMAIL DELETED]) on Saturday, September 14, 2002 at 19:38:02

    x: 32883


    This one a month earlier:


    3:20:46 AM Time Travelers PLEASE HELP!!!

    Hello,

    If you are a Time Traveler from Dimension D1263GT10, year 2008 or Dimension D2044GT5, year 2432 and or in possession of the Dimensional Warp Generator wrist watch, the Carbon Copy Replica model #52 4350 series or similar technology I need your help! My entire life and health has been messed with by evil beings! I simply need the safest method of transferring my
    consciousness or returning to my younger self with my current mind/memory. I need an advanced time traveler to work with who can help me, I'd would prefer someone with access to teleportation as well as a variety different types of time travel. This is not a joke! I am serious! Please send a separate email to me at: [EMAIL DELETED] if you can help! Thanks

    Formulario enviado por ([EMAIL DELETED]) em Sabado, Julho 13, 2002 at 08:16:43

    x: i
    email: [EMAIL DELETED]



    (Yes, I deleted e-mail addresses to protect the guilty, but hey, it's principles.)

    Another interesting note: The first time I tried to submit this: Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

    So, at least we know he's lame.

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