Re: [tlug] spammers

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 05:55:59PM +0100, Godwin Stewart wrote:

>register whatever domains they like at bulk price. Can you say
>"paycenter.com.cn", "DirectI" and "ENom"? Anything coming from a domain
>registered with any of those registrars is more than likely to be spam.

Ah, yes, paycenter.com.cn, a name I know well :-p

>No, not at all. Look at godaddy.com for instance. Ben, who works the abuse

Godaddy and Domains by Proxy are a couple of the rare exceptions out there.
There are some pretty long-running spammer websites out there, because
few registrars (DbyP itself is not a registrar, they are a registration
service, and I was highly suspicious of them when they first crossed
my radar, but they do seem to be on the up and up) will terminate anyone
for spamming.

>The ISP's are the first people who need to be forced to cooperate. Places

This is spot-on.  Large ISPs do little to keep spam from exiting their
networks. and not much more to keep it from entering.  There is a lot they
could to to make life harder for spammers, but most choose not to do so.
Hosting companies are like that as well.  I used to work for a large one,
and they once had a fairly aggressive abuse department.  When financial
push came to shove as the dot-com bubble popped, that abuse department was
gutted of staff (it may have been eliminated entirely; even I, as an
insider, stopped receiving responses from it) and they started taking a lot
more business from pr0n sites (which had previously not been very welcome) and
they went on to become fairly spam-friendly.

The other day I saw a spam advertising hosting for bulk email advertised sites
and they said straight-up that the servers were all in China and they had
a contract with the hosting provider that allowed all complaints to fall
on deaf ears.  They sounded like they were a competitor of BP (Bullet-Proof)
but that could have been marketing spin, too.

>like UUNet/MCI/WorldScum, VSNL, cogentco, xo and chinanet receive complaints

chinanet is by far the worst of those, because they have no fear of
prosecution.  The only thing that would get them inline is if the others
started refusing to route anything from chinanet, and we know how likely that
is.  Business in general, and big business in particular, will, when faced with
a choice between the ethical and that which allows corporate survival, toss
ethics out the window.  That is how these spammers get so much shelter from
the big network operators and big hosting providers: they have money and
for some of those providers (especially in hosting) taking money from
spammers probably really is/was the difference between survival and
Chapter 7 or 11.

Jonathan
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