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AOL Sues Porn Spammers
MasterOfDisaster writes "c|net reports "that in a crackdown on spam, America Online is suing a company that owns and operates pornographic Web sites, accusing it of sending junk e-mail to AOL members." My favorite part is the comment from the accused, "We do not knowingly profit from unsolicited e-mail." Ah, blessed ignorance.
It is disturbing to me that AOl picked out "Porn Spammers" to sue. Do I get Porn Spam. Sure. Do I get MLM spam? Yes. Do I get semi-illegal decoder baox Spam? Fairly regularly.
Singling out Porn smacks of the deep thread of puritanism that still runs through America and gives me a 1st Ammendment chill.
Because, Santa, receiving AOL CDs doesn't cost you a penny, whereas receiving spam EMail does cost you.
"But I've never had to pay for it!" you cry.
Actually, you do. The Euro recipients know this right up front, because they get cold-cocked with per-second telephone access charges.
Americans *should* know it, if they'd only just think for a moment. They get higher ISP charges and/or go over their transfer limits because of the spam email.
Yes, yes. You only pay $35/month for your whizbang ADSL connection. But that $35/month *includes* the cost of spam. Your ISP is paying for the transfer, storage and processing of that spam EMail -- and you *know* that the costs are passed on to the consumer, with a few percent tacked on for good luck.
You pay for the spam, sure as god/dog made little green apples.
Ergo, no double standard.
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The UUNET spammers collective is still being allowed to operate -- one of them tried a stealth port25 probe today but hit our firewall:
00:22:03 (EST) 04 January 2001: Port 25/smtp ACK/no_SYN connection DENIED from: 1Cust180.tnt38.det3.da.uu.net (63.44.201.180)
Coincidentally no doubt, this was quickly followed by the Harvard dialup scanners collective checking our netbios availability:
23:28:10 (EST) 04 January 2001: Port 137/netbios SYN connection DENIED from: sfp220-198.harvard.edu (128.103.220.198)
Someone please tell me UUNET and Harvard are doing something to stop these guys.
Scroogle
That may be true for some real-world businesses who are taking their first dip on the web, but it's clearly not true in this case. All of the big players in online porn are fucking brilliantly net-savvy. They keep up with the bleeding edge of technology, and they know exactly what they're doing.
If you read between the lines you'll see that Cyber Entertainment set up the anti-spam policy as a weasel dodge. As long as they don't do the actual spamming, and "don't ask don't tell" about spam sent by their licensees, the devilish contract stays intact. AOL is working hard to prove that even without direct orders to spam, their "wink wink nudge nudge" is bad enough.
Personally, I'd love to see eBay shot down for the same exact thing. eBay knows damn well that their auctioneers spam the hell out of off-topic Usenet groups. Unfortunately, Usenet doesn't keep a pack of rabid lawyers on retainer...
Isn't the junk mail (including AOL CDs) that comes to my real life mailbox just as annoying and using more resources than Spam? Why the double standard? Where is the clamor for ridding ourselves of *all* junk mail?
Dancin Santa
If these spammers go out of business, will I still be allowed to opt-in to their helpful pr0n newsletters?
Dancin Santa
In the UK you can opt out of paper junk mail by registering your name and address with the Mailing Preference Service. After I registered I got no more paper junk mail addressed to me. Occasionally I get junk mail sent to my address which have no name on them.
Freepost 22
London
W1E 7EZ
I was wondering whether there is a similar service in other countries?
Scroogle
-p4
(c) All Rights Released.
Ok listen here, this is AMERICA. When we start to persecute those who like a little spam in their porn, who's next? The very framers of our hallowed constitution so many years ago?
If we start with the little people, the men and women of otherwise fine moral upstanding nature who just happen to enjoy copulation with meat products in all its varied depravity, then who among us can truly claim to be an AMERICAN?
Come on people, this is what
I think it was Mark Twain that said "When you lose the freedom of expression, then you're just fucked." Weighty words indeed.
They had a horrible time getting rid of it, and were losing the battle, until they came up with a unique solution.
Someone did some research, and figured out how to cook it, and promote it as a delicacy. The result was that suddenly you had a whole bunch of people hunting down the critter so they could cook it themselves, or sell it to a restaurant, or whatever.
The population is now very nicely under control, and is no longer an ecological threat.
So what has this got to do with spam?
It is my contention that spam will continue to exist as a problem until we make it profitable to go after folks who are spammers. Then it becomes a business.
that is why I have advocated a spam licensing program in the past, so that it would become legal for everyone to bill the spammers for traffic, etc. and business would pop up whose sole purpose in life would be to hunt spammers. The spam hunters would get a piece of the action, and send you a check.
It has to become advantageous for someone to have a business billing spammers on a general basis. Everyone hates bill collectors. We could turn them on the spammers.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
No, you're thinking of a bill that was introduced into Congress in 1998 by Sen. Frank Murkowski. It passed the Senate as a rider to S. 1618 but died in the House after organizations such as CAUCE and FREE mounted a huge phone-in campaign. They were against the bill because it was seen as pro-spam because it implied that spamming was fine as long as the spammer provided a way to get removed from his list. Aside from the obvious problems with an opt-out system, there were major loopholes. For example, there wasn't much to prevent a spammer from removing you from one list, then adding you to others later, since you'd have to somehow figure out that the same person had spammed you twice. There was also nothing to prevent your address to be sold or given to another spammer. So, Party A could spam you, get your remove request, remove you, then give your address to Party B, who is spamming on Party A's behalf, to spam you again. (There was no penalty for the person _sponsoring_ the spam, only for the one actively sending it at that moment, so each and every spammer could spam you until you asked for removal.) Finally, neither you nor your ISP could sue for damages if a spammer didn't remove you. All you could do was report the spammer to the Federal Trade Commission, who had sole authority to levy penalties. Aside from these issues, ISPs were afraid that the bill implied a right for their customers to spam if they followed certain guidelines, and the ISPs feared that they would lose the ability to enforce their AUPs. For example, what if a spammer obtained a Hotmail address to receive remove requests, and Hotmail closed the account. Could the spammer argue in court that Hotmail had no right to do this, since the spammer was using the account to perform a legally-required function, namely, to receive and honor remove requests, as required by law? Luckily, this monstrosity died before it became law.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
"We aren't knowingly making money off of spam"
This dosn't mean "We are making money from spam we just fain ignorence" but "We never bothered to learn what spam is"
Thats the problem with a lot of busnesses. Our luck that spam simply dosn't occure to most people when they first start doing busness on the net. When they try to addapt the old postal junk mail anolog they print up post cards and mail them out. I rember when TI did this.. The first postal junk mail I ever got reguarding the Internet,... I was kinda supprised... But it wasn't the last junk mail.
Still when someone new to the Internet dose his homework often Spam supplyers strike.. They latch on and teach the ways of spam... "Ohh ignore those techno dweeb hippys... they aren't up with the cutting edge..." or some such nonsence... By the time they run accrost matereal against spam they think it's all nonsence and BS.
Then they spam.. lost all credability.. lose money.. and drop off the face of the net never to return again...
Then there is the other side of this...
"Ignorence is bliss" the reply to the comment..
We've come to expect Spammers to lie.. but for many spam hunters this has lead to a gult before innocents addatude..
Just becouse a person says "We aren't knowingly proffiting from spam" dosn't mean "We fain ignorence and spam anyway" they could simply be saying "Look we aren't sending spam.. someone COULD be spamming in our name.. but it's not us" For someone new to spam it seems a reasonable assumption... "Fans" do all kinds of nutty things to premote someone they like.
(Linux advocates are a good example.. some are really painfully annoying...)
At times it's a matter of chilling out...
For a while it was a spammers tactic to clame support (in some way) from a larger company. AoL and Microsoft got hit with this and for a long time (Becouse AoL and Microsoft are "Bad guys" in other areas) people belived it..
But realisticly AoL and Microsoft have allways been against spam... AoL sued CyberPromo on occasion and was sued by CyberPromo... Bill Gates wrote an artical trashing spam as a total waist of time.
So basicly when dealling with a potental spammer two rules apply.. Spammers lie convencingly and innocent victoms tell the truth unconvencingly...
Some times it takes work to find the guilty party.. some times it just takes work confermming the person you have in your claws really is as gulty as you think he is...
You can't use simple rules to base your judgment.. Spammers will just use this against you... They love it when you come down on an innocent victom... "See.. they just resisting change..." and they also love it when you pass over an gulty party.. "Encorcement..."
In the end I don't believe in letting them go easy I also don't believe in being trigger happy...
I don't actually exist.
$35/mo ISP cost, 3Gb xfer limit, ISP expects an average 20% use of xfer limit.
Effectively, $35/60Mb xfer per month.
Assume net profit of 10%. Actual cost of providing service, then, = $31.50. (Net profit includes *all* expenses of providing service, and is typically well below 15%, and usually gets down to less than 5%. I'm being very generous.)
Cost of providing service = $31.50/60Mb = 0.05 cents per kilobyte.
Average spam = 1k (HTML format these days, y'know). Average 20 spam received per day.
Average 60s time spent dealing with spam per day. Average wage $10/hr. Population = 330 million for North America. Average 30% population uses EMail daily.
Equals nearly 2 billion spams per day.
Equals nearly 2 gigabytes of spam xferred per day.
Equals $16.5 million dollars *per day* in wasted time.
Equals nearly $1 million dollars *per day* in wasted ISP resources.
Equals $64 **out of your pocket** every year, because those costs are ultimately paid for by you, the consumer of EMail services.
And that's an optimistic figure.
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Storage and mail server meltdown may be issues, but the time spent downloading spam isn't. The banner ad at the top of the screen here was 10k. That's the equivalent of five moderately lengthy spam emails. A typical web mage has many images (adverts and non-adverts), and Joe User will surf through many pages in a day. Someone who never touches a web browser might see their charges rise due to spam, but anyone who browses even a little bit has a much, much bigger drain on their phone bill than spam would ever produce.
The ISP, too, is processing image and other binary data as the bulk of its traffic. Spam does load down the mail server quite a bit, but not the pipe.
I don't *like* spam, and I don't think I should be *sent* spam, but the "time to download" argument doesn't hold water.
Guys,
We should call this stuff what it IS. This is Unsolicited commercial email / junk email it is not Spam or done by Spamer's.
Spamer is my family surname (Try searching Google, you'll find hundred of us), and you can appreciate the unrestricted use of the expression Spamer, Spam, Spaming causes me (and my Brother who both work in IT/Internet industry) considerable problems. I've been flamed, mail bombed, had my machines attacked, this has become seriously unfunny!
This is plea that everybody be responsible, use and encourage others to use, the most accurate term Unsolicited commercial email / junk email.
Lately, I've been getting spammed from "sexyfun.net". Every time it comes from a different site with a STUPID ASSED sysadmin with his wide open for relaying mail server he probably never bothered to actually configure after initial installation.[*]
If this is the case then IMHO the vendor/supplier is at fault. There is no good reason to supply an MTA configured to relay at all. i.e. the sysadmin should have to explicitally configure it to relay. (Especially since the primary reason for needing third party relays at all is to handle crippled software which won't work without one.)
[*] Most of these sites are is asia, or some schmucks cablemodem/DSL conencted Red Hat box. What is it with Red Hat (l)users anyway?
It's Red Hat who are at fault here. They put together a system with inappropriate defaults. If they were doing this 15 years ago they might have some excuse, but there has been no legitimate reason for supplying an MTA which is an open relay in its "out of the box" configuration for well over a decade, assuming there ever was a good reason in the first place. Since RFC821 allows for relaying to be refused with a 551 return code.
I get tons of porn spam from AOL accounts. Shouldn't they make sure their own house is in order?
...but I'm afraid they'd sue me.
Got Warez?
If not (and I doubt it), of what law has Cyber Entertainment run afoul? The C|Net article only mentioned (as far as I bothered to read) that Cyber Entertainment violated its own anti-spam policy.
Short of blocking all binaries, limiting crossposting and honouring cancels (and hoping they arrive in a timely fashion), there's not much else a server can do.
Why is it that whenever I send -anyone- on AOL mail, I start getting spam for a few days after?
I've long wondered whether AOL might be selling lists of external e-mail accounts to spammers.
Hi all,
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that since their own personal download time for spam messages is next to nothing in comparison to regular browsing traffic, it can't be costing them much.
As a sysadmin for an ISP, I'd have to disagree. Spam in general raises operating costs quite a bit, ad that's what a customer's bill pays for. What users aren't thinking about is that it isn't just a few users that get spammed. Let's say a mid-sized ISP, with maybe 40,000 customers, suffers a spam attack in which 50% of their customers receive a 5k e-mail. You're looking at almost 100 MB of traffic generated by just one spammer in a short period of time.
This isn't the worst of it, though. It used to be that spammers used lists of valid e-mail addresses to send their spam from... Now, going by what I've seen lately on our mail servers, spammers have taken up what I've coined as "shotgun spamming." They fire off e-mails alphabetically, from multiple sources simultaneously, choosing common last names and pairing them up with first initials, first names with last initials, etc, knowing full well that the bulk of their mail won't get anywhere, but be bounced back. During such an attack it is not uncommon for a server to get hammered with several thousand messages a minute assuming the hardware can handle it without deferring connections. By the time the attack is over, a server will have received somewhere along the lines of 100,000 to 200,000 messages.
The problem that makes this sort of spamming worse: MTAs will attempt to send a bounce message back to the sender if an address doesn't exist on a given server. The spammers know this, and don't want to catch all that traffic themselves, so guess what? They use an address that doesn't exist as well, causing the attacking server to bounce the bounce message our victim server sends right back again. This is known as a double bounce, and once it occurs, the message does finally die... But let's look at what damage has been done:
Using the hypothetical ISP outlined above, let's assume a fairly small attack of 100,000 5 kilobyte messages, of which 50% of the 40,000 customers end up receiving a mail... This results in the aforementioned 100 MB of traffic, and leaves us with 80,000 bounce messages to send. These bounces generally include the contents of the original message plus some additonal text describing the problem, so they'll be a little larger than 5k, but we'll ignore that.
Now, we've got another 400MB of traffic in bounce messages to send, to which we'll get another 400MB of double-bounces in reply. This results in 900MB (that's bytes, not bits, for hose of you counting at home) of total traffic from one such salvo of spam, not counting the endless amount of resends on each side since both servers will likely be deferring acceptance of messages by about halfway through, causing a buildup in each server queue and wasting HD space to boot. This is a fairly tame example.
I personally spent an entire week recently monitoring the mail queue of a mail server being shotgun spammed ("TURNKEY E-COMMERCE SOLUTIONS"), and shutting down acceptance of messages from their sources -- It was disgusting to see the Net's lowest life form next to child pornographers (spammers) sink to a new low in their tactics. Automated spam-blocking tools can't fully alleviate this problem, no matter how well designed. Heck, even non-automated attempts can't. As I was shutting down acceptance from one relaying machine, another would pop up and start spamming, taking the place of the one just blocked... It was like trying to fight a DDoS being done through SMTP!
Anyway -- in short, spam will cost you, not matter who you are. I'd recommend http://www.cauce.org for more information on this issue.
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NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
They had a little turf battle back in 1997 where bulk-mailer threatened to release five million AOL email addresses. It was all over the news at the time, because AOL was the big enemy on the horizon and it was fun to see them blackmailed. Now that I think of it, it still is. It takes something as evil as AOL to make spammers look nice by comparison.
Remember back in 1995(?) or so when AOL changed its terms of service to allow AOL to profit from charging businesses for access to AOL's mailing lists? The hypocrisy is revolting.
Read the rest of this comment...
And there isn't a massive amount the spammers can do about it. I don't see a lot of spam these days, the occasional one gets through though.
/dev/null anything which is addressed to the spamtrap account.
Basically, every time someone spams you, they give you information about themselves. You can use this information against the spammers.
Give the spammers a bunch of nice juicy spam trap aliases to fill their mailing lists then just
It's documented here:
http://www.yelm.freeserve.co.uk/spamido/
Excuse the spelling.
Deleted
There are loads of uses for them. Coffee mug coasters is number 1 and I've tiled my cubicle with them but I have a pal with a sideline in cheap wallclocks. I don't know where he'd be without a steady supply of CDs from AOL.
Others think so too:
http://www.wanderlist.com/aolsux
http://www.networkboy.com/humor/aolcd.htm
http://www.aolwatch.org/disks.htm
Deleted
My company does business with Cyber Entertainment.
Specifically, we provide them with a fair number of email boxes.
While I certainly cannot attest for their practices with regard to AOL, I have noticed that they appear to follow their AUP closely; at least when it comes to us.
In every instance where a large number of complaints have come our way (generally because someone found one of the email boxes, discovered who the ISP was, and started hammering our abuse department), Cyber Entertainment has handled the issue quickly and professionaly, instantly terminating (or at least we never heard another word about it) their relationship with the offending spammer. In fact, we've seen numerous misplaced emails from former "webmaster affiliates" who are VERY upset that CE refuses to do further business from them.
Logically, I think CE views the whole thing (until now) as quite a scam.
Think about it: They get to have other individuals/companies spam for them, but once the spam is reported, CE can sever the relationship, not have to pay the spammer a dime, yet still reap the benefits of spam.