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December 08, 2002

Jihad

The article starts off innocently enough about a man, Alan Ralsky, that is one of the top spammers in the world building a new house in Oakland County near Detroit. They talk about the banks of servers he has to power his operation, yadda yadda yadda, but it's the last few paragraphs that really make my blood run cold:

Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam.

It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened.

"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.

"Isn't technology great?"

Someone please kill this man now.

Looks like the guy's getting a taste of his own medicine, though. Two weeks after the last article, it looks like he's now being inundated with a flood of mail after his address was posted on Slashdot and a campaign was arranged to sign him up for as many ad campaigns as possible.

Poetic.

Courtesy of James.

Posted by KinCross at December 8, 2002 10:27 AM

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