As some of you know my email has been problematic lately. This was
due to my intentionally allowing the "aeiveos.com" domain name
to expire at Network Solutions, in anticipation of moving it to
a more courteous and responsive domain provider. After eNom
wrestled with this for 3-4 weeks unsuccessfully, I finally
called Network Solutions. It turns out that the *bastards*
will not turn over a domain name unless the registration is
paid-in-full (even if it is requested by the "holder"). They
would not even *delete* the domain name in a timely fashion (< 30 days),
so I could reregister it elsewhere, forcing me to fork over
$35 to the spawn of Saten.
My recomendation -- damn NSI's name every opportunity you get a
chance and watch carefully for the bubble to burst on the
valuation ($21 bill) paid by Verisign (VRSN) for NSI (NSOL).
Unless NSI changes its way of doing business customers are going
to leave them in droves, if anyone can provide even marginally
better service.
Although Slashdot had a discussion about DNS registrars a
couple of weeks ago, the results seemed fairly inconclusive.
I'm unhappy with eNom (they only sometimes answer their phone
and were unable to inform me that NSI would not transfer the
domain). Does anyone know of a reliable approved DNS registrar
who provides responsive and courteous service, that would also
follow the privacy & personal rights you would expect for an
Extropian -- e.g. the domain name is *my* property and others
aren't to use it for their purposes? [If we can't find one of these,
its something that ExI might take on as a privacy/rights issue that
would bring some income into the organization.]
Now, onto the SPAM issue. Since aeiveos.com seems to have
popped back up as being valid in the DNS system, that I'm
now getting a flood of SPAM messages to relay. Unfortunately
I've been procrastinating implementing the changes to the
rather old software on my systems that allow SPAM relays to
take advantage of me. Since my machines may have been "advertised"
as a SPAM relay point, it seemed to make sense to take advantage
of this if possible and turn it against the evildoers.
Premise: If people are using your systems to relay mail (and you
can track it), then you should be able to bill them for the services.
If they refuse to pay for the services, then you can have them jailed
for grand-theft. Of course for SPAMers, one wants to set
a fairly high price ($100/message relayed). The complementary
efforts of anti-SPAM programs and costs to or jailing of a few
purveyors of this crap should function as a greater anti-SPAM
effect than programs alone can manage. [Why? Because programs
alone only encourage SPAMers to get more clever, as I will show
below.]
It is worth noting that Washington State is one of the states that
does have anti-SPAM legislation, though I'm unsure of the degree
to which it could be used in this case (and you have the problem
of jurisdiction).
Now, the problem at hand... Attached is an example of the many messages
being relayed through my mail system (converted to HTML). The
"Received: from" lines show up as being from at least 3 sources
so it is questionable if any are valid. The target URL is
very cleverly encoded and appears (in my limited knowledge)
to perhaps bounce a URL through several relays(?) [www.freeyellow.com
and angelfire.com]. The actual IP address of the server is cleverly
hidden as a decimal number as well. We are dealing with the Aristoi
of Spamers IMO.
The adverstisment is cleverly coded so they can call you and you can't
call them (or their ISP, if you are at my ability level, which is
certainly greater than the average Joe). So, the question becomes
how do we decode the information to either make them pay for my
services or stop it entirely (clearly preferable!).
For now, I've turned off my smtp daemon so I cannot accept the SPAM.
I may turn it back on when I can target to a "black hole" the incoming
requests. Fortunately most of the destination email systems will not
accept the relayed mail, so the net result is for the SPAM to accumulate
on my system and suck up my bandwidth to the destinations.
Just so I don't get painted black, the last time I checked, there
were many thousdands of systems worldwide that had the same type of
open email relays that are on my systems. So I'm not alone.
If you are inclined to help me with this, please respond to:
bradbury@aeiveos.wa.com.
since the aeiveos.com domain isn't accepting email.
Thanks,
Robert
================== BELOW IS HTML VERSION OF THE SPAM MESSAGE ==========
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
Received: from penn.com (wnnt01.win.net) by aeiveos.com ; 10 MAR 100
00:49:26 PDT
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service [12.3.1320.61] (Linux; I)
Original-Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Original-Content-Type: text/plain
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2000 04:00:10
X-Accept-Language: en
From:
To:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Money is the Root Of All Evil!
X-Other-References: 09CECB1C0
X-In-Response-To: 0BA5780C9
X-See-Also: 020762FF7
MessageID: <3t11yknd4mgwedq.100320000400@penn.com>
Content-Length: 1451
Content-Type: text/plain
=======================================
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4%6D%6C#@angelfire<http://3462929566/%62%62%62%61%6E%6B%73%32%6B/%69%6E%64%6
5%78%2E%68%74%6D%6C#@www.freeyellow.com@3462929566/%74%72i%70%69%6E%66%6F/%6
9n%64%65%78%2E%68%74%6D%6C#@angelfire.com/%74%72i%70%69%6E%66%6F/%69n%64%65%
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:49 MDT