AS 25653
FortressITX
went to zero for one day, 15 May, in the
May 2012
U.S. SpamRankings.net,
but bounded back up to more than 294,000 spam messages a day a week later,
placing #6 for the month as a whole.
This was the second time FortressITX made the U.S. top 10. It had been #9 in March, but had dropped out of the April 2012 U.S. rankings. And yes, it’s snowshoe spam. That ASN does show a few other problems, also not botnets.
-jsq
Microsoft, world leader in Internet security, will doubtless clean up its spamming act when it sees its AS 8075 is #1 for outbound spam in the U.S. for April 2012 in rankings from PSBL data, pushing the U.S. to #1 worldwide.
Other rankings don’t show Microsoft high, but does MSFT really want to show up in any of these rankings?
| Rank | (Previous) | Country | Population | Spam Volume | Percent of top 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | (3) |  US |
310,232,863 | 673,306 | 18.2% |
| 2 | (2) |  IN |
1,173,108,018 | 506,397 | 13.7% |
| 3 | (1) |  CN |
1,330,044,000 | 413,089 | 11.2% |
| Total | 3,689,376 | 100% |
These rankings that show Microsoft high are derived by SpamRankings.net from PSBL blocklist data. The April 2012 SpamRankings.net from CBL blocklist data do not show Microsoft in the top 10. Apparently PSBL’s spam traps happened to be in the line of spam from Microsoft, while CBL’s were not.
And of course Microsoft probably doesn’t mean to be sending any of that spam. More likely botnets exploited a MSFT security vulnerability. Here’s hoping they clean it up soon!
-jsq
0. Premise: free and open software will stay indefinitely. Full stop. You may argue eternally, but free software is the ultimate disruptive technology, moving up from the low ground, replacing complicated and ill-fitting proprietary alternatives at every turn, such as web-browsers, e-mail clients, video players, office software, etc., which at one point cost money, but now most people find that they can no longer justify spending money to buy an upgrade for more “Clippy the Happy Assistant”. Proprietary software will only be able to stay relevant by searching out ever more niche applications, or by massive expenditure on research in high-end applications for which it will take time for the ideas and algorithms to filter down to the greater community, and thus a brief window of profitability will remain. Software patents are nothing but a destructive force to retard innovation, and with more and more of the technology and legal communities realizing this basic fact, software patents are about to go away forever.I think he’s being a bit optimistic about software patents, but no more so than Windows advocates claiming that open software is a flash in the pan. Then he gets into the undeniable stuff, chief of which is:
1.1 History’s greatest playground for malicious software. With unpatched machines on the internet taking only minutes to become infested with viruses, or become a slave bot for massive illegal spamming operations, Windows is a blight on the Internet’s infrastructure.And it keeps getting better. He says he wrote it just as a game, but it pretty much spells out why I don’t use Windows, plus why Windows is a menace to the Internet.