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Death of a spammer
« on: 2005-07-26 10:43:12 » |
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Russia’s Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered in Apartment
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/07/25/spammerdead.shtml
Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.
<snip>
Russian Media Hails Spammer’s Murder
http://www.mosnews.com/commentary/2005/07/26/spamassassin.shtml
Indeed, the deceased must have been the most hated person among 17.6 million Internet users in Russia, whom he continuously spammed over the last few years, sending out tons of email ads for his language courses. These feelings are shared by many among the 20 million Russian-speaking Internet users outside the country, whom he also plagued with unsolicited ads, both text and graphical: despite limiting its offers to Muscovites only, the American Language Center did send mail to locations as remote as California, Canada or the office network of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, in Israel.
Russian-language media, both online and offline, has made little effort to conceal one central thought when dealing with the spammer’s demise: that somehow the late Mr. Kushnir got what he deserved. “The Spammer Had it Coming”, one headline reads. “Spam is Deadly”, “Ignoble Death Becomes Russia’s Top Spammer”, “An Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem” - 84 Russian-language news captions on Kushnir’s murder, retrieved by the Yandex News search engine within a day of the event, seem to share the general feeling.
[...]
Given all this sad experience, and the constant increase in the number of unsolicited emails clogging Russia’s network traffic, one can easily imagine the feelings of a typical Russian Internet user, witnessing his very own and personal Inbox steadily reduced to another edition of a Trash folder. Joining the spamming industry in Russia is dirt cheap: any business can afford to mailbomb a million users for $100, and any individual can buy a software bundle, complete with mail address databases, starting from $20, to send out his CV, advertise his flat for rent, or sell a used car. Little wonder, that many spam-fighting tools, such as Spamcop, offer its users an option to ban any mail from the RU domain altogether, and thousands of Russian SMTP servers (including those of large ISP networks) occasionally make it to major international relay-blocking lists, due to spammers’ exploits. Which means that any mail originating from the Russian users of those servers gets trashed automatically, without notice to either the sender or the recipient.
It’s little wonder, then, that Vardan Kushnir became as popular a character among Russian-speaking Internet users, as Lord Voldemort must be among Hogwarts’ fans. And a tale of some anonymous ’Harry Potter’ paying him a private visit on a warm July morning produces quite a predictable sensation among the audience. Of course, everybody understands, that spam will not stop with Kushnir’s demise — it will persist for years to come, exactly the way Lord Voldemort finds his way back into the picture with every new installment of the Harry Potter saga. But this time, the magic wand has for once dealt a deadly blow to the arch-villain, and there seems to be no option left for the spectators, than to hail the magic.
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