Russian spammer taken out. Literally.
If you search the site for 'spam', you'll find a whole bunch of references to it. I hate it. It's affects the site adversely, and it affects my time adversely.
It's a parasite that hasn't evolved in a gracious way, which means its in the category of stupid , because it quite literally is choking the host, harming its viability, and its own ability to live. (We'll talk about this more, because it is going to affect what is on the site soon)
Still, I was disgusted to hear a big Russian spammer was taken out of the world literally:
Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.
Spam has rounded the horn for me in a big way. I'm generally a pretty down to earth guy, but there have been days or evenings when its made me want to throw a punch or find where its coming from and put my molotov cocktail knowledge to use.
On average, spam costs me between 15 to 30 minutes of time a day in its various forms, whether it be email, comments or trackback. There have been times when I've been gone for a days, and come back and had to spend two hours going through and filtering out comments and the horrors of my inbox.
I'm not on the high or low-end of the scale, but that time adds up, and it is an every single day thing. Comment and TrackBack spam has a habit of hitting certain times of the day, and quite literally there have been times where its affected my schedule. If we use a lose average of say, 22 minutes per day, every single day, that is over 133 hours per year that I'm having to spend on it, and while there are 8,760 hours in a year, that adds up.
If you assume an eight hour work day, that's 16 days per year gone from my life, just to deal with these bastards pumping the junk out. It takes me a little over 30 hours to put together one of my interviews, and you could well say its costing readers four interviews per year. That's not the whole story, because the extra time could well end up being used to watch TV or something, but it gets the idea across... Because, well, I'm not using the time to watch TV, I'm using it to deal with the consequences of the spammer's actions.
Spam just grinds you down, and I'm just one person. There are probably easily another 20 million out there just like (probably many more), which if used as an example would mean over 40 million weeks in the world down the drain, just to deal with spam, or 769,230 life-years collectively. Lies, damn lies and statistics, but I don't think there is any way the above wouldn't be a horrifyingly low-ball estimate of what spam costs us, and we haven't even touched on its actual affect on the infrastructure. It causes real harm around the world.
So, I get spam, and I get why it could just set someone off, but at the end of the day, but still we're talking about an ethereal thing here. If I were standing in an ISP and knew that by yanking some power cables I could shut down 50% of spam for the day, I'd have some thinking to do, but if I were standing next to a spammer with a baseball bat, while I'd be livid I can't imagine caving his head in even if the edges of my vision would be pink.
The truth is, this could actually well have nothing to do with someone angry about the spam, even though that is where my mind jumped and it looks to be where the article went too. There are times when I feel like I know way too much about Russia, and its surrounding satellites now, but what you need to know is just how horrifyingly corrupt it is.
We're not talking about 'pink bandwidth' and such, where an ISP charges extra and looks the other way, but actual mafia stuff. It's just pervasive, and while there is always going to be corruption and abuses of power, it can be difficult for 'Westerners' to really fully comprehend the sway they have there.
We're talking about a hockey franchise going and trying to build a league and setting up stadiums, and the russian mafia deciding it looked profitable so it moved in, forcing the NHL to write it off and move out. I know a guy who tried to work with some programmers in one of the older -- and actually considered to be one of the more progressive -- republics which have broken away, and having the apartment they were using raided by the police for having too many computers in it.
Paying $100 to the chief made it go away, no matter that they had a 'computer club' license to have more than their one or two computers around. When it happens again -- which it will -- they'll have to pay again. They don't really have a recourse, as the theoretical ones are rigged enough that right now its just cheaper (And safer) to deal with the corruption and consider it a known cost. Doing business in Russia right now is just very dangerous, and the minute they smell money -- especially money that is in a gray area, because demand + illegal = lucrative profit -- you will get knocks on the door.
Strange, I never thought I'd be wishing someone being scrubbed off the earth would end up being a hit, because the alternative (Someone being that upset over something so ethereal) is almost scarier in its own way.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJuly 25, 2005, at 01:29 PM
Comments (9)
Posted by: Twist at July 25, 2005 02:37 PM
I get around 200 spam emails per day to the accounts I still check as well as 10 to 20 pieces of comment spam per day on my Movable Type powered blog. I managed to completely kill trackback spam and cut comment spam in half just by changing the names of the cgi's and editing the cfg file to reflect those changes.
Six Apart has a bunch of features in the new beta for dealing with spam but the area they seem to be failing on is preventing spam from getting entered into the system in the first place. I don't want to use a TypeKey required system but I am tired of comment spam. The new measures are just filters which I don't really trust (I don't trust them in Mail either because I get false positives pretty regularly and I have been training the damn thing for over a year now). WordPress has the option to use one of those random text in an image things to help prevent comment spam and I hear that it works pretty good. There is a very flawed third party system for doing that in MT that probably doesn't affect comment spam at all (it doesn't actually make any changes to the cgi it is just some javascript you add to your comment forms and I figure most of the comment spamming bots are accessing the cgi directly). A small modification like adding a check box to the form and having the cgi check to see if it is checked would probably defeat most of the spam posting bots for a while. Be less annoying than having to type the text in from the image. Or you could use the random text in a image thing but have a popup menu with a few different choices to pick from. If I was better at coding I would try some of these out but unfortunately perl just isn't my language.
Anyway I am always impressed by how well you keep up with the comment and trackback spam since I never actually see any on your pages. Are you using MT-Blacklist or any other tools to help or are you just doing it manually?
Posted by: jgt at July 25, 2005 04:55 PM
In light of your comments about Russia, do you have any comment on allofmp3.com? I don't know that it's connected to the Russian mafia, but somehow I got that impression. Even though it's technically legal (as far as I can tell), it always felt even sleazier than just straight downloading a track off a file sharing network.
Posted by: The Spelling Police at July 25, 2005 05:45 PM
loose != lose
Posted by: vastheman at July 25, 2005 06:11 PM
allofmp3 is an interesting case. They have a broadcast license, like a radio station. They say they are simply running a "personalised request show" over the Internet for each of their customers.
What this means is that it's legal for them to supply the music to you, but it's only legal for you to listen to it once. Just like the way recording off the radio is technically illegal in a lot of countries. If you keep a copy of the track after listening to it, you can be prosecuted (assuming they can catch you).
Now I'm sure hardly any of allofmp3's customers actually delete the files after listening to them, and I think allofmp3 are guilty of encouraging people to illegally retain the files. So overall it's pretty dodgy. But if people were honest (yeah, right), allofmp3 wouldn't be a problem.
Posted by: Kim at July 25, 2005 06:15 PM
That's funny. I thought this article was going to be about spanners. DB, you're a pretty clever guy - I would have thought you'd figured out how to not get spam. :-/
-Kim.
Posted by: Z.D. Smith at July 25, 2005 06:17 PM
I'm sorry, DB. I really am. I feel terrible, but I have to say it: he wasn't 'literally' taken out. 'Taken Out' is a figure of speech, and while he was in fact killed, that doesn't satisfy the conditions for 'literally', any more than it would be if you said he 'got the axe'—unless someone had given him an axe as a gift, and in that case it's just a torturous pun.
On the very same lines, spam is not literally choking the host, because the notion of spam as a parasite on the host of the internet (or email) is itself a biological metaphor.
Hell, while we're at it I'll mention that parasites are by definition harmful to their hosts, and so host/parasite is in fact an *apt* metaphor, though your use of it has a built-in questioning of its aptness.
There are a couple dozen other typos, but those don't really trouble me; I'll just assume you had a few too many salvatory White Russians before your rant.
Well, after all that pedantry I feel really dirty. Again, my apologies.
Posted by: SamR at July 25, 2005 07:43 PM
Hey Spelling Police, if you've got access to a windows XP/2003 box running IIS 6, have a gander at the 'Restart IIS' dialog box. It never fails to amuse.
Posted by: morbid at July 26, 2005 06:29 AM
The chump got what he deserved. He was pissing off thousands (maybe millions) of people every day. He was a complete asshole and though I'm not happy, I sure as hell am not sorry he's dead.
"If you assume an eight hour work day, that's 16 days per week just gone from my life, just to deal with these bastards pumping the junk out."
Wow, I wasn't aware that a week had 16 days :).
I hate spam too. I wish it would stop, but I don't think that will happen anytime soon. Some part of me still wishes that computers wouldn't have become as popular as they are, since now every grandma and her cheap perfume has a computer that is probably going to be used at one point to relay spam. mm, I miss the good old days.