Dumbest Guy Alive

'Open proxies are the single greatest threat.'
 - David Ritz

Spam is a problem we all deal with, regardless of platform. AOL estimate that 80% of their traffic is spam. We use filters at both the local and ISP server level; organisations band together to document origins and block them; the spammers themselves count on only one message in a million netting a sucker; yet the deluge continues.

One of the most important tools of the spammer is finding a relay that completely disguises sender addresses, and no tool out there does the job as well as AnalogX's Proxy.

Proxy is a poorly written piece of software (as are all the AnalogX offerings) which comes 'out of the box' with all the bad stuff enabled so the spammers can hook up to the machines where it is running and use them as unsuspecting relays.

As over one million people have been injudicious enough to install the program, the possibilities for spammers are today more than adequate. Killing off machines running AnalogX Proxy would go a long way to stopping the pestilence of spam.

And despite its poor engineering, Proxy can be configured to not function as a spam relay - it's just that these 'tweaks' are turned off by default, and most users don't know how to configure the program, or what the issues and tangible threats are.

And thus the misery continues.

SPEWS now calls Marc Thompson (AnalogX's real world name) 'the dumbest guy alive', and they certainly don't get an argument from professional developers.

Following a write-up at the New York Times, SPEWS has taken to listing the thousands upon thousands of wide-open Proxy IPs functioning as spam relays.

What can you do? You can surf to the AnalogX website and send a software report to the author, requesting that safety features in Proxy be turned on default.

Use this URL to send Thompson a nastygram.