Real spam?

On 10 January, 2002, we started a correspondance with a senior person at RealNetworks, Inc., and suggested that their "free" player should be compared, as far as marketing/download methods were concerned, with acrobat reader™ - and as a "good point" (for Adobe) suggested he did a Google search for:

+realplayer +spam Results 1 - 10 of about 3,980

and

+"adobe reader" +spam Results 1 - 10 of about 180

That same day, 10 January 2002, we got the following "easy opt-out" response:

As to the spam issue, I don't disagree that many dislike what they have seen from us. However, these documents are historical, and do not indicate recent efforts we have made to address this issue, not to mention our future planning. We have, for instance, recently revised our e-mail system so that users can ask to get off our lists through a very clear and very automated web page. This has been extremely helpful for those receiving our e-mail and those who don't. And it may be good for you to know that there are a fair percentage of our users that WANT to hear from us. Given the complaints we have received over time, or seen on the web, we were pleasantly surprised to see such a positive reaction. This is not to eliminate the complaints from our thinking, but it does illustrate that this is not such a black and white issue as some would have you believe.

So we asked (10 January, 2002) some of our technical colleagues and friends, many of them responsible for abuse issues at ISPs around the world for _recent_ experiences with Real-spam that anyone might have had.

Here is a sample of the responses we recieved within the following forty eight hours (and they are still coming in a week later):

• How recent? I routed their website and mail to /dev/nul 4 months or so ago after getting some trash. They can rot in in there forever as far as I'm concerned.

• There are none. I blackholed them for spamming and peddling spyware long ago...not to mention that threats against people who were trying to write open-source software to read their formats.
  They're scumbags, through and through. Let 'em rot.

• I put up with them far longer than anyone else because of all the "firsts" that was done with RealPlayer/Producer. In the end I had to insert blocks from every IP that I've been receiving spam from (*not* just blindly inserting netblocks!). Dec 7th is when I started blocking. I've added the IPs every so often since then to get to the above list.

  Firsts: - 24 hours Du Le'Mans race coverage in audio. (Really fond memories) - Can receive BBC from computer now. - Can watch CNN news feed at my desk.

  I'd guess that they're hurting because Micros$ft is now giving away a Windows Media Producer free, and like so many other companies that have gone tits up are desparately spamming before flaming out, IMHO.
• I think the issue Real are going to have is the long term residual effect of their spamming and the times when they've e-bayed your preferences.
  I have their mailservers in the deny list due to them sending very large HTML ads to tagged addresses sent here. One occurence of their list sending stuff was my not noticing that one of the "Sign me up for this list, or this list etc.." had a scroll bar and everything out of sight was checked when the viewed stuff was unchecked.
  Since then, even though they're in the deny lists anyway, whenever I install the software at a client's site (sometimes I have to deal with the users) I tend to give the software a real.com email address and not a tagged one.
  With Adobe I've noticed that you can download the software without ever providing an email address, and even the tagged one has only ever received one email telling me that an updated version was available for free. They have never tried to sell me Acrobat distiller or any other Adobe product.

• > I *knew* there was a good reason real.com is RBL'd.
  >
  >
  > Hey Real:  free clue - abuse@munged.com *never* opted-in to your spew,
  > so why are you trying to mail to it?  Hmmmm?   Accepting forged
  > subscriptions is rather st00pid, isn't it.  I challenge you to show me
  > proof of *any* opt-in for abuse@munged.com
  

• But the problem is that 'opt-out', easy or not, is NOT an acceptable option.
• That is still the case _today_ in the "real player 8 basic" update that I finally managed to find by poking at an old RealPlayer on a Win95 box.
  And otherwise, as far as I can tell in the 10-15 minutes of tolerance that I could muster, it is no longer possible to download real player for free.
  Also <me1> through <me9@privacy.net> were all "existing" accounts and probably received reminders of their passwords today...
• [Real's reply to you is] BS. It most certainly is black and white. Real has spammed me, and when I've called to complain, they've lied to me. Tell that to your contact at Real.
  And the fact that they pulled that crap on me, when I am an Internet professional that can recommend their server products to people who will buy them based on my suggestion, means they are really stupid.
• My trap domains are still receiving Real spam at addresses which never existed.
  I'm sure Ron could tell you the same thing if he removed his blocks against Real for a day too.
  Opt out is a cop out.
• I have to agree - I've installed their crap before (never again if I can help it), and
  1. It takes a half hour to install because you have to switch about 2 of every 3 of the checkboxes from Yes to No (Can we spam you? Can our friends spam you? Can we sell your name to anyone we feel like? Can we send you daily crap?" - Who's idea was it to default those to YES??
  2. They spam you, regardless of what you say. I think I still have a e-mail somewhere addressed to "real.dot.com.are.lying.spamming.bastards@...." since that's the address I gave and I unchecked all the spam options.

  They're /dev/null on my system too.

• And At 10:55 PM 1/10/02 -0600, Foo Bar wrote:
  >My trap domains are still receiving Real spam at addresses which never
  >existed.
  
  Gee, ya think so?
  
  I found seven such turds with a few seconds of grepping just the
  traps from only two of my domains over only the last thirty days.
  
  Once they've *kept* their act clean for a full year then I MIGHT
  consider removing them from the filters.
  

• I hate real networks... Here at work the firewall blocks them (and their software would GPF if ZoneAlarm disallowed it talking back to base), I also have a gut feeling that their audio quality isn't as good as the MS equivalent but I'd need to do A/B comparisons to be sure. (Preferably on the EBU test CD)
• real-net.net has been "opted out" here for sending SPAM to system accounts repeatedly. They did not remove any of these addresses from their list even when I contacted them. Personally, I do not care for their new "easy opt-out" because this is completely wrong. They should at least switch to verified opt-in and drop the old addresses.
• They have something they call "easy opt-out"?

  If my ethics were just a tiny bit weaker I might be willing to pay for a few months of AOL and a phone line, and dedicate an old Pentium, just to feed them "millions" CDs in randomized order and at a randomly varying rate, maybe 2 to 20 per second.

  a new twist on "GIGO"

  And/or I might not be displeased to hear that script kiddies with collections of rooted cable boxes took on said opt-out with an all-out dictionary attack.

• I recently had no choice but to install real player on a PC I share with my wife on our LAN here, so she could use real player to study language lessons downloaded from the uni's language lab on it. The installation was an agonizingly long process of confusing steps requiring REPEATED opt-outs from their friendly offers to spam you, many of the stages with craftily designed scroll-down menu options that, unless you were very careful, you would overlook and not scroll down to see the lists to which by default you were being opted in.

  Not that it matters, since every piece of information offered that might identify me was totally fabricated, including the email address.

  And any time I finish installing any such software, after a reboot I immediatetly go to the currentcontrolset run registry key and remove anything the vendor has so thoughtfully put there to start when I reboot my machine. Munged labs was really bad about this last year, so don't get the idea realnetworks is the only culprit here.

  To echo the sentiment/opinion most often stated in this thread: let them rot.

Amazingly, we did not get a single reply from a single IT professional (or anyone else) that had not been spammed by real in answer to our query "for _recent_ experiences with Real-spam that anyone might have had".

Surely, we asked the wrong question.