munky.org|v3.0

the different view of news

It doesn’t pay to be a spammer

Only need a thousand more of these!

According to CSO Online, yet another Facebook spammer has been nail to the wall with outlandish fines for spamming. This time, Adam Guerbuez, of Montreal, was order to pay $1 billion CDN to Facebook for his spamming campaign.

Mr. Guerbuez set up a phishing site, stealing login information, then using a botnet to send out over 4 million spam messages. Man would I like to get my hands on that punk.

Obviously, he’s not on Forbes billion list, so don’t expect him to pony up. In fact, he’s refusing to pay a penny, and has declared bankruptcy. He’s trying to get a book deal out of the whole thing. Hah! If he did, he’d never see a penny of it. Oh well.

As I said, he isn’t the first that has been nailed. Last year another company prevailed against spammer Sanford Wallace, awarding more than $700 million US. Holy smokes.

Will all of this help us, the average joe, bombarded by spam daily? Maybe. According to Facebook’s CSO, Joe Sullivan, he has “seen discussions in underground forums where spammers say things like, ‘I don’t want a $100 million judgment hanging over me.’”

Honestly, I don’t know about you, but I would rather see these scum bags go to jail. I don’t see the humor in being one of the (insert cruel words here) who ensure that our daily inboxes are clutter with useless junk every day. It’s like the internet version of the shady street guy selling watches out of his jacket. Look at the fake or stolen inventory, and never realize you’ve already been pick-pocketed.

Maybe one day we will find a way to rid the word of spam. Until then, hopefully these billion dollar awards will help to keep some of these guys in check.

Russians, clunkers, and hackers

Akula class Russian submarine, like the two that were found off the East U.S. coast

Akula class Russian submarine, like the two that were found off the East U.S. coast

Seems like Russia wants the world to know that it is supposedly back on top of its military game. The U.S. has been tracking two Russian submarines off the east coast of the U.S., hanging around in international waters. That’s comforting to know given that A) I don’t trust Russians and B) I live on the east coast. Of course, I’d be a maniacal conspiracy-theorist to believe that they are out there sitting for me, but it still isn’t comforting. Russia has been showing signs of wanting to reunite its former soviet states, and has been showing that this new “democratic” government – lead by Medvedev, prime minister Putin’s puppet – is still built a lot like it’s former socialist self. I’ll save my evidence for another day though, I’m sure I’ve pissed enough folks off saying I don’t trust Russians.

Aside from Russians, wtf is this about clunkers? If you guessed CARS – Cash for Clunkers – then you’d be absolutely right. This geniously little program, which is about to run about $3 billion once Obama signs the latest bill, has done more to stimulate than the $750 billion+ economic bailout/stimulus. They are estimating 750,000 cars sold. Even if half of the buyers were planning on buying anyways (according to economists), that’s still hundreds of thousands of new car buyers out there.  That’s billions of dollars worth of new loans flowing into the market place, hundreds of millions if not billions being pulled out of savings to pumped back into the economy. That’s salesmen who finally are getting a decent check, sales managers who have work to do. A definitely positive shot to the economy. So for all you naysayers, complain once you kiss your elbow.

So now what does the 1st part, and this last part, hackers, have in common? Is it that they are both listed using an odd number, or that putting the numbers together makes an unlucky American number (13) ? Well, its true and all, but the meaning is much deeper than that. Russians = hackers. Maybe. At least some who manage to stay away from the Vodka water fountains long enough =)

As I said, it could be. If you haven’t heard, someone or a group of someones led a distributed denial-of-service – DDoS – attack against twitter and some other services yesterday. Turns out that this attack was launched specifically at sites by a man named “George”, including his twitter page, livejournal, and facebook. As of this writing, his Livejournal and Facebook page is still down. But why him? To quote CNN:

His recent posts include: “How Russia was preparing military agression (sic) against Georgia, how they were training soldiers and mobilizing military equipment, what kind of provocations were carried out by the separatists prior to the war.”

“Seems somebody did not like such a chronicle of events,” he [ "George" ] told CNN.

So was it Russians? Was it someone in Georgia who is pro-Russian? Hopefully the world may end up finding out. Given that this dipshit(s) didn’t just take out one page, but knocked out Twitter, numerous groups are now involved with this, including the Georgian government. But I would be more concerned with the hackers that use Twitter.

What this all boils down to is more Russians or pro-Russians afraid of the truth. They should’ve just stuck with the vodka.

Oh, and for one last jab. I just noticed that if you look at Medvedev and Putin side by side, Medvedev looks like 007, while Putin fits the bill for one of his Russian enemy masterminds.

putin1medvedev2