Posted on 06/22/2004 4:07:02 PM PDT by Dog Gone
I'm all for this proposal, but it doesn't go far enough. As far as my firewall tells me, more bandwidth is consumed on Qwest (my ISP) by port scanning than by email spam. I get about 150 port scans per hour, compared to about 10 spam emails per day.
I've use that as a helpful tool to get rid of nasties at times.
This is utterly ridiculous: Punishing the victim!
Does anyone know if any ISPs are willing to rename an account or do I have to close it completely and then open up a brand new account?
I figure if I no longer am "johndoe@thisismydialup.com" then I can't be blamed for sending viruses or spam as "johndoe@thisismydialup".
Some people change their credit card account number every year to block identity theft. Does it seem unreasonable to do the same with your online identity?
That's what I was afraid of. Good article, thanks. I'd just hate to see my mom yanked off the internet for a problem that existed long before she and zillions of other "zombies" got on the internet. She's old. She's frail. She doesn't see well. And every time the computer hiccups, she's ready to chuck the whole thing out the window, lol. Took me and my brother forever to convince her that email was a wonderful thing.
In my case, McAfee software pops up any time I send 5 or more identical or near identical E-Mails and asks if I am aware of them.
Roadrunner allows me to send unlimited E-mails, but if I wish to send over 100/day I must log on and notify them first.
So9
McAfee (and probably Norton and others) offers privacy software that will warn you if the same email is being sent too often in a short period of time. It will prompt you to allow the email or reject the send and stop the email.
-PJ
One does have to wonder how well Apple's OS would fair if it were the target of choice for hackers, crackers and spammers!
I have three email accounts that all feed into my email inbox. 99% of the spam, and 100% of the infected emails are associated with one of those addresses, an email address from an ISP that was bought out by my current ISP. I need to eliminate that one, but I can't do it from my computer. The forwarding of that email occurs at the ISP level. I'm getting about four viruses per day, but Norton is catching them.
Do you recall the software title? As much as I hate spam, I'd certainly feel guilty if some trojan on my computer was contributing to the problem.
I'd be plenty tweaked off if they pulled that on me. I keep my system clean and up-to-date with security patches. I sit behind a hardware firewall, have Norton scanning outgoing email and don't use Look Out! Express. Still, I get the occasional complaint from someone thinking that he's been spammed from my address.
How? From trojans and worms in OTHER PEOPLE'S MACHINES. I run a fairly popular website and respond to email questions that people send in. My address goes into their address books. If the aforementioned nitwit gets infected with a worm or trojan that harvests addresses from the user's address book, I can suddenly appear to be peddling Viagra, cable descramblers, DVD-copying software and cut-rate mortgages. Can't tell you how much that infuriates me!
But it's not as much as I was infuriated by a message that I got, supposedly from "Support" at a domain that I happen to own. As the domain owner, I administer the email users, and I have never created a user named "Support." The nerve of these bastards!
I have comprehensive filters in place to reduce the spam, and am amazed at the tricks these jerks are coming up with to get around them. Most amazing is that they think I might possibly be interested in buying something from them after they have managed to irritate me by using deception and trickery to get past my filters. It's like having someone break into your house in the middle of the night, sleep on your couch, fill the house with burnt-toast odor, put his bare feet on your kitchen table and greet you with "Hi -- wanna buy some alumimum siding?" as you crawl out of bed in the morning.
I say give 'em a job as foreign communications workers and send 'em to Iraq...
Having...trouble...breathing...ROFLOLOLOL.
I hope this was sarcasm, because it's one of the funniest things I've read in a while. ROFL. And if it's not sarcasm, you won't understand why I think it's so funny. LOL.
VirusScan will trap multiple emails being sent. Privacy Service will allow you to customize prompts for cookies, programs launching other programs, programs accessing the internet, personal data being sent, etc, as well as restricting child access to the internet (specific sites and time of day). SpamKiller will intercept spam before it gets into your Outlook or Outlook Express inbox and allow you to purge it or accept it.
-PJ
I have cleaned up 3 friends machines in the last month. The spy ware and viruses on their machines were appalling.
I think I may understand why . . . You think the problem didn't start until they first came aboard? Well, if so . . . I was here before almost any of them came aboard and the net was already lousy with spammers when I arrived, almost all of them academic rejects. No, I do not think we can blame the unwashed masses for this one.
I have Time-Warner's Road Runner and was a target of a Denial of Service attack. Security changed my IP address in half an hour. No problem. I have the WinXP Pro SP-1 firewall and Blackice Defender running which warned me of these attacks.
In my computer's defense, I'm running that horrible Windows ME, which is the worst version of Windows ever released. I'm going to have to take a long weekend to backup my data, find my installation disks, and install a new OS.
I'm pretty happy with my Norton virus protection, but it doesn't have that same feature as VirusScan. I may have to switch to that after I complete the OS overhaul.
That spyware and other crap hijacked my browser a few weeks ago. I ran AdAware and found a folder with a .dll and another foreign file without a source/date stamp was located. Moved them somewhere else and rebooted. No more problem. I think I clicked on an ad in some spam the day before. I will never do that again. I'll search out reputable businesses to deal with on my own.
I think it's part of the firewall programs they offer.
Mcafee.com
Ah just wait for the corporate version of XP Pro SP-2 to show up on the newsgroups in a few weeks:):)
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