In the suicide operation, the botnet's connections were used by Kaspersky to notify all 150,000 of the infected machines (which is uncommon in itself—most would prefer to not know their computers have been doing naughty things in the dark). Instead of popping up a window full of l33t retardedness, Shadow provided instructions on how to kill itself, one node at a time, to the unsuspecting users. You can check out the details of the fix here. [Kaspersky via Ars Technica]

Our own Jason Chen also noticed a surprise when he docked his iPhone this morning—this big fat ad for MobileMe in iTunes under the "Summary" tab for his phone. No code installed here, but getting spammed for a service that's had hiccup after embarrassing hiccup over the last several weeks is not the best way to keep those already in your customer base happy. Tsk tsk Apple. [Computerworld]

I hope you are right about CERN's Large Hadron Collider exploding and destroying the whole frikkin' universe in a big fiery ball of antimatter, neutrons and Higgs bosons.

That way we won't have to try and decipher your spam any more.

Yours Sincerely,
j.

P.S. Check out MIT Center for Theoretical Physics' admin answer to this guy after the jump. Apparently he doesn't only spam via email, but calls and harasses people everywhere and leaves messages on answering machines.
P.P.S. Stop sending mail, you psycho.
P.P.P.S. Can someone at Google shut down this spammer's Gmail account at once? Thanks.

On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 12:42 PM, Scott Morley <****************@mit.edu> wrote: Dear Sir,

I am the Administrator for the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT. You have been repeatedly sending emails to the CTP regarding the LHC in Geneva. You have left dozens of messages on the answering machine of Professor Frank Wilczek and on the machines of various other professors. You have also called and attempted to speak with other professors—ones not involved in any way, shape or form with the LHC.

You have additionally phoned a member of my staff repeatedly and then chose to send a large mailing list of individuals an email where you directly insulted this person.

I am writing you to ask you to please cease your contacts with all members of this Center.

Thank you.

Scott Morley

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, SPAM! LOVELY SPAM!

Many security programs simply trigger an alarm when bandwidth demands exceed a certain point. They can be dumb, and might not know that it was you who wanted to download four movies at once, or send picture e-mail to 100,000 of your closest friends. This thing sees what you're doing and how you're doing it, and can safely say more frequently that some bizarre behavior is acceptable—though maybe not to your boss.

The software also watches for regular pings to computers across the net. By seeing not just the location but determining the intervals of the calls "home," Proteus can even figure out which malware is in use.

The reason this is so effective is that it differentiates systems that otherwise look identical. Corporate laptops all look the same, software wise, right? If someone can crack one, they can crack them all. If Proteus gets deployed, hackers have a much harder time with the old virtual B&E. Even when, say, a spambot was in place, it would have to know when each user would typically be in the mood for more bandwidth in order to fool Proteus.

Since this comes from Intel, word is that the company is trying to figure out a way to hardwire this stuff right into the chips, rather than let it be some subscription program that pops up every so often to scare you with over-the-top allegations of your system's vulnerability. [Technology Review]

The sheer volume of spam that can be sent by harnessing the full power of the Storm worm is much greater than anything before. Due to this fact, the money that is generated from spamming, as well as from business deals that are a result of said spam, is thought to be in the area of millions of dollars per day. Clearly, we're in the wrong business. [Personal Computer World]

While the military was tight-lipped about the attacks, Chosun Ilbo newspaper claims that the origin was China.

No confidential information was captured in the process, as these soldiers' PCs are only used for personal use (a.k.a., passing the time through Desktop Tower Defense and maybe the latest Victoria's Secret fashion show). And while South Korea boosts their spam filters, North Korea may begin sending out legitimate intelligence, just to spite their enemies. [smh via theinquirer]

Part of the fun is the artist's luring of the spam by posting email addresses on numerous websites and bulletin boards. And, as spam messages are received, their addresses are sent to various blacklists on the Interwebs in an attempt to spare others the craptastic suffering from such detritus. Of course, the pile of shredded paper is recycled to alleviate any guilt or bad karma.

Take the jump to see the grisly executions, as well as a few observations.

"Spamtrap" - watch the video

There's something truly gratifying about seeing this spam physically executed right there in front of you. This reminds us of a malevolent boss from long ago whose picture adorned a dartboard at home, and became our whipping post for venting daily frustrations. Sometimes destroying such effigies can be a catharsis, exactly what's needed against such seemingly unwinnable battles. – Charlie White

Artist's Page [Bill Shackelford, via boing boing]

We're loading this up and trying it now. This whole spam problem is getting to be ruinous and a scourge on humanity. It clogs up all those pipes on the Interwebs, so much so that sifting through all of it is becoming a chore that makes email hardly worth it. For instance, I counted 675 spam e-mail messages in our Gizmodo tips email box on December 25 alone. Help us, bejeebus.

Any other suggestions, commenters? Is there a perfect solution to the spam plague? – Charlie White

Download of the Day: SpamFighter (Windows) [lifehacker]

Download SpamFighter

Of all the lame Christmas gifts I've received over the years, two stand out in my memory as particularly egregious. The first was a Manhattan Transfer album, the awfulness of which requires no further description from these quarters. The second? A shower radio that assuredly cost its giver less than a tenner. I know, I know, it's the thought that counts. But when poor reception limits your showertime musical entertainment to a station that specializes in airing the devilish wailings of sackless lite-rock crooners, my holiday spirit flushes away like so much corn-flecked dung.

Not that I'm philosophically opposed to the concept of shower radios, and I realize that there are some groovy options out there. But let's face reality here: sub-$10 shower radios of dubious quality are too often the gearhead's equivalent of a lump o' coal—yes, even if they're shaped like Shrek. After the jump, a brief history of this water-resistant gadget's transformation into the fruitcake of geekdom. PLUS: Spammers aren't nearly as smart as you think.

Let's start by rewinding to a glorious year: 1984, when the Olympics came to my hometown and Ghostbusters rightfully reigned supreme at the box office. It's also the year when, to the best of my knowledge, executoy catalogue Hammacher Schlemmer first offered the WetTunes, the granddaddy of semi-affordable shower radios. Powered by a 9-volt battery, the WetTunes was pretty revolutionary at the time—we'd all grown up learning that radio plus bathtub equals death, so the product gave me a newfound sense of faith in technology's ability to solve all of humanity's pressing problems. Alas, priced at $30 (c. $58 in today's dollars), the WetTunes was too expensive for my dad; I think he got me some knock-off Gobots instead.

Shower radios stayed high-end for a few years then, with Sony (of course) entering the fray with a technologically superior, ridiculously overpriced model: the ICF-S77W (c. $89 in today's dollars). But then you saw the boom in home-shopping channels, the perfect medium through which to sell shower radios. See, here's what I've figured out about the likes of HSN and QVC when it comes to electronics: they don't care a jot about specs, what they need is a superficial "wow" factor. And waterproofing is a cheap, easily understandable wow. Heck, here's a little free advice, guys—waterproof a 13-inch TV by encasing it in plastic, and advertise it as "the first TV you can watch in the tub!" You'll sell out within minutes.

All of a sudden, you had shower radios crashing below the $20 barrier, then the $10 barrier. The fact of the matter is that waterproofing—or, more accurately, water resistance—is pretty straightforward: have your Guangdong factory make a mold for the case, then crank those puppies out en masse. (There may be an FCC approval step here that I'm missing, but I don't have much faith in that particular agency's regulatory zeal nowadays, for better or for worse.)

The problem with gadgets that sell on gimmicks, of course, is that they have no incentive to, y'know, make the blasted thing work as advertised. The GearToGo's and Sentrya's of the world know that these sub-$10 units are purchased by-and-large for novelty purposes, or as gifts. They depend on the receiver of said gifts to be so amazed by the fact that he can actually listen to the radio in the shower without being electrocuted, he won't really mind when his audio choices are limited to a half-dozen Clear Channel atrocities.

Thing is, this is 2006, and such wowable consumers are a dying breed. In an age in which even Jessica Simpson namechecks HDTV video modes in commercials, shower radios float relatively few boats. So how about all us skinflint gearheads make a vow this year, in order to end the madness once and for all: if we are given a shower radio, we will kindly tell the giver that, while the thought appreciated, such craptacular electronics no longer have a place in our society.

Then, for dramatic effect, the radio in question should be thrown upon the ground and stomped into smithereens, in plain view of the giver who thought he/she was being oh-so-clever by spending $5.03 on such a gee-whiz gadget. Sounds heartless, I realize, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Who's with me?

BEHIND THE TIMES: Spammers are known for baiting potential dupes with absurdly good deals—mortgage rates of 2.15 percent and the like. So what to make of a recent spam I got from "USB Stick Factory", advertising a 1-gig Flash memory drive for $12.99? That's a decent price, for sure, but come on—I can easily get an identically sized drive from xPCGear.com (and lots of other legitimate joints) for just seven bucks more. Us low-enders are concerned about price, sure, but a $7 price differential isn't worth the gamble.

So, note to Douglas Ching, who identifies himself in this spam as "marketing manager, Starline International Group": you gotta keep up with the times and slash those tease prices, my friend. No one's gonna gamble on your goods unless they can save at least 75 percent by rolling the spam dice.

NEXT WEEK: Last-minute gift guide for that not-so-special someone in your life.

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a columnist for both The New York Times and Slate. His Low End Theory column appears every Thursday on Gizmodo.

Read more Low End Theory

The big news is that spammers are wily and rascally, easily trumping every filter anti-spam companies come up with. Image spam, specifically image spam that automatically changes a few pixels every so often to avoid getting found out, is all the rage. The most popular and lucrative spam? Penny stocks, which spammers get idiots to buy to jack the price before selling and running off with the profits.

So the real question is this: have you really been getting boatloads of extra spam lately or is it just a slow news week at the paper of record? –Adam Frucci

Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself [New York Times]

Time Bandits

You might recall a little incident down in Florida a few years back, when a bunch of Wal-Mart shoppers stampeded over one another like so many cracked-out longhorns. Their excuse for acting more like beasts than men? A DVD player going for the then-unheard of price of $29.87. It was, at first glance, a sad day for humanity, not to mention for that one lady who got knocked unconscious.

But you know what? As a fellow cheapskate, I understand where these folks were coming form. Not to say I'm itching to pancake someone in pursuit of an Apex DVD player, but let's face it—when a once unattainable product dips below the magic $30 barrier, those of us with shorts arms and deep pockets tend to lose our minds. How could this happen? Pshaw, why doesn't it happen more?

I share this depressing thought by way of introducing the newest member of the sub-$30 club: the personal video recorder. That's right, the TiVo has been low-ended into the $29.99 I/O Magic PC PVR, which brings time shifting and live pausing to the masses—well, at least the masses willing to tinker with their PCI slots. It's by no means the end of the set-top box—you can still buy some more atrocious free agents for the Knicks, James Dolan—but the proliferation of budget PVRs does hint at the growing sophistication of low-end consumers. Ruminations and recriminations after (you guessed it) the jump. PLUS: Low-end spam, scourge or menace?

The downward trend in PVR prices is notable mostly for its rapidity. This, of course, is mainly thanks to the WinTV line from Hauppauge, starting with the popular WinTV-PVR-150. If memory serves, these listed at $99 as recently as the spring—a pretty good deal, no doubt, but not quite low-end territory. Now look: aside from the I/O Magic bargain-basement unit, there are sub-$50 options from Kworld, AVer, Bytecc, and some other brands whose ads you definitely won't be seeing during the Super Bowl.

When our discount pals in Shenzhen get cranking on a product this quickly, it obviously indicates a couple of things. First off, the technical details must be relatively straightforward, or at least easy to copy off publicly available documentation. (I'll give everyone the benefit of the doubt here and assume—totally, totally naively—that corporate espionage only happens in America.) Secondly, there are low-end retailers willing to stock the product, with the full expectation of turning a profit. And that means there's an assumption of demand among a demographic not known for its technological acumen.

The Kworld PVR is USB 2.0 compatible, but the rest of the lot are for PCI slots. All of us know what that means—lots of troubleshooting, especially for those unfortunate XP Home users who never upgraded to Service Pack 2. (Or, like myself, left my damn antivirus software on while doing so, and ended up with the OS equivalent of Quatto, minus the telepathy.) But we've reached a level where those who've missed the TiVo boat are willing to put up with a certain level of tech discomfort in pursuit of the PVR's seemingly magical benefits.

Though technically more sophisticated than in years past—thanks in small part, I hope, to our sister site Lifehacker—low-end consumers must still possess strong stomachs. That's because the dime-store PVRs not only lack the nifty menus and recommendation engines of pay services like TiVo, they also are still rough around the edges when it comes to performance. I haven't tried the sub-$30 I/O Magic unit, but I can vouch for the fact that the Kworld USB 2.0 unit has some quality issues. Yes, it time shifts as advertised, but you also have to figure out that a driver update is required, as well as noodle with some typically godawful bundled software. And the picture quality is a notch below TiVo at its most compressed.

Fortunately, low-enders like myself are used to deprivations of this nature. Heck, I watched the entire 2005 NFL playoffs on a 13-inch Apex tube TV that was covered in a thick layer of dust. (I swore off Windexing for Lent last year, and just kept on going.) But just because we're cheap doesn't mean we don't want to take part in the PVR revolution, and I gotta hand it to I/O Magic and its off-brand cohorts for realizing that late adopters need love, too.

Now it's time for the TV makers of the world to step up to the plate. You hear me, Coby and jWIN? We want sub-$100 tube TVs that'll work with PCI cards without extensive modifications. I'm sure there's some way to work this mod as-is, with the aid of many gold-plated Radio Shack cables, but my life's a wee bit too hectic to learn it—the wife's buggin' me to grout the ledge, and the third season of The Wire just came out on DVD. Please, help us TiVo without the TiVo (not to mention the monthly fee).

GADGET SPAM: I've long wanted to do a Low End Theory on gadgets that can be purchased via spam solicitations. I'm hip got hipped to a Thai company called Inex Global thanks to one of those annoying little e-mails, and I'm trying to do some due diligence. But I'd also like to throw open the chore to y'all, gentle readers, and ask the question: has anyone out there ever purchased a gadget off a spam? If so, what was your experience? Did your identity end up getting swiped by a 16-year-old Bulgarian Java programmer, or were you actually happy you took the plunge? Lemme know (in comments, if you'd like), and the, uh, immortality of a mention in this glorious space could be yours.

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a columnist for both The New York Times and Slate. His Low End Theory column appears every Thursday on Gizmodo.

Read more Low End Theory

From D-Link, the SecureSpot DSD-150 features plenty of things to make you feel safer in your Internet travels, including a firewall, spyware protection, virus protection, identity theft protection, pop-up blocker, spam blocker and plenty of parental controls to make sure Junior doesn't wind up going blind at an early age. Never mind that most, if not all, of these features can be had by using things like Linux and Firefox. The included software can be controlled with a Web-based interface, provided your kid hasn't already blocked access to it. So much for common sense being the best type of security.

She's available now for $99.99. – Nicholas Deleon

Product Page [D-Link via The Red Ferret Journal]

Unfortunately, the spammers DDOSed Blue Security until it died. Because spammers are shit-eating scum, they had hundreds of zombie machines at their fingertips and slammed Blue Frog into paste. Oh well. Couldn't someone work out a SETI@Home sort of thing that does this exact same thing? Torrent the download and make sure there is no one point of attack?

Web attacks end anti-spam effort [BBC]
Blue Frog killed by Russian spammer [TheInquirer]

Once tagged with [SPAM], [VIRUS], or [PHISH] the Spam Cube software toolbar can filter these unwanted messages to a specific folder or the trash bin. Unfortunately the software toolbar only works with Windows-based email clients, so Thunderbird or other users will need to set up their own filtering rules. Out of the box they claim the Spam Cube is 95-percent accurate and after some training it can be upwards of 98-percent accurate.

Don't Can Spam, Cube It [PCWorld]

A pittance, you say? Maybe. It'd be nice to just include that in the basic price of the game to begin with. But the real kicker is a second "option" they give you: allow ESPN to "sponsor" your "online subscription" to the game, instead, and you can play for free! All you have to do is give up your e-mail identity and allow ESPN to fill your inbox with promotional spam.

We'd feel like a sucker to sign away our spam-free rights, but we'd feel like an even bigger sucker to fork over a measly two bucks to e-sucker punch your roommate in the jaw. Heck, we could just do that for free.

EA experimenting with marketing [ArsTechnica]

Their theory is this: if you have to pay to send email, you won't send spam. This theory has a gaping hole—spammers will pay to send you spam. It all depends on your definition of "spam"—and how lax AOL or Yahoo's definition will be.

Our thoughts after the jump.

The only true anti-spam method is challenge-response, AKA the spammer Turing test. ("Hi, this is Joe's mailbox. Just hit reply to prove you exist and you'll never see this message again.") This test already costs plenty in terms of CPU cycles and bandwidth and the pay-for-play vision is a distant cousin to this same process. ("Hi, this is Joe's mailbox. Pay me to send this message.")

The way AOL's system works is frustratingly similar to the Marijuana Tax—you pay for "stamps" in order to access AOL's bulk email system. If they pay, organizations like the Red Cross and Red Envelope can spam you willy-nilly while the rest of the po' folks with the penis pills will have to contend with spam filters—the same filters which they have been bypassing quite handily already. This sounds like a way for these big guys to get a little cash and for the other big guys to feel like their doing their part in not pissing you off.

Trust us, guys, you are pissing us off.

It's the mail handling protocols that are broken. The creators designed them to ensure ease of use, which led to the rise of spam. What we need here aren't ways for AOL and Yahoo to bankroll their next corporate retreat in Bali, but an entirely new system of email "subscriptions" which ensures that email to and from the folks from whom you want to receive email makes it to your mailbox, and everyone else's is buffeted back. This will take a concerted effort by open source/academic folks to adopt and maintain this new system which will then trickle down to the corporate level. Of course, new systems for spam-resistant email have been in the cards for years, but no one—even people not trying to make money on the side—have been able to come to any sort of agreement.

Let's talk about next-gen mail handling protocols in the comments, because there has to be a better way.

E-mail charging plan to beat spam [BBC]