MikeL

My Feedback: (3)

Cookies on your machine that generate an instant mass mailing? Sorry, but that's just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about. That's not how it works. You're making claims without providing any link between your spam and RCU. Toss up some message headers.

What's your daughter doing checking your email anyway? There's plenty of kid-safe email services out there if you feel she needs access to email. It's irresponsible parenting to allow a child access to an adult's email. Take some responsibility yourself for what your daughter can/cannot see rather than blaming others. It's your PC!

Elwood

My Feedback: (2)

Fortunately, that is untrue. If he was getting porn spam in his e-mail, he shouldn't give it out when registering with porn sites. This is purely an attack without anything to back it up. It would be nice if he could get a little help with his problem.

mpj220

If you do a search on both addresses, you will find that they both share the same IP address, Administrative Contact, and Technical Contact. I also discovered this same rumor a little over a week ago. One thing that I can tell you is that the registrant name on the xxx site has changed in the past week. When I checked last week the owner's name was Marc Vigod with the same address as VLM, inc.

http://dns411.com/

I too, have been receiving spam emails for porn and viagra. I can assure you that I do not surf porn sites therefore, I have no idea where they got my email account. If any of you are receiving unwanted emails and you use a POP type account, I highly recommend this free program. http://www.mailwasher.net/
It scans your email as it resides on the server and gives you the opportunity to bounce it back to the originator. It makes your email appear to be invalid at their end.

Back to the original issue. Although these emails may not be generated via a cookie on my machine as my settings delete all cookies upon closing - except for "trusted" sites....RCU, homepage, etc. I did use my email for registering on this site. I recently updated my profile so that my email cannot be viewed by others.
Does RCU share or sell our registration information with anyone outside of RCU - including sister or parent organizations?

Thank you,
Mark

MikeL

My Feedback: (3)

I have no connections to Marc other than my usage of RCU, so this isn't biased. Your statement about the ownership of that site being listed as Marc last week is untrue, either through a mistake on your part or through some agenda of your own. The record for that site was last updated last September. If you pay attention you'll see that listed with the rest of the registrant info.

Where else have you submitted your email? Contests, web-registrations, product warranties, e-mail sent by you to various companies/commercial sites, your bank? Depending upon the privacy policy of any of these entities your e-mail address can be sold. Once it's been sold, it's availible to a large number of varied interests. Places like Yahoo and Hotmail sell addresses (or did at one point). Your own ISP can do that.

You get spam for porn and viagra because those are some of the entities that purchase contact databases. It's not necessarily because you've solicited that information in any way.

There's a whole lot of half-truths, misconceptions, and veiled finger pointing going on around here with regards to spam. I'd urge everyone to educate themselves on the issue before publicly making misleading statements. Ignorance can cause a lot of bad feelings, and needlessly damage reputations.

Marc runs a fine site here at RCU. He's been very explicit about the content allowed here, and his moderators have been zealous in maintaining the standards of the site.

=XGC= OzZ

FIrst I will say that any emails you get from any commercial site is not as a result of your records here in the RCU database.

We do hosting for a variety of clients of which some had requested all domain information including registration be handled by me and my company. I've been inthe programming and hosting business since 1996 and have had clients ranging from attorneys to those who run link sites in the adult world (keep in mind that Fortune 500 companies like AT&T, MCI, UUnet, Exodus and so on all host these servers as well)

I am extremely knowledgeable in server security and am quite sure that all sensitive information is securely kept private with ZERO chance any client could access it. We have tripwires in place so even if a breach had occured that although it would be too late I would at least be aware of how it happened and by who.

So I ask you did you ever get spam email before you joined RCU? We only started this site in December and I know anyone who has been online for any lenght of time has got adult emails. My friends kids for god's sake get them all the time and they don't belong to RCU and don't even know about it. Next they will blame poverty & all the problems in the world on RCU.

If you did get a spam email from us it would have to be sent through our system and thus would have the usual headers that you get from other users who send mail to you through our system otherwise sorry, it's just not possible as these systems are secure.

However I do know that there is a hole in these bulletin boards which can allow emails to be sent and spammed out but I caught this early on in the beginning of this year where we had a relatively benign incident which exposeed this flaw and I custom programmed in a patch to the software to prevent it again...I offered it to Mark Runryder who never even got back to me as to whether he wanted the fix for it...it was offered as a courtesy to him for free but I got no response from his as all the messages I had sent to him fell on deaf ears.

Oh...and if you want to contact ANY of the companies that are sending you spam and ask them where they got their list from I can 100% guarantee you that my name or RCU or any company I'm affiliated with is not going to be in their response. They won't even know who we are.


__________________
Marc
RCU Site Webmaster, Administrator & Proprieter

mpj220

MikeL,

Did you check the website registration last week?
I did (many more times than once) and the information I gave is correct. The statement I made above is TRUE. There is no half-truth or misconception about it. I really don't care if the owner is the same, my concern is.... Is this the source of the spam emails?

I have submitted my email to very few places. It is true that the spam porn emails can originate from any source. I highly doubt that my bank, that I have been registered with for well over 2 years, suddenly decided to get into the porn spamming business but, who knows, maybe they have.
It is most likely that my email has made it to a database that is bought and sold worldwide. It may have been given by my ISP (there privacy policy dis-allows them from that) or a small number of other sources. RCU is one of those sources. My email was required for registration and I did read the privacy policies. I enjoy RC and figured that I would give my address. I did not say that these spam emails are directly attributed to RCU. I asked a perfectly legitimate question. I asked the question because another user is getting the same type of spam that I am.
I used to register on all websites with a hotmail account as to avoid spam. The only problem that occurs is that I missed many legitimate emails because I would get to frustrated trying to sift through the hundreds of spam email associated with any hotmail account.

I have enjoyed RCU and will continue to do so. My only concern is the privacy of my email and if it was shared with any other source - including any affiliates of RCU.

BTW...... ZG77_OzZ,

What was Marc referring to with this statement at the end of your posted link?

"And to eliminate any ownership questions I've contacted the real owner and requested that the name now be put into his name to avoid any confusion. He agreed and said it was not a problem so the ownership will be transferred over to the real owner of the domain."
Just curious..

Thank you,
Mark

=XGC= OzZ

RCU does not sell any email listings at all.
This I now for fact.
You will not have to worry about any email being sold buy RCU.
I was not saying you . My above post was pointed at people who now who they are.

mvigod

There is a closed thread on this in the helicopter forum which fully explains my statement on this. If interested you can look at it there...MitchD and a few others are merely "trolling" for trouble here by making false statements. The fact that they are 100% false opens them up to a bevy of libel/slander charges...they should watch their step because my attorneys are already on this.

RCU's lists are not for sale nor have they been released to anyone. Cookies do not divulge info and if they do ANY site you go to would be open for grabs and not just RCU. These helicopter guys are from runryder and are running scared of RC Universe because we blow them away and now they are trying anything to bring RCU down including slanderous statements but it's ok because in court they are going to have to prove their statements and claims were true (of which will not be possible because they are completely without merit) and then the judge can simply decide on damages and require them all to post retractions. See you in court fellas...

MikeL

My Feedback: (3)

My bank just changed their privacy policy this year. Instead of an opt-in agreement where you have to give your consent for the sharing of your personal information, they changed to an opt-out where you have to notify them not to share your information. The broucher they mailed out giving notice of this change was very carefully worded, and quite slick. Nice of them, eh?

My grandmother is also a likely source of spam for me. She sees contests online and registers me for them. Tends to forward a lot of junk mail to me, too. It's amazing where this stuff can come from.

Thankfully, I use a Mac so I don't have to deal with it.

mvigod

Just so you guys know there have been breaches of security in Internet Explorer of which many allowed access to cookies and other info...that means that any site could get your info if they wanted to or if you were vulnerable...Fixes and patches were quickly put out when discovered but they of course must be installed. Remember it takes a malicious site to want to exploit these things for them to be a problem.

There are also many clever ways to get emails like if you see a popup window and click the close button a script inside can snag your email by having that actually be a form which sends a message to a server from your email and then they just log the return address to gather names...it's a dangerous place on the net.

As far as our servers they are not susceptible to virus as we run linux and I'm very adept at securing it and no client on any of our servers has access to our database or files and if they did trip security our tripwires would let me know. Never happened in 7 years although 1000's of attempts have been made over that period of time.

Also to the gentleman above who changed his profile so others cannot view the email that is not really accurate. There is no way whether that is set to on or off where others can actually view your email address. What it means is that others can send you email securely through our system or not send you email (in other words be able to contact you). If you email somebody from here you will realize you NEVER see their email address nor is it even sent over the network.

Many of you who are on this site are not computer experts and don't understand how these things work but most of the stuff spoken about is simply impossible to do. The thing in common from a few guys coming over here complaining about emails from RCU is that THEY ALL ARE HELICOPTER GUYS FROM RUNRYDER! Gee what does that tell you....either they are trying to bring RCU down or that RUNRYDER.COM is the source of their problems!

Enough said...there are other posts here which I made both in the beginning days of RCU which explained that we host for all types of sites on many servers and I reposted recently so if anybody wants more info on it search for them. This issue is dead and another attempt by the unruly heli guys to eliminate their competition which is fast gaining on them. My lawyers will be in touch with each of them.

(btw..as mentioned above in a former post if you actually post your email in the forums here or on runrdyer or any newsgroup or site where it is in plain site like within a post then a harvester can pull it...that is why we keep emails secure and not available through the web. If you post your email within an actual post there is nothing anybody can do to stop a harvester on any site. Again our complete system is foolproof against harvesters because our server acts as the agent to send email. )