Posted on October 11, 2007 Posted by John Scalzi 27 Comments
One of the major purveyors of Russian Viagra spam found murdered.
I wish I felt worse about the fact that my first reaction to this bit of news was to say “good.”
But, yeah. I don’t.
Update: Apparently, a hoax.
Taunting the tauntable since 1998
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Athena Scalzi, editor – AMS
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Live by the ‘botnet, die by the bullet.
I feel a little bad for anyone who loves him, but on the whole, I can’t say I regret his death.
It just seems he should have been impaled by some long, hard object. It just seems wrong to simply get shot…
Yeah, well… While I mourn the loss of a human life to murder…
Live by the spam, die by the sword.
Odds are, it wasn’t vigilante justice, but that he ticked off someone important in the Russian mob. Possibly by sending spam.
John, you need to submit this to Fark.
I’m sure someone already has.
Odds are, it wasn’t vigilante justice, but that he ticked off someone important in the Russian mob. Possibly by sending spam.
Or by saying “nyet” to “protection” payments or some such.
You mean somebody saved me the trouble? Good…
Kushnir has his head caved in with a wrench. Dating back to the last days of the USSR, when telecom was pretty much under KGB control, private telecom and computer networks in Russua tend to be Mafia-affiliated, either by direct ownership or minority control (for money laundering). My local Mafia guy in Moscow was big into computers in 1989.
I have a feeling the bosses don’t like paying for the bandwidth and express their displeasure this way.
So does this mean I’m going to get less penis enhancement spam mail or what?
What do you call . . .
“A good start”.
I assumed this was just the second announcement from Google this week.
So he’s a stiff now, eh?
He probably deserved something more painful and drawn-out than merely being shot. But as Seth said, it *is* a good start.
So he gets (well, got) a percentage of all the sales of these products he advertises via spam and he made about 2mil a year?
Who are these people who are clicking on the spam? For the love of all that is holy, STOP FEEDING THE SPAM INDUSTRY, people!!! There are plenty of other ways to purchase products to enhance your sexual organs! Just google it already if that is what you are looking for.
(I’m not directing this at anyone here. I have more faith in Scalzi readers than that. I’m just amazed that there are that many people out there that actually decide to be persuaded by a spambotted email to pay for a drug to ingest into their actual body with the words “B A re41 m4n w1t H A re41 P3n15!!” )
As we used to say in Jr. High, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” It is a pity that he died fast though. He deserved a sadistic killer who would make sure it took a week or so of intense pain to kill him.
May other spammers similarly meet their ends, especially that damn Nigerian money-smuggling crowd.
Unfortunately, further evidence is available.
The blog is on a domain that was just created, and appears to have no pointers to it in google except for that one page.
There aren’t any corroborating stories in the press.
McAfee has more information.
“McAfee has more information”
Damn, but I didn’t realize that McAfee’s anti-spam program was so effective. Now what does poor Norton have to do to up the ante? Invade Nigeria, maybe?
Well, yeah, I’d be more excited if I didn’t know that spammers are like cock(heh heh)roaches, stomp on one, and ten more come to funeral.
Hmm I epxected more from the commenters here. Look, if email spam is an actually issue for any of you, uh, how do I say this politely?
Oh hell, I won’t bother – If spam is hitting your inboxes, get off your lazy behinds and start filtering it. There’s no reason for you to see spam in your inbox anymore and if you do it’s your own damn fault.
Really folks, if you don’t have a decent spam filter running by now, you deserve the hassle. I get dozens of spam emails in my GMail account. Far more than 99% of them are filtered, virtually none of my legitimate emails are misidentified. All of my other addresses are forwarded there, so those emails are filtered as well. Occasionally I have to manually nuke a couple of emails. Per day. I can’t get all worked up about that
I don’t like spammers. I get that they’re bad, I get that viruses etc spread that way (among others). I get that it’s a HUGE issue for IT and that spam and the filtering technologies make email less useful.
But rejoicing over someone’s murder is way more reprehensible than spamming. If email spam is anywhere close to a major issue for your email accounts you have a pretty stress-free life.
Well, jeez, Rick, I’d like to get up there on that pedestal with you, but Lot’s of people die in this world every day. Many don’t deserve it. For some it’s just their time, for others it’s a dammed shame, and for others – well, they’ve got it coming. And I’ll shed no tears for this parasite, his death gives me joy and I hope his compatriots soon follow him, and all your moral posturing isn’t going to change that. So thanks for the thought, now piss off.
Update reaction:
Ah shit.
–ml
You know, I spend hours every day fighting spam for my company…and while I won’t be shedding any tears if it were true, I certainly wouldn’t be dancing a tarantella and fantasizing about killing other people over the perceived damage waged by spam.
If people were really as bothered by spam as they claim to be, they’d push much harder for a new e-mail standard that would address many of the root causes of these exploits, and make sure all the machines that they have a responsibility for are patched to be secure…because for these spammers to be effective, they need to use botnets. For botnets to be effective, people merely have to put there machines in a public place and leave them vulnerable there.
Hoax?
El fuck.
Why don’t I just filter out spam? Because no spam filter can have the human intellegence it takes to get it right every time. I don’t mind when an occasional Canadian pharmacy ad gets through. But I mind VERY MUCH when a filter throws out real e-mail. That I can not tolerate, so I don’t use filters. I even got my ISP to bypass their filters on my account.
Now, that said, I get very little spam. Maybe 5 on an average day, sometimes as high as 10, sometimes none. None of them are ever pornographic. So it isn’t a big deal for me personally.
But spam is a public blight, and every time one of these carbonated turds sends out 10,000,000 claims that “You have won 2 millions dollars USA based from your post code” it steals that much bandwidth. They steal money from those who believe them, which is even more reprehensible. Talk to someone who has lost their entire savings account because they got a false warning apparently from their own bank that there was a security problem. You would see that it is not “perceived damage.”
It is unreasonable to expect millions of barely computer literate people around the world to put measures in place to stop spam. It is necessary to stop the spammers. They are the problem, they need to stopped. No mercy.
So he didn’t really die or perhaps with the help of drug he merely rose again?