advertisment goes to far

How long before advertisment goes to far? Or has it?

At one time I believed that concerned netizens could put a stop to this, but now im beginning to loose hope.

Advertisers destroy software that we put on our computers to stop their spyware and it’s ok. Agreed we didn't pay anything for it, but the fact is we wanted it.

Advertisers install trojans on our systems and protect their "right" to do this with ELUAs. If I put a trojan on a computer and tricked someone into clicking "agree" to a eula, id be in jail

Advertisers are using net send a commonly used admin tool to sneak pop up ads onto our computers causing us to shut down services we might want to use or install costly firewalls.

Advertisers are now spamming blogs, flooding friendly family services with porn and rip-off ads

Advertisers make mailboxes unusable. They fill it with so much crap its impossible to sort out real messages.

They invade every aspect of our lives with blatant disrespect for us, and our governments sanction this. Its good for business, but what about us?

Does anyone think we can still stop this by ourselves, Or is it time to bring in people who will make laws to stop this?

Now I realize not giving your email address out and constantly updating spam filters are effective, but this means behavior that can become anti-social and allot of time spent that can be used for other things.

I guess what it really boils down too is: should the technically inadequate be ignored to keep the Internet un-regulated. Or should the Internet be for everyone and how do we decide just what everyone means.

I think we have not choice but to stop it our selves. The problem is that protecting your self against the methods mentioned above is a little over the head of your average computer user. Most people don't know how to use a firewall to block net sends or set up junk mail filters. And just when you think you've dealt with every method of computer based advertising they come up with something new.

i don't know if it would be fesiable to write a new mail protocol that somehow makes spamming impossible, because im unfamiliar with spamming techniques. i imagine that this would require radical changes to companies hardware and software. perhaps the invention of new hardware and software? but maybe its about time for radical change. could this be implemented successfully?

rant...
i mean that if most ISP's and Microsoft eventually were to set up a mail protocol that would, Block mail from older protocols, and also Make spamming impossible with the new protocol,
i speculate that the 'average internet user', and all their 'average internet friends', (who i assume have email addresses with their ISP or HOTMA!L) could be seemlessly converted to the new protocol, and even be able to retain the same address, thereby forcing the infinate 'not so average' minority groups of mail providers to convert to the new protocol.

with a nice user friendly name, and a trendy logo, companies that advertive this new theoritical mail service would surely succed over all those that...well...weren't so technologically new. thereby cutting spammers off at the pass. with enough migration to the new service, there would be nobody left for spammers to spam.

cwk9 you say we should do it ourselves but how. The person sending out this **** is usually savvy enough to protect themselves from reprisals. You got any good ideas...im with ya!

***Disclaimer: I'm posting an incident that happened to a family member, which shows a pornographic site. Please, do not visit the site, it was an incident that happened, and I was proving a point. Again, I'm only after proving a point, and want to keep the content family-friendly. Please don't visit the site.***


I don't like spamming at all really, and I wish there was a way to stop it. Sadly, I don't think there is a way to. Tedob1, I agree with you. My mom was watching the movie "The X-Men" and decided to try to go to the site and everything. My mom, who isn't a computer whiz or anything like that, didn't decide to lookup the official site and tried X-Men.com Well, you could probably guess the results. I want to advise that nobody goes there, it is a porn site and could get you in trouble. In general, I just want to say I agree and I hope that people can come up with ideas on how to stop it, as I'm not the most creative person.

Here we go!
1:Don t use your real email adress[like in kazaa-lite but use fake]
2:Hunt all the spy-ware out of your pc.[adware,Xcleaner-free,Spybot search & destroy]
3:Clean your temp.internet files with the spy-cookies between them[like flavicom]
4:I use a firewall wich blocks my email adress from being seen during surfing the web[i get an allert when the firewall blocks sending my email adress]
5:use an ad-blocker during surfing[but NOT at ANTIONLINE....THUS SUPPORTING JP]

With these steps you will get less spam!.......But never 0

For the ones you still get make a filter rule in your firewall or email prog.

My 0.2

That would work, but remember that when using your e-mail to be careful as to what you signup with that email. If you signup for like a yahoo service, you might also be signing up for information from their sponsers. That could be another tip, just to watch out what you signup for.

So what your saying is:

The internet is not a place to be enjoyed by all. A place where anyone can learn anything. Its only a place with traps meant to lure us into the snares of marketers. The only way one can get anything out of the internet is to hide behind phony identities and if you don’t know that, well, too bad for you.

If someone forwards a message they like that you’ve sent them, cease immediately all communication with that person. S/he’s not to be trusted and will only betray you to the marketers.

You must be less than honest in all that you do, never reveal your true identity or the marketers will get you.

What in hell are we doing here? Otherwise honest people acting like bandits! Shunning people that only want to be friendly! This is a fucging outrage and must be stopped.

In addition to the steps kadeng has posted,

I recommend using several e mail addresses.

I use one e mail address for retrieving passwords to sites that I want to join.
I use a second e mail address for newsletters that I want.
I use a third e mail address for personal e mail.
A fourth for school purposes.
And last but not least, a fifth for business.

I pull off of them into one e mail client and filter them to folders.

Before I pull them into my e mail client, I use a program called mail washer.

This program lets me blacklist via address or server.

Thas kept my spam mail to a minimum of about 3 messages a week.

I have setup a coworker with similar settings and his spam went from about 100msgs a day to 10 a week.

There are several other things to use as kadeng has posted above.

I also recommend using software like popup-stopper . When I am at a site that I know won't abuse me (eg Antionline.com) I disable the software.

When I search the web, I use the popup-stopper but when I need a second page to load, simply hold the shift key and click on the link. Everything else will be blocked.

Im not a fan of spam, I hate it alot. Its nothing but a bunch of people lookin to make cheap cash quickly. They should put their time to something more productive and atleast to something that would earn them more money.

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cwk9 you say we should do it ourselves but how. The person sending out this **** is usually savvy enough to protect themselves from reprisals. You got any good ideas...im with ya!

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Ya there’s not much we can do about the people sending the stuff the best we can do is protect our selves from spam its self. Maybe if enough people take measures against theses types of ads spamming will be ineffective to the point that the spammers will just disappear. I’ll admit that’s kind of far fetched since spamming is so cheap even if one out of every 3000 people read your spam its still a success.

It s sad ppl need to install antivirus,firewalls,anti-spyware tools and ad-blokkers to have a good time on the internet,ie talk with their frends and family.

And when you are not aware of the dangers and spy-ware ie spam,the internet is becomming more and more a bad place to be!

My parrents started using their pc 2 years ago.

Not aware of patching,antivirus or firewalls let allone spy-ware and spam.

When they got their fist spam mail,it took me almost 30 min.to explain them why and how someone they don t know sends them this mail they didn t like!

All i can say,i feel sorry for the ones not aware and i hope there will come global laws to stop this!!!

another way to blocks ads and popups is to edit the hosts file in your windows folder, you can find premade ones around the net i think you can find one at http://www.kazaalite.com/

Very good suggestions. One thing i was able to find out was that 90percent of the spam came from about 3percent of the IP's as identified in the headers. my server control panel, like most of yours, has a feature where you can configure a block for IP's, subjects, words in the body, or anything after the @ in an address. After i databased (old paper & pencil style :) ) the addresses, IP's and certain phrases or words in the subject/body, i had about 20 entries and it stopped 98percent of the spam at my server address. There isn't much real control on most "free webbased" addresses you might sign up for, and i found that trying to block with the tools in Outlook Express-6+ was a neverending job with few results. I've noticed that the new Symantec offering has a spam-identifyer which puts the words "spam alert" into the first of the subject line. I'm watching it to see if it "spam alerts" anything i might want to keep, and if it doesn't do so then i might use the Outlook Express blocker to whack anything that has "spam alert" in the subject over to a "check later" folder or just delete it off the server. At one time i installed a program called "Spam Assasin" on my server and it about drove me nuts so i took it off. That was before i had the new domain interface with the newer mail control. I think it's going to be a matter of figure out how to whack the garbage ourselves, as the so called laws are pointless and without teeth. Besides, if the lawmakers actually figured out how to make the spammers feel pain, the sickos would just move offshore and keep up their attack on our privacy. Oh, yes, you can also block your browser from going to certain IP's, so that might help some people. Another thing to watch for is the old "disconnect and redial the 1-900 or a dozen other costly area codes offshore. I keep my modem volume on high, and only got whacked once, it locked up my 'puter so i couldn't disconnect with the mouse so i pulled the phone line right outa the wall. Got billed for one minute at $29, called AT&T billing and explained what had happened (a popup ad sponsored by BMB but not on the AO account) and told them they could delete the charge or i'd go elsewhere for long distance service and they deleted the charge. Then they told me to contact my local phone company and block the 1-900 and other offshore dialings, which i did. I don't call anyone offshore anyway except for one old Leopard-II tanker chief in Germany, and we just write occasional cards now.
If all else fails, hunt them down and shorten their fingers! :D

Ted >

Trace your spammer back to his host network and get them added to the Real time black hole list (For more info on the RBL see: http://mail-abuse.org/). The RBL is just the sort of thing you suggest - network admins clubbing together to protect their users from the scourge of spam.

Then you can use the RBL data to dissallow incoming connections from Banned IPs to your mail server. Spammers get a neat little message saying that they have been blackholed. (So does everyone else on their network but hey - you can't make sushi without slicing fish - read the docs carefully!).

When an ISP becomes balckholed they very quickly find the user that has been spamming and ban that user instantly (so as to get removed from the RBL list).

It would be nice to be able to pull a few of ones blacker peices of code from ones toolbox and teach the spammers a lesson. It would also be nice to be able to open ones mail without fear of a deluge of non-family-friendly advertising.

But fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side; and the Dark Side leads to prison, Big Black Bubba, and a sore ringer. Using the realtime backhole list is almost as fun as a DDOS but without the danger of the sore ringer.

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Originally posted here by Tedob1
How long before advertisment goes to far? Or has it?

At one time I believed that concerned netizens could put a stop to this, but now im beginning to loose hope.

Advertisers destroy software that we put on our computers to stop their spyware and it’s ok. Agreed we didn't pay anything for it, but the fact is we wanted it.

Advertisers install trojans on our systems and protect their "right" to do this with ELUAs. If I put a trojan on a computer and tricked someone into clicking "agree" to a eula, id be in jail

Advertisers are using net send a commonly used admin tool to sneak pop up ads onto our computers causing us to shut down services we might want to use or install costly firewalls.

Advertisers are now spamming blogs, flooding friendly family services with porn and rip-off ads

Advertisers make mailboxes unusable. They fill it with so much crap its impossible to sort out real messages.

They invade every aspect of our lives with blatant disrespect for us, and our governments sanction this. Its good for business, but what about us?

Does anyone think we can still stop this by ourselves, Or is it time to bring in people who will make laws to stop this?

Now I realize not giving your email address out and constantly updating spam filters are effective, but this means behavior that can become anti-social and allot of time spent that can be used for other things.

I guess what it really boils down too is: should the technically inadequate be ignored to keep the Internet un-regulated. Or should the Internet be for everyone and how do we decide just what everyone means.

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Nice post.

If anyone is interested, I'm currently working on an email client which guards against spam, does not automatically run .vbs files, etc etc. The result? An environment with much much much less spam (I have a stats thing built into the program, and I now have to sort through 60% less email (about 2% of which is spam!). And to make things even neater... that 2% of spam that does get into my inbox only gets there because it's PGP encoded... I have yet to implement the decode routines to block these emails. Anyway... to address the fact that many users don't know how to properly set up a spam filter, the program automatically has them built in. It has several different settings to block either more or less spam (the default setting blocks nearly all spam, but can be changed based on user needs). I believe this is definately a bonus for the family environment as it blocks out all sex related advertisements. It's also good from the time management point... if you are the kind of person who gets 100+ emails daily, and 90 of them are spam, you'll know that it takes a long time to delete those 90 spams and find the 10 regular emails in there. When you only have 12 messages delivered to your inbox and 2 are spam, your sorting through your emails is obviously a little bit faster. :)

I just got one of those stupid net send spams while typing this, so if I can I might try and incoroperate a way to block spames from those into my program as well.

This is not to be taken as an advertisement of my program. It is just to merely show that there are indeed solutions available to stop some of this nonsense! (note I said some and not all!) I can't do much about trojans, virus attacks and EULA's. :P

Anyway, if you are interested in my program, its web site is http://www.compmore.net/~chambers/spam/

McAfee also has a solution to spam problems.