Peter sent me to a neat blog, FlowingData that is partly about visualization. Nathan, the author, posts longish notes like 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe. He also has a good one on 21 Ways to Visualize and Explore Your Email Inbox which has some creative ways to handle spam like Alex Dragulescu’s Spam Architecture that takes spam and generates “three-dimensional modeling gestures”! (I want to be a 3D modeling gesture!)
Stop Spam Here – Combat Spam, Spyware and Phishing is a web site that grew out of the Task Force on Spam who released a report in 2005 that includes recommendations like:
10. … the federal government should lead in establishing a Canadian spam database (i.e. the “Spam Freezer”).
15. As part of its ongoing effort to increase user awareness and education, the federal government, in cooperation with interested stakeholders, should continue to promote the “Stop Spam Here / Arr?™tez le pourriel ici” user-tips campaign by encouraging others to link to these websites, and through the use of other appropriate methods and media. (Executive Summary)
The report says that spam has hit a ratio of 80% of global e-mail and there seems to be nothing we can do about. The Stop Spam Here web site suggests three tips to protect yourself:
The first and third don’t seem likely to make much of a difference. The second option is a form of giving up – it accepts that we have to keep multiple addresses and manage them. The alternative is to stop using e-mail and switch to a secure environment like Facebook where only friends can message you. Is it surprising that youth are not using e-mail the way we do?
The press is full of the news that Robert Alan Soloway, the “Spam King” has been arrested. See, for example, Spam King and the zombie computers from the Times Online. For more there is a site, solowaysucks.net that has links and an image of the arrest warrant.
I think it interesting that it is business owners that he preyed on and leveraged for his zombie empire.
Prosecutors allege that Mr Soloway preyed on computer-gullible business owners who thought they were hiring a legitimate company to help to increase traffic to their website. He then used their sites to send waves of spam in their names. When they complained, he threatened to charge them extra fees and report them to collection agencies.
Dear readers,
I have turned on commenting again. To combat spam I have installed a plug-in that will ask you to answer a simple math challenge (as in “add 3 and 8”). Please try it out and e-mail me if it doesn’t work.
Geoffrey Rockwell
US Spam Decline Stalled in Q1 according to a Sophos press release. This press summarizes where spam is coming from – 23.2 % originates in the US. What is interesting is the growth in European zombie networks that are advertised. The press release links to a picture of a Russian ad advertising services. Most spam is now coming from zombies or bots. In effect we are sending ourselves spam.
The United States accounts for the highest spam output as a country, but together China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan account for almost half of the worldwide spam output, making Asia the top offending continent. In addition when ranked by continent, Europe has now surpassed North America and has risen to the second position on the chart with a marked rise from Q1 2006 due to increased zombie activity.
If it can be shown that the poor security design of Windows is responsible for so many machines being hijacked by malware, does that mean Microsoft bears some responsibility for all the spam?
Over a year ago I blogged about the grockwel: Make Love Not Spam campaign. The site now links to a page with documentation on the discontinued project including this lovely picture of what spammers actually look like.
There is a cool animation of what the screensaver looked like.
A great set of pages on how to make your e-mail address hard for a spambot to harvest is, Project Honey Pot: How to Avoid Spambots. Project Honey Pot is also interesting at a higher level. They are encouraging website administrators to work with them to mount pages with fake addresses that let them track spambots.
Anti-spam efforts to this point have generally focused on the tail end of the spam cycle. In order to send out their messages, spammers must gather addresses, procure contracts, send emails, and collect money. Unfortunately, whether through filtering, authentication or enforcement, nearly every solution to this point has tried to stop spammers at virtually the last step: sending messages. Project Honey Pot is an attempt to move earlier in the spam cycle and identify the “King Pin” spammers who sit at the top of the food chain and spend their time harvesting our addresses.
The company behind this initiative, unspam.com has a great spam news ticker.
It has been reported in the media that fake software is being circulated on the Internet under the "makelovenotspam" name, which is actually not a screensaver but a computer virus. Please note that the "makelovenotspam" initiative has been discontinued. There is no point in trying to obtain a copy of the screensaver, as it will not function anymore. Moreover, you may be offered a computer virus which has nothing to do with the original campaign, and may actually be harmful to your computer and the data stored on it. You are therefore advised not to download or install any software purporting to be the "makelovenotspam" screensaver, and to remove any copy you may have on your PC.
So ends the first chapter in the sorry make LOVE not SPAM initiative. From screensaver to virus.
Second Chapter
What is interesting is the suggestion from kuro5hin.org – namely that such DoS attacks could be decentralized and built into personal tools like our e-mail clients. Imagine if everyone could set their client to hose servers that annoy them. Imagine if iDoS (personal Denial of Service) systems were widely available and easy to use (just drag an offending spam message to the “harass for a month” applet). A radical idea of the “give everyone a gun and there will be no crime” variety, but an interesting idea none the less. My guess is that taken to an extreme this would slow the Internet down to the point where major players would have to implement a solution to both spam and counter-spam.
Lycos Europe has apparently launched a project to encourage users to launch a distributed denial of service attack on known spammers. They offer a screensaver that will attack spammers. For the story see, Netcraft: Spam Sites Crippled by Lycos Screensaver DDoS. I can’t get through to MakeLoveNotSpam.org to check this (and get my copy of the screensaver), but this sounds like a great idea (and a great title.)
According to this story, Lycos Europe denies attack on zombie army | CNET News.com the Lycos site could have been hacked in return.
Continue reading Make Love Not Spam
The Guardian reports that Bill Gates gets 4 million emails a day (David Teather, Friday Nov. 19, 2004). I’m glad someone gets more spam than I do.
The next time you’re sifting through the mortgage offers, cheap Rolex watches or dubious business proposals from Nigeria, spare a thought for Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder is the most spammed man in the world, with 4m emails arriving in his inbox each day.
Brian Cantwell-Smith was discussing the development of e-mail and made an interesting claim that some of its flaws can be traced to the way e-mail in the 70s was designed for people like the engineers who were developing it. As a result it doesn’t work well for someone who needs to have a secretary filter e-mail as the engineers were not managers and did their correspondence themselves. One could respond that it was exactly such a design that made the net feel democratic – even if you had staff there was no way to get around answering your own.