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I thought excite.com (the story link) was long dead.

That's OK. We all thought Sanford "Spamford" Wallace and Walt "Picklejar" Rines were out of business as of ten years ago. Those two motherfuckers (and I already have lawyers from the Oedipus Complex Anti-Defamation Leage calling on line one for my slur against people who fuck their mothers) have been spamming in one form or another since before excite.com even started. Here's a snapshot of the spam wars, circa 2001. Look

Walt Rines' nickname of Pickle Jar comes from news.admin.net-abuse.email, and he was dubbed thusly by one of the Elder Gods of Spamfighting, the immortal Bill Mattocks. The USENET thread to which I just linked was the one in which what had been widely known for some time was finally proven -- that every time a spammer says he's going to "remove you from his list", he's lying. (Following the FTC hearings, most of the major spammers of the day, including Spamford and Pickle Jar, were touting a "universal remove list" as the solution -- unbeknownst to the spammers, the list was seeded with never-used email addresses, and unsurprisingly, those never-used email addresses immediately started receiving spam.)

They may sound over the top to you, but these judges are just following the law. It is not their job to set sentence guidelines, it is a job for the lawmakers.

"I was just following orders!"

I just don't buy the defence. If there was someone else involved, we would've heard about it by now.

Really? You think so? And you think that is sufficient to make the planted-drugs theory impossible?

This is the whole point of why the drug war concept is so very stupid. The way it should work (for all such cases) is: Prosecutor: "She had drugs in her bag." Defense: "She says she didn't put them there." Judge: "Can the prosecution prove she put them there?" Prosecutor: "Er, no." Judge: "Dismissed."

Because such a situation would make it much much harder to convict a drug courier (unless they were actually caught in the act of using or selling the substance), the burden of proof gets thrown out the window - and so the inevitable innocent victims have to try to prove it was impossible for them to have put the substance in their bag. Which is kind of tricky to do.

How could you not believe that you're going to get innocent victims in a system like that? The whole concept of the burden of proof means that if you make it easier for the prosecution to convict, you're going to increase the chances of innocent people being convicted.

Some people think that the occasional innocent person being convicted is an acceptable price to pay for convicting most of the guilty. It's easy to hold a view like that, until it's you or a friend or family member playing the role of the innocent victim.

It happens, don't try to pretend it doesn't. And it happens to actual real people just like you.

Keith Henson, during a deposition. It's all over the place, but definitely here

0x0d0a didst speak thusly:

The SEC also went after Rice, the guy that hired her. Everything got covered. I've seen attempts to sue spammers, to complain to them, to flood their phones, to complain to local police/attorney general. Nothing does much...except this. Seems that the first effective clean sweep against a spammer that I've ever seen -- and it was done by a black hat. Frankly, I'm quite pleased.

Actually, not quite the first clean sweep...

The first clean sweep I am aware of, or rather clue-by-fouring en masse, was of a particularly notorious spammer (both Usenet and email) by name of "Krazy" Kevin Lipsitz (notation in the Spam Timeline here: http://keithlynch.net/spamline.html).

Krazy Kevin was one of the parties that directly lead to confirmation of accounts--he used to use Compuserve throwaway accounts in particular, as I recall, to promote his magazine scheme.

It came out after a while on many net.abuse forums that not only was he spamming, but he also failed to deliver magazines...

Eventually the State of New York spanked him in probably one of the first court precedents in regards to spam. (Reference here: http://www.oag.state.ny.us/internet/litigation/leb edeff.html)

This all happened around '96 or '97...Krazy Kev was busted around 1997ish.

"Krazy Kevin" no longer is spamming, and apparently makes much of his living now being a professional gourmand (he apparently holds a world's record for consuming the most amount of pickles in a five-minute span, and is a regular contestant at the Nathan's hot-dog eating contest)...at least it's a bit more honest a way of life than spamming, I suppose. :) (More about Krazy Kev going honest, in a sense: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/WolfFiles/wolffi les204.html) Still selling magazines too, but hopefully people get them now :)

Sanford, aka "Spamford", Wallace also was whacked into sense between being sued by both AOL *and* Compuserve (pre-merger) and getting ordered not to spam them (info on that lawsuit here: http://www.netlitigation.com/netlitigation/cases/c ompucase.htm)--and having literally been nearly banned from the Internet entirely and causing one of the major "backbone" sites of the Internet to be nearly universally shunned as well (the Agis.net UDP around 1996--Wallace and the nancy.com spammers were almost completely responsible) after it ended up being the last site on the Internet to deal with him...

In fact, Sanford Wallace has the rather dubious distinction of not only having been the reason behind many states' proposed antispam statutes, not only does he have the dubious distinction of having also been a junk faxer before he went into spamming and being almost singlehandedly responsible for the US law prohibiting junk faxing, but is singlehandedly responsible for much if not most of the early case law in regards to spamming...

After having realised the errors of his ways around 1998 or so, he started running an opt-in mail service for a while and (in a theme that seems to recur among reformed spammers) also apparently does entertainment, specifically, he's a DJ (more info here: http://www.canismajor.demon.co.uk/antispam/sanford .htm; info regarding his present company here: http://www.annonline.com/interviews/970522/biograp hy.html)...

(Now, mind, I've just included the first two cases I can recall off the top of my head involving people being sued directly for stuff related to spamming...)

"Picture 1980. Ted Nelson is running around with his Xanadu guys: Roger Gregory, H. Keith Henson (now waging war against the Scientologists) and K. Eric Drexler, later to build the Foresight Institute. They dream of creating what is to become the World Wide Web. Nowadays guys at hacker cons might dress like vampires. In 1980 they wear identical black baseball caps with silver wings and the slogan: 'Xanadu: wings of the mind.'"

1994-current. Work continues on the second XOC fine-grain hyper-sharin transpublishing server, under Roger Gregory and Keith Henson.

o In 1992, the Church of Scientology had become the first religious organization in Canada to be convicted of criminal conduct. Specifically, stealing documents from law firms, public associations and government entities -- and breach of trust. In addition, in the Casey Hill litigation, Scientology was ordered to pay millions of dollars to Canadian lawyer, Casey Hill, for slandering his reputation.

Which came first, the spammer or the open relay with which the slimy bastard sent out 10,000 messages?

The first spams were (depending on your point of view) chain letters or Usenet spam. Open relays were first mentioned as a problem in March 1997, years later. See Keith Lynch's spam timeline.

Spammers only started to use open relays because other methods of delivering their junk were stopped by means of UDP's (Usenet Death Penalty) and the blocking of spamhausen.

The problem with checking quantum money (this is explained in the book) is that by checking it you destroy the value. (Subject to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, etc.) The only good thing about quantum money (IMHO) is that quantum cryptography evolved from it.

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