Spammers Stoop To New Low

mathowie writes "I received an unsolicited spam this week from MonsterHut, extolling the virtues of their "products" which are "email marketing" (they're a spam cannon). After reporting it at Spamcop, I received an interesting email from their bandwidth host. It seems that before they could cancel MonsterHut's account for violating their terms of service, MonsterHut began suing them. The worst part? A judge granted MonsterHut a temporary restraining order, forcing Paetec to keep their site online while they continue spamming, before Paetec even knew about the suit. Paetec is collecting affadavits from people that received the spam, so if you did, fill one out. It may be their only chance against the court. How far will spammers go to get their word out? When's it going to stop?"

Comments

URGENT !!

[Spootnik]

Looking for a picture of Rob Malda naked. No fake, thanks... found nothing on Google.

Hate it

[Anonymous Coward]

I just hate spam. Now that they act like that, makes me believe that it's not only people forced to do it by their companies. They must be enjoying that. Sorry for the rant.

Re:Hate it

[Skapare]

Spamming is simply a method of communication used by people with small minds to extract money from other people with small minds. The problem with spamming is that the flack hits the rest of us.

i am a gay fucking whore

[JeromeyKesyer]

incidentally, i am also a moderator
+5 funny niggers

NEWS FOR RIGHT WING LOONIES, MODERATORS ON CRACK

[Spootnik]

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Oops, unexpected outage.

[Kris_J]

I think there have been plenty of examples where an unexpected outage has lead to loss of service with no legal recourse -- perhaps that's what Paetec needs in this instance.

(The most annoying thing is that the judge who made the decision probably doesn't even have an e-mail account.)

Re:Oops, unexpected outage.

[n76lima]

An EXCELLENT idea. If my DSL can go down for hours at a time with no explanation (or refund!) It seems reasonable that the PAETEC circuits *might* go out on occasion!

And yes the Judge DOES have internet access at home and an email address. I read the entire 73 page transcript of the hearing. He claims that SPAM is annoying and unwanted at home, and costly (productivity) in business. So he's not clueless about this issue.

Re:Oops, unexpected outage.

[Quila]

Someone else not reading.

Re:Oops, unexpected outage.

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny? Where are the gray hat hackers when we need to DDoS something out of existence?

Re:Oops, unexpected outage.

[SuiteSisterMary]

Almost sounds as though the judge specifically wants to go through the entire process, check and doublecheck at every step of the way, to provide a rock-solid, bullet-proof, airtight precident against spammers that other courts can then gleefully use to go after spammers double-barrled. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Re:Oops, unexpected outage.

[0_KrUsH]

We had a similar situation about 2 years ago with the company I work for (ISP). We found the loophole that we did not guaantee delivery of e-mail through the system. We simply routed all port 110 and 25 traffic for their IP ranges to the bit bucket. They opted to drop suit and leave our services. A good "I'm sorry we can't seem to locate the problem" can come in handy.

:-)

Re:Oops, unexpected outage.

[Anonymous Coward]

I got spam from these folks and tried to report it as well. This was months ago.

At first, I took their answer as truth. I spoke with them and they sent me a word doc that I was to sign and get noterized.

But, *I* had to pay for that aspect of it. I dropped it as I was still unemployed at that point.

I now think it is a ploy of a spam friendly ISP to act like they are trying to do something and avoid a backlash. A pretty good one at that.

I have since added the isp to my sendmail refused list, as well as their spamming client.

At least I will not see more email from them.

Re:Oops, unexpected outage.

[Anonymous Coward]

We simply routed all port 110 and 25 traffic for their IP ranges to the bit bucket.

I was thinking that the harddrive (and backup tapes) for that particular rack unit should find themselves in the vicinity of a degausser m'self...

"Sorry, y'rHonor, their hard drive just crashed... yes, and the tapes, too. Bad batch. Pity..."

NOT!

IS THIS CONVERSATION JUMPING ALL OVER THE PLACE?

[Spootnik]

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Oh, great...

[EvilStein]

This is the LAST thing we need.. spammers being allowed to bully ISPs/upstream providers around and using the court system to do so. What kind of a judge would allow something like that? I haven't read the .pdf files yet (I'm pissed at Adobe still, and I axed Acrobat Reader) but I can't imagine a sane person actually letting something like that happen. :(

This is a job for the A-Team..or 12 angry machete swinging Samoans.

Re:Oh, great...

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont care what the LAST thing geeks need is. Or the FIRST. Or anything in between.

(I'm pissed at Adobe still, and I axed Acrobat Reader)

You're the MAN without any prospect of WOMAN.

God this site is full of pathetic, self centered idiots. You're all stooges to consumerism, anyway, so why the fuck all this fuss about SPAM? Has anyone ever surveyed a few days of slashbore headlines? Product this, product that -- an orgy of commodity fetishises veiled by talk of "rights" to look at code. Who cares? Code for normal people doesnt do dick except run the machines that bore and oppress their daily lives.

YOU ARE THE FUCKING ENEMY OF MANKIND, NOT ITS SAVIOR.

Re:Oh, great...

[robinjo]

Of course you could use Ghostview to view pdf...

Re:Oh, great...

[Delgul]

Seems there are a lot of "sane" persons, all making very "sane" decisions lately, without having any idea what the problem is about.

Sad... sounds as sane as letting a security guard (no offence meant) design a bridge spanning a large river and forcing everyone to use it... Has to be safe... he is a _security_ guard after all isn't he? :-)

Re:Oh, great...

[Caid Raspa]

What kind of a judge would allow something like that? ... I can't imagine a sane person actually letting something like that happen.

Nicely put. But in USA(c) or United States of America (for Corporations), what did you expect? A sane legal system?

The thing I can't understand is why has PaeTec sold the service to MonsterHut? I thought MonsterHut is a well-known spammer. If someone is well known to violate the policies of the corporation I work in, they end on our 'corporate blacklist' and will not be dealed with. Sometimes we share the blacklists with a few of our competitors so that someone having/being a constant problem will not be able to change from one to the other provider. For example, if someone can't keep his deals with one of our competitors, why should he treat us differently? We don't take risks like that. No company can be forced to sell/buy a service/product. This is also a good way of saving legal costs and trouble. I think 10% of our customers make 90% of the trouble.

Activities that will generally put you to our blacklist include spamming, paying bills only after 3rd reminder, and some other things.

Re:Oh, great...

[nailerr]

Recently I have started getting spam that bypasses my filter by using MY NAME to send it to me. They are sending me mail with things like myname-at-msn.com or myname-at-yahoo.com.
Spam must be ended, along with the people who do it.

I am not the only one who wants these people to get crippling cancer and then get burnt slowly in a car crash with a steel post. Am I?

btw, using -at- because I am working on an apple mac at the moment, and am used to using real computers =P

Re:Oh, great...

[Steeltoe]

Of course you could use Ghostview to view pdf...

Only if they start using anti-aliased fonts!

It's a joke!

- Steeltoe

Re:Oh, great...

[Vesperi]

Trust me, i've worked for a tier 1 ISPs abuse department, it's been suggested. The problem is sharing a black list is even more of a problem then dealing with an occasional law suit. It gets into 'unfair trade practices' and turns into a federal anti-trust case against all the involved ISPs.

Re:Oh, great...

[pete_p]

Must be a very weird Mac if @ isn't shift two. Perhaps you should invest in a keyboard localized to whatever your locality is?

Re:Oh, great...

[old_n_anal]

It runs long, but it's really helpful to read the complaint and particularly the transcript.

PaeTec sold the service because, well, that's what they do. PaeTec's T&C's explicitly prohibit spamming (defined in the contract as unsolicited e-mail) and MonsterHut represented that they only send targeted e-mail to addresses that have opted in. Using PaeTec's definition, not spam.

Where PaeTec blew it is by allowing an addendum to the contract that essentially allows 2% of MonsterHut's mail to be spam. MonsterHut contracted the addendum to cover the case of what they claim are people who opted in and then forgot or who've just got an axe to grind. Furthermore, the 2% means that 2% of all recipients have to complain.

MonsterHut has sent 96 million e-mails. That means just under two million people have to complain before reaching the 2% threshold. Oops.

So the basic lesson learned here is: Don't allow stupid addendums to service contracts. Or, don't do things based on a percentage of volume.

In this particular case, it would seem (believe it or not) that if MonsterHut were found in violation of the 2% rule, an acceptable remedy would be to send out more spam on the bet that fewer than 2% would complain about the new round of mail. Relief through dilution.

(Consider the nuclear power industry. In the early days, dumping of radioactive material was legally limited to some number of microcuries per milliliter. Got something to dump that's too hot? Just add water. There's a radioactive stream in Windsor, CT. as result. These days disposal is limited by total microcuries. )

Re:Oh, great...

[GreyPoopon]

The problem is sharing a black list is even more of a problem then dealing with an occasional law suit. It gets into 'unfair trade practices' and turns into a federal anti-trust case against all the involved ISPs.

So don't "share" them. Just post your list (in a nice downloadable form) somewhere on your web site. If all ISPs do this, they can each download everybody elses lists.

Or, have somebody who is NOT an ISP sponsor a big blacklist that all ISPs can contribute to and get the contents of if they so wish.

Re:Oh, great...

[-=OmegaMan=-]

"Sometimes we share the blacklists with a few of our competitors"

Mmmmmm... collusion...

Re:Oh, great...

[Misch]

Or, have somebody who is NOT an ISP sponsor a big blacklist that all ISPs can contribute to and get the contents of if they so wish.

We have that. It's called spamhaus.org and the database of known spammers is called Rosko

Re:Oh, great...

[Misch]

Defendant's argument is that the clause only applies to mails sent within the terms of the contract, which is a "targeted e-mail marketing" (not-spam). Defendant is arguing that the clause doesn't apply to unsolicited e-mail. (i.e. the e-mail addresses they plucked off of Network Solutions whois databases.)

Re:Oh, great...

[pjrc]

MonsterHut has sent 96 million e-mails. That means just under two million people have to complain before reaching the 2% threshold. Oops.

Even if this is true, it's not necessarily 2 million people, but 2 million emails. They send the same thing out over and over, so in all likelyhood most of the complaints will be about many messages. Maybe in this case the slashdot effect will do some good for the world....

I've been dreaming about setting up an anti-spam program and service (free, I hope) that would use real-time reporting like MAPS/ORBS and user feedback like spamcop. The idea would be to keep an near-real-time updated list of regexes with match all the recent spams but are highly unlikely to match any normal emails.

I wonder if anyone else is doing this sort of real-time-regex list?

Re:Oh, great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe in this case the slashdot effect will do some good for the world....

One can hope. Until then, use the SBL to block them:

http://spamhaus.org/sbl

I've been dreaming about setting up an anti-spam program and service (free, I hope) that would use real-time reporting like MAPS/ORBS and user feedback like spamcop. The idea would be to keep an near-real-time updated list of regexes with match all the recent spams but are highly unlikely to match any normal emails.

I wonder if anyone else is doing this sort of real-time-regex list?

This seems to be close:

http://spews.org

BTW, ORBS is dead and MAPS now charges larger users. There are many free ORBS like replacements.

/.!

Re:Oh, great...

[Anonymous Coward]

How does deleting a $0.00 program from your HD affect Adobe in any way?

SPAM GOOD!!! Slashdot BAD!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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joagasgrqf

OT: Microsoft QotD

[imipak]

A Microsoft lawyer was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 this morning and he came out with this classic:

"We have by far the most open system!"

John Franks, Head of EU law, Microsoft.

Re:OT: Microsoft QotD

[phalse phace]

"We have by far the most open system!"

I think he might have been refering to all their (open) security holes.

Re:OT: Microsoft QotD

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, but unrelated :)

Re:OT: Microsoft QotD

[really?]

A Microsoft lawyer was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 this morning and he came out with this classic:

"We have by far the most open system!"

John Franks, Head of EU law, Microsoft.

And that's not true? Think back just a couple of weeks and you're going to remember all the hoopla about CodeRed ... and the various e-mail viruses...and
Oh, he had something else in mind ... err ... never mind then. :-)

Countersue

[sopuli]

Is it not possible to counter-sue, and get a restraining order on MonsterHut's system?

Net congenstion

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I posted this very reply much before the original article showed up.

Hi! Some blatant spam!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is some blatant KDE spam:

At:
http://bugs.kde.org//db/27/27340.html

you can read:
"No fake - I'm a big fan of konqueror, and I use it for everything. Linus Torvalds".

hence

Spam:
Do like the guru! Get your own KDE!

Re:Hi! Some blatant spam!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that's a well supported, argumented, meaningfull, insighfull, constructive spam.

Don't Get Your Ribbon Cables in a Crunch

[Anonymous Coward]

Tired of thin skinny cables?

Introducing the ALL NEW GOATSE IDE cables! They're BIG, THEY'RE ROUND, and you can fit LOTS of DATA through them. Order yours today at goatse.cx

Affadavit

[solopido]

I would fill out the affadavit but I'm being spammed to death!!

This post will bring you luck!

[Anonymous Coward]

But it is your choice whether the luck will be good or bad! Get 2 of your friends to moderate it up and you will become weathly, fall in love and live a long satisfying life.

If you moderate this post down, terrible things will befall you and those you care about. Your closest friend will fall ill, your pet will die and you will be condemed to a life of pain and suffering. Choose wisely.

Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[tester13]

According to the affidavid filled by the plantiff, they were not involved in sending unsolicited email, and thus not violating any terms of use. If you possibly opted in through some other company then maybe it isn't technically spam? (according to the TOS)

The point I'm trying to make is I can understand why the court wants to show some restraint before allowing an ISP to cut a firm's internet access. What would be the consequences if they cut the pipes and then sorted it out? Monster Hut could be deprived alot of revenue!

I'm not trying to defend Monster Hut as they could very well be guilty. I just think that we should be pleased with the Judge's injunction until this gets litigated.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[KjetilK]

Oh, yes, they are big-time spammers, I've got some e-mail where they brag about it: Another successful marketing campaign brought to you buy: <a href="http://www.monsterhut.com" [snip] Judging from the address they sent it to, it comes from a web-harvest done about four years ago...

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[nmarshall]

but what this looks like is that Monster Hut is claming that Paetec is caning them based on hearsay. thus this could be really bad for isp's, if spammers can sue to stay online and dismiss complains as hearsay...

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Alot" isn't a word, YOU STUPID FUCK!

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[Eggplant62]

MonsterHut (aka Beaverhome) has been a well-known spamhaus for at least a couple of years. For further information regarding this rotten outfit, take a look at this link on The Spamhaus Project's ROKSO database. Lots of good history there. Or simply search DejaGoogle on Beaverhome or Monsterhut.

Rich

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[mystik]

Want to cut their internet access?

Easy.

Call it a DMCA violation. The ISP is required to cut access as soon as they are notified. No trial, no judge, no red tape, no waiting.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[cyclist1200]

Monster Hut's original affidavit contends that they only send opt-in bulk email. The Hartl affidavit says Monster Hut told PaeTec that they send email to "externally generated targeted lists" ie, they bought email addresses, spammed them, and basically admitted to PaeTec that this is their business.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I do believe I own the copyright on some of the materials they are sending out. Bastard IP Thievery is what it is!

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[hesiod]

> "Alot" isn't a word, YOU STUPID FUCK!

And not quite as eloquent as your expletives. I don't think you should be the one complaining about language usage.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[Sabalon]

Until they turn back around and sue your ass for fraudulent DMCA claims.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[Anonymous Coward]

ie, they bought email addresses, spammed them, and basically admitted to PaeTec that this is their business.

Continue reading, please.

The Hardt affidavit ALSO says that the "externally generated targetted lists" are all opt-in.

I am on one of those lists. I have never opted-in to ANYTHING.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the affidavid (sic) filled (sic) by the plantiff, they were not involved in sending unsolicited email

Rule 1: Spammers lie.

What would be the consequences if they cut the pipes and then sorted it out? Monster Hut could be deprived alot of revenue!

What would be the consequences if they don't cut the pipes? If other sites blackhole PaeTec because of the muensterhutch spam, that could cause PaeTec to lose legitimate customers and the associated revenue.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[blang]

Why bother?
Just submit a slashdot story about them. That will take care of their web site.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[Misch]

You ask:
Does Monster Hut send spam?!

I reply:

Beaverhome / MonsterHut / Neal Martin records from the Rosko database at spamhaus.org

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[Esoteric Moniker]

>> "Alot" isn't a word, YOU STUPID FUCK!

>And not quite as eloquent as your expletives. I >don't think you should be the one complaining >about language usage.

I agree, especially since he didn't bother to point out that it is in fact TWO words, i.e. "a lot" which most people confuse for a single word, "alot". Now isn't learning about our language a lot more gratifying than cussing out your fellow /.'er you stupid $*#@ing *#$! ;-)

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[p_trinli]

Monster Hut is claming that Paetec is caning them based on hearsay

Caning? Ouch. That's where they hit your buttocks and stuff.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[rfc1394]

Tester13 writes:

According to the affidavid filled by the plantiff, they were not involved in sending unsolicited email, and thus not violating any terms of use. If you possibly opted in through some other company then maybe it isn't technically spam? (according to the TOS)

I would also agree with this point. If you opt-in - even if you don't realize it - it's not spam. I don't like it that way but if they put up say, a check box like the one below this message when I typed it in that says "Post Anonymously" I should not be able to complain when it shows my e-mail address.
While I think most spammers deserve at least Summary Execution or even more severe punishment (as soon as I figure out what kind of punishment would be more severe) what it sounds like, is that this company was buying addresses from others where people probably opted in and didn't realize it, then some complained when they got mails and didn't realize they had inadvertantly opted in to something.
It might also include some where the party they bought the E-mail addresses from were in fact spamming and Monster Hut was unaware of it (or claims that they were unaware). But what seems odd to me is that this company apparently was - if the claims are true - using valid return addresses and was clearly identifying whom they were. Two practices that real spammers never do.

The point I'm trying to make is I can understand why the court wants to show some restraint before allowing an ISP to cut a firm's internet access. What would be the consequences if they cut the pipes and then sorted it out? Monster Hut could be deprived alot of revenue!

I agree as well. It seems like the ISP was going to institute a "shut them down first and ask questions later" scenario. That is probably quite valid if someone really is spamming. However the contract they signed - if the trial documents are correct - indicates they knew the company was in the business of sending commercial e-mail where the person agreed to get it. If true, then, it would imply a little more investigation would be needed because there are going to be people who forgot that they joined some of these e-mail opt-in things and then complain about it.

I'm not trying to defend Monster Hut as they could very well be guilty. I just think that we should be pleased with the Judge's injunction until this gets litigated.

I agree as well. In this case, the injunction preserves the status quo, since the court could if it's shown that Monster Hut really was spamming, rule in favor of the ISP. Also, if their customer is really spamming the injunction protects the ISP against retaliation because their upstream providers can't cut their feed due to the practices of the customer because the ISP can say it has no choice because it's under a court order (and if the supplier does something to interfere with that then they can get an order as well or the other provider might conceivably be in contempt of court), and if Monster Hut really was spamming, it's certainly not going to do so now, and if it did, it would be easy enough to check. Also, a trial would certainly provide considerable evidence if they were up to something unsavory.

Reading the court transcript tells me two things that were lacking in this case: make sure you write your contracts carefully and if you have to enforce the contract, get lawyers who know something about how people send messages through the Internet; it looks like the lawyers - on both sides - were about as clueless as a 15-year-old Script Kiddie.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[DNS-and-BIND]

Registering a domain name does not count as opting in to a spam campaign.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[vanyel]

The courts should show restraint because there's a lot of people who will falsely complain just to get someone they don't like into trouble. BUT, any judge who actually has an email account would just need to be shown one of the monsterhut messages to realize that the complaint is valid and deny the TRO.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[itachi]

Yeah, but if I opt to receive email from Bob's Email List Co., and then Bob turns around and sells my address to Larry's Spam Co., that doesn't mean that I opted in to getting Larry's spam. In fact, it is quite clearly UCE. No amount of verbiage will alter that basic fact. Opting in is a list by list thing - if I opt into bugtraq, that doesn't mean I also want vuln-dev, even though they are run by the same people on the same servers.

itachi

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[cburley]

Caning? Ouch. That's where they hit your buttocks and stuff.

They don't hit your stuff, just your buttocks.

Re:Does Monster Hut send spam?!

[cyclist1200]

That was my point. They SPAMMED those addresses (the addresses were not 'opted-in'), i.e. they violated PaeTec's TOS.

Guano Heralded as Prozac Substitute

[Anonymous Coward]

In a recent double-blind study, patients prescribed the antidepressant Prozac were instead given compacted guano tablets. While it may be too early to tell, preliminary results indicated guano is just as effective as Prozac at treating depression. The study, headed by Bats Against Depression (B.A.D.), aims to prove that Prozac is no more effective than bat excrement. So far, results look promising.

Dr. Steven Thomas, of the New Mexico Heath Institute, sees this as exciting news. "Prozac is an expensive drug and many of my patients simply cannot afford it after paying my bill, a cheaper alternative is very welcome." Others are not convinced.

"This could be a the start of a dangerous trend.", says Dr. George Zott. "Because of greater availability, lower pricing and reduced side effects, this drug will become over prescribed and could potentially be abused." A spokesperson from B.A.D. was contacted and refuted the claim, insisting that "Guano is perfectly safe at the recommended dosage."

Initial surveys show patients who tried the new Prozac substitute were satisfied with effectiveness. "I feel so much better now that I've switched to Guano. Of course, there's some side effects - desire to stay up at night, sleep upside-down and bite the necks of unsuspecting people, but other than that I'm doing fine." Said M. Edwards, a salesman from Miami. Most others experienced less pronounced side effects

B.A.D. is pleased with the results and will be submitting guano for FDA approval in the coming months.

YEAH!

[Perdo]

We can just spam 'em with our affadavits! Yeah that will get our point across... .. . Never mind.

Re:YEAH!

[Anonymous Coward]

It would appear from the Monster Hut site (http://www.monsterhut.com) that they do accept email at info@monsterhut.com but I am not suggesting that anyone send any large files or use bulk emailers to send large amounts of abuse or otherwise do anything like ./ them that might take down their web or email servers.

Spammers will go this far...

[Anonymous Coward]

...all the way to slashdot!

BUY THIS!

Re:Oh, great... (o/T)

[EvlPenguin]

%gv tro.pdf

No one said you have to use an Adobe product to view the output of one.

Read the rest of this comment...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my God! It just goes on like that.

Damn...

[DiLLeMaN]

I feel sorry for Paetec... Since when isn't an ISP allowed to cut an offending account anymore? Would this have been possible with AOL or another biggie for ISP? What about their TOS? isn't there any clause in there to prevent this kind of thing?

Of course we could all help by hitting monsterhut with the /.-effect, even though it would hurt Paetec itself too...

OT: I received a piece of Dutch spam the other day... on an e-mail account that was until then totally spam-free =\

Re:Damn...

[bacchusrx]

I think you misunderstand what's happened. The dispute is precisely over whether or not MonsterHut has in fact violated Paetec's terms of service.

A preliminary injunction was ordered to prevent one party in the dispute (the ISP) from withholding services essential to the business of the other party (the Spammer) until it can be determined on the balance of probabilities whether or not MonsterHut did in fact violate Paetec's Terms of Service.

It's perhaps analogous to saying that the State cannot execute a man until after he's been tried and convicted. In other words, MonsterHut deserves due process of law. I mean, when someone is arrested for capital murder we know he won't be executed prior to his trial... some people would like to say: "Since when can't a Government execute its citizens for violating its rules!" But, then, we have a name for those people, don't we? ;)

I'd hate to see people attack the fact that Paetec was enjoined from terminating MonsterHut's service because MonsterHut is a spam cannon... the injunction is a good thing insofar as justice is concerned. It does not prevent MonsterHut from ever being shut down.

However, precedents like these can help to protect you when, oh I don't know, the largest media content production and media distribution network in the world wants to shut you down for having unpopular opinions.

BRx.

Who buys into this stuff anyways?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, when somebody emails you bragging about a "GREAT MORTGAGE RATE!!!!!!!!!!", do any of you really buy into it? Only the most base of base intelligence would believe that. Must be why spamming is so profitable on the 'net of today ;)

Re:Who buys into this stuff anyways?

[MrBogus]

Two theories:

1) In direct postal mail a response rate of .5% is considered good. It could be that with essentially 0 cost to the sender that a response rate of .01% makes it all worthwhile.

2) Spammers don't make any money from spam. Instead they make their money scamming would-be spammers by selling 'consulting services', address lists (often containing the known complainers), and harvesting or mailing software (uhh, free dimitry!). It's a big pyramid scheme, which is why they talk themselves up like Amway salesmen. And it's natural because people think "I get so much spam, SOMEONE must be buying this stuff".

Of course, once the sucker has taken the hook and realized that spamming isn't a get-rich-quick scheme, the dim bulb goes off in their head and they immedeately start running trying to hook other would-be spammers. The cycle continues.

Why does everyone think Microsoft is evil?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, just the other night, Bill Gates came to me in a dream and he spoke to me.

"Microsoft is not evil."

"But why, Bill does everyone think you are evil?", I questioned.

"Because they're all on crack. Microsoft is the light, the salvation."

"Really?", I replied.

"Yes. Go forth and tell the non-believers the truth."

"You mean Slashdot?" I asked.

"It's a start, but you must spread the word of Microsoft further as well."

"But I could face pain, torture, death or even be modded down!.", I said.

"Fear not these petty things, to know the truth is your salvation. Now go forth, my son!"

It was about this time, I woke up in a cold sweat. Wow, what a nightmare!

It is not Spam, no really.

[Codeala]

Did anyone actually read the thing! It is "permission-base commercial email", damn it! Not only did they include a REMOVE line at the bottom of each email, they put one on TOP too! WOW! These are obviously nice decent people...

... just kidding. DIE SPAMERS DIE!

I'm sure that MonsterHut is run by Jews

[Anonymous Coward]

Learnthe truth about niggers and jews in convenient mp3 format.
Tune intothe fun with these recent broadcasts:

• July 7 - Fast and Furious
• July 14 - We Deserve Their Contempt
• July 21 - The Jews Are Our Misfortune
• July 28 - Subverting Freedom
• August 4 - Time to Blast Our Enemies
• August 11 - Demonstrating for Freedom
• August 18 - To Be, or to Be Nice
• August 25 - The Saga of Yehweh ben Yehweh

Dr. William Pierce turns over the rocks and exposes the jewish slime !

Oh yes it is.

[iainl]

I don't care if the entire email is one big remove message, if its unsolicited advertising then I'll laugh at their corpses. I know you were kidding, but some idiots really believe that they can eat my bandwidth just as long as they claim to have an option that says 'yes, I do read your spam. Now don't send that particular one again'.

Cool! Let's ALL email......

[jimbojames]

info@monsterhut.com

abuse@monsterhut.com

sales@monsterhut.com

admin@monsterhut.com

Post to USENET.....

ENLARGE YOUR PENIS!

Get a MONSTER!

Enquiries to:

bigpenis@monsterhut.com

Re:Cool! Let's ALL email......

[AlgUSF]

Even better, sign up admin@monsterhut.com, root@monsterhut.com, sales@monsterhut.com, and info@monsterhut.com up to one of those pr0n mailing lists that doesn't ask for e-mail confirmation. As everyone knows once someone signs you up for one of those, you are instantly on like 50 pr0n mailing lists. :-)

Re:Cool! Let's ALL email......

[Sir Tristam]

Now that's real smart. And I wonder where they'll get the addresses for their next round of "solicited" e-mails. Or were you planning on all of us forging our headers in our emails to them?

Chris Beckenbach

Re:Cool! Let's ALL email......

[Anonymous Coward]

use hotmail accounts. let microsoft pay for the spam

Pae-Tec may be shining on you

[Spootnik]

I already sent an affidavit stating such and it was notarized at my expense. I also paid the postage for this mailing and did not receive an acknowledgment that it had been received.

JonKats Stoops To New Low

[Anonymous Coward]

From ABCNews.com:

JonKatz, movie reviewer of the popular Linux website slashdot.com, recently announced he has reached a new low.

"I'm going to have sex with 12-year-old boys now, they're much cuter." says Katz, a known pedophile.

Prior to this release, it was widely speculated that Katz was only interested in molesting 15-year-old boys.

"Well, I like the older ones too, but they're better when they're still nice and smooth." continued Katz.

When asked if he feared prosecution for statutory rape, Katz just reponded with a laugh.

"My boys love me and would never turn on me like that!" chuckled Katz.

However, Katz wouldn't reveal the names of his underaged lovers upon further questioning. The state is currently investigating.

Re:IS THIS CONVERSATION JUMPING ALL OVER THE PLACE

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's look at two companies which face criticism over their programming practices.

First off, Microsoft and their IIS server. This has been roundly criticised for having numerous security holes. The company has faced extreme flak from some quarters for not responding to even the most blatant demonstrations that their technical fixes for these problems have not worked.

Secondly, VA Linux and their Slashdot web bulletin board. This has been roundly criticised for having numerous troll problems. The company has faced extreme flak from some quarters for not responding to even the most blatant demonstrations that their technical fixes for these problems have not worked (cf the parent post).

When will these awful corporates wake up to the calls of decent programmers and fix their products? No wonder that the technical staff of these institutions are widely reviled for their ostrich-like approach to criticism.

In related news: Hormel Foods Sues Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Earlier today, Hormel made a short and rather vulgar press release. Here it is in full:

"Slashdot fsckers! Who said you could use our trademarked, patented and copyrighted spam logo to represent unsolicited commercial e-mail on your site? You're nothing but a bunch of freeloading thieves, twisting the law for your own ends! You'd better take our logo off your site and destroy all the backups it is on, or we will sue you so hard it will make your head spin! Just ask Weird Al what we did to him when we heard his song titled "SPAM" - his anus STILL hasn't fully recovered!"

Actually this is a good thing...

[Ami Ganguli]

Think about the bigger picture for a second. What's happened is that a client of an ISP has forced the ISP to win in court before cutting off service.

We've seen lots of cases where service has been cut off for questionable reasons (hosting deCSS, hosting "slanderous" material, whatever) and the ISP's client has had _no_ recourse.

While I would wholeheartedly support the lynching of spammers, I also welcome any trend that forces ISPs to be accountable for disconnecting service. It's not right that my Internet access can be cut off because of unsubstantiated allegations made in a lawyer's letter to my ISP.

Rather than fighting to get these guys booted from their ISP, just enter their IP into the black-lists. If their outgoing mail is handled by the ISP, the ISP can set up a specific IP address as the source of the spam and the rest of the world can block it.

Re:Actually this is a good thing...

[rmst]

I would assert that it is the ISP's right to kick you off, completely arbitrarily. Well, not completely, assuming that the terms of service were laid out such that they specify exactly what the conditions for possible disconnection are. Unfortunately, I can't quite find the actual terms of service for this specific case, but I see nothing wrong with an ISP disconnecting a customer. Your connection is not a right, it's a privilige that you pay for. The day when a company providing a service loses control over said service other than the control it agrees to relinquish is a very unhappy day.

Whether the terms were violated is also an internal issue for the ISP, nothing the courts should be involved in. Their service, they can set the standard for what X is. If they're irrational, people will stop using the ISP. Isn't it grand?

Re:Actually this is a good thing...

[Ami Ganguli]

Your connection is not a right, it's a privilige that you pay for.

That's right, I pay for it. Not only that, when it gets cut off unexpectedly I can suffer real losses. Of course the ISP can impose terms of service that the subscriber has to agree to. But if you're going to cut off the service you'd better be sure that the terms of service have really been violated.

The real problem is that Internet access is becoming an "essential" service like telephone service or electricity, but it's still being treated like a luxury. If you abuse your phone service then it can be cut off, but it's not something that's done lightly and certainly not because of an e-mail or simple lawyer's letter. Internet access should be the same.

Re:Actually this is a good thing...

[Skapare]

I just got attempted mail delivery from Monsterhut on August 29. It was blocked because I already subscribe to a number of spam blocking zones. More info is available about why Monsterhut is blocked here.

As long as we can block spammers, we don't have to take it out on the ISPs. It's when the spam gets mixed up with legitimate mail (such as from an open relay where otherwise good mail comes from, or via a regular mail server relayed by their customers) that we need to complain directly to the hosting ISP.

Another approach is to complain to any businesses that appear to be customers of Monsterhut, such as Hertz, even if that company wasn't involved in spamming. Tell them (the customers) that because Monsterhut is spamming, any legitimate email promotions they might send out won't get through because everyone has Monsterhut blocked off.

Re:Actually this is a good thing...

[commodoresloat]

What's happened is that a client of an ISP has forced the ISP to win in court before cutting off service.

And that only proves that the US legal system still works for those willing to pay for it. This is news? Believe me, ISPs will continue to deny services to individuals or small businesses on mere accusation whenever they find it more convenient than sorting through evidence. I really doubt this will set any kind of precedent or do dick for anyone trying to host decss or anything controversial. If an ISP is scared they will be sued for your content they will toad you whether or not there is any evidence you are hosting illegal content. Yes there are a small few ISPs who will make it a point to act differently but the overwhelming majority will (and perhaps, at least from their owners' perspectives, should) cover their asses by 86ing any users who might get them SLAPP-ed by Mattel or whoever.

Re:Actually this is a good thing...

[jeremyp]

It's something you pay for, so you have a contract with the ISP to provide an internet connection. If the ISP arbitrarily cuts you off, it is in violation of the contract and can therefore be sued. If there is a clause in the contract which says you can't spam, and you do spam, then you are in violation of the contract and the ISP is within its rights to terminate it in which case it can cut you off straight away.

In this case Monster Hut disputes that it has violated the anti-spamming condition so there is a difference of opinion on whether the contract has been violated which will get resolved through the courts. In the meantime, they should not be penalised for an unproven allegation. Personnally, I reckon they will lose.

Re:Actually this is a good thing...

[Erasmus Darwin]

"In the meantime, they should not be penalised for an unproven allegation."

When I first heard about this incident (about 4.5 months ago), PaeTec had already received several affidavits from people who had had addresses spammed that had been used exclusively for domain name registration. I'm surprised that the judge hasn't considered there to be enough evidence to revoke the injunction until the completion of the trial.

Re:Actually this is a good thing...

[atheos]

Blocking them is great and all, but you forfeit your right to complain.
I enjoy doing this as much as the next guy:
more syslog | grep reject

And anytime I go to complain about all the rejected 'attempted' spam I receive, I'm told that must have the full headers, and spam message to properly complain.
I mean, come on. If I have a log showing hundreds of rejected entries from the same offender, that should be proof enough.
ISP's should check their own damn logs.
anyone care to enlighten me on how I can get a full copy of rejected spam without my users getting bombarded???

Re:Actually this is a good thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Moreover, having read some of the court
documents, the ISP agreed that they knew
the customer was a bulk emailer, and agreed
they'd accept up to 2% complaints. Bearing in
mind the volume of people who either block spam
or silently curse and delete it, I'd be amazed
if any spammer saw remotely close to 2%
complaints.

Look at page 39 of the following URL:

http://litigation.paetec.net/transcript0604.pdf

It's hard to have much sympathy with the ISP when
they set such a high bar.

ian

Re:Actually this is a good thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

The day when a company providing a service loses control over said service other than the control it agrees to relinquish is a very unhappy day.

I agree. I mean, what would be next? A medical insurance company being sued because it didn't provide payment for a service, when its contract said that it wouldn't cover that service?

I'm just sitting here expecting the US Congress to start work on an Internet Users' "Bill of Rights" to keep mean, evil ISPs like PaeTec from arbitrarily kicking off good, hard-working, upstanding citizens like MonsterHut. Contracts be damned!

ARIN info

[Skapare]

Monsterhut Inc (NETBLK-PAET-RO-MONSTER-1)
1 Columbo Drive
Niagara Falls, NY 14305
US

Netname: PAET-RO-MONSTER-1
Netblock: 64.80.216.0 - 64.80.221.255

Coordinator:
Pelow, Todd (TP521-ARIN) tpelow@monsterhut.com
716-298-9797

Re:ARIN info

[Anonymous Coward]

Any Rochester/Buffalo/Niagara Falls /.'ers want to go to Niagara Falls and do some Larting?

Heck, afterwards, we can cross the border and go to Casino Niagara, or some of the other fine adult entertainment establishments in Southern Ontario ;-)

I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[john_updyke]

I don't get it.. what's so difficult in deleting a few messages that you might not want to read ?

Now before you mod me as troll, just take a moment to think about this: The normal reason why spam is bad is that "Oh, it costs in bandwidth, time, connection charges etc" but has anyone ever calculated how much it costs to set up RBL+ , ORBZ etc. ? I did some analysis when evaluating RBL+ (now that it's pay-per-view) and decided that I can always delete those five messages a day (on average).

Besides, if all network admins would unblock all spamhousen maybe the "penis extension"-emails would give a "boost" to the "economy"..

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[Anonymous Coward]

If you get just five spam mails a day, well done. Now shut up and let the people who receive literally hundreds talk about the problem.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[cyberdonny]

> I don't get it.. what's so difficult in deleting a few messages that you might not want to read ?

The operative word is precedent. If we let Monster off the hook, other spammers will take notice, and very soon it will no longer be just a "few" messages, but thousands of them. How would you feel if you had to pass an hour each morning sifting through your spam, fearing that you might miss an important message from your friends or coworkers? Today spam is not that bad, but if we don't react now, it may be that bad five years from now.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[jwonase]

I have to disagree. It interrupts my work. I get emails from customers through out the day, and I have a tendency to try and reply within a reasonable amount of time. So, whenever I get an email, I have to interrupt my work. And trust me, it can get real annoying when I get a spam every 10-15 minutes. That is a big time interruption. Luckily filters are starting to help, but it is still an annoying problem. If I could just turn mail off for the day, that'd be great. But I can't. So instead of a 14 hour day at the office, I'm here 14 ½. That is ½ hour less time spent with my family. That Sh*t pisses me off.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[Jumperalex]

Well, because I get way more than 5 spams/day on average, more like 20-30, and I'm lucky enough to have a cable connection so I don't have to wait very long for those emails to download. But I don't even want to imagine what a hassle it is for modem folk.

Try to imagine what it would be like to get 20 phone solicitation calls/day. Now imagine it without caller ID. Now imagine your phone is delayed so that you have to wait say 10 seconds after picking up for the caller to start their pitch.

I have had my same email addy now for 6 years and do not feel I should have to hop to another addy just to try and avoid spammers.

That is why spammers need to be dealt with and why [god i can't believe i'm about to say this] there outta be a law ... forcing all info distribution to be opt-in not opt-out so I have to explicatly give my permission; and no i never will.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're at the office for 14 hours in a day, you're not spending enough time with your family anyway. It doesn't really matter about that extra half an hour, they're going to get pissed off with you. I'd look into cutting down your work hours immediately. Try doing normal 8 hour, 9-5 days for a while.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[john_updyke]

will no longer be just a "few" messages, but thousands of them. How would you feel if you had to pass an hour each morning sifting through your spam

That's the point. The lawmakers would also receive those thousands of messages, if they know what email is... Nobody gets annoyed from a few spams but think about thousands of spams per day!! It certainly wouldn't last for long and it might put an end to spam for good. This would require that the spam situation gets worse and really fast. Nobody notices a gradual increase anyway.

Oh well, that's a better idea than the email tax that was floating around few years ago :)

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent troll, good work!

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[jwonase]

Thanks for the obvious, my friend. Unfortunately, that will cause the business to be "out of business", which means I have no job. I guess I pick the lesser of two evils. If I only work 8-9 hours, THEN ½ hour wouldn't be a big deal. But when I only get a couple hours each night with my kid, taking away any amount of that time hurts.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it.. what's so difficult in deleting a few messages that you might not want to read ?

Because most of the spam I get is pornospam. And not light playboy.com stuff, but sick nasty shit.
My whole family uses the net+email and having that stuff appear in the inbox (with html, images) is not acceptable.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[nick-less]

I don't get it.. what's so difficult in deleting a few messages that you might not want to read ?


I would'nt care, but unfortunatly most spam arrives on adresses, which were intended to report customers trouble to me. Adresses used in RIPE/NIC /whatever Databases get constantly spamed, which makes them allmost unusable.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats nice that you the end user, don't mind gettng your "few messages" a day and delete them, but this isn't about you the end user. This is about me, the network/system operator. I personally don't give a shit about your silly little mailbox. I do though about your silly little mailbox multiplied by tens of thousands. If every one of my users recieve a few messages a day, that quickly translates into several millions of messages per week. Guess what, this is a real cost. A real cost of disk space, a real cost of support hours, a real cost of bandwidth, a real cost of CPU utilization, a real cost of abuse time trying to clean it all up. You don't have to clea up after spam, I do. When you look at the big suckhole and start adding up all the costs of diskspace, time and bandwidth across all providers, you have a major problem with billions in dollars in losses just so you can have a bigger cock.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[Eggplant62]

I don't get it.. what's so difficult in deleting a few messages that you might not want to read ?

Ever done the math related to spam email? Let's say that 1% of all businesses connected to the Internet == 340,000. Let's say that all 340,000 decides to start using unsolicited email as an advertising medium and send one message a week. I don't know about you, but spending the time necessary to hit delete on 340,000 emails in one week isn't something I relish, especially if I decided to take a vacation and can't see my inbox for two weeks or better.

It might be five spam emails today. I assure you, if left alone, the glut of spam will cause email to become useless as a communication tool.

Rich

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[Steeltoe]

I don't get it.. what's so difficult in deleting a few messages that you might not want to read ?

Interesting... Is that why you don't have an open email address on /.? Try it, I think you might not like it.

Now before you mod me as troll,

Saying that only confirms our suspicions.

- Steeltoe

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[sporty]

Well, what about the bandwidth it uses of off my low-end DSL service? Can I sue them when it becomes "usuable"? What's the percentage of lost bytes until /I/ can sue them?

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, the main bandwidth hit here is not on your individual machine, but on the sender's network. Thousands, or tens or hundreds of thousands, of emails a day degrades the performance of the network.
Second of all, think of your European friends, most of whom pay by the minute for email connections. Do really want to pay anywhere from a few pfennigs to a couple of marks a day for something you didn't ask for, don't want, and probably won't even read?
It's no big deal for me, moneywise, but it still pisses me off, especially when most of the spammers obfuscate their email address (which is illegal in only one state so far, I think), and when I get the same fucking email three times in a row (a 38 year old guy who weighed 264 lbs, then a 38 year old woman who weighed 264 lbs, then I got bored.) And it would be a big deal for me if I was a)paying by the minute, b)as active as I used to be on usenet and mailing lists, which function as reservoirs of email addys for spammers.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[ajs]

What's more I get about 20-100 pieces of spam a day (and that's just what my filters which took months to perfect catch).

This represents a huge use of bandwidth and my personal time. Just identifying it as spam and deleting takes enough time that I could spend hours each month. I will not tolerate that.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[gad_zuki!]

First off, spam usually equals scam. Think those penis pump devices work or that credit fixer is going to do anything than offer you a high interest load?

Second, unlike traditional junk mail spammers do not pay the real cost for their mailings. Bandwidth is usually stolen. Guess who eats up the cost? The customers of the ISP. We're paying for the penis pumps HTML ads.

What? @home is $6 more this month! Wonder why.

Third, its inconsiderate to put someone on a mailing list and have them manually unsub themselves 10 times a day to avoid more spam.

Fourth, spammers won't agree to any convention for easy filtering, like Subj: ADV blahblah. Instead they send use fake names with misleading subjects to fool people into reading their aluminum siding ad. With an ADV tag we could put it straight into our spam folders or auto-delete it.

Spam sucks.

Sign the petition to convince Disney to bring Hayao Miyazaki's anime to the US.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[hearingaid]

you get five messages a day. that's pretty low.

I live in a heavily filtered world, now. before, though: at one point I was more like sixty messages a day of spam.

try coming back to that after two weeks of Christmas. unenjoyable.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it.. what's so difficult in deleting a few messages that you might not want to read ?

Because it's more than a "few" messages. Spam accounts for more than 99% of my email. That's right: less than one email in a hundred that I receive, is real. (That's what I get for having the same email address for 7 years and posting to Usenet, I guess.)

I have some automated filtering that cuts down on how much of this spam I actually see, but I still have to spend time every once in a while updating my filters. And if I didn't have the filters, I would be truly screwed. When spam gets this bad, one tends to get into the habit of just not reading their email anymore, and legit emails start to get deleted along with the spam. So it's effectively Denial of Service.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[Eccles]

I don't get it.. what's so difficult in deleting a few messages that you might not want to read ?

I've been going through 2,500 messages for my mom, for an account she has essentially never used. I have yet to find anything that wasn't spam.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[moheeb]

You're confused...If you spent months perfecting your filters....then those 20-100 messages would be considered your e-mail....the good stuff.

Maybe you should start reading them.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[NetPhoenix]

Today spam is not that bad, but if we don't react now, it may be that bad five years from now.

Not bad?? We move about a million emails a day. Of those million messages, approximately a third are identified as SPAM by postini spam filters (user configurable). I think that can be classified as a bad .

-NetPhoenix

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[ajs]

Nope. SPAM. The lot of it. Doesn't matter how long it takes for me to write filters to catch it all. Unsolicited commercial email is still unsolicited and commercial.

Re:I don't know why you guys hate "spam" so much

[Erbo]

I don't get it.. what's so difficult in deleting a few messages that you might not want to read?

Because it's not just "a few messages." Just now, I checked my mailbox, and it had about 30 messages in it since the last time I checked it (last night). Of those, maybe one or two were legitimate e-mails (routine messages that I could delete right away). Of the rest, about half were spam, and the other half were double-bounce error messages from the Electric Minds mail server--spam that someone tried to send to minds.com email addresses, that the server tried to bounce but failed for one reason or another (usually because the return address does not exist, or the machine would not handle the incoming SMTP connection properly), and hence that get passed to me.

When I get double-bounces back, I usually "blackhole" the address that the spam was sent to (i.e. set up that address as an alias to /dev/null). Occasionally, though, some companies will "carpet-bomb" the minds.com server with spam for random numerical addresses (like "00000001@minds.com"), and I have to blackhole an entire "from" domain (or range of "from" domains, as with the fscking bastards at edirectnetwork.net and opt-in-net.net). This is a royal pain to deal with on a daily basis, despite the fact that I use qmail as my mail server, which makes it easier to perform these operations.

That's why, whenever I hear someone say "I don't know why you guys hate 'spam' so much," I want to reach for my LART.

Eric

New Flash: Was a Joke...

[Codeala]

News Flash: /. moderators have no sense of humour, while I got a mail order PhD degree totally free.

Re:New Flash: Was a Joke...

[Anonymous Coward]

> News Flash: /. moderators have no sense of humour, while I got a mail order PhD degree totally free.

News Flash: this is old news.

Re:Oh, great... (o/T)

[Yakman]

No one said you have to use an Adobe product to view the output of one.

No one said you have to use an Adobe product to make a PDF.

Cultivated e-mail addresses. You jest, surely?

[jgp]

http://www.monsterhut.com/our_lists.htm:

"All of our email lists are permission based. Our lists have been cultivated through list broker alliances and affinity agreements that we have established."

Translation:

"We didn't ask permission, but we don't feel guilty about that. Our lists were purchased in bulk on CD-Rs in exchange for sexual favours. We hope to aquire more CD-Rs as it's the only sex we get."

Re:Cultivated e-mail addresses. You jest, surely?

[Pope]

But the holes in CDRs are sooo tiny...

Oh, wait a minute, that makes more sense now...

Re:IS THIS CONVERSATION JUMPING ALL OVER THE PLACE

[Anonymous Coward]

Hee hee. (-1, Offtopic). That's right, play down criticism...the patch works...no-one will mind...Bill is happy...sorry, that should be "Taco is happy" - I keep getting the shoody nature of this site confused with the shoddy nature of the Microsoft products it likes to criticise.

Send fake DMCA violation letters...

[cyberdonny]

Send an authentic looking "lawyer's letter" claiming that on Sunday August 12th, you found pirate movies on their site only to find them gone on Monday 13th, but back next Saturday and gone again on Monday.

The ISP personnel will have to come in working during a weekend to check on the claims, and, fearing DMCA litigation, they'll prefer to cut off Monster waiting for a sworn affidavit from them that they have no pirated movies on their site.

Re:Send fake DMCA violation letters...

[Pig Hogger]

Send an authentic looking "lawyer's letter" claiming that on Sunday August 12th, you found pirate movies on their site [monsterhut.com] only to find them gone on Monday 13th, but back next Saturday and gone again on Monday.

Won't work.

The DMCA does not have force of law where they are, and the ISP personnel will be glad to tell them to shove up their lawyer's letter.

Re:Send fake DMCA violation letters...

[cyberdonny]

> The DMCA does not have force of law where they are, and the ISP personnel will be glad to tell them to shove up their lawyer's letter.

Huh? Paetec (the ISP) is located in NY, which is in the US. DMCA is federal law, thus it certainly applies. > whois paetec.net
Domain Name: PAETEC.NET
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: http://www.networksolutions.com
Name Server: NS1.PAETEC.NET
Name Server: NS2.PAETEC.NET
Updated Date: 02-jan-2001

Registrant:
Paetec Communications (PAETEC-DOM)
290 Woodcliff Drive
Fairport, NY 14450
US

Domain Name: PAETEC.NET

Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
Noren, Bill (NB519-ORG)
dnsadmin@PAETEC.COM
PaeTec Communications
290 Woodcliff Drive
Fairport, NY 14450
US
(716) 340-2737
Fax- - (716) 340-2509
Technical Contact:
Paetec Hostmaster (PH2710-ORG)
dns@PAETEC.NET
Paetec Communications
One PaeTec Plaza
600 Willowbrook Office Park
Fairport, NY, US 14450
US
1-877-472-3832
Fax- 1-716-340-2786

Record last updated on 02-Jan-2001.
Record expires on 04-Jun-2002.
Record created on 04-Jun-1998.
Database last updated on 31-Aug-2001 00:08:00 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.PAETEC.NET 64.80.255.250
NS2.PAETEC.NET 64.80.255.251

Re:Send fake DMCA violation letters...

[maetenloch]

The DMCA does not have force of law where they are, and the ISP personnel will be glad to tell them to shove up their lawyer's letter.

Apparently they're located in NY, so the DMCA would definately apply. Furthermore, what ISP in their right mind would continue their service (and risk liability) when they are already known to be spammers.

A good solution to a serious problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

I vote we begin assassinating these guys.

I'm serious. It's what we have the rights to guns for, to give justice to those that violate our rights, and I am assuming privacy to be a right in this country as much as guns is.

So if these people refuse to stop, and they're using the system to their advantage... it's time to stop playing to the system and just take matters into our own hands.

I mean, hell, isn't this what Counterstrike is for, to teach geeks how to use sniper rifles? If not, then my opinion of the game has reached a new low.

I say we start killing RIAA people too, for the same reasons. Hillary Rosen's the first that needs to go down. (Or, if someone's willing to truly sacrifice themselves, I think her problem is that she's never been laid properly, and we need to get someone to give themselves to her, for the sake of all mankind.)

So what say we let the manhunt begin, huh?

---
I'm not a real anonymous coward, I just play one on TV.

Re:A good solution to a serious problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

OK if it will stop you from killing anyone I am willing to fuck Hillary Ro,.... oh, wait. nevermind, I thought you meant the other Hillary.

The worst thing being

[halftrack]

he read the spam mail.

mark, mark, mark, delete, delete, delete

Re:The worst thing being

[Anonymous Coward]

Get ricochet.
Make and conf.
Save your daily spam to for example spam.txt
Run ricochet spam.txt
Spammers internet account gets deleted, we hope.
Repeat.

DDoS attacks as a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't someone DDoS these guys to death? I mean, if we're gonna say that unsolicited e-mail is morally wrong, and this is the only method we have to dispose of these cretins, why not just go ahead and unleash hell on them until they can't stay online anymore?

So what if we're disrupting their business? It's an illegitimate business anyway.

Re:DDoS attacks as a good thing?

[Monkeychunks]

In my humble opinion, that's absolutely hunky dorey. There is such a thing as provocation, and it often releases an attacker (in the physical world) from liability, so I'd like to see the same principle applied here.

Also, when it comes up in court that monsterhut got whacked left and right in the good ol' DDoS fashion, it will make public opinion of their practices glaringly clear, and I believe that this would be an important step toward achieving real legislation against spammers.

Re:DDoS attacks as a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah. Vigilante justice. Great idea.

Now, please...shut the fuck up.

Spam protection

[bero-rh]

Since spam is getting more and more of a problem, I've decided to release my partial solution (content based spam filtering).
It currently kills about 70% of the spam I receive (still leaving about 20 messages per day in my normal mailbox :( ).

ftp://ftp.bero.org/pub/experimental/NoSpam-0.0.1.t ar.bz2

And yes, it kills spam from monsterhut.com.

Re:Spam protection

[Kidbro]

I applaud your initiative! I am somewhat sceptic to the efficiency and validity of your added (besides the GPL2) license restriction though. Would you care to explain whether you have any hope of it actually having any effect? (I'm asking this out of pure ignorance, having little knowledge of the validity of various licenses, but would this, say, hold in court?)

For those of you who haven't downloaded the file, and sees no reason to crash bero-rh's poor ftp server, the addition reads:
IT IS ILLEGAL TO LOOK AT THE SOURCE CODE FOR THE PURPOSE OF FINDING OUT HOW TO BYPASS THE FILTERS OR HOW TO HELP OTHERS TO BYPASS THE FILTERS. BY ABUSING THIS PROGRAM OR PARTS THEREOF TO CREATE OR SEND SPAM (HEREBY DEFINED AS ANY SORT OF UNSOLICITED BULK MAIL) OR TO AID WITH OR SUPPORT THE CREATION OR SENDING OF SPAM, YOU AGREE TO PAY A FEE OF $100,000 TO THE DEVELOPERS AND FACE ANY OTHER CONSEQUENCES YOUR ACTION MAY HAVE HAD (SUCH AS LAWSUITS FROM PEOPLE WHO RECEIVED THE SPAM). THE DEVELOPERS OF NoSpam CAN IN NO WAY BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR ABUSE.

Re:Spam protection

[nick-less]

I've been blocking any free mail provider, filters out more than 90% of all spam ;-)

btw: I haven't had much email lately..

Re:Spam protection

[bero-rh]

IANAL, so I can't tell you whether or not this could hold in court.

The reason I've put it in is because spammers will probably want to figure out how to prevent their mail from being blocked, and rephrase the typical spam phrases I'm catching, and I don't want that to happen.

The possible solutions would have been

• Don't release it
  This worked quite nicely in the last month or so - reduced the amount of spam I get, but doesn't help anyone else. A rather egoistic approach, not a solution.
• Release it under a binary only license
  I've actually considered this for the first time in my life, using a license like Use the binary, don't reverse engineer it, but if you need to run it on a platform other than Red Hat Linux on x86 simply let me know and I'll give you the source under the condition that you don't make it available, but make your resulting binary available. But then, I know what I think of proprietary software, so I'd rather avoid this one, as well.
• Explicitly forbid abuse of the source
  That's the one I picked - I don't know if it can be enforced (it'll probably be hard to prove a spammer rephrased his spam because he looked at the phrases being blocked), but making clear it's not ok and threatening consequences might stop one spammer or two.
  Since sending spam is illegal in many countries, this is not even much of an additional restriction to the GPL - it's just a "Don't use this program for illegal purposes"

I'm not sure if the license with this addition still meets all the terms of the Open Source Definitions (not shutting anyone [spammers] out), but I think everyone will understand this restriction. ;)

Re:Spam protection

[Trollificus]

Some careful re-wording of the agreement and he might be able to use the DMCA to his advantage.
Are his "filters" encrypted in any way? If so, then he may have something there.

Re:Spam protection

[jfunk]

Yup, the GPL specifically forbids arbitrary restrictions to specific groups, even if they are spammers.

It looks like Bero is trying to use the DMCA for 'good' but I don't agree with it, for the same reason the GPL disallows it.

We shouldn't be acting like the Adobes or the MPAAs of the world. We don't want to stoop to their level, even if spam annoys us.

Re:Spam protection

[commodoresloat]

Someone whose sig points to vhemt is bitching about a clause in the license that tells spammers to fuck off? It's not like bero-rh expects to collect the $100G (I can just see a court ordering that - yeah right). It's a statement, dude, kinda like vhemt....

Re:Spam protection

[ajs]

I get about the same rate with my simple procmail filters. I do the following:

1. Bounce subject-less mail
2. Bounce anything where the initial headers indicate content-type charset containing: ks_c|b2312|DEFAULT_CHARSET|iso-2|euc
3. Bounce anything with a content-type starting with: text/html|application/|image/|x-.*
   NOTE: This is only for the initial header. If you have an attachment of one of those types, I allow it.
4. A content-type header somehwere in the headers or body, but no content-type: text/plain anywhere in the headers or body.
5. Match a few case-sensitive things in subjects like, FREE!|LOSE WEIGHT
6. A bunch of simple regular expressions on the body including
   • =?charset
   • HR 3113 and S. 1618 references
   • !!!
   • SirCam signature, EAALoQAA4ftAnNIbgBTM0hkJBUaG
7. Bounce some pesky domains that are often mentioned in SPAM or by pushy recruiters
8. Bounce some bulk mailer signatures

I actually send a reply, assuming that: a) most spammers will never read it and b) my name is already on their lists and c) Someone unfairly caught by my filters will know why I didn't reply in person.

Re:Spam protection

[Refrag]

What is #2 for?

Re:Spam protection

[pointwood]

I use sneakemail (http://sneakemail.com) to create disposable email addresses.

Excellent service, easy to use and puts you back in control of your email address!

Need a working email address but don't want to hand out your real address? Create a new sneakemail address, label it and you got it.

If you get spam on that sneakemail address then you just filter it or delete the address. Furthermore you know that who has spammed you (or sold your address), since you (if you are smart) have only used that address at one particular site.

My explanation is probably not good, but take a look at their site - they have excellent howto's, etc.

Re:Spam protection

[Kidbro]

I'm sorry, it wasn't intended as bitching, rather a sincere question. Bero seemed to understand that, at least, which is sufficient for me :)

Re:Spam protection

[ajs]

I speak and read english. If someone sends me Japanese, it's SPAM. This won't be the case for everyone, but it is for me (and the sheer volume of foreign-language spam I get is astounding).

Re:Spam protection

[ZeLonewolf]

Can you post these procmail filters (or perhaps a portion of them)?

Re:Spam protection

[bero-rh]

That's pretty similar to what my tool is doing, with the exception that I'm not filtering out Japanese or text/html (some people do send legit messages with broken mail clients).

Re:Spam protection

[bero-rh]

Nice fix - but you can't do that for your business address.

("Hi, CEO of important customer! Sure we can talk about this via email! My current address is foo1234567@sneakemail.com, and if I discontinue reading that, please try bar7654321@sneakemail.com!").

Re:Spam protection

[bero-rh]

Since sending spam is illegal, I consider the addition to the license a simple case of "you may not use this to do illegal things", much like you implicitly claim "I won't use this to kill someone" when you buy a knife.

I think it's ok to make this so clear that even a braindead spammer can understand it. ;)

Re:Spam protection

[praedor]

Hope I'm not too late to this discussion to get an answer...

Lately, my mailbox has been getting hit heavily with spam. At first, using kmail, I simply setup filters to bounce any mail deemed as spam (the usual suspects containing "!!!","diet", "money", "fast", etc). It turns out that most of the crap I was getting had false email addresses on them so instead of bouncing properly, my inbox began filling with failed delivery messages.

Question: with this nospam app, if the email address is bogus, don't you stand the chance filling your inbox with just as many failure to deliver notices as spam? Since the nospam app sends off a complaint message to the sender, if the sender email is bogus, you will get a failed delivery notice for every spam that contains a bogus email. How do you protect against that?

I ended up going with the app "ricochet" which automatically sends a complaint letter to the contact emails appropriate for the origin of the spam, regardless of the bogus email. Hopefully, the ISPs so notified will then take action.

Re:Spam protection

[bero-rh]

It doesn't catch this (yet). But you can turn off sending the bounce messages (they're completely optional).

I decided against adding lookups of the IP owner because of speed and traffic issues - I need this thing to handle >= 8000 messages a day (yes, I'm running it over mailing list folders as well. spam from linux-kernel is just as annoying as spam sent to me directly).

Re:Spam protection

[Elbereth]

Shouldn't it be called "less spam", rather than "no spam"?

Spammers

[Anonymous Coward]

Spammers should ofcourse be hung in public, but first of all we must be sure that they ARE spammers. Are they? Are their emails unsolicited?

Re:Spammers

[shokk]

We can find that out by trial. If they die after we throw them off a very high cliff, burn them to a crisp, chop them up, or drown them, then they were spammers. If not, then we apologize profusely and ask them not to destroy our civilization.

AIDS Kills Spammers Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:Oh, great... (o/T)

[darylp]

No one said you have to use an Adobe product to view the output of one.

Try telling that to Dmitry Sklyarov.

Yes, they do!

[Anonymous Coward]

and they use faked headers:

Received: from smtp105.monsterhut.com ([12.105.4.105]) by <My ISP> with ESMTP id <Some id> for <My email address>; Mon, 23 Apr 2001 17:56:57 +0200 (MET DST)
Received: from _[15.51.190.3]_by (12.105.4.22:4221) by smtp105.monsterhut.com (LSMTP for Windows NT v1.1b) with SMTP id <2.00003F61@smtp105.monsterhut.com>; Tue, 24 Apr 2001 01:02:51 -0700
Received: from [131.105.201.168] by _[15.51.190.3]_by with SMTP id A40C47E11 Mon, 23 Apr 2001 11:49:51 PDT
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 12:07:08 +0000
Subject: Send someone a special gift from Proflowers.com

Remark the "_[15.51.190.3]_by" on the second 'Received' line, this is an attempt to make you believe that 12.105.4.22 was not the original sender but just a relay for the faked adress 15.51.190.3
The third 'Received' line is completely faked.

My ISP has stated in its AUP that the use of faked headers in email or usenet postings is a sufficient reason for immediate termination of an account.

Re:Yes, they do!

[AstroJetson]

There's always the debate: Is is spam or is it not spam? It's like the porno debate of a few decades ago - I know it when I see it but it's hard to define in law. Well, faking headers and using open relays are two of the ways you can tell for sure. If it's legit (ie, you opted-in), there's no need for the subterfuge.

I just love spam that at the bottom says: "This is not spam, blah, blah, blah....." Then why are you sending it through an open relay and pretending to be someone else???

However, as much as I hate spam, I agree with the original poster. The court doesn't know whether these guys are spammers. Better to err on the side of caution than put some struggling company out of business by mistake. I hope justice prevails in the end, though. And by that I mean that the spammers should be forced to listen to Britney Spears for 20-life. On second thought...that's not harsh enough.

Re:Yes, they do!

[Captain Sarcastic]

...And by that I mean that the spammers should be forced to listen to Britney Spears for 20-life. On second thought...that's not harsh enough.

You could try Yoko Ono... but the ACLU might go after you for "cruel and unusual punishment"...

Re:Yes, they do!

[Anonymous Coward]

All you have to do is just find some unsuspecting site, and recreate that on a local network with the same numbers and names. It's faked, but now looks like real...

Re:OT: Microsoft QotD -- memory leaks ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess he's refering to many MS apps leaking memory like hell... a reaaally open memory management system where' every pointer is welcome, even if it's from another process !

And they're now introducing a garbage collector in C#, in the ample hope that that will solve the problem.. ha ! Pretty curious how safe that collector is gonna be....

spam sucks but????

[Anonymous Coward]

Spam is heinous, but with all of the talk about bringing government regulation to the internet, people need to consider that politicians usually want a hot button issue to wave around while they pass some hidden adgenda. Spam would be the perfect poster child for the pols to use as an excuse to regulate the hell out of the net in other ways. Sometimes one has to accept the price of a free system ie spam AND viruses. The savy user is already dealing with those WITHOUT and help from regulators. Maybe the problem is that the net is used by too many non technical whiners who want someone to hold thier hand.

Re:spam sucks but????

[Anonymous Coward]

Spam is heinous, but with all of the talk about bringing government regulation to the internet, people need to consider that politicians usually want a hot button issue to wave around while they pass some hidden adgenda. Spam would be the perfect poster child for the pols to use as an excuse to regulate the hell out of the net in other ways. Sometimes one has to accept the price of a free system ie spam AND viruses. The savy user is already dealing with those WITHOUT and help from regulators. Maybe the problem is that the net is used by too many non technical whiners who want someone to hold thier hand.

That's a damn good point, so do you have any ideas on how to change this trend with asking for help and getting a draconian law in response?

Perhaps requiring anyone who makes internet law be internet savvy or at least knowedgable or functional in a programming language.

Perhaps dividing internet issue's into individual segments so that a lumped-bloated-cover-all law doesn't get passed legally.

Perhaps a SANITY CHECK to make sure that a law isn't going against the constitution, passing a law like that ought to be considered DOMESTIC TERRORISM and the lawmakers responsible for even attempting to pass it, should be held accountable for it. After all ignorance of the law is no excuse... right? Then ignorance of the constitution should be no excuse either and these bastards ought to be thrown in jail without bail. The MILITARY should be the ones who remove bad lawmakers.

Re:spam sucks but????

[Anonymous Coward]

this isn't the bloody point; it's the fact that they're using the court to keep spamming

Give MonsterHut a Call...

[Cheviot]

I bet they'd love our opinions :)

716-298-9797

Re:Give MonsterHut a Call...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't they have a toll free number? May as well let them foot the bill for the phone call.

Re:Give MonsterHut a Call...

[Anonymous Coward]

use 1-800-collect to call them and for your name just say "you suck"

If I were the owner of the ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

I would just shut off MonsterHut.
What more harm could it do, already your in a friggin court with em. Might as well make their time miserable. But you better get your shit together and make sure you can prove they are spamming.

Something that puzzles me though is I wonder why the ISP didn't force MonsterHut to sign to some kind of agreement that protects the ISP and grants power to the ISP to cut them off for violating the TOS.

This should be a lesson for other ISP's who may know how to run an ISP (e.g. technically) but not how to protect themselves legally.

Re:If I were the owner of the ISP

[n76lima]

"I would just shut off MonsterHut."
This equals "I will rot in jail for contempt of Court."

"But you better get your shit together and make sure you can prove they are spamming."

They tried this. They brought affidavits to Court showing numerous complaints from those that have email addresses setup for only Network Solutions contact, and spam traps that have never been used for public email, etc.

"Something that puzzles me though is I wonder why the ISP didn't force MonsterHut to sign to some kind of agreement that protects the ISP and grants power to the ISP to cut them off for violating the TOS."

They did have an agreement that specifically banned "B.U.C.E." or SPAM. But MonsterHut argued that they should be allowed to continue unless 2% of the 69 million emails sent came back as complaints! PAETEC has been warned by Vario (their upstream provider) that they are in danger of being cut off because of this!

"This should be a lesson for other ISP's who may know how to run an ISP (e.g. technically) but not how to protect themselves legally."

Fat chance. PAETEC had a contract negotiated with MonsterHut which the Judge examined and found to be valid, but he issued the injuction anyway, inspite of MonsterHut not meeting deadlines for depostions, etc.

Re:If I were the owner of the ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

"I would just shut off MonsterHut."
This equals "I will rot in jail for contempt of Court."

I see that now. The court said they gotta keep them up.

"But you better get your shit together and make sure you can prove they are spamming."
They tried this. They brought affidavits to Court showing numerous complaints from those that have email addresses setup for only Network Solutions contact, and spam traps that have never been used for public email, etc.

What the hell kind of Kangaroo Courts are we running in the US? Is the judge blind or just stupid. I wonder. Thanks for the followup....

"Something that puzzles me though is I wonder why the ISP didn't force MonsterHut to sign to some kind of agreement that protects the ISP and grants power to the ISP to cut them off for violating the TOS."
They did have an agreement that specifically banned "B.U.C.E." or SPAM. But MonsterHut argued that they should be allowed to continue unless 2% of the 69 million emails sent came back as complaints! PAETEC has been warned by Vario (their upstream provider) that they are in danger of being cut off because of this!

Here's where you loose me, and I really question the sanity of the Judge. SPAM is illegal right? Then what argument should MonsterHut have at all? Furthermore I sure hope that PAETEC forwards that information about Verio (the Upstream Provider) threatening to cut them off because of this crap uce from MonsterHut. If there is ONE complaint about uce, then that is SPAM it is illegal. your talking 2% of 69 million that's a lot of fscking complaints. Federal Trade Commision won't help?

"This should be a lesson for other ISP's who may know how to run an ISP (e.g. technically) but not how to protect themselves legally."
Fat chance. PAETEC had a contract negotiated with MonsterHut which the Judge examined and found to be valid, but he issued the injuction anyway, inspite of MonsterHut not meeting deadlines for depostions, etc.

Then that is a BAD judge. If the system is this much broken I start to wonder if maybe people who suggest non-legal methods to deal with problems like this are not correct in their intents. (we know they're right, but legally they would be just as wrong as the spammer)

I am getting so sick of this crap where the new business model is to sue. Maybe leveling the buildings and infrastructure these vultures live and work from is the real answer.

Caught Spamming? Loose your property. Get banned from computers for 10 years. Make it like hacking a .mil server and spying. Throw the fscking book at em.

Make some CONSEQUENCES for your ACTIONS into LAW.

Re:If I were the owner of the ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that Paetec is a young company, about 5 or 6 years old I think. And to top it off they are primarily a telecom company. I've interviewed with their data people. What a bunch of idiots. They wanted to give me the job but they're offer was so low that I laughed. Really, in person. That didn't go over to well and I decided they wouldn't be a great company to work for if they were stupid enough to think that I was that stupid. Apparently I was right.

Re:If I were the owner of the ISP

[elflord]

But MonsterHut argued that they should be allowed to continue unless 2% of the 69 million emails sent came back as complaints!

This argument is obviously bogus, and I wish the judge would see through it. The problem is that most people obviously won't complain. This is actually a back-door opt-out scheme -- unless users explicitly complain, it's assumed that they've opted in.

It would be interesting to take a random sample of say 1000 people on the mailing lists, ask whether they solicited mail from monster-hut, and see if more than 98% of the replies assert that they did !

A good read!

[_Sprocket_]

I'd like to advise everyone to hit the link, grab some documents (especially the transcript) and have a good read. I've found the transcript fascinating and I'm only at pg. 47.

Some interesting points so far...

The biggest part of the case is whether this was actually a case of unsolicited email or not. The Defendant has stated that they believed Monsterhut was an opt-in advertising service when, in fact, they buy their lists externally with the apparent assumption that these are genuine opt-in customers.

The Plaintiff has pointed to a provision in the contract that allows for a 2% complaint rate to avoid immediate termination of their contract. First, whoever agreed to this for the ISP should be shot considering the sheer amount of traffic Monsterhut can throw out and the number of spam messages that 2% allows for (the Plaintiff even mentions a number over 6 million outgoing messages to date, if I remember right). Apparently, this provision exists to protect Monsterhut from users who opt-in but later forget (or change their minds). When the ISP receives complaints, they are to forward them to Monsterhut who will verify the address, validity of the complaint, and apparently make the appropriate changes to their database. Makes you warm and fuzzy to know your complaints are, in fact, going directly to the spammer.

An interesting side effect to all this is the ability to verify individuals. Quite a lot of attention is paid to whether the individuals could be identified according to their email addresses and the fact that SpamCop removes this information. It seems this comes in to play during the complaint / remediation process. But it is even more important when dealing with the court. The Defense pointed out that the Plaintiff had ample opportunity to subpoena SpamCop for identifying information, but failed to do so.

One final interesting tidbit... the Judge wanted to define the difference the Defense saw between a case of one of the 2% mistaken users and a "true spam" case. The Defense began to talk about harvested email accounts that are not user email accounts, such as those used for contacts in Network Solution's whois database. The Plaintiff apparently perks up on this, grabs the ball, and attempts to run. It appears that Monsterhut does "use Network Solutions" to identify businesses offering services that could be marketed by Monsterhut. Since they only send mail out to, say, 5 "targeted" customers... why... this isn't the kind of mass emailings that we're all talking about. Not spam at all. Nosir.

Re:A good read!

[ergo98]

Just about every spam I've been getting over the past little bit has about 60% of the body full of disclaimers and justifications for the spam, and it usually indicates that somehow I have "opted-in" to their spam list. My favourite are the ones that include long rambling essays on how you can simply "delete the message" if you don't like it, and that it helped saved trees because the alternative was that they would direct mail: Give me a break. >99% of these shady, quasi-illegal scams (I still gotta pick up the several hundred university diplomas that are waiting for me, and that will earn the respect of family and friends) couldn't garner enough investment to send paper mailings to a small neighbourhood, let alone the millions they indiscriminately spam. And sure it sounds great that I can "just delete it", but when there's thousands of spammers sending out this crap "just deleting" turns into a pretty onerous job.

Re:A good read!

[kimihia]

Indeed it is a good read. I'm part way through the transcript of when they were before John P Lane.

Pretty much the whole way through, MonsterHut was spouting BS and attempting to weasel out of answering the Court's questions. Have a read of this. They are fighting over whether enough people have complained about the spamming:

(Page 32) THE COURT: So do you agree, Plaintiffs, that the two percent doesn't apply, as counsel has just stated?

MR. TOOHEY: No, your Honor. We think, and I know you don't want to see my charts, but I've got charts that show the number of E-mails that have been sent out.

THE COURT: Huge number. Huge number. In the millions.

MR. TOOHEY: Sixty-nine million, versus less than eighteen hundred complaints.

THE COURT: Clearly eighteen hundred would not be two percent of the volume up to a point.

MR. TOOHEY: That's correct.

Having read the above ^^^, I gotta say, those people that say "Just delete spam" are helping spammers. Of course the ISP isn't going to get 2% complaints when 99% of the people are just hitting delete! I send spam reports all the time. Use SpamCop, it helps a lot.

And also, the above number is pretty shocking. 69 million emails!

Hmmmm....

[linatux]

I too hate spam - costs time, costs bandwidth and is just plain annoying.

I hate junkmail too. It also costs me time and money to dispose of (doesn't even burn very well!)

However, I have a mailbox ... and it's not against the law for junkmailers to fill it.

I could rip it out of the ground, get a PO box & be junkmail free.

Likewise, I can take steps to ensure I don't get any spam - but is it worth the cost/hassle?

Re:Hmmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually P.O. Boxes get junk mail too :( just not as much...

Re:Hmmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

"However, I have a mailbox ... and it's not against the law for junkmailers to fill it."

It is illegal for people to send you unsolicited pornographic materials. It is illegal for people to continue to send you junkmail when you have requested to be removed from their lists. It is illegal for them to say "tell us who you are so you can be removed" and then take that information and send you an increased volume of junkmail. It is illegal to send deceptive, misleading or blatantly fraudulent solicitations.

"I could rip it out of the ground, get a PO box & be junkmail free."

Wrong again, clueless. Go to the post office and ask if you can rent a box and be excluded from blanket mailings - sales notices from the supermarket or "have you seen this missing child" and the like. EVERY box gets a copy, and there is nothing you can do about it - I wanted a POB just to avoid such things, but the post office needs to get the money to blow on moving executives across town (for a quarter of a million a pop) from somewhere, so guaranteed delivery is what it is all about.

When's it going to stop?

[MongooseCN]

When's it going to stop?

It's not. As absurd as spam seems, it works. There are millions of people who think they were specially selected to recieve that email and go out and by whatever junk they were mailed. Besides, look at all the junk snail mail you get every day, do you think that's going away any time soon?

Re:When's it going to stop?

[sql*kitten]

Besides, look at all the junk snail mail you get every day, do you think that's going away any time soon?

The difference is, when you receive junk mail in the post, the sender pays. When you receive it in your inbox, you pay.

On my "public" mail address, which gets most of the spam I get, it actually saves me time to log in via the web mail interface, delete the spam, them POP3 download the real mail when I'm on a modem.

Re:When's it going to stop?

[Steeltoe]

Besides, look at all the junk snail mail you get every day, do you think that's going away any time soon?

In Norway, we have new laws where we can opt-out on junk-mail and other types of mass snailmail. You register in an opt-out database that companies _have_ to filter through and you get a sticker to put on your postbox. My experiences with this is that it's working. It's great, because I really don't want trees to be used to spread junk I have no interest in, or to be sent junk involuntarily.

It stings my heart when I discuss this with my neighbour who manages to say she wants to support the _mailmen_, thus don't opt-out. I mean, a person can be as intelligent as he like, but having wrong priorities will just cloud your mind anyways.

One downside is that this apparently does not include free papers, which I never read. I'm going to raise some bruaha about this in the near future though, so maybe it'll be changed :-) I didn't opt-out on information from voluntary projects though (like Red Cross), but so far, I've received none.

Anyways, my point is that it's not impossible. Companies have to follow the laws to stay in bussiness. Now what are you doing, besides complaining and developing an ulcer?

- Steeltoe

Re:When's it going to stop?

[spacialK]

In this respect it's much like those damn telemarketers that call my home phone at all hours of the day. Luckily I live in Florida where the state maintains a list of telephone numbers that are registered no-call numbers for telemarketers. For ~$5 per year people in the state of FL can be listed and although this doesn't stop the unsolicited calls altogether it does give the offended party some basis for recourse. I wonder if any states are providing similar no-spam lists to citizens.
Anyway, as stated before spam continues because ,like telemarketing, *it works*. IMHO spam is much preferable to telemarketing though because it seems much less invasive and a few spam filter rules go a long way.

Re:When's it going to stop?

[arafel]

You have to *pay* to say that you don't want to receive junk calls? And that's seen as a good thing? Wow. :-)

Another option is just to go ex-directory, which is what my phone line is. Admittedly it's in the UK and I don't know how your phone directories work, but...

Re:When's it going to stop?

[Sir Tristam]

Another option is just to go ex-directory, which is what my phone line is. Admittedly it's in the UK and I don't know how your phone directories work, but...

I live in the US in Florida, also. State law prohibits sales solicitation calls to any phone number that is on the state's "no-call" list (costs you $10 first year, $5 each additional year) OR a phone number that is unlisted or unpublished. Unpublished numbers are not in the paper directory, but can still be found through directory assistance; unlisted numbers are not even available through directory assistance.

All this info is available in the front of my white pages phone book; YMMV.

Chris Beckenbach

Re:When's it going to stop?

[koreth]

Besides, look at all the junk snail mail you get every day, do you think that's going away any time soon?

Well, actually, yes -- a couple months ago I went to Junkbusters and sent out all the "take me off your mailing list" requests their site will generate for you. It has cut my paper junk mail volume way down. Not completely to zero, but now I rarely get any junk mail from businesses I'm not already dealing with.

possible solution to spam

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't implemented this yet, but I always wanted to.
Set up your mail program in the following way:
user joe has an account. All mail to joeNNNN@host is mail for
joe, where NNNN is a number. Joe can generate numbers that are valid e-mail addresses. All other numbers are invalid.
Joe will get an e-mail message addressed to joeNNNN@host provided:
1. NNNN is a valid e-mail number
2. The "same" e-mail did not get sent to another invalid number, or to more than 5 valid numbers of joe (for 5 a small positive number, and the appropriate definition of "same").

Joe can also cancel the validity of any of his valid e-mail numbers. This way, you give out certain numbers to friends, other numbers to web-sites, others on program sources, etc.

One can also easily file which e-mails were given to which vendors, and then ask them specifically to stop using the e-mail address.

Re:possible solution to spam

[shokk]

See SpamGourmet. Does what you want it to do.

French Riviera way to fight spam

[TNN]

Today there is no risk associated with spamming.

There are places, like the French Riviera, where
there are things you won't do because you know you
will get into serious trouble -- and I don't mean
legal trouble.

Now, there's many of us geeks who are "well built". Can't we organise ourselves as a network
to show the spammers that our muscles are not only
in our fingers but also what's above them?
With a bit of cooperation we can often determine where the physical spammers are located.

I'm sure we can do something to get spammers to
think a little bit more about what may happen to
them if they send spam. We can track them globally and act locally -- very locally.

Legalise and regulate is the answer?

[proton]

Im not supporting spam in any way, but if the goal is to reduce spam, maybe the way to go is to legalise it and regulate it?

Suppose its legal to send commercial offerings to people by email, lets say we add a tax of 1 cent per email. Tax would go towards enforcing the law.

The tax would make it unattractive to send to just any email address there is. They'd do more targetted stuff and use more opt-in lists, simply cuz they would be paying for it. They dont pay now, so why would they care that their spam hits half a million burmese farmers whose english is limited to "fack joo".

You wouldnt need any new laws to cover spam specifically either, it'd simply become tax evasion and you'd be invaded by the IRS (in the states atleast) if you did anything naughty.

Ofcourse, it wouldnt completely stop spam, but do you think anything could?

/proton

Re:Legalise and regulate is the answer?

[greenrd]

Could be an improvement, if the tax was high enough. But why not just make it illegal?

Re:Legalise and regulate is the answer?

[KjetilK]

We have some good laws here in Norway. Somebody actually did their homework and made a good law. It prohibits spam.

Unfortunately, most of my spam (10 a day, steadily increasing) comes from US sources, so it doesn't have any appreciable effect. But if US got the same law, I think there would be strong impetus for other countries to get good laws as well, because if they didn't we'd blackhole them.

I would want the Final Solution to the spam problem. As with most problems a total solution requires a totalitarian regime. So, if I got one spam a month, and the idiot who did it would be spanked, I would consider the problem solved.

Re:Legalise and regulate is the answer?

[Homewrecker]

Yes! That idea always works, just look at alcohol and guns -- as soon as they became legal, the problems vanished.

Wake up, Timmy!

Spam the spammers

[hoomonkey]

has anyone tried spamming the spam sites? flood the site with tons of emails that are thank you's for all of the unsolicited emails? i think that would be a nice response...

and spamcop kicks butt. a great site...

It is Spam

[Quila]

Some addresses Monster Hut sent to were only used as points of contact for domains with NetSol.
There is no way they could have opted in anywhere since these addresses aren't used for anything other than domain contact.

If one of those people got an unsolicited email, then it's spam, against terms of service, and reasons for terminating the contract.

Monster Hut got that 2% complaint figure thrown in hoping it would save them from getting cut off for spamming, knowing there's no way to get 120,000 separate provable complaints.

But they forgot that that's complaints on truly opted-in spam -- and they should have to prove the opt-in status. They can't -- they're toast.

Re:It is Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

mod the parent up.

Re:It is Spam

[EndersGame]

This is the best tack I've heard for going after them. They must prove that 50 times the number of complaintants are true opt-in users.

If they produce their list and someone starts checking them one by one, they will only have to do 50*N checks to validate MonsterHuts' claim. Of course, every person on that list who says "Nope. I never opted into MonsterHut's mailing list." will add an additional 50 true opt-in users that must be found.

Since most of their users may have opted into something at some point, but not specifically MonsterHut, they are in serious trouble.

PS. If you are an ISP and someone needs an addendum like that, think very hard whether you want them as customers. Consider an N-complaint per month rate rather than a percentage.

Hmmm...

[Monkeychunks]

...So Weird Al got a hot beef injection from Hormel. Well, there goes his veganism!

10 reasons why I hate spam

[clarkie.mg]

Why I hate spam ? Easy, here are the reasons :

1. It's a violation of my privacy. In the country I live, it is illegal to collect and use information about individuals without notifying them and let them correct the info.

2. It hides non-spam messages. As spammers do not mark they messages as advertisements, it is sometimes difficult to spot real email among a list of spam email.

3. It forces me to hide. I cannot use my email on usenet, on the web. I have to use tricks when I have to give my email, those cost time. Multiple email are mandatory to protect your privacy.

4. There is no limit in the amount of spam email you can receive. As it costs almost nothing to send spam, the number of email you receive can be very impressive and cost you time and money. It is worse if you have multiple emails (work, home, topic1, topic2, school, work2, usenet, mobile phone, ...).

5. It can interrupt your work. like said in a previous post.

6. It is a menace for children. Some spam are offensive, illegal or pornographic making the internet a unsafe place in the mind of parents.

7. Spammers hide themselves and forge emails in their messages. You can not answer, complain to their messages.

8. More, as they use a hotmail, yahoo or other email address, these services are sometimes blocked or suffer bad image.

9. Remember that unlike postal advertising, YOU pay for spammers, the whole internet community pays for them.

10. It is illegal, period.

When I'll have time, I'll publish this on my web site : http://unixe.net .

M.G.

Re:10 reasons why I hate spam

[Pyrosz]

Mod this up... good list.

Possibly illegal?

[Gordonjcp]

Isn't is illegal to allow someone to send spam through your servers?

Hence, isn't it just as illegal to *force* someone to maintain service to a spammer?

matter of common sense

[jlemmerer]

As i am Sysadmin an an ISP i get confronted with requests from our "law division" to shut down e-mail accounts from people accused to "spam" certain sites. most time i try to find out what user it is, get his phone number (my ISP is also the largest cell phone provider here - quite good, we have lots of user data) and give him a call. if he doesn't stop spamming i call again - and i shut down his account. unfortunately this only works with provate persons and not with companys. here in austria, to shutdown a account of a company that is accused of spamming, you have to log every mail they send for about half a year (after getting a search warrant from a judge of course). good thing: if they can't explain you about 70% of mails, they are out. bad thing: most times they can explain, and in some cases, 30% of mail traffic they can't explain is enough to spam a whole lot of people.

Re:matter of common sense

[tbo]

As an ISP, you have to get a search warrant to log your own traffic? What the hell? You don't even need to log message contents to prove it's spam--just look for patterns generated by mass-emailers (shitloads of messges of about the same size all going out at once). True, they could be mailing customers, but, if they're a small company and mailing 10 million people, that's kinda unlikely.

WTF is up with Australia? The government can rape you any way they want, but, as a private individual or company, you have to tiptoe around restrictive slander laws, you seem to get screwed every time you connect to the internet, and only China and Afghanistan have worse internet censorship. And you call yourselves a democracy?

Re:matter of common sense

[Vuarnet]

WTF is up with Australia?
Austria. Not Australia. And I always thought nothing was "up" with Australia, "the land down under".

There's only one way to test...

[Monkeychunks]

...Forcefeed them large amounts of spam. If they die from salmonela or similar, then they have achieved an honourable, Christian death.

If, however, they use their abnormal tolerance to spam to survive, then they will have proved their true nature, at which point they will report immediately to the gallows. Innit.

What will get spammers to stop...

[drsoran]

Is just what you said. It's going to take someone gathering up a bunch of people and going to a spammer's house and just beating the living shit out of them. The more radical alternative is for some crazed loner to capture a spammer, drive them deep into the woods, and hunt them for sport. ;-)

Re:What will get spammers to stop...

[Detritus]

I've often thought that this could be a profitable new business for the mafia. They could sell spam insurance. Spam one of their customers and you get a free concrete flotation device and a swimming lesson.

Re:What will get spammers to stop...

[bonehead]

I thought it was pretty much accepted that drowning is one of the more serene and peaceful ways to die.

How about removing their skin with a belt sander, then packing them in salt?

Ever seen a commercial bacon slicer operate? All kinds of interesting things come to mind.

Or, just let them bleed to death through a massive open wound where their genitalia used to be.

Not saying that I'd ever do these things to a spammer myself, but I might watch it on pay-per-view. :-)

Re:What will get spammers to stop...

[bonehead]

One more popped into my head.

Throw them into the arena with a bunch of BattleBots. I'm sure Nightmare could do things to a spammer that would be quite fun to watch. And just imagine what Toro's lifting arm could do if it happened to impact a pair of testicles.

Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "He's pushing him onto the Kill Saws." :)

Re:What will get spammers to stop...

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys make me want to spam you...

I have your addresses now, and I'll use them every time I sign up for some stupid service that forces me to enter an email address!

Oh yeah, and I'll check all the boxes too... I want the updates, the special deals, the mailing list, and all!!!

hehe,

AC

The thing that will help the spammer...

[duffbeer703]

Is the definition of "spam" as specified in the AUP as shown in this document http://litigation.paetec.net/ptmol.pdf

According to the defense affidavit, "Spamming is the distribution of unsolicited commercial e-mail in bulk"

What constitutes "bulk" email from regular email? They do not define "bulk email" as being 10 messages or 10,000 messages, and this gives the spammer a technicality to argue before the court or a tool to delay the process.

Re:The thing that will help the spammer...

[Anonymous Coward]

The last AUP I wrote was based loosely on demons, at www.demon.net somewhere, which says something along the lines of

"we are part of the internet community and must be seen to act responsibly wrt this community, any actions by anyone using our services that adversly affects this can result in termination of service."

Theres also a sexy bit about "your data may travel across the systems of other companies, and you must abide by the AUP's of those companies aswell as our own" which basically means "if I left something out of my TOS then you won't get away with it aslong as it's included in someone elses"...ie the ISP of the recipient of any spam.

Not sure how this would stand up legally so I also wrote about 10 pages of tech speak saying basically you cannot do anything, then stating what is allowed (uploading, non-commercial emails, non-advertising emails etc) to cover our arses.

It's a shame but in this world full of non-tech people using and abusing computers you need to be sure to totally cover yourself. If this means writing a 50 page AUP that nobody can understand then so be it. If someone complains about it then tell them to bugger off...theres enough other people willing to pay for ISP services out there. The odds are if they're complaining its because they intended to do something questionable, or possibly because they're worried you will kill their service for no good reason....its not hard to word the terms of service to avoid this, if you cannot do it then pay someone else to....and get a lawyer to check them.

btw I don't understand why they included the "in bulk", any unsolicited email should be against the TOS, this then also stops hate mails, bomb threat pranks etc from coming from your servers.

Re:The thing that will help the spammer...

[duffbeer703]

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is the reason why lawyers can charge so much. Small details make the difference in legal action.

You have to stop it.

[Caid Raspa]

Just gripe on slashdot about spam/junk mail and you'll receive it forever. Take action and it will end after a long fight. However, junk mail and spam can be reduced by simple means.

look at all the junk snail mail you get every day, do you think that's going away any time soon?

My standard reply seems to work well. You could also try to look at some consumer groups, they have good advice on this.

'I will inform all my friends and their dog about your harassive and misleading marketing' (which I actually never do, griping about junk mail is boring) ... 'I hereby forbid you to send me any mail in the future. I am not interested in you products and never will' ... 'Legal actions may follow' (Some companies sending junk mail do not have large legal depts, so I try to scare them).

For the junk mail send to me by without an address, I have a 'No junk mail here, please' sticker on my mailbox. And if I get some, I call the local post office. The amount of junk mail I receive has diminished by about 75% in two years. Some of my neighbours have started imitating me, as they are getting sick of junk mail.

As absurd as spam seems, it works.

Sometimes spam is counter-productive.

The spam I get is mostly 'harvested' from the company website. Most of the spam we get is 'evaluate our new (MS-Win) software'. The department I work in has about 40 Linuxes, 5 Sun and 3 Mac workstations and 2 Windows machines for the secretaries. So, we do not use Windows software expect the Office package that the secretaries use. This is also clearly stated in our website.

The company spam policy is:

1. Sending spam is strictly forbidden. (This applies also to the marketroids, not only R/D where I work). Spamming would lead to suspending of e-mail account (or the employee, depending on how bad it was).

2. Any spam received should immediately be reported (forwardedto ). A 'legal actions may follow' reply describing our spam policy is sent to the spammer, his/her boss and the webmaster/sysadmin of the spam-sending company. In a few days, the spammer is added to a corporate blacklist for some period of time (something like 3 months). The spam-sending company is also informed on our policy. Anyone on the blacklist will have the following treatment: Any mail sent to our employees from their addresses is dumped automatically. No business will be made with anyone on the blacklist. Repeated spamming results in that we contact the ISP and CEO of the company sending spam, and ask them to stop the harassment.

Some of our departments are Win-only, so the blacklist policy is actually hurting spammers. An their bosses are infomed on that.

(Paging Dr. Hawk....)

[wowbagger]

A question to the real lawyers that read Slashdot (paging Dr. Hawk....)

Paetec has a clear statement in their terms of service that prohibts the use of their service in the furthurance of spam. MonsterHut agreed to that TOS as part of their contract, with the obvious intent of violating that TOS. Does not that mean they entered into the contract in bad faith? Does not that mean that MonsterHut committed a tort of fraud? Does not that mean Paetec can bring countersuit?

I have been a long time advocate of ISPs, "free" e-mail services and "free" web hosting sites adding lines to the contracts stating spam is verboten, and then bringing fraud (charges|civil suit) against spammers. I've read on /. that some ISPs try this, but find it difficult to follow through because the spammer just disputes the credit card charge, and the ISP gets in trouble with the credit card company. However, this seems to me to be a deliberate, premeditated violation of a contract on the part of the spammer, and an act of criminal fraud. Especially if the ISP makes the fine large enough, wouldn't that be felony fraud?

OK, so it was several questions. And I know, that any practicing lawyer no more wishes to give out free advice than I wish to give out free computer service, but.... How about a little non-binding, pro bono, off the cuff, YMMV opinion?

Another way to help filter spam?

[image]

This may already exist, and if so, please point me to it.

First, I use the SpamBouncer procmail scripts, so I actually don't see that much spam any longer. But SpamBouncer is just a set of pretty good heuristics for scoring mail, and sometimes it is a little over or under-zealous.

Second, I use mutt and it has a keystroke ('S') aliased to move a mail to the =spam folder and delete it from the current folder.

What if hitting 'S' (or pressing the hypothetical "Spam" icon in the Outlook toolbar) went so far as to make a MD5 checksum of the alleged spam and send a packet with that checksum off to a centralized server. The server then keeps a database of each checksum and increments a counter associated with that piece of alleged spam.

Now, when the procmail scripts see incoming mail they can request the value for that checksum from the server. Depending on user configuration, a certain threshold (100, 1000, 10000?) must be reached before agreeing that it spam and proactively moving it.

Upsides to this system: if widely used as directed it would be extremely effective at blocking spam. Relatively private (because you are sending checksums not the actual mail).

Downsides to this system: Someone could vote multiple times to make an email appear to be spam (you could have a second packet that decrements the counter as well that people could use on their "spam" folder, or less effectively, you could restrict it to one vote per IP). There is a central server (you could mitigate this by having hierarchical servers that communicate and synchronize with their parent and children in batches). Plus the first 'n' people still have to see the spam.

Yes, this is a lot of overhead to deal with the intelligent filtering of spam. But if we can reduce the efficacy of sending spam to negligible conversion ratios, then there will no longer be an economic incentive to send spam.

Re:Another way to help filter spam?

[Mark J Tilford]

A spammer could put a few random characters into each message so that all the checksums would be different.

Re:Another way to help filter spam?

[Tom7]

And indeed, most do this already.

MD5 might be overkill, but I don't think that creating a pretty accurate fingerprint which would be resistant to extra random characters would be too difficult.

Re:Another way to help filter spam?

[image]

> A spammer could put a few random characters into each message so that all the checksums would be different.

I'm not 100% sure they could -- not without losing the ability to send one mail to a server with multiple recipients. I remember back about 5 years ago when I was at Tripod and we were sending out our weekly newsletter to millions of people, our challenge was personalizing it. It wasn't the computational overhead of processing of the outbound email to include the individual name. It was the fact that we could no longer deliver all the AOL mails, Earthlink mails, etc., to their servers as one mail with a bunch of BCC's.

Maybe spammers don't deal in that volume, or I may be remembering this *entirely* wrong, and you may be perfectly correct.

Re:Another way to help filter spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortualy the checksum idea would be trival to get round. Just have the spam generate a string to insert into the content of the mail depending on the outgoing address (ie Dear Image, [rest_of_msg] ) this would then defeate this mecanism.
This example could be got around easly and may be hard for the implemter to do but something like tacking the date on the end of every mail out could be done trivaly.
The best way is still to deny the server. Mabe to score the server on number of spam returns that diffent ppl give it and having this publicly avadible. ....
still sounds messy to me

Re:Another way to help filter spam?

[dwlemon]

I've read of somebody using dict to filter out all non-words, stripping out all short words, then sorting and uniqing the results.. and then getting a checksum.

that may be overkill but it'd strip out any randomness that the spammer may have put into the message.

Re:Another way to help filter spam?

[Ramses0]

Take a look at Nilsimsa. It appears that it is designed to

1. grep through a huge amount of messages
2. detect "duplicate" messages by a sloppy checksumming algorithim
3. bounce those "duplicate" messages in the future

Most of the time, these duplicate messages will be spam, but if this little proggie had a human touch behind it, the future would seem a lot better. I would implement the filtering/bouncing as a "bulk mail" folder, much like yahoo does. Sometimes I'll find a few newsletters in that folder which I honestly did subscribe to, and I wouldn't be surprised if some sort of bulk-filter accidentally picked up on those too.

--Robert

Re:Another way to help filter spam?

[aozilla]

Or you could just block email from people you don't know, and force new contacts to contact you through a web page. Make the webpage nonstandard and changing so bots can't hit it. Or email a reply to those who aren't on your contact list, which says: you're not on my contact list, to enter onto my contact list, send a reply to blahblahwhatever. At the least that forces spammers to use their real email address, at best you can apply anti-bot measures there too (make the email address an image, for instance, and include false addresses which when sent to block that email address).

Spam is pretty easy to stop, really.

One solution

[Seska]

One solution is to cut MonsterHut off at the bank teller. On their web site is a very prominent animated ad for Hertz rental cars. Fire off a letter to Hertz stating that as long as they use a company that engages in mass email campaigns you will never rent a rental car from Hertz.

However, it seems to me that MonsterHut would very much like to be legitimate; it's not like the Nigerian Money Scam spam I received yesterday has a sophisticated web site associated with it. Maybe someone should try removing themselves from the MonsterHut list and see if they're the single legit mass emailer in 15 years of email.

Re:One solution

[Hertzresponse]

Hertz is not affiliated with MonsterHut in anyway and has not used MonsterHut in any of its marketing efforts. The ad posted on MonsterHut was created without Hertz knowledge or permission. We have asked MonsterHut to remove it immediately from their site.

Hertz does not spam and is a strong advocate of internet privacy and anti-spamming legislation.

Re:One solution

[Kushana]

I received this email this afternoon:

Thank you for bringing the ad on www.MonsterHut.com to our attention. This
ad was produced without our knowledge. Actually we never heard of the site
until we received your e-mail today. Our legal team will be in touch with
MonsterHut.com to rectify this potentially illegal situation and to
instruct them to promptly take this ad down.

We value your business and hope in no way this incident has changed your
opinion of Hertz. Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,

Joseph Torpey
Manager, Interactive Marketing
The Hertz Corporation

Re:One solution

[BattyMan]

If you're really Hertz, you could do us all a favor by suing the snot outta these guys.

How far?

[Anonymous Coward]

"How far will spammers go to get their word out? When's it going to stop?"

Won't somebody please think of the children?

Beaverhome

[Anonymous Coward]

When I read this story, the situation of Beaverhome came to mind. Years ago, they sued their ISP when their ISP cut them off for spamming. I talked to them by voice to tell them to stop spamming me, and they laughed in my face.

Now, I go check Monsterhut, and see that BeaverHome is proudly presented on the home page as a MonsterHut spamming customer!

Re:Beaverhome

[Anonymous Coward]

Monsterhut IS BeaverHome

Does anybody recognise this ?

[AftanGustur]

My company has been a victim of spam. The "From" address was forged so the mail appeared to come from us. Finding who is actually behind "Cybernet Enterprise"is a hard thing and the telephone number only gives a cryptic ansvering machine.

Does anybody recognise this ?

*** Begin Spam
We offer some of the best bulk e-mail prices on the Internet. We do all the mailing for you. You just
provide us with the ad! It's that simple!

What we offer:

*General AOL Lists or other ISPs
$200.00 for 1-million e-mails sent.
$400.00 for 3-million e-mails sent.

Snip..
...
...

Cybernet Enterprise 209-656-9143
go nettech27@excite.com to be removed. Please no mail bombs, legit removal.

Re:Does anybody recognise this ?

[Dimensio]

This is a bit offtopic, a company run by a man named Craig Nowak forged 'flowers.com' in the From: headers of a spam run and he was successfully sued by flowers.com, who were able to show damages resulting from being associated with spamming. Perhaps you could get a lawyer to subpoena the telephone company where the answering machine resides?

Also, to get back to the original story, this isn't the first time that an ISP has been sued by a spammer. In a somewhat different case, remember when Cyberpromo sued AOL for blocking their e-mail? That TRO was lifted as soon as it got to a higher court. I'm hoping that this restraining order is swiftly lifted by a more clued-in judge. Spammers are wretched scum who should be flayed alive and impaled and left to die in a desert somewhere.

Re:Does anybody recognise this ?

[Nick Number]

My company has been a victim of spam. The "From" address was forged so the mail appeared to come from us. Finding who is actually behind "Cybernet Enterprise"is a hard thing and the telephone number only gives a cryptic ansvering machine

Read the Received: line in the header of the emails. It will tell you what IP they originated from. Look this up and complain to the appropriate ISP.

There are a number of good antispam how-to's on the web.

Re:Does anybody recognise this ?

[dbullock]

I can top that. I admin the email servers for Gotcha (the sportswear company).

There's a lot of people out there filling in webforms with @gotcha.com email addresses, and it's amazing how many even valid email lists don't honor 550's

:/

Re:Does anybody recognise this ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why yes, yes I do.

Check all the spam he's done

Blocked from mailing by anti-spam lists

Someone adopted the spammer as a "personal pet"

Now what'cha going to do!? I have ideas, but they all may be illegal. ;-)

I have very little sympathy

[gowen]

Both parties seem to acknowledge that, at the times of the contract:

MonsterHut were in the target commercial email business.

The legality of it aside, junk mail (paper and electronic) is a pain in the ass to the recipient and almost never desired and PaeTec took MonsterHuts money knowing they had basically immoral[0] purposes.

If you sup with the Devil, use a long spoon -- Proverb

[0] Anyone really not believe that wasting my time in order to try and sell me stuff I don't want isn't immoral?

Re:I have very little sympathy

[kindbud]

Anyone really not believe that wasting my time in order to try and sell me stuff I don't want isn't immoral?

Well, after parsing this through my double-negative discombobulator, I can say that Yes, I Don't believe that wasting your time in order to try and sell you stuff you don't want is immoral.

Check this out!

[G-funk]

Hey guys, check this out! I know you're against spam and all, but this one isn't spam at all! I thought it was, and I've deleted countless messages just like it, but I decided -what the hell- I'll give it a go, and I couldn't believe my eyes! First only a few dollars came in, then the cheques started rolling in! I recieved $63,000 in just five weeks, and so can you! Just follow the simple instructions, and you can reach retirement at 23 just like I did!*

*Yes, this is a joke. that's +1(funny), not -1(idiot) thankyou.

Re:Check this out!

[Anonymous Coward]

just because something is a joke does not make it funny. that is not funny. you are an idiot.

Re:Check this out!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a little study on what the people that respond to junk emails actually think. I actually have seen their responses. There is a site (visit it if you are a moron) http://www.rezdirect.com/ to buy reports that tell you how to sell reports.

This eAmway dipshit tried to do eAmway or something as stupid. The bulk emailed spam is below. Out of some sick impulse, I actually looked at the site. Quite stupid at the time ... one form designed to cull a list of suckers by getting them to fill out their email address and name and comments. I looked at the form source and saw a reference to GLleads.htm which (drum roll) was a publicly accessible file. This was much better than the typical "15 billion email addresses for $19.95" mail that I continually receive. This list is actually composed of self-verified suckers!

Check out their comments! If it were not so sad, it really would be humorous.

"Please advise"
"This is a pretty exciting opportunity for me, to actually become a member of a new company. Please send me all the information as soon as possible! Thank you, Linda"
"give me the scoop but don't be supprised if i don't bite."
"sounds interesting but I am tired of the hype what is so different about y'all?"
"I want to make real money while working from home."
"What's this about?"
"looking for real opportunities"
"I cannot tell you how many times I have been disappointed in the past, I am taking a chance on this opportunity."
"I am very interested. Please send me more info. Thank you."
"Currently I dont qualify for a credit card. Will this program help me get one? I presume I could get one if I made an income through you program. Look forward to your answers and information. thanks"
"very interested"
"I'm excited!"
"Let's get it on."
"SHOW ME"
"Please send some info. Thanks."
"Wondering what type of business this is?"
"DO NOT SPAM - YOU USED AN ABUSE EMAIL THAT WAS HARVESTED OF THE NET! IS BUYING A LIST WORTH LOSING YOU IP........SPAM IS A REALLY BAD THING AND THE EMAIL YOU USED IS AN ABUSE MAIL........A COMPLAINT HAS BEEN FILED"
"tell me about the company, product and benefits."

----- Original Message -----
From:
To:
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2001 6:22 PM
Subject: FREE Website & Income Opportunity
> Dear ,
>
> What Company is Predicted to do $1 Billion Within 36 Months?
>
> FREE Membership & Income Opportunity
> FREE Website & Virtual Office
> FREE* Product
> 100% Internet-Based
> Huge Potential SPILLOVER
>
> http://www.rezdirect.com/Goodlife.htm
>
> Why are we so confident? Look at our dream team:
>
> Richard S. (Dick) Johnson
> President of Amway Japan from 1991 to 1999
> During Dick's tenure, Amway Japan grew to almost TWO
> BILLION DOLLARS in annual sales.
>
> Steven and Terry Smith
> Founders of Inovative Technologies Corp. (ITC)
>
> Dr. DeSilva, M.D. PhD
> Serves as the President of the American Nutraceutical Association and
> has attained national television exposure in hosting medical segments
> on CNN. He is on the teaching staff at JFK medical Center in Edison,
> New Jersey. "Ask The Doctor" is the name of Dr. DeSilva's daily
> nationally syndicated radio talk show.
>
> Jim Lord
> Jim is the CEO and founder of Internet Billing Systems, makers of the
> business operating system, QBOS. Jim's career spans 20 years and
> includes such clients as NASA, IBM, TVA and now, our company.
>
> Bob Lively
> Over 25 years of worldwide senior management experience
> in the electronic banking industry. As Executive Vice
> President/Treasurer/COO of the Armed Forces Financial Network from
> 1984-1999, Bob organized, developed and managed an International
> electronic banking network providing ATM/POS/SMART CARD services to
> military personnel throughout the free world.
>
> Gerald P. Nehra Attorney-at-Law
> Mr. Nehra is one of very few attorneys nationwide whose practice is
> devoted exclusively to direct selling and multi-level marketing
> issues. His 29 years of legal experience includes 9 years at Amway
> Corporation where he was Director of the Legal Division.
>
> NOW IS THE TIME TO GET ENROLLED.
>
> IT'S FREE
>
> PLEASE DON'T PROCRASTINATE AND LOSE AN
> EXCELLENT POSITION IN A FUTURE BILLION $$
> BUSINESS.
>
> CLICK HERE >>> http://www.rezdirect.com/Goodlife.htm
...

Wrong.

[NineNine]

You don't have any "right" not to be cut off by your ISP. They don't have any "right" to cut you off. Let's quit talking about rights here. What the two of you have is a BUSINESS CONTRACT. If they want to cut you off, and it says in your contract that they can't, then the only "right" you have is to sue them. There is no unalienable RIGHT to provide or have provided Net access. It's a business agreement, and it should be handled that way.

Re:Wrong.

[tester13]

As another poster put better earlier, You do have a right to internet access if that is what you have a contract for. One of the reasons we have courts is to enforce contracts. In this case, the plantiff is more or less alleging that the ISP is in breach of contract, thearby getting the judge to issue an injunction.

I'm not arguing the merits of the Plantiff or the Defandants case. Additionaly, I am not positive of the terms of service (having only glanced at the affidavid). That aside, if there is a contract and one party violates it, then of coure the other side should be able to seek relief through the courts. No?

Re:Wrong.

[Ami Ganguli]

Sadly you're right. Large companies with extensive legal resources can do pretty much whatever they want to indvidual clients. It's only when the victim has some money that things start to get interesting.

Anyway, I didn't dispute that. I'm just saying that there should be some recourse. Companies might be more careful about breaking contracts if they risked large punitive damages.

Finland has an interesting system regarding traffic fines. They're based on your salary, so if you're a billionare you still have to worry about getting caught speeding - the fine could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It makes a lot of sense.

The same kind of system should apply in these situations. If AT&T costs me a years wages by cutting off my connection (say I'm a consultant who works from home) then they should be liable for a year's worth of their revenue. Then they would have to think seriously before breaking their contracts.

Re:Wrong.

[SPYvSPY]

It doesn't take extensive legal contracts to create leverage in a business contract -- it takes balls. IAAL, and I can tell you that the most important element of successful business negotiation is an unwillingness by the business people to settle for garbage. Sadly, this is rare. Anyway, you don't need $500/hr lawyers to get a good contract.

Re:Wrong.

[kin_korn_karn]

I think what we'll see soon is government-subsidized internet access, where it will become a right, to information for citizens. In the USA people have the inalienable RIGHT to go wherever in the country they so please using the public road system; extend that to the internet.

Re:Wrong.

[BinaryC]

Actually driving is a privelege, not a right. That's why they can suspend your liscence for just about any reason.

Re:Wrong.

[kin_korn_karn]

Driving is a privelige, but access to the roads is a right. That's what I mean - if you take the "information superhighway" [puke] metaphor for the 'net, then the government may end up guaranteeing access to the Internet as a native right of US citizens.

Re:Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Finland

That would provide a huge incentive for the police to hunt down any exotic sports car like a Ferrari. Imagine what would happen if Bill Gates was caught going 67 in a 65 mph zone! That ticket will be $2 million, sir. That really does not make sense - the infraction does not fit the penalty.

Re:Wrong.

[Courageous]

There has been recent legal movement to change the status of ISPs to be more analagous to public communication carriers ala the phone company. Since talk of "rights" makes you feel uncomfortable, what it comes down to is how the people decide to organize themselves and society. Civic society includes a moving SOCIAL CONTRACT in which the terms are occasionally mutated to fit the current view of how society ought to function.

There are arguments in favor of free speech which are leading in the public access direction. While I tend to favor the business contract, free trade, and competition amongst vendors point of view, I can see and understand the other argument and the goodness that it is trying to achieve.

Hopefully, you can too.

C//

Re:Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why they can suspend your liscence for just about any reason.

In many states you can't be arrested for driving without a license.

Re:Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is how it works: If you are in a relationship where your ISP automatically bills you in exchange for the service you are receiving, it is called an implied contract.

An implied contract can't be broken unless there is sufficient notice, or some other governing contract or terms of service was breached. They can't just "disconnect" you without warning you (unless you did something bad).

Re:Wrong.

[NineNine]

The same kind of system should apply in these situations. If AT&T costs me a years wages by cutting off my connection (say I'm a consultant who works from home) then they should be liable for a year's worth of their revenue. Then they would have to think seriously before breaking their contracts.


But, the law IS set up like that. You CAN sue for loss of business. It happens every day. Not only can you sue for the fees that you paid, AND for the loss of business, but often, in an egregious case, a judge will award punitive damages. So yes, the civil action that you talk about IS available. I just think that calling it a 'right' is both misleading, and more importantly, dillutes the reason definition of a 'right'. We have the 'right' in the US to say and write what we want, but we don't have a 'right' to ISP service (unfortunately!).

Re:Wrong.

[Ami Ganguli]

But what are the punitive damages based on? Whatever the damages are, they obviously aren't an effective deterrent. The fine needs to be big enough that the board of directors and shareholders notice.

Note that I don't really feel that the victim should necessarily get all the proceeds. Give it to charity or something like that. If I lose a week's salary (that's a more realistic number for lost Internet access) then I want to be compensated reasonably - lawyers fees, financial losses, maybe a little extra for the trouble. I don't expect to walk away a millionair. But the company that screwed me over should feel some pain - enough to get a few incompetant mangers fired and make sure that they change the way they do business.

Re:Wrong.

[NineNine]

The reason that you see ISP's walking all over business contracts is because the industry is still brand-fucking-new. Really, companies are still opening and closing almost constantly, and there aren't too many businesses online (other than porn, and a few mega-sites) that make enough income online to make it worthwhile to sue. But eventually, I see service improving, one the industry matures a little bit.

Spam in general

[egon]

I have to admit that I find it interesting that everybody wants to stop spammers. So many of these same folks are the ones that want Dmitri released for exercising free speach... *sigh*

I know I'll probably get moderated down into oblivion for saying this, but I don't see how this is any different than the Dmitri case. I know - people will start talking about "well, it costs me to download it so they're hurting me financially". And I suppose that what Dmitri did isn't going to hurt Adobe financially?

Anyway, I don't remember who said it, but somebody once said (paraphrase) "I may disagree strongly with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

I guess that only applies when what somebody has to say doesn't annoy us and cause us to have to hit the 'd' key.

Re:Spam in general

[osolemirnix]

I would think there is a big difference between free speech as in "publishing something on a web site for interested parties to download" and free speech as in "forcing something into someone else's mailbox".

If I sit in front of my house on the porch on a sunday afternoon and you come over for a discussion, that's your choice (even if you disagree with my opinion). That is free speech.
If I come to your house and start yelling my rants while it's obvious you do not want that, that's not free speech. That would be molesting you, I would guess.

Re:Spam in general

[egon]

Admittedly true. However, I would argue that there is a definite difference in that case. Ignoring the whole psychological "invading my personal bubble" stuff, that is a physical affront, sending spam is not.

Just for the record, I despise spam too ( I have some serious procmail filters set up) - I just am not in favor of repressing people's right to do it. 8)

Re:Spam in general

[sik puppy]

Commercial speech is not protected. Personal speech is.

Otherwise, billboards would have to carry ANY message the advetiser was willing to pay for, including alcohol, tobacco, porn, whatever.

Re:Spam in general

[egon]

Um, "speeach" is protected. To my knowledge, the constitution does not distinguish between the two.

"Otherwise, billboards would have to carry ANY message the advetiser was willing to pay for, including alcohol, tobacco, porn, whatever."

There are no laws that say I have to sell you my services. However, if you were to get your own billboard, I could do nothing to tell you what you can and cannot say.

Re:Spam in general

[dcecchi]

Anyway, I don't remember who said it, but somebody once said (paraphrase) "I may disagree strongly with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

Voltaire said it.

Re:Spam in general

[Anonymous Coward]

IT'S NOT ABOUT CONTENT

The issue is the unauthorized use of other people's equipment. It doesn't matter whether they're advertising aphrodisiacs, drugs, golf balls, lose money fast, murder for hire, penis extenders, pornography, stock tips, toner or wives; what matters is whether they have permission to use the hardware from the relays through to the recipients' computers.

Read up on, e.g., AOL versus Cyber Promotions; the courts have ruled, multiple time, that UBE is theft and trespass. Or see Rowan versus USPS.

Re:Spam in general

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you egon@tuininga.org and I hope you continue to maintain this cheerful outlook on spam in the future.

Re:Spam in general

[egon]

*chuckle* I will.

I understand this was an attempt to add spam to my inbox. And as much as I disagree with your motivation, I'd certainly not attempt to stop you from posting it.

Incidentally, this will just make me have to learn more procmail skills - always a plus for a geek such as myself. 8)

Re:Spam in general

[bero-rh]

There are actually big differences.

Everyone has the right to free speech. But I have the right not to listen.

Also, for the money case: Dmitri isn't going to hurt Adobe financially, at least not directly.
Red Hat is hurting Microsoft financially by making fewer people buy Windows - does that make us thieves? I don't think so. And this is much more like DmitriAdobe than SpammerUser is.

Re:Spam in general

[catfood]

I know I'll probably get moderated down into oblivion for saying this, but I don't see how this is any different than the Dmitri case. I know - people will start talking about "well, it costs me to download it so they're hurting me financially". And I suppose that what Dmitri did isn't going to hurt Adobe financially?

Spammers use your resources without your permission until you tell them to stop, and many times they keep doing it anyway.

And quit whining about being modded down for posting transparently stupid, illogical crap. It has nothing to do with disagreement and everything to do with lameness.

Re:Spam in general

[Phoenix Rising]

egon spewed:
I know I'll probably get moderated down into oblivion for saying this, but I don't see how this is any different than the Dmitri case. I know - people will start talking about "well, it costs me to download it so they're hurting me financially". And I suppose that what Dmitri did isn't going to hurt Adobe financially?

Well, since you weren't moderated into trolldom...

Back to this, are we? Spam costs money directly: online time, bandwidth, storage, backup time, and complaint response time. None of us ask for spam; we just get it shoved down our Internet pipe by inconsiderate a------s out to make a buck at our expense.

Dmitri wrote a program which restores rights granted by Copyright law (excepting the DMCA). He also provided a service by exposing just what a bunch of crooks Adobe were in creating such a lame encryption format. And his actions are no more "hurting Adobe financially" than the copier industry hurts book publishers.

Anyway, I don't remember who said it, but somebody once said (paraphrase) "I may disagree strongly with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

But there are limits to how you can say it. It is illegal to steal radio and/or TV bandwidth to broadcast your message. It is illegal to barge into a private building and post the message all over the place. If spammers want to get their message out, they can buy up banner ads on the cheap, or put out ads on *.forsale, as appropriate. They can buy domains and put up obnoxious websites with BLINK tags. But they can't steal from me to do it.

Re:Spam in general

[sik puppy]

But there are laws prohibiting alcohol ads near schools. Part of the tobacco settlement included no bilboards near schools.

There is a distinction between commercial and personal speach. An advertiser can not force you to listen to their pitch. For example the TCPA, which allows for legal action against telemarketers, etc.

If I tell a marketer to leave me alone and not to bother me again, if they do I can take action. My express will not to be disturbed overrides thier right to make their pitch to me. I have no right to stop them from selling to others, but ever right to stop them from trying to sell to me.

There is case law on this, but I don't have the link handy.

The Truth

[pantherace]

Hey morons, If you don't want spam, don't post your email everywhere. (And if you have to, use filters)

They have the same rights to send email as you do. However, in this case (violation of terms of service) they should lose their net connection, because they violated the contract.

The Feds are eating some SPAM today!

[Anonymous Coward]

Feds Eat Spam and Move Back
and you didn't even know this was happening!

test

[Anonymous Coward]

30-Jul-01 LAMONICA, FRANK

Shareholder 34,767

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144)

9-Jul-01 FAITH, RICKARD E

Shareholder 2,203

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $6,300.

6-Jul-01 OWEN, JENS

Former, Shareholder 44,802

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $138,438.

26-Jun-01 EVANS, ROBERT

Shareholder 26,438

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $84,337.

22-Jun-01 YOUNG, MICHAEL

Shareholder 5,468

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $16,404.

13-Jun-01 NEUMEISTER, ROBERT M

Director 0

LNUX Initial Direct Holdings Statement

7-Jun-01 REBACK, GARY L

Shareholder 189

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $850.00.

4-Jun-01 LOTZ, BARBARA J

Shareholder 52

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $225.00.

1-Jun-01 MASSEY FAMILY TRUST

Shareholder 161

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $607.00.

1-Jun-01 PAUL, BRIAN E

Shareholder 3,130

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $8,732.

1-Jun-01 DAUBAR, GERARD

Shareholder 900

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $3,888.

1-Jun-01 PETKANICS, DONNA

Shareholder 908

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $3,223.

1-Jun-01 SANDERS, ROBERT D

Shareholder 4,162

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $15,691.

31-May-01 KENNEDY, MICHAEL J

Shareholder 81

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $339.00.

30-May-01 SINDELAR, ERIC

Shareholder 1,407

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $6,000.

29-May-01 BONHAM, MARK

Shareholder 87

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $925.00.

25-May-01 LATTA FAMILY TRUST

Trust, Trustee 167

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $748.00.

24-May-01 LAMONICA, FRANK

Shareholder, Employee 12,885

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $55,367.

24-May-01 LAMONICA, FRANK & ARLEEN

Shareholder 15,734

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $67,616.

24-May-01 LAMONICA, ARLEEN

Shareholder 2,849

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $12,222.

22-May-01 PRENSKY, WOLF & RIVA

Shareholder 8,441

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $38,828.

21-May-01 EVANS, ROBERT

Shareholder 5,123

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $25,000.

17-May-01 WELLFLEET EQUITIES LLC

Shareholder 279

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $1,278.

17-May-01 CINER, EUGENE

Shareholder 279

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $1,278.

14-May-01 SCHILLER, RABBI MAYER

Secretary 352

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $1,609.

8-May-01 FAITH, RICKARD E

Shareholder 3,105

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $17,015.

4-May-01 FREET, PAUL

Shareholder 15,000

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $70,000.

2-May-01 FREET, PAUL

Shareholder 20,000

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $87,000.

12-Apr-01 SPARK PUBLIC RELATIONS LLC

Shareholder 643

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $17,834.

12-Apr-01 LISTWIN, DONALD J

Shareholder 558

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $1,574.

11-Apr-01 TRUDO, ALEXANDER DANIEL

Shareholder 651,549

LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144).

Estimated proceeds of $1,300,000.

10-Apr-01 FREET, PAUL

Shareholder 20,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $50,000. 9-Apr-01 FREET, PAUL Shareholder 20,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $45,000. 6-Apr-01 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M Director, Chief Executive Officer * 10,000 LNUX Gave as Gift. Value of $20,312. 3-Apr-01 ANDREESSEN LIVING TRUST Shareholder 1,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,210. 2-Apr-01 BIG KALA TRUST Trust, Trustee 651,549 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,900,000. 29-Mar-01 BUTLER, DANEN THOMAS Shareholder 200,477 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $600,000. 29-Mar-01 TRUDO, ALEXANDER DANIEL Shareholder 200,477 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $600,000. 29-Mar-01 STEUR, DAVID S Shareholder 115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $341.00. 23-Mar-01 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M Chief Executive Officer, Director 26,000 LNUX Sold at $3.50/Share. Proceeds of $91,000. 21-Mar-01 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M Chief Executive Officer, Director 14,700 LNUX Sold at $3.00/Share. Proceeds of $44,100. 20-Mar-01 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M Chief Executive Officer, Director 30,000 LNUX Sold at $3.14/Share. Proceeds of $94,200. 15-Mar-01 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M Chief Executive Officer, Director 41,500 LNUX Sold at $3.25/Share. Proceeds of $134,875. 14-Mar-01 ZWICKER, IAN Shareholder 10,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $34,380. 13-Mar-01 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M Chief Executive Officer, Director 50,000 LNUX Sold at $3.38/Share. Proceeds of $169,000. 13-Mar-01 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M President, Director, Chief Executive Officer 400,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,600,000. 12-Mar-01 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M Chief Executive Officer, Director 400,000 LNUX Acquired Shares via Exercise of Options at $0.02/Share. Paper gain of $1,192,000 at a fair market value of $3.00/share on 12-Mar-01. 6-Mar-01 SUMITOMO CORPORATION Shareholder 59,068 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $240,634. 6-Mar-01 PRESIDIO VENTURE PARTNERS LLC Shareholder 59,068 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $240,406. 5-Mar-01 SEGRE, DAVID J Shareholder 109 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $395.00. 2-Mar-01 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M Chief Executive Officer, Director 250,500 LNUX Sold at $3.66/Share. Proceeds of $916,830. 1-Mar-01 DAUBAR, GERARD Shareholder 900 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $6,721. 1-Mar-01 BLOCK, PHILIP D III Shareholder 239 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,091. 1-Mar-01 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M Chief Executive Officer, Director * 150,000 LNUX Sold at $3.63/Share. Proceeds of $544,500. 28-Feb-01 BROWNELL, ROBERT Shareholder 329 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,233. 27-Feb-01 PRESIDIO VENTURES PARTNER Shareholder 200,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,000,000. 27-Feb-01 SUMITOMO CORPORATION Shareholder 200,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,000,000. 26-Feb-01 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M President, Director, Chief Executive Officer 134,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $703,500. 26-Feb-01 MENDOZA, KATHY S & THOMAS F Shareholder 201,812 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,031,986. 23-Feb-01 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M President, Director, Chief Executive Officer 41,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $215,238. 21-Feb-01 FLINT, ELIZABETH R Shareholder 82 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $595.00. 20-Feb-01 PARNES, MARK Affiliated Person 4 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $32.00. 15-Feb-01 LEGAL, COMMUNITY AGAINST VIOLENCE Shareholder 39 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $329.00. 13-Feb-01 FRENCH, RICHARD L Senior Vice President-OSDN 0 LNUX Initial Direct Holdings Statement 12-Feb-01 PET KAVICS = GERSPENSCHALGER FAMILY TRUST Trust, Trustee 82 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $686.00. 6-Feb-01 SYNNEX INFOR TECH INC Shareholder 31,280 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $290,318. 2-Feb-01 SILVER STAR DEV LTD Shareholder 31,068 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $296,699. 30-Jan-01 INTEL CORP Shareholder 108,741 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $996,024. 29-Jan-01 INTEL CORP Shareholder 120,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $960,468. 26-Jan-01 SHORE CL UNITRUST Trust, Trustee 2,800 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $269,500. 26-Jan-01 INTEL CORP Shareholder 70,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $531,097. 25-Jan-01 INTEL CORP Shareholder 88,500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $710,345. 24-Jan-01 INTEL CORP Shareholder 170,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,364,539. 23-Jan-01 INTEL CORP Shareholder 145,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,062,807. 22-Jan-01 INTEL CORP Shareholder 110,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $782,485. 22-Jan-01 VAUGHN, ISAAC Shareholder 79 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $585.00. 19-Jan-01 GOOD, SARAH Shareholder, Affiliated Person 80 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $583.00. 19-Jan-01 INTEL CORP Shareholder 57,500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $424,063. 18-Jan-01 INTEL CORP Shareholder 137,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $980,153. 17-Jan-01 CRAIG, ALEXANDER J Shareholder 4,952 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $44,568. 11-Jan-01 SACCANI, DANIEL R Shareholder 3,500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $28,378. 4-Jan-01 INTEL CORP Shareholder 87,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $723,257. 2-Jan-01 FELDMAN, ROBERT P Shareholder 143 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,162. 24-Dec-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 10,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $81,869. 22-Dec-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A President 5,000 LNUX Exercised Options at $0.06/Share and Sold at $10.13/Share. Proceeds of $50,350. 21-Dec-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A President 10,000 LNUX Exercised Options at $0.06/Share and Sold at $8.13/Share. Proceeds of $80,700. 21-Dec-00 AUSTIN, ALAN K Director 189 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,607. 20-Dec-00 BORO, LAUREN I Shareholder 1,554 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $15,090. 20-Dec-00 BELL, SUZANNE Y Shareholder 69 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $565.00. 19-Dec-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A President 15,000 LNUX Exercised Options at Average of $0.06/Share and Sold at $10.04/Share. Proceeds of $149,770. 18-Dec-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 5,000 LNUX Sold at $12.00/Share. Proceeds of $60,000. 18-Dec-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A President 15,000 LNUX Exercised Options at $0.06/Share and Sold at $10.50/Share. Proceeds of $156,600. 15-Dec-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 10,000 LNUX Sold at $11.43/Share. Proceeds of $114,300. 14-Dec-00 DEFILIPPS, THOMAS C Shareholder 92 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,179. 14-Dec-00 ZEHR, GREGG E Vice President, Engineering * 20,500 LNUX Sold at $11.29/Share. Proceeds of $231,445. 14-Dec-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 5,000 LNUX Sold at $11.25/Share. Proceeds of $56,250. 14-Dec-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 10,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $114,368. 14-Dec-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A President 5,000 LNUX Exercised Options at $0.06/Share and Sold at $11.63/Share. Proceeds of $57,850. 13-Dec-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 10,000 LNUX Sold at $14.54/Share. Proceeds of $145,400. 13-Dec-00 ZEHR, GREGG E Vice President, Engineering * 4,500 LNUX Sold at $14.22/Share. Proceeds of $63,990. 13-Dec-00 ZEHR GREG TRUST Trust, Trustee 50,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $700,000. 13-Dec-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A Affiliated Person 50,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $700,000. 13-Dec-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 10,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $145,429. 13-Dec-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A President 12,798 LNUX Exercised Options at $0.06/Share and Sold at $12.60/Share. Proceeds of $160,487. 13-Dec-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A President 10,000 LNUX Sold at $13.93/Share. Proceeds of $139,300. 12-Dec-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 250,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,589,075. 12-Dec-00 SHORE, DANIEL K Vice President, Operations 10,000 LNUX Sold at $9.75/Share. Proceeds of $97,500. 11-Dec-00 SORE, DANIEL R Officer 20,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $186,562. 11-Dec-00 SCHULL, TODD B Chief Financial Officer 55,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $534,000. 11-Dec-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 110,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,027,268. 11-Dec-00 GOODRICH, JOHN B Shareholder 167 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,324. 11-Dec-00 SHORE, DANIEL K Vice President, Operations 10,000 LNUX Sold at $9.33/Share. Proceeds of $93,300. 11-Dec-00 SCHULL, TODD B Chief Financial Officer 55,000 LNUX Sold at $9.72/Share. Proceeds of $534,600. 8-Dec-00 SCHULL, TODD B Chief Financial Officer 10,000 LNUX Sold at $1.00/Share. Proceeds of $10,000. 8-Dec-00 VIRNIG, KENNETH J Shareholder 16,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $128,000. 8-Dec-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 190,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,441,720. 8-Dec-00 SCHULL, TODD B Chief Financial Officer 15,000 LNUX Sold at $7.27/Share. Proceeds of $109,050. 8-Dec-00 SCHULL, TODD B Chief Financial Officer 25,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $190,000. 7-Dec-00 SCHULL, TODD B Chief Financial Officer 12,000 LNUX Sold at $7.06/Share. Proceeds of $84,720. 7-Dec-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 200,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,399,380. 7-Dec-00 SCHULL, TODD B Chief Financial Officer 12,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $85,000. 6-Dec-00 SHORE, DANIEL K Vice President, Operations 28,000 LNUX Gave as Gift. Value of $222,250. 6-Dec-00 ALTER, AARON Shareholder 87 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $690.00. 6-Dec-00 BRANTZ MAYOR TRUST Trust, Trustee 2,939 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $23,512. 6-Dec-00 GRECO, LISA M Shareholder 1,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $13,000. 5-Dec-00 SHORE, DANIEL K Vice President, Operations 22,500 LNUX Sold at $8.93/Share. Proceeds of $200,925. 5-Dec-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 20,000 LNUX Sold at $8.43/Share. Proceeds of $168,600. 5-Dec-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 92,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $805,000. 5-Dec-00 SHORE, DAVID R Vice President 22,500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $185,427. 5-Dec-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 20,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $169,054. 4-Dec-00 BARCLAY, MICHAEL Shareholder 87 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $729.00. 4-Dec-00 SHORE, DANIEL K Vice President, Operations 22,500 LNUX Sold at $8.24/Share. Proceeds of $185,400. 4-Dec-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 90,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $757,341. 4-Dec-00 SHORE, DANIEL K Vice President, Operations 22,500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $185,427. 4-Dec-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 10,000 LNUX Sold at $8.19/Share. Proceeds of $81,900. 1-Dec-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 100,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $878,200. 1-Dec-00 KLEIN, THOMAS C Shareholder 55 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $456.00. 30-Nov-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 90,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $719,532. 30-Nov-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 19,792 LNUX Acquired Shares via Exercise of Options at $6.00/Share. Paper gain of $43,295 at a fair market value of $8.19/share on 30-Nov-00. 30-Nov-00 SCHULL, TODD B Chief Financial Officer 47,944 LNUX Acquired Shares via Exercise of Options at $0.50/Share. Paper gain of $368,570 at a fair market value of $8.19/share on 30-Nov-00. 29-Nov-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 103,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $896,028. 21-Nov-00 VANYO, BRUCE Shareholder 877 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $9,811. 20-Nov-00 LADRA, MICHAEL Shareholder 504 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $5,166. 17-Nov-00 GOETZ, JAMES J Shareholder 1,884 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $24,492. 9-Nov-00 MOORE, JASON T Shareholder 50,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $806,000. 3-Nov-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 60,500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,846,563. 3-Nov-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 60,500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,846,562. 1-Nov-00 TRUSTEES OF DAVIDSON COLLEGE Shareholder 8,740 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $255,645. 31-Oct-00 MOORE, JASON T Shareholder 1,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $48,438. 31-Oct-00 COSPER, KIT Shareholder 12,500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $331,231. 31-Oct-00 KNIGHTSBRIDGE VENTURE CAPITAL IV LP Shareholder 58,270 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,544,155. 30-Oct-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 19,792 LNUX Acquired Shares via Exercise of Options at $6.00/Share. Paper gain of $373,574 at a fair market value of $24.88/share on 30-Oct-00. 30-Oct-00 KILLAM, DAVID Shareholder 37 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,110. 26-Oct-00 DAVIS, PAUL Director, Secretary 382 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $10,623. 26-Oct-00 HUSICK FAMILY TRUST Trust, Trustee 234 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $6,592. 25-Oct-00 CHAPLICK, TREVOR Shareholder 191 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $6,762. 24-Oct-00 AUSTIN, ALAN K Director 824 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $29,767. 24-Oct-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 125,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $4,475,650. 24-Oct-00 DAVIS, KIMBERLY Shareholder 5,700 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $201,987. 24-Oct-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 125,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $4,475,625. 23-Oct-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 62,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,147,376. 23-Oct-00 BUSH FOUNDATION Shareholder 29,135 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $445,075. 23-Oct-00 VLG INVESTMENTS 1998 Shareholder 279 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $10,445. 20-Oct-00 KOZEL, EDWARD R Shareholder 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $40,418. 20-Oct-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 152,500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $5,467,659. 19-Oct-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 160,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $5,618,128. 19-Oct-00 GILL, FRANK & MARY Shareholder 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $40,418. 18-Oct-00 ODONNELL, LIZ Shareholder 252 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $8,489. 18-Oct-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 175,500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $5,687,185. 17-Oct-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 75,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,456,123. 16-Oct-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 255,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $8,709,219. 13-Oct-00 COSPER, KIT Shareholder 2,500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $83,500. 13-Oct-00 DREW, JOHN L Shareholder 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $37,213. 13-Oct-00 KELLER, DONALD M Shareholder 2,822 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $94,467. 13-Oct-00 VANLIGLEN, GLEN R Shareholder 486 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $15,870. 13-Oct-00 INTEL CORP Shareholder 160,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $5,403,120. 12-Oct-00 MCKINNEY FAMILY TRUST Trust, Trustee 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $36,033. 11-Oct-00 ESTRIN, JUDITH L Shareholder 279 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $9,765. 10-Oct-00 VLG INVESTMENTS 1998 Shareholder 922 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $32,691. 7-Oct-00 DAUBAR, GERARD Shareholder 1,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $48,437. 6-Oct-00 OCONNOR, ROBERT Shareholder 37 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,785. 6-Oct-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 19,791 LNUX Acquired Shares via Exercise of Options at $6.00/Share. Paper gain of $539,305 at a fair market value of $33.25/share on 6-Oct-00. 5-Oct-00 MCGOVERN, PATRICK J Shareholder 4 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $166.00. 5-Oct-00 INTERNATIONAL DATA GROUP Shareholder 19,354 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $826,214. 5-Oct-00 IDG VENTURES MANAGEMENT INC Shareholder 23 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $997.00. 3-Oct-00 SMALLCAP WORLD FUND INC Shareholder 390,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $18,817,500. 3-Oct-00 MCKINNEY FAMILY TRUST Trust, Trustee 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $56,515. 3-Oct-00 REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAL/ SHELLWATER & CO Shareholder 92,231 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $4,022,312. 2-Oct-00 MOFFENBEIER, DAVID C Shareholder 235 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $11,383. 1-Oct-00 SILVER STAR DEV LTD Shareholder 129,534 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $5,000,000. 28-Sep-00 REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Shareholder 40,789 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,887,637. 28-Sep-00 SILICON, VALLEY BANCSHARES Shareholder 1,394 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $62,382. 28-Sep-00 LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES MASTER PENSION TRUST Trust, Trustee 24,998 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,083,312. 28-Sep-00 GROSSMAN, JERRY & BARBARA Shareholder 1,884 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $84,309. 27-Sep-00 SOKOLSKY, DONNA Shareholder 750 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $36,000. 27-Sep-00 HEMPEL, CHRISTINE HOLTEN Shareholder 750 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $36,000. 27-Sep-00 BELL, SUZANNE Y Shareholder 265 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $12,455. 26-Sep-00 TSAI, FENG-TZU Shareholder 38,860 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,850,513. 25-Sep-00 FORD FOUNDATION Shareholder 96,144 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $4,927,380. 25-Sep-00 CHENG, CHIU KAI Shareholder 38,860 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,944,256. 25-Sep-00 SILVER STAR DEV LTD Shareholder 129,534 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $5,000,000. 25-Sep-00 SHERMAN FAIRCHILD FOUNDATION Shareholder 11,654 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $575,707. 25-Sep-00 GILL FRANK & MARY FAMILY TRUST Trust, Trustee 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $55,750. 25-Sep-00 RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE Shareholder 17,481 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $863,561. 25-Sep-00 THE FORD FUNDATION Shareholder 96,144 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $4,927,380. 25-Sep-00 SYNNEX INFOR TECH INC Shareholder 116,580 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $5,892,257. 25-Sep-00 SIEBEL, LIVING TR Shareholder 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $51,000. 25-Sep-00 FRAZEE, DAVID I Shareholder 1,072 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $54,186. 22-Sep-00 TRUSTEES OF AMHERST COLLEGE Shareholder 17,481 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $812,839. 22-Sep-00 LEEWAY & CO STATE STREET BANK TRUSTEE Trust, Trustee 15,791 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $798,235. 20-Sep-00 KOZEL, EDWARD R Shareholder 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $55,750. 20-Sep-00 MAYES, JOHN Shareholder 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $55,750. 20-Sep-00 STONEBRAKER IRREVOCABLE TRUST Trust, Trustee 1,117 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $58,503. 19-Sep-00 UNIVERSITY, OF CHICAGO Shareholder 52,442 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,740,095. 19-Sep-00 DARTMOUTH COLLEGE TRUSTEES Trust, Trustee 11,654 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $608,922. 19-Sep-00 GOODRICH, JOHN B Shareholder 770 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $33,000. 19-Sep-00 LELAND, STANFORD JR UNIVERSITY Shareholder 93,231 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $4,871,320. 19-Sep-00 UNIVERSITY, OF SOUTHERN CAL Shareholder 34,962 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,826,765. 18-Sep-00 SEQUOIA, CAPITAL VIII 10% Beneficial Owner * 9,429 LNUX Other Disposition 18-Sep-00 REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MN Shareholder 23,308 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,153,746. 18-Sep-00 LEONE, DOUGLAS M Director, 10% Beneficial Owner * 85,725 LNUX Other Disposition 18-Sep-00 SEQUOIA, CAPITAL VIII 10% Beneficial Owner * 85,725 LNUX Other Disposition 18-Sep-00 SOLOMON, LARRY Shareholder 235 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $11,251. 18-Sep-00 LEONE, DOUGLAS M Director, 10% Beneficial Owner * 9,429 LNUX Other Disposition 16-Sep-00 CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE TECHNOLOGY Shareholder 23,308 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,217,843. 15-Sep-00 DUKE UNIVERSITY EMPLOYEE RETIREMENT PLAN Shareholder 11,654 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $576,622. 15-Sep-00 CONWAY FAMILY TRUST Shareholder, Non Affiliate 2,787 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $137,500. 15-Sep-00 STONEBRAKER LESLIE KAREN IRREV TRUST UA 10/16/95 Trust, Trustee 315 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $17,215. 15-Sep-00 GOTHIC CORP Shareholder 17,481 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $864,905. 15-Sep-00 BANQUE, DE LUXEMBOURG Shareholder 11,150 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $590,950. 15-Sep-00 MEYNIER, LAURENT Shareholder 1,320 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $65,010. 14-Sep-00 WELLINGTON TRUST Trust, Trustee 1,114 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $61,268. 14-Sep-00 STONEBRAKER, LESLIE K TR Trust, Trustee 300 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $16,500. 14-Sep-00 FORD FOUNDATION Shareholder 32,048 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,762,640. 14-Sep-00 COLUMBIA, UNIVERSITY Trustee 40,789 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,245,944. 14-Sep-00 SIPPL, ROGER J Shareholder 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $59,663. 14-Sep-00 HOLLIS TRUST Trust, Trustee 1,114 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $61,270. 13-Sep-00 WOOD JOHNSON ROBERT FOUNDATION Shareholder 40,789 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,202,606. 13-Sep-00 GAND H PARTNERS Shareholder 942 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $48,749. 13-Sep-00 JENAB, ALI Senior Vice President, General Manager, Systems Division 0 LNUX Initial Direct Holdings Statement 13-Sep-00 ENDOWMENT VENTURE PARTNERS III LP Shareholder 40,789 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,202,606. 13-Sep-00 WALT DISNEY CO RETIREMENT MSTR TRUST Shareholder 29,135 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,607,838. 13-Sep-00 IRONWOOD, CAPITAL Shareholder, Non-Affiliate 2,230 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $115,403. 13-Sep-00 GOLDBY STEVEN & FLORENCE TRUST Shareholder 1,394 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $72,140. 13-Sep-00 UNIVERSITY, OF NOTRE DAME Shareholder 52,442 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,831,868. 12-Sep-00 KLEIN, THOMAS C Shareholder 234 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $12,778. 12-Sep-00 COLUMBIA, UNIVERSITY Trustee 40,789 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,223,001. 12-Sep-00 HASEL, ANDREW J Shareholder 234 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $12,166. 12-Sep-00 HARBOURVEST PARTNERS V PARELLEL PARTNERSHIP FUND LP Shareholder 44,951 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,472,395. 12-Sep-00 PRIVATE EQUITY TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS CV Shareholder 11,654 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $639,975. 12-Sep-00 HARBOURVEST PARTNERS V PARELLEL PARTNERSHIP FUND LP Shareholder 7,492 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $415,060. 12-Sep-00 MIT RETIREMENT PLAN Shareholder 20,394 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,121,670. 12-Sep-00 REYES PARTNERSHIP IV Shareholder 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $59,580. 12-Sep-00 HARVARD PRIVATE CAPITAL HOLDINGS INC Shareholder 40,789 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,243,395. 12-Sep-00 VANDERBILT, UNIVERSITY Shareholder 52,442 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,810,582. 12-Sep-00 BROCK, JAMES Shareholder 118 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $6,284. 12-Sep-00 DORRIAN 1997 REVOCABLE TRUST Trust, Trustee 1,394 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $76,670. 12-Sep-00 LEWIS, JOHN C Shareholder 557 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $29,451. 12-Sep-00 SANTA, CLARA UNIVERSITY Shareholder 11,654 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $618,008. 12-Sep-00 MILLER LIVING TRUST Trust, Trustee 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $60,768. 12-Sep-00 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Shareholder 20,394 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,121,670. 12-Sep-00 GREENBERG, ERIC Shareholder 471 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $25,052. 12-Sep-00 POULETTY, PHILIPPE J Shareholder 2,230 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $119,305. 12-Sep-00 WILLIAMS, COLLEGE Shareholder 5,827 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $323,610. 12-Sep-00 SEQUOVEST Shareholder 11,654 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $640,970. 11-Sep-00 SEQUOIA, CAPITAL VIII 10% Beneficial Owner * 24,646 LNUX Other Disposition 11-Sep-00 SEQUOIA, CAPITAL VIII 10% Beneficial Owner * 128,587 LNUX Other Disposition 11-Sep-00 LEONE, DOUGLAS M Director, 10% Beneficial Owner * 1,942,313 LNUX Other Disposition 11-Sep-00 LEONE, DOUGLAS M Director, 10% Beneficial Owner * 128,587 LNUX Other Disposition 11-Sep-00 LEONE, DOUGLAS M Director, 10% Beneficial Owner * 24,646 LNUX Other Disposition 11-Sep-00 LEONE, DOUGLAS M Director, 10% Beneficial Owner 65,705 LNUX Acquired 11-Sep-00 SEQUOIA, CAPITAL VIII 10% Beneficial Owner 1,942,313 LNUX Other Disposition 7-Sep-00 SCOTT, TIMOTHY T Shareholder 424 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $23,320. 7-Sep-00 ODONNELL, MICHAEL J Shareholder 252 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $12,616. 6-Sep-00 MORRISSEY, MICHAEL Shareholder 300 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $16,931. 6-Sep-00 SACCANI, DANIEL R Shareholder 3,500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $194,906. 6-Sep-00 MITZ, DANIEL R Shareholder 191 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $10,800. 6-Sep-00 IRVINE JAMES FOUNDATION Shareholder 34,962 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,949,873. 5-Sep-00 HAYNES, MARK A Shareholder 382 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $23,016. 5-Sep-00 SCHULL, TODD B Chief Financial Officer 15,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $910,000. 5-Sep-00 SHULMAN, RON E Shareholder 531 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $31,594. 5-Sep-00 SCHULL, TODD B Chief Financial Officer 14,485 LNUX Exercised Options at $0.50/Share and Sold at $60.90/Share. Proceeds of $874,894. 5-Sep-00 ALLEN, JEFFRY R Director, Board Member 36,300 LNUX Sold at $61.03/Share. Proceeds of $2,215,389. 5-Sep-00 SCHULL, TODD B Chief Financial Officer 515 LNUX Sold at $60.91/Share. Proceeds of $31,369. 1-Sep-00 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M President, Director, Chief Executive Officer 30,000 LNUX Sold at $61.04/Share. Proceeds of $1,831,200. 1-Sep-00 EGGLETON, KEITH E Shareholder 191 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $10,753. 1-Sep-00 JONES, LIVING TR Shareholder 5,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $265,000. 1-Sep-00 SOLOMON, LARRY Shareholder 235 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $14,100. 31-Aug-00 DEFILIPPS, THOMAS C Shareholder 424 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $19,054. 31-Aug-00 ROTH, RONALD Shareholder 382 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $20,469. 31-Aug-00 KIRKMAN, CATHERINE Shareholder 37 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,921. 31-Aug-00 PETKANICS GERSTENSCHLAGER FAMILY TRUST Trust, Trustee 382 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $20,628. 31-Aug-00 ZEHR, GREGG E Vice President, Engineering 15,000 LNUX Sold at $53.15/Share. Proceeds of $797,250. 31-Aug-00 LATTA FAMILY TRUST Trust, Trustee 743 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $38,450. 31-Aug-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 5,792 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $310,221. 31-Aug-00 SPARKS, TIMOTHY J Shareholder 451 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $23,869. 31-Aug-00 ZEHR GREG TRUST Trust, Trustee 30,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $162,000. 31-Aug-00 ZEHR, GREGG E Vice President, Engineering 15,000 LNUX Sold at $53.09/Share. Proceeds of $796,350. 31-Aug-00 ESTRIN, JUDITH L Shareholder 279 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $14,718. 31-Aug-00 FELDMAN, ROBERT P Shareholder 664 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $34,412. 30-Aug-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 43,584 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,036,621. 30-Aug-00 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M President, Director, Chief Executive Officer * 3,000 LNUX Sold at $48.45/Share. Proceeds of $145,350. 30-Aug-00 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M President, Director, Chief Executive Officer 30,000 LNUX Sold at $48.45/Share. Proceeds of $1,453,500. 30-Aug-00 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M President, Director, Chief Executive Officer 30,000 LNUX Sold at $51.19/Share. Proceeds of $1,535,700. 30-Aug-00 GROSS, IRWIN R Shareholder 37 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,924. 30-Aug-00 SHORE, DANIEL K Vice President, Operations 25,000 LNUX Sold at $49.03/Share. Proceeds of $1,225,750. 30-Aug-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 19,792 LNUX Acquired Shares via Exercise of Options at $6.00/Share. Paper gain of $906,721 at a fair market value of $51.81/share on 30-Aug-00. 30-Aug-00 FELDMAN, BORIS Shareholder 664 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $32,900. 30-Aug-00 GOLDBERG, SELWYN D Shareholder 191 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $9,359. 30-Aug-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 43,584 LNUX Sold at $46.68 -- $46.84/Share. Proceeds of $2,036,741. 30-Aug-00 HARBOURVEST PARTNERS V PARELLEL PARTNERSHIP FUND LP Shareholder 7,492 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $514,060. 30-Aug-00 STONEBRAKER, LESLIE K TR Trust, Trustee 500 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $23,375. 30-Aug-00 AUGUSTIN, LARRY M President, Director, Chief Executive Officer 90,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $4,500,000. 30-Aug-00 HARBOURVEST PARTNERS V PARELLEL PARTNERSHIP FUND LP Shareholder 44,951 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,472,395. 30-Aug-00 AUGUSTIN, ALICE K Affiliated Person 3,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $145,341. 29-Aug-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A Divisional Officer, Senior Vice President International Sales 35,000 LNUX Sold at $40.38 -- $43.00/Share. Proceeds of $1,453,200. 29-Aug-00 SHORE, DAVID R Vice President 100,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $4,426,880. 29-Aug-00 SHORE, DANIEL K Vice President, Operations 50,000 LNUX Sold at $44.27/Share. Proceeds of $2,213,500. 29-Aug-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A Divisional Officer, Senior Vice President International Sales 5,000 LNUX Sold at $40.50/Share. Proceeds of $202,500. 29-Aug-00 IRONWOOD, CAPITAL Shareholder, Non-Affiliate 2,230 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $98,956. 29-Aug-00 BONHAM, MARK Shareholder 340 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $14,482. 29-Aug-00 DREW, JOHN L Shareholder 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $47,875. 29-Aug-00 HUMPHREYS, IVAN Shareholder 403 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $16,121. 28-Aug-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A Affiliated Person 100,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $4,300,000. 28-Aug-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 100,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $449,982. 28-Aug-00 VLG INVESTMENTS 1999 Shareholder 9,068 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $385,514. 28-Aug-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A Divisional Officer, Senior Vice President International Sales 5,000 LNUX Sold at $43.75/Share. Proceeds of $218,750. 28-Aug-00 GOGUEN, MICHAEL L Shareholder 50,014 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,250,630. 28-Aug-00 LAMOND PIERRE R & CHRISTINE TRUST DTD 11/22/85 Trust, Trustee 28,245 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,271,014. 28-Aug-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 10,000 LNUX Sold at $45.00/Share. Proceeds of $450,000. 28-Aug-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A Divisional Officer, Senior Vice President International Sales 15,000 LNUX Sold at $42.56 -- $43.00/Share. Proceeds of $640,600. 28-Aug-00 LEE, DAVID C Shareholder 300 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $12,761. 28-Aug-00 TWICKLER, BRUCE A Divisional Officer, Senior Vice President International Sales 40,000 LNUX Sold at $43.13 -- $44.63/Share. Proceeds of $1,764,600. 25-Aug-00 TESTA, TROY Shareholder 1,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $44,000. 25-Aug-00 UNIVERSITY, OF SOUTHERN CAL Shareholder 34,962 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,440,913. 25-Aug-00 WS INVESTMENT CO 98A Shareholder 3,011 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $132,484. 25-Aug-00 SILICON GRAPHICS INC Shareholder 400,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $18,400,000. 25-Aug-00 STANFORD, UNIVERSITY Shareholder 109,488 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $4,817,472. 25-Aug-00 ANDERSON, JOHN Shareholder 1,000 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $46,000. 25-Aug-00 MCCORD, JIM Shareholder 71 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $3,200. 24-Aug-00 SUMMER IRREVOCABLE TRUST DTD 3/9/98 Trust, Trustee 10,704 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $460,272. 24-Aug-00 SUTO, JEFFREY Y Non Affiliated Person 1,130 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $49,720. 24-Aug-00 NASSAU, CAPITAL Shareholder 64,096 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $2,820,224. 24-Aug-00 ALCOA FOUNDATION Shareholder 23,308 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $865,310. 24-Aug-00 CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE TECHNOLOGY Shareholder 23,308 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $865,310. 24-Aug-00 TOMASETTA TRUST Trust, Trustee 1,115 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $41,394. 24-Aug-00 REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAL/ SHELLWATER & CO Shareholder 93,231 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $4,053,940. 24-Aug-00 IRREVOCABLE WINTER TRUST Shareholder 21,406 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $920,458. 24-Aug-00 IRREVOCABLE SPRING TRUST DTD 3/9/98 Trust, Trustee 10,704 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $460,272. 22-Aug-00 FAIRCHILD SHERMAN FOUNDATION Shareholder 11,654 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $422,329. 22-Aug-00 RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE Shareholder 17,841 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $633,493. 22-Aug-00 NOWICH, UNIVERSITY Shareholder 5,827 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $211,164. 22-Aug-00 RUSSO, ROBERT Affiliated Person 39,584 LNUX Acquired Shares via Exercise of Options at $6.00/Share. Paper gain of $1,187,520 at a fair market value of $36.00/share on 22-Aug-00. 22-Aug-00 MURDOCK, M J CHAR TR Shareholder 29,135 LNUX Proposed Sale (Form 144). Estimated proceeds of $1,055,823. * Indicates shares held indirectly (i.e. in a trust, by a spouse, etc.)

I agree.

[Tom7]

I successfully went 4 years of undergraduate with only about 50 spams. It's easy to do, just don't publish your e-mail address everywhere. On accounts where I do get a lot of spam, I just delete it. No big deal, and it kills fewer trees than postal mail. It's also easier to automate. Spam that is a scam or illegal deserves to be dealt with using existing consumer-protection laws, but I am opposed to any kind of government regulation of the internet. We have technological measures which are more effective than any legal remedies; I suggest that we use (and continue to develop) them.

Re:I agree.

[sqlrob]

No big deal, and it kills fewer trees than postal mail.

Possibly not. How much does it take to power the e-mail servers?
How many ISPs have had to increase capacity because of spam? This is in increase in electricity, as well as toxic chemicals used to produce the servers. So spam is NOT environmentally friendly

How Can I Add a Very Mean Person to Spam Lists?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any suggestions? This is a very mean person ...

Won't even need the tax

[gad_zuki!]

A better method would be to have spammers pay for their bandwidth and adopt an advertising convetion like putting ADV in the subject line.

This would kill the problem in two easy steps:

1. ISPs won't have pass the cost of mega-bandwidth waste to their customers because they'll be billing the spammers directly.

2. Users can make rules to put spam in either the proper folder or just delete it. Spam without an ADV gets reported to the authorities. With all these newly trained cyber-cops they'll appreciate the work of tracking down spammers.

As spam prices increase because of real cost billing "scam spam" will disappear because only legitimite businesses will be able to afford mass mailings. Instead of getting credit fixing ads you'll get coupons from Target. They're going to have to make you want to open those emails, especially for those who have them going into a bulk mail folder.

Sign the petition to get Disney to release Hayao Miyazaki's anime in the US.

TOS probably says "With or without cause"

[yerricde]

I would assert that it is the ISP's right to kick you off, completely arbitrarily. Well, not completely, assuming that the terms of service were laid out such that they specify exactly what the conditions for possible disconnection are. Unfortunately, I can't quite find the actual terms of service for this specific case, but I see nothing wrong with an ISP disconnecting a customer.

Usually, ISP contracts include language to the effect: "$ISP may terminate your service at any time, with or without cause." And because "without cause" is acceptable, it's perfectly OK for them to say "You can no longer use this service now that we've discovered you're $ethnicity."

Re:TOS probably says "With or without cause"

[idmillig]

No... If they can terminate the service "without cause", they don't have to state their reasons. That's what "without cause" means (at least in non-legal English).

"You may no longer use this service," is all they need to say.

Re:TOS probably says "With or without cause"

[Registered Coward v2]

Usually, ISP contracts include language to the effect: "$ISP may terminate your service at any time, with or without cause." And because "without cause" is acceptable, it's perfectly OK for them to say "You can no longer use this service now that we've discovered you're $ethnicity."


Actually, while you can write virtually anything into a contract, it's up to the courts to decide what is enforcable (some things are automatically non-enforcable), and in many cases, what a clause really means. For , example, what is unsolicited email? If you pull my email address off a post and send me an (on-topic) comment, does that count? What if I say please post all replies? What if you mistype an address - should your ISP be able to terminate you?

And yes, in a libertarian utopia, companies that are draconian would eventually go out of business, but that ignores the very real search costs to customers to identify the bad ones and to replace them as they are discovered.

Unfortunately, until enough suits are decided, and appealed, much of this area will be unclear. As much as I hate lawsuits, they do serve to clarify and codify the law, so ISP and spammers know the limits.

Mod above up !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone mod the above up!!! That was funny.

When will it stop?

[Bobo1952]

Easy. When we find out where they live.

This happened last April

[finial]

Hmmm... The identical thing involving the same two entities happened last April... I wonder if Paetec is really pursuing this or whether they're in on it and sending this "woe is me" out as a ruse.

The reply to the complaint (April 5, 2001):

From: IP Admin
To: "'21047903@reports.spamcop.net'"
Subject: RE: [SpamCop (http://www.monsterhut.com) id:21047903] Compare and
Save at CompareWebHosts.com
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 17:35:20 -0400
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19)
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Status: U

PaeTec Communications, Inc. received the attached complaint from you
regarding your contention that you received spam, i.e., that you received an
unsolicited, commercial, bulk e-mail. PaeTec is an integrated
telecommunications provider which offers access to the Internet to
businesses. PaeTec strongly opposes spamming. The e-mail about which you
complained originated from a customer of PaeTec's by the name of MonsterHut.

PaeTec's agreement with MonsterHut expressly prohibits the
sending of spam. In reliance on the complaints it received from you and
others stating that the e-mail you received from MonsterHut was spam, PaeTec
informed MonsterHut that it was terminating its contract.

MonsterHut responded by commencing litigation against
PaeTec. Prior to PaeTec being advised of the existence of the litigation,
MonsterHut obtained a temporary restraining order from the Court, which
prevents PaeTec from terminating MonsterHut's contract pending a hearing at
which both sides can present evidence. The only proof before the Court at
the time it issued the injunction was MonsterHut's claim that it had
received permission from the recipients, such as yourself, to send the
e-mail, and therefore, the e-mail was not spam. PaeTec has disputed
MonsterHut's assertion and has demanded that MonsterHut prove that you and
the other recipients solicited the e-mail. MonsterHut has also claimed that
virtually every complaint PaeTec received was simply a request to be removed
from MonsterHut's mailing lists and was not an allegation that its e-mail
was spam. PaeTec interprets your communication as not simply requesting
removal, but complaining that the e-mail was spam.

It would be very helpful for PaeTec to obtain sworn
statements, which are also known as affidavits, from you and others stating
(if true) that, to the best of your knowledge, you did not solicit e-mails
from MonsterHut, you did not opt-in to being included on the mailing list of
MonsterHut, you did not opt-in to be included on any mailing list that
indicated you were authorizing the sending of e-mails by other unspecified
parties, and that your complaint was not merely a request to have your name
removed from a mailing list. If you are willing to assist PaeTec in its
efforts to vacate the injunction and terminate MonsterHut's Internet access
service, please reply to this e-mail and advise of your willingness to do
so. On the other hand, if you did solicit e-mail from MonsterHut and/or if
you intended merely to request that your name and address be removed from
MonsterHut's mailing list, PaeTec would appreciate it if you would advise it
of those facts so that it can take them into account in deciding whether to
pursue a termination of MonsterHut's service.


The affidavit request (April 9, 2001):


From: IP Admin
To:
Subject: Monsterhut Affidavit
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 17:14:37 -0400
Importance: high
X-Priority: 1
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19)
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Status: U

Thank you very much for indicating a willingness to help PaeTec
Communications, Inc., in our litigation with MonsterHut. We have gotten a
tremendous positive response from members of the Internet community, and
this will make a big difference in our efforts to vacate the injunction and
to prevent MonsterHut from using PaeTec's network and/or IP addresses to
spam. MonsterHut contends that all of its commercial bulk e-mail is
permission-based and therefore not spam. MonsterHut also contends that most
of the complaints PaeTec has received (particularly those received through
Spam-Cop) were merely requests to be removed from MonsterHut's mailing list,
and were not allegations that the complainant had been spammed. We hope to
refute those claims with your help.

Attached to this e-mail is the text of a sample affidavit that
PaeTec has prepared to assist you in putting your statement into a form we
can submit to the court as evidence. The text of the proposed affidavit is
also located at a website created solely for this purpose,
. The text is somewhat generic because of
the volume of people who have indicated a willingness to sign an affidavit.
As a result, we must ask you to type in some basic information. Please fill
in your name on the first line. In item 1, please fill in the state and
county in which you live. If you do not live in the United States of
America, please modify the language in Item 1 to indicate the country in
which you live and your general location using the equivalent terminology
that is applicable in your country.

Next, please review the text in Items 2-8 very carefully to ensure
their accuracy. Feel free to make whatever additions, deletions, or
modifications you feel are necessary. Since this affidavit is being given
under oath, we want you to be sure that it accurately and truthfully
reflects the facts pertaining to your situation. In this regard, the vast
majority of the people who responded to my last e-mail stated they were
absolutely certain they had never solicited e-mail from MonsterHut. As a
result, the sample affidavit was written this way. A relatively few people
indicated that "to the best of my knowledge" they never solicited e-mail
from Monster Hut. If you feel more comfortable providing a sworn statement
with this type of qualifier, please add it to the appropriate sentence(s) in
paragraph 6 of the sample affidavit. In addition, we need you to fill in
two pieces of information. In Item 5, please indicate the month and date on
which you received your e-mail from MonsterHut, and type in the subject line
of the message you received from MonsterHut. If you cannot recall this
information, it is located below in the "Original Message" portion of this
response or in our initial e-mail to you. In Item 7, please fill in the
blank to indicate whether your initial complaint was made via Spamcop or
directly to PaeTec.

We have left a blank area after the number 9 at the end of the text
so that you may add any additional information that you believe would be
helpful to demonstrate that MonsterHut's e-mail was unsolicited by you .
For example, a large number of people indicated that the e-mail address to
which the MonsterHut e-mail was sent is used only as a contact point for
domain registration purposes with Network Solutions. As another example, a
number of others indicated the e-mail address was not active or was used
solely as a "spam trap". Many others of you indicated the address was used
for only certain specific purposes and was never used to solicit e-mail from
anyone from this address. If you do not wish to add any information, please
delete the number 9.

Once the affidavit meets with your approval, please type in your
name below the signature line next to the word "By:", print out the
affidavit as a separate document, and sign it before a notary public (or if
you are from outside the United States, the equivalent official in your
country who can attest to a signature affixed to a document that is sworn to
under oath). In order for the affidavit to be considered by the Court, we
must receive the original signed copy so
we can submit it to the Court. Therefore, please mail the original, signed
affidavit to PaeTec's outside legal counsel at the following address:

Suzanne, Galbato, Esq.
Bond, Schoeneck & King, LLP
One Lincoln Center
Syracuse, New York 13202
United States of America

If you do not wish to incur the expense of mailing, PaeTec will send you a
self-addressed, stamped envelope for you to send it the original if you
provide PaeTec with a mailing address to which it can send the envelope.

Finally, many of you requested that we ask MonsterHut for its proof
that you solicited e-mail from it. We already have made a formal request
for this proof from MonsterHut. MonsterHut has not yet formally responded
to this request and its time to do so will not expire until after PaeTec
must submit its affidavits to the Court. Moreover, in informal
communications, MonsterHut has advised our attorneys that, at this time,
MonsterHut will be unable to prove on an individual basis that most of you
solicited the e-mail because most of the complaints went through Spam-Cop,
which masks the identity of the complainants,. As a result, we have
requested that MonsterHut describe the sources from which it obtained the
names it used. It appears there may be a relatively few sources.

If you have any questions, please contact us by e-mail at
ipadmin@paetec.com
. On behalf of PaeTec, we want to thank you for your assistance.

fa

[Anonymous Coward]

another case of a stupid, uninformed judge making a dumb ruling. lawyers are often good at shopping around for judges that will rule the way they want them to. Love our legal system. It's a total mess, thanks a whole century of dumb rulings.

Simple answer, at least for us

[macdaddy]

Just block them. They've been in my access list with a REJECT statement for some time now. My access list is just under 1000 lines long, including a few RELAY entries. I don't wait for MAPS to list them in the RBL, RSS, or DUL. I do the research, scan the logs from time to time, and block them myself. Simple.

personal choice in private business and matters

[Anonymous Coward]

what right does the judge have to tell a private organization that it cannot choose who and who not to provide service too? Oh wait, that is what always happens when you empower someone or a group over your neighbors... it comes back towards you.

But with serial killers

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone is accused of killing a lot of people they can be kept in jail until the trial. This is called "remand".

Of course in the US what happens is that the journalists will help the killers by broadcasting all the police's clues on the radio, e.g. when Andrew Cunnanan was running from the cops after killing Versace, the media broadcast that the police were tracking him via the car phone in the Lexus he was driving. This meant he dumped the car, killed someone else and took his one. Score one for free speech without responsibility!

Free speech and all that...

[Anonymous Coward]

You say that they have a right to free speech.
What about my right to not have to listen?
And if all this spam was good and ethical, why are they forging From: addresses and using the "reply to this to be removed from our list" addresses to harvest more emails? It's not.

Look, people, as has been stated before, if we don't find a solution to stop spam, email will become useless as a form of communication. And what, YOU all want to use M$ Messenger Service or AIM?

Re:Free speech and all that...

[egon]

"What about my right to not have to listen?"

Well, I'm not sure I would agree with that as a "right". In our society, there's a lot of stuff we'd rather not have to deal with, but that doesn't mean we should do away with it.

Ex: I'm particularly unfond (is that a word?) of white supremists. I would be willing to stand by them to support their right to say whatever they want though. Do I want to hear their rhetoric? Certainly not. But the moment we begin to say they can't express whatever they feel, we become judges. Then who's to say that a particular opinion that you (or I, or anybody else) have can't be censored or made "wrong"?

"And if all this spam was good and ethical, why are they forging From: addresses and using the "reply to this to be removed from our list" addresses to harvest more emails? It's not."

I would agree with you that it is unethical - and in fact, this is part of what I despise about spam. Personally, I think forging email headers should be illegal - that would certainly make filtering spam easier. However, this has little to do with my point. My point is not the ethicality or morality of such things - it's wheter we should be attempting to repress it from happening.

"Look, people, as has been stated before, if we don't find a solution to stop spam, email will become useless as a form of communication. And what, YOU all want to use M$ Messenger Service or AIM?"

After all, mail was made completely useless by junk mail. Hell - nobody uses mail for anything more - they all just use the telephone. To go back to my example, the US is a completely useless place to live (well, ok, maybe this isn't a good example *grin*) because with one bad thing in it (in my example, the white supremists) the whole thing is made bad.

Re:Free speech and all that...

[Kwil]

Actually, we have a very strong right not to listen. They can be allowed to say anything they want. They have no right to be up in my face to say it.

Consider, while I have every right to sing (badly) Jingle Bells at the top of my lungs in the middle of July. Does that same right extend to doing it outside your bedroom window at 3:00am? Of course not. Even if I'm not directly on your property I can get arrested for doing that. Free speech arguments won't hold any water against a disturbing the peace charge, even though free-speech is a constitutional right. Ergo, my "right" to free speech does not trump your "right" to a pleasant existance and a good night's sleep.

Now when you consider that my e-mail address is my property, I've paid good money for it after all, what right do they have to come stomping up on to my property with their shouted slogans of cheap furniture or judgements collected? Take this one step further to the poster who's getting spam on his cell-phone and having to pay for it.. or the fax spammers that existed before the law was put in to stop them. When spammers use *my* resources (time, bandwith, paper, storage, money) to do their marketing, without my permission - that's wrong, and should be stopped.

The difference between Dmitri and Spam is that only those who wanted to hear what Dmitri had to say went to listen to him. Those that didn't, didn't hear him. If you WANT to get spam and opt-in to all kinds of lists, well, go ahead. Until I opt-in though.. spammers can stay the hell out of my mailbox.

Re:Free speech and all that...

[sqlrob]

Ex: I'm particularly unfond (is that a word?) of white supremists. I would be willing to stand by them to support their right to say whatever they want though. Do I want to hear their rhetoric? Certainly not. But the moment we begin to say they can't express whatever they feel, we become judges. Then who's to say that a particular opinion that you (or I, or anybody else) have can't be censored or made "wrong"?

I agree with you. However, white supremacists are presenting a political/moral/ethical view. How is someone selling you something doing the same?

Startblaze

[Starbreeze]

Are they responsible for the startblaze product review spam as well? I couldn't find anything on their site about it, but it follows the same pattern.

Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 10:04:00
From: Carl Carlson
To: elf@nauticom.net
Subject: Product Review: S t a r t B l a z e

Product Review: S t a r t B l a z e

Concept: Website Traffic Building System
Overall Rating: 5 out of 5
Ease of Use: 5 out of 5
Effectiveness: 5 out of 5
Recommendation: Use it Immediately - Mission Critical Tool
Price: FREE

We heard some buzz about the new free traffic building system called StartBlaze created by Mark Joyner of Aesop.com and
decided to test it out. Mark and his guys are always releasing *something* over there, but this one is unique -and
breathtakingly cool.

We could probably fill up volumes with all the cool features, but rather than waste your time, we thought we'd just
give you the URL so you could try it out yourself:

StartBlaze

Listen, this thing is so easy, and so effective that you would be certifiably insane not to use this immediately. I
mean that.

Bottom Line: This is probably the most effective traffic building system we have ever encountered. We just hope it
stays free... You should get it now while it still is.

Re:Startblaze

[Anonymous Coward]

We heard some buzz about the new free traffic building system called StartBlaze created by Mark Joyner of Aesop.com
</spam&gt

Google found this name along side "spam" quite quickly.

Link: Pamela.net Spammer - Mark Joyner

Does education of spammers work?

[Anonymous Coward]

On Freebsd-security they got this spam from ptc.com. Not often you get spam with an 1-888-782-3776 number, from a computer software company filled with technical people who should know better.

It is not often the Spam marketing company Aprimo has the VP of sales:
"Before Aprimo? Marketing, we faced challenges in arranging our executive conferences and product seminars because we had disparate databases and inconsistent lead and project management systems. We now have a targeted audience that we go after with an integrated marketing program. We anticipate that the new marketing management system will be responsible for an increase in sales from the executive conferences and product seminars this year."

-John D. Stuart
Senior VP Worldwide Field Marketing
PTC

I just spent 4 rounds with PTC.com, makers of Pro E.

The worldwide Vice President of marketing John Stuart:
1) Does not know what spam is
2) feels the advertising campaign goal is to contact as many people as possible.

The head of sales, Dan:
1) Does not know what spam is, and even AFTER given a definition.
2) Thinks that spam works, because, well, I called, didn't I?
3) Spam does not cost anyone any money.
4) FreeBSD must have a marketing partnership with PTC.

Does calling 1-888-782-3776 and letting know that SPAM is bad work?

Re:Does education of spammers work?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it when spammers include a toll free phone number in their spam, or somewhere on their website/whois info. You see, "toll free" just means it's free to the caller. Since someone has to pay for that call, the phone company charges the owner of the phone number. So everytime you call a spammer at their toll free number, you're costing them money. Not much, but if a million people called that number eight times a day, every day, for a month, PTC would get a nice fat bill next month.

Re:Does education of spammers work?

[Anonymous Coward]

remember: call from a pay phone, and cost the spammer even MORE money!!!!

($0.35 as opposed to $0.10 a min or so)

But under the DMCA they cut first and sort later !

[corporatewhore]

Why do they have to be so concerned about cutting the pipe ? Under the DMCA they require ISPs to pull your plug as soon as the potentially illegal activety is reported, right ?
Seems like a double standard to me. Anyone else ?

I hate Maverick Records

[Bogatyr]

"Some addresses Monster Hut sent to were only used as points of contact for domains with NetSol. There is no way they could have opted in anywhere since these addresses aren't used for anything other than domain contact."

I have been receiving spam from Maverick Records concerning their various pop music artists for over a year, including to addresses I never use. Emails to the record label bounce, and I hate them.(more details snipped)

Unbalanced system

[N8F8]

The only problem with this is that people who abuse the law have little to lose because in this case crime really does pay. We just have to face the fact that criminals tend to know more about the law and how to abuse it. In the end, honest peole have more to lose because they care about their reputation and the dishonest people know this and use it against them. The ISP stands to lose its good name (almost irreplacible) while the spammer can simply find another chump to take advantage of. In the end the only solution for the ISP is to write a catchall phrase into the TOS to allow termination for any reason - if it is legal under the laws of the state where they incorporated.

Re:Unbalanced system

[KyleJ61782]

While it may be a problem in some instances to have such a law allowing due process, it does protect the rights of the accused. What's this with guilty until proven innocent?! Remember, the laws of the land were made with the idea that the laws would be applied equally and fairly across all individuals, whether accused or not. Now, that's not to say that the government doesn't pander to corporate interests. What it does mean is that for those cases where corporate interests aren't at stake, the law is quite fair. Unfortunately, personal interests have been all too quickly forgotten in light of corporate money.

Kyle

Re:Unbalanced system

[N8F8]

"guilty until proven innocent" does not apply since we are talking about one company providing a service to another under contract. Due process only applies to government action against individuals (including corporations in the US). If you rented a house to someone and discovered thay they were punching holes in the walls should the court stop you from evicting them if the renter claims the holes constitute "normal wear"? No, of course not. Two parties entered a contract. Party one believes the contract is voided by actions disallowed in the contract.

Party two certialy should have the right to sue party one if it believes otherwise and can prove it. But that does not mean party one should be forced to honor the contract it beilieves void, especially if the conduct in question is damaging party one.

Re:Unbalanced system

[bacchusrx]

"guilty until proven innocent" does not apply since we are talking about one company providing a service to another under contract. Due process only applies to government action against individuals (including corporations in the US). If you rented a house to someone and discovered thay they were punching holes in the walls should the court stop you from evicting them if the renter claims the holes constitute "normal wear"? No, of course not. Perhaps not-- but, in my jurisdiction at least, landlords have no right to evict. Only the provincial Housing Tribunal is allowed to evict a tenent. And yes, landlords are as good as enjoined from kicking you out up to and until an eviction order is issued by the Tribunal.

BRx.

How can anyone claim spam does not cost anything?

[flatcat]

Lets say I'm using my wireless Palm with the bacis service. After about 50 messages, each one starts costing $.20 per k. So each spam message costs me $.20 per k.

Luckily this address has not slipped out yet, but considering my other 'spam' address gets on average 100 messages a day. 95% "opt in" ( intentional or not ), 5% totally unsolicited, ( I don't recall ever having a need for Miss Cleo, nor Sex related products and services ). And not to mention all thos "contests" I have won, but never entered.

Re:Oh, great... (o/T)

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod up! Funny!

Gee..

[Anonymous Coward]

I only submitted this 6 months ago when it first happened... I guess it takes a while for things to be "news" here.

Re:But under the DMCA they cut first and sort late

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this up!

Easy, boycott MonsterHuts clients...

[eFlashDash]

If you want to hurt MonsterHut, have tens of thousands of slashdotters email all of their clients (Hertz, Beaverhome, GrandPrixOnline, etc) and let them know you are boycotting their services because they are doing business with a known spammer, and you don't approve. Also send MonsterHut an email letting them know you are doing it. For that matter, send about 1,000,000 of them a day to MonsterHut (fire with fire...).

Re:Easy, boycott MonsterHuts clients...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, you can request info on their site: http://www.monsterhut.com/request_info.htm

There is a nice meaty Comments section on this form. I wonder what my comments to them will be...

Re:Easy, boycott MonsterHuts clients...

[Hertzresponse]

Hertz is not affiliated with MonsterHut in anyway and has not used MonsterHut in any of its marketing efforts. The ad posted on MonsterHut was created without Hertz knowledge or permission. We have asked MonsterHut to remove it immediately from their site. Hertz does not spam and is a strong advocate of internet privacy and anti-spamming legislation.

Re:Easy, boycott MonsterHuts clients...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't "ASK" them to remove it! Do what they would do.. SUE THEM!!

Re:Easy, boycott MonsterHuts clients...

[eFlashDash]

See, then we are making a difference already (and if any of your too many lawyers are bored, sueing them isn't a bad idea). On with the boycott (except for Hertz, they're one of us...).

Re:Oops, unexpected stay in jail.

[Russ Nelson]

In general, you must do what a judge tells you to do in relation to actions in his court. A judge has considerable latitude to throw you in jail for the rest of your life or until you comply with the judge's order. It's called contempt of court.
-russ

Been done already

[macdaddy]

And it's an interesting idea. The only problem is random strings within the message. You've noticed the "[x623k9fd]" crap at the end of many of your subject lines (way way out there) haven't you? That random crap is usually different for each and every message that gets spammed out. Many large ISP MTAs filter mail when more than XYZ pieces of it come in with the same subject line, so they have to get creative and write random gibberish. That by itself will nix the MD5sum idea. Let's say we skip the subject line and just MD5sum the body. Shortly there after the spammers will start doing the same thing to text within in the message. They could stick some random giberish in HTML comments or tack it on to the end of a URL like "fred.html?blahblahblah". Bye bye MD5sums again.

Another way of identifying spam is looking for keywords and phrases. Each match raises the likelyhood that it's spam. A product has been built for this too, although I forget it's name. Supposed to work fairly well.

I personally use the RSS, DUL, soon the RBL, and a very very long access list of known spammers.

Have You Hugged a Spammer Today?

[SomePoorSchmuck]

In the 10 years since I opened my first Internet email account [bounced once a day through a local BBS], I've been fortunate [or prophylactically paranoid enough] to never have any SPAM problem large enough to be annoying.

However, a co-worker of mine who uses her account much less than I do started to get anywhere from 4-19 porn ads per day on her hotmail account. The "junk mail folder" option helped considerably, but I told her that once she gets on an address list that gets passed around, the best thing to do is just change addresses -- a prospect which isn't really a big deal if you're using free, semi-permanent webmail anyway.

Although I can see the frustration it has caused her, I still think that SPAM is best left to technical, and not legal solutions [yes, I am talking about gray hat vigilantes here], because it's highly probable that the legal structures that would be effective against SPAM would all-too-easily be turned on the rest of us once govs/corps had grown accustomed to their use.

You can't ask a police force to keep your neighborhood crime-free without also creating the certainty that it will discover your "crimes" during its surveillance of your neighbours.

Oh, this one is easy.

[Icephreak1]

What would be most appropriate in a case like this? Swift, unrelenting vigilante justice. This is an organization that needs a big-ass DDoS cannon pointed their way and fired. And fired. And fired. And fired. And fired.

And fired.

ICEPHREAK

Re:Oh, this one is easy.

[Aexia]

Maybe someone should submit a story linked to their website.

solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

why not have paetec's uplink blackhole bigmonsters addresses. they still have service provided by paetec, but it goes nowhere now, like a network outage.

Go read the transcript.

[Russ Nelson]

Go read the transcript. The ISP claims the right to terminate service with no notice, but allows 30 days to cure a breach of contract, but promises not to terminate service simply because of complaints where a user opted in but forgot. Problem is that they have affadavits from people who didn't opt in, but got the email anyway. Monsterhut is trying to assert that users opt to receive email related to their internet service simply by listing an address in whois. Monster is also trying to assert a lot of nonsense that the judge isn't putting up with.
-russ

Re:Go read the transcript.

[bradleyjay]

It's been way more than 30 days. I was spammed by these a-holes almost 6 months ago, and i didn't opt-in. I complained to the ISP, who informed me of this predicament. They asked me to fill out an affadavit which I did. This all took place almost 6 months ago, so it's way beyond 30 days.

"Keitai" spammers are the worst

[Linux Freak]

Spammers are scum. When I used to be an active anti-spammer (gave it up a few years back as it got to be too much of a time suck -- kind of like SlashDot is now. ;-) ) I had to deal with mail bombs, death threats, revenge spam, etc. Very interesting times.

The ones who are really pissing me off now are the mobile phone spammers. I live in Japan and have to pay 300 yen (about $3.00 US) every month for the "privilege" of e-mail. Before registering my mail alias (I used a word which is NOT in common use in Japan :p) my e-mail address was numeric (ie. my phone number). After getting dozens of spam messages delivered there (no stretch to send e-mails from 090-0000-0000 to 090-9999-9999, right?), I got sick of it and registered my alias. I hadn't even started USING the address and I'm already getting about 5 spams a day to it (what, did NTT Docomo sell my damned address or something?) The damned phone WAS set to ring whenever I got an incoming mail, but I got tired of being woken up at 3:00am when some damned deai advertisement arrived, so I had to disable THAT too.

Not only do I pay 300 yen a month, but I have to pay per packet, so everytime one of these SCUMBAGS sends me spam, it's an actual yen or two increase in my monthly bill -- per message. It doesn't take long to add up.

So to the previous person who said, "Just calm down and hit 'delete'", there are many, many reasons to disagree with you.

Re:"Keitai" spammers are the worst

[darekana]

Actually I believe you can change the default # based email to a much harder to guess email by filling out a form or something for free. The companies are aware of it.

Its just the form is probably Japanese. You can probably do it over the phone too.

Re:"Keitai" spammers are the worst

[darekana]

Doh. I wish I read your whole comment before I replied... and I wish Slashdot allowed you to delete your comments. (does it?)

That's harsh if you still get spam after changing it.

on a tangential note: slashdot spam!

[Anonymous Coward]

i use sneakemail (www.sneakemail.com) to help me track where my spam originates. yesterday i received some spam that originated from slashdot itself. well, i bet it wasn't slashdot, but my address has been undeniably harvested from slashdot's database. i haven't even posted anything to slashdot since i changed it to that address, suggesting that the spam bot was crawling through the user list.

anybody else have this happen?

.... and you "jump" to conclusions...

[Prothonotar]

How many of you have actually read any of the pdf files? Hemos, you should have at least. The suit was not brought about due primarily to spamming (although it is mentioned in the case), but due to a conflict over the lines to be installed for the company's bandwidth. Basically, they are arguing they were given the runaround first, the spamming concerns coming later. If there is evidence of them spammin, I would whole-heartedly agree to cutting their access, but I don't agree that they should have been given the ole bait-and-switch on their original bandwidth agreement.

Not new, but this is how you stop it

[Kagato]

Last year the same thing happened to a friend of mine owns an ISP. The key is to fight dirty tricks, with dirty tricks. Basically, you set up a sendmail rule to accept the spam message, then drop kick it to /dev/null. So, the Spammer sees in his logs that the message was accepted. But on the backend you're dumping his traffic. If they call just tell them it's SPAM filters upstream and you can't do anything about it. Perhaps you'd like to sue sprint or AOL about it.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[jareds]

This is not informative, this is just failure to read the information given.

If you followed some of the links in the article, you'll find that the litigation began in March. The "same identical thing" didn't happen twice, it happened once and is still ongoing. Courts are slow.

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

Then they're not really stooping to a "new low" then, are they?

SPAM haters get a grip.

[FaxiS]

Why does everyone hate spam? Do you send emails to the hosts of every spam message you recieve? Do you sit down and write letters to the company of every piece of junk mail you get? HIT THE BLOODY DELETE BUTTON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Re:SPAM haters get a grip.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you! You have just proven that yes, Virginia, the world is full of morons like FaxiS.

Re:SPAM haters get a grip.

[rfc1394]

FaxiS writes:
Why does everyone hate spam?

Because it clogs our e-mail box with messages we don't want and aren't interested in.

Do you send emails to the hosts of every spam message you recieve?

In many cases, doing that will simply cause them to know that you are a valid e-mail address and send even more.

Do you sit down and write letters to the company of every piece of junk mail you get?

No, because sending responses to junk mail through the postal service costs money.

HIT THE BLOODY DELETE BUTTON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You are probably unaware that some people have to pay money for their incoming e-mail, per message and/or per packet. Even if they don't it takes time to determine which is garbage and which is important and most of it is the former.

ISPs: cross your "T"s

[dbrower]

What comes out of the transcript is the same thing that has just happened in a case involving a perceived conflict of interest with a utility regulator in California. Activist demanded a court remove him from a post for a violation of a conflict rule. The judge held that the rule was badly written, and the proof offerered was not clear enough to make the case. His soundbite was, "if you want to hang someone on a technicality, you've got to cross all your 'T's".

In this case, it appears Paetecs original contract was vague about the 'bulk' that constituted spam; the addendum on 2% was unclear; and their termination letter was not consistent with the terms of the contract on the 30 day cure provision. Paetec did not cross its 'T's on this.

You can be sure that the AOL handling of TOSing people is a -lot- more tightly done. ISPs who deal with "bulk emailers" need to be airtight too.

-dB

What ever happened to....

[Restil]

"We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone"????

Granted... those businesses under regulation like utilities can't very well just refuse to provide services if the customer is paying, as the customer has no other options, but bandwidth is not exactly a monopolized industry.

-Restil

Does spam actually work?

[Kithraya]

Maybe I'm missing something here. Does spam really work as an advertising method? When I get spam, I delete it. I've never purchased a product or service, directly or indirectly, because of spam. Are there people out there that really say, "Wow, I can get 50% off a pair of used socks! I'd better buy these right now!" ???

I know that sending spam is pretty low-cost for these companies, but if they're not seeing any return, it's still a bad investment. Are there any numbers of how effective spam really is? And if a Slashdotter has purchased something because of spam (not because of something you asked to receive), please post it. I'm anxious to hear stories about that.

Re:Does spam actually work?

[Anonymous Coward]

if they get a single customer, then spamming is a worthwhile endeavor for them. It costs them less money to send out a million emails to as many addresses as they can find than it would to locate a target audience and send mail only to that audience.

Spam will only go away once it costs more money to spam than it does to advertise legitimately. Businesses are all about making money, after all.

Sidenote

[ergo98]

I have actually missed legitimate messages that were important because they were lost amist the noise of spams. There is absolutely no question in my mind that effective as soon as possible: All spam (even "opt-in" spam) must contain a header that cannot be modified (perhaps two): "Opt-in advertisement", "Advertisement". Under no conditions may the sender modify this. This should literally be a UN convention that countries sign onto (just like the various other international laws). If Bulevia decides that they don't need to follow it to get the token spammer taxes, they should be cut of/filtered from international pipes. It is bad enough to get sent unsolicited advertisements, but when the senders intentionally mask the subject to pretend that it's a reply, something else, etc. that is criminal in my mind: They're wasting my time. Additionally all spammers must check and obey a universal opt-out list: Not 10,000,000 different lists that ebb and flow to make it convoluted to get yourself off their list.

It is a sad state when everyone has to hide their email addresses because of these scumbags.

Re:Sidenote

[spood]

Spammers are already breaking the law by sending UCE. What makes you think they are going to start obeying this law, especially when it means that they will probably have most of their messages filtered into the trash!?!?!

And filtering an entire country's e-mail is not only ludicrous, but impossible. Spammers have proven themselves to be resourceful enough to get around all kinds of restrictions.

Re:Sidenote

[Zwack]

I'd agree...

You don't want to know how upset my wife got when I received an e-mail from "Jenny" with the subject of "Re: You have got to look at this."

It was formatted to look like a complaint from
someone about an e-mail that I sent out saying to look at some pornographic website.

It wasn't until I showed her the full headers showing that "Jenny" had sent the complaint about the website from the same domain that she calmed down a bit.

As if it wasn't bad enough sending me spam, making it look like a complaint about ME sending spam is MUCH worse.

Zwack

NineNine

[Anonymous Coward]

Your site rocks. Really.

An easy solution to take care of monsterhut

[Anonymous Coward]

Make sure all of the various monsterhut.com contact addresses appear in every Outlook addressbook you can get access to, and SirCam (+variants) will take care of the rest! QED.

Re:How can anyone claim spam does not cost anythin

[Legion303]

Funny you should mention the Miss Cleo spam. I got one and showed it to my wife, who said, "If she were really psychic, she'd know that you hate spam."

Paetec should immediately countersue for breach of contract.

-Legion

You're a f**king spammer, aren't you?

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to know why I hate spam? Because this damn country pipes in comercialistic theme music everywhere I go. When I watch TV, there are commercials. Okay, I expect that. When I'm listening to the radio, I have to listen to 10 minutes of meaningless advertisement before I can hear a decent song. When I load up web pages I get tons of banners (fortunately I have learned how to filter most of these). When I drive around, there billboards and advertisements everywhere I look. There is virtually no place I can rest my eyes without becoming some sort of ad agency statistic. Everywhere I turn, someone is trying to get me to spend my money on useless junk.

When I am checking my email, I get to turn all of that off. I am receiving and sending communication to the people that matter in my life. The most important thing in life (people) is the only thing on my mind when I am dealing with my email. And THEN the bastards find a way to dump an advertisement in my inbox, cleverly disguised to look like a real person has taken the time and effort to send me a personal email. Perhaps you can imagine my rage when I find out that it is only another scam to take the money I worked hard for, so that someone else can get it without having to work at all.

That's why I hate spamming. Because there are almost zero possible ways to communicate with people without the capitalists sticking their nose in the business.

Plus, I hate it because I now have to deal with the evil that is procmail.

Paetec

[Ashcrow]

Paetec is known for trying to rip off college students since the own 'College Link' which is a really bad Phone/>56k LAN company. Even though I hate spammers, I kind of like seeing them get hit by a suit.

karma whore

[Anonymous Coward]

karma whore

Send it to the judge.

[jcr]

Would someone please post the snail-mail and e-mail addresses of the judge in question?

Next Monsterhut spam I get, I'll just forward to the judge. Maybe he won't mind deleting it.

If I can't get his e-mail address, I'll send it to him by snail-mail. Maybe he'll get a clue.

-jcr

Attorney: this is only for 10 days or so

[hawk]

I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, contact an attorney licensed in your own jurisdiction.

This is a temporary restraining order. THe very nature of these is that you get one at the time of filing to protect the status quo. A time for a preliminary injunction hearing is set, typically within ten days, which is the first time that evidence from both sides will be heard. There is *nothing* sneaking about getting the TRO before the other side heres of the suit; you serve them both at the same time.

While the standard of evidence to get the TRO is pretty much "file an affadavit,", to get the preliminary injunction you must show a likelihood of winningat trial and that you will be irreparably harmed. If the other side shows you perjured yourself in the TRO affadavit, you tend not to get it (Judges *hate* perjury. They were the group most angry at Clinton).

hawk, wsq.

Exactly so.

[Kasreyn]

While I hate monsterhut as much as the next guy (yes I've been spammed by them, no I didn't save it so I can't help with the affidavits), this is definitely a good thing.

Anyone remember the recent case where the copyright-piracy-cops got an IP wrong and cut off some innocent guy's cable access, for downloading a DivX while - get this - while he was out at the movies with his computer turned OFF? And it took him months to get back on his cable ISP and he could not get them to waive the bill for that month.

This is definitely a good thing, because if it can be done to the spammers it can be done to us. We need more levelheadedness - and more spam blackholes. Not more litigation and access-cancelling.

I've *personally* threatened reporting spammers to MAPS in the past, and about 50% of the time I never hear from them again. Perhaps this means they fear that, hmm? =)

-Kasreyn

BOFH

[smartfart]

They ought to be glad I'm not the admin. I'd LART 'em in a second.

"Well, you know, we had a guy down the hall that blew a breaker, and our whole floor lost power. Too bad about your site. You do have backups, don't you?"

So sue me.

Only way to end spam for good!

[Anonymous Coward]

The only surefire way to end spam forever is via XNS filtering (http://www.xns.org/xns/whitepapers/filtering/). Write your email provider today and request them to adopt this technology.

Legal Recourse

[hship]

It's truly awful that an entity that exists solely to spew spam has "legal recourse" to continue operations when *individuals* have none such. A recent article on salon.com (which, alas, I couldn't find a link to) details how quickly an ISP will yank someone's access, based on unaccountable notices from RIAA-related organizations.

Re:Legal Recourse

[jiheison]

Read the article here [salon.com].

(Better late than never.)

Running the numbers

[AnotherBlackHat]

Does spam work? Probably.
If spammers can buy bandwidth for less than $10 a Gigabyte, and the average spam size is 10K, Then they can send 10,000 spams for a dollar. If a sale is worth $10, then they only need better than a 1 in 100,000 positive response rate to be profitable. Those figures are high. A well written piece of spaming code could do 10 - 20 times that, which lowers the needed response rate to 1 in 1,000,000.

It's tempting to try and change this. Suppose for example, ISPs charged 1 penny for each SMTP connection initiated by an account. Then a spammer would need a 1 in 1,000 positive response rate to make money. This would probably eliminate most of the true scams and pathetic offers, but doing so would make spam more "legitimate." As the stigmata of spam wore off, the same companies that are sending you junk mail now would start sending you spam (junk mail already costs more than 10 cents)

There's really only one sure way to stop spam - higher someone else to read your email, and delete all the stuff you don't want.

Hit

[Anonymous Coward]

the DELETE button (or 'd' if you're using PINE, as I do.)

I have a kernel I'm trying to sell

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I email it to them?

Oh, happy hipocrisy...

[Gruneun]

Someone potentially violates a Terms-of-service agreement.

Someone complains to the ISP.

The ISP shuts down the account.

So, the client takes the ISP to court. You'll notice the ISP couldn't provide good proof to shut them down (I assume, probably incorrectly, that all of you read the PDF transcript of the hearing, too) and the judge sided with the "alleged" spammers.

So, being a just and fair audience, we in the Slashdot forums changed our opinion on such a matter...
cause this time we don't like the client.

It's, uh, um, a...

[dkresge]

From the transcript -- much better than Cats

THE COURT: Just as a point of curiosity, what is a DTI card?
MR. KIRCHNER: Can I ask my client? I don't know the answer to that, your Honor.
THE COURT: I'm just curious. What is it? I have an eight year old grandson who knows more about computers than I do, so when I get a change to ask a question like this, I generally take advantage of it.
MR. KIRCHNER: What that is is it's -- I'll try putting it in terms I understand, your Honor. And it's customer equipment that's co-located in our facility. In other words, they're allowed to put their router in with our equipment so that it works.
THE COURT: Thank you.

When I first read the question "What is a DTI card?" I thought to myself "how wonderful it is that our Justice System expresses interest in such things; so many people would just gloss over a TLA". Imagine my surprise when MR. KIRCHNER didn't say "Digital Trunk Interface, your Honor. It's for a T1 -- like a really fast phone line". Oh well, back to reality.

I used SpamBouncer for a year

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a great little package, but as soon as I needed to add my own rules I was lost.

perl.com had a nice article about Mail::Audit the other month and since I already know Perl, I started using it along with Mail::SpamAssassin. I don't get any spam anymore, even the stuff that slipped by SpamBouncer.

Believe it or not, the rule that is most effective is to trash any mail that isn't addressed or CC'd to me. Once you filter for mailing lists, of course. 70% of the spam I catch is snagged by that rule.

Plus I can do other filtering things in Perl that I wouldn't know how to do with Procmail.

If you're into Perl, you might give Mail::Audit a go.

It is IRONIC though to watch

[Archfeld]

big business tactics get used against another big business rather than against you and I. A pre-emptive law suit, you almost have to admire the low cunning and infernal dedication of this spamco.'s lawyers.

You don't have to open source everything ...

[clarkie.mg]

Why not open source the code but keeping the filtering rules encrypted ? After all, those rules are not "code".

Re:You don't have to open source everything ...

[bero-rh]

That would kill the biggest point of making it open source: I want people to be able to add their own rules (and send them back to me for inclusion in the next release). I don't think we can ever come up with a spam filter that catches all spam, but we can definitely get closer to that goal.

Different people usually receive different spam. ;) For example I'm quite sure I've been getting all those "hot teen pix" and "enlarge your penis" spams ever since I made the mistake of telling a "statistic survey" (needed to be filled out to get to a download page) that I'm single.

Also, I simply don't believe in closed source.

Re:You don't have to open source everything ...

[Hierarch]

bero-rh wrote:

> I don't think we can ever come up with a spam filter that catches all spam, but we can definitely get closer to that goal.

I did some thinking about this. To do that, you'd need a content-based filter. At that point, it needs to read (usually broken) english and understand it. And it needs to do that all day, every day, with every email you receive. Since the only reasonable way to do this is to create an AI that reads your email, you'd be condemning an intelligent entity to reading spam, day in, day out, forever.

Isn't that prohibited by the Geneva Convention?

Even if it wasn't, the solution would only last for a few days. The poor AI would be irretrievably insane within at most 50 hours.

--I need a .sig, somebody infect me with a .sig virus, please!

Re:You don't have to open source everything ...

[bero-rh]

Even if it weren't against the Geneva Convention,
it's probably a bad idea - since AIs start out being
naive, they might sign me up for a "Make Money
Fast" spam. ;)

The only thing that'll stop this...

[alumshubby]

...is if Guido and Vito drop off a horse head in somebody's bed.

Seriously, until somebody can get a successful lawsuit so there's a legal precedent established, this kind of baloney will continue. Once there's a severe financial disincentive to engage in spamming, i.e., you'll get your fanny sued off in an open-and-shut case based solidly on law, spamming will move off of e-mail and on to USENET where...gulp, G*d forgive me...it belongs.

Content filtering sucks, use an accept list

[nicwolff]

Content filtering doesn't work reliably. I use this simple .procmailrc to keep an accept-list and let new senders with real return addresses add themselves easily. No-one has ever complained, and I get no spam at all.

Re:Content filtering sucks, use an accept list

[bero-rh]

Content filtering doesn't suck - while an accept list kills even more spam, it also kills some legit mail (such as bugzilla notifications), causes problems when you sign up for a mailing list, and simply annoys people (think "important customers") who want to send you a message.

There are situations in which an accept list is better - but for others, content filtering is much better than nothing.

When will it stop?

[-=[ SYRiNX ]=-]

How far will spammers go to get their word out? When's it going to stop?

It will only stop when 0.00% of spam recipients reply to the spam. Spammers know that some small percentage (ballpark estimate: 0.01%) of spam recipients turn into customers, and thus it is cost-effective (for them) and in their interest to keep spamming.

Education is the only answer. That 0.01% needs to be edcuated about the fraudulent nature and globally negative impact of spam so that they will stop replying to such mailings.

Along this line of thought, I still believe that the only way to improve the Internet experience is to require every Internet user to have a license, and to require comptency tests before granting such licenses. If people knew about spam before ever being permitted online, spam would quickly become a dead end for marketers and it would stop happening.

Public Filters

[rfgmonkeys]

Those of you who are postmasters are welcome to have a look at the domain name blocking lists I have built up, and use them if you feel so inclined: http://www.monkeys.com/anti-spam/filtering/lists.h tml

Regulations

[deathscythe257]

Spammers have as much of a right to advertise their product as do any other corporation. However, television and radio stations will not play back to back advertisements and there are regulations regarding courtesy calls made by companies restricting them to residential phone lines between the hours of 8 am and 5 pm M-F.

The thing that we must do to stop this madness is to somehow find someone to construct a bill that will restrict spam to once a day per email address and only _proven_ personal email addresses. Sending spam to someone's professional email is like calling their office phone or their company cell phone. It isn't right and isn't done. Also those who wish their address, much like their phone number, to remain unlisted should be able to do so. I know this is a daunting task, but what we've seen out of spammers so far requires a sort of yellow pages for email addresses- listing "residential" addresses and business addresses seperately, and the ability to "unlist" one's address.

Also the spamming would be hard to regulate without anyone's cooporation in reporting such offenses [only something like 1 in 4 rapes go reported].

The reason I propose such an idea, is that in personal email accounts, most people are simply annoyed by spam[having a regulation to 1 mail a day or less would cut down on this] much like courtesy calls. You can delete them. The real problem is when spam floods corporate networks, again, just like when there are too many calls coming in for the operator to handle.

I'm writing my senator about this problem[when i find time, which between beer, chicks, food, and school... spam is relatively a low priority] and i suggest that everyone who feels the same way, do the same. Regulations are there to keep people in check, as much as we would like to have the internet deregulated. We have rules in a society for a reason- the majority of people decide what is moral and just in that society.

I have a lot more to say, but i'm sure it's already been said... and i'm tired.

Re:But under the DMCA they cut first and sort late

[gorf]

Except that typically the ISP will have received hundreds of complaints from different people. That gives the ISP reasonable grounds to believe that the complaints are correct.

On the other hand, cutting someone's pipe just because a single big corporation with lots of lawyers says so?

Yes, it's possible to forge emails from various different people using various different open relays, but that certainly would be fraudulent and could be dealt with legally.

And yes, complaints filed under the DMCA to an ISP to cut off someone's connection are made under penalty of perjury, but this only works if people are willing to sue the very large company with lots of lawyers, which tends not to happen, due to the large financial resources required.

Right

[Fred Ferrigno]

You don't have any "right" not to be cut off by your ISP. They don't have any "right" to cut you off.

What part of his post does this contradict?

Let's quit talking about rights here.

OK, but you started it. The word "right" is used only once in his post ("It's not right ...") to mean that premature disconnections are not 3. Fitting, proper, or appropriate , legal issues aside.

I don't like "rights language" any more than you do, but for once when someone isn't using it, you go ahead and bash him anyway.

It works?

[ackthpt]

As absurd as spam seems, it works.

Maybe on cattle, but not me. Most of it is just a con. Once the mark has submitted enough information to be stolen from or have their identify swiped, the victim is poorer but smarter.

As a practice, I cease to do business with companies which spam me, and I make sure they know why they have lost a customer. I highly recommend the return communication, since they'll pay more attention to someone who isn't silent on the matter.

How to make money fast

[mc6809e]

Hey all you computer-geeks turned sales people! I found this great email address you can send your resumes to! Or if you haven't turned sales-person, why not offer some technical advise (for free!) about how they can improve there sales using you're latest, proprietary, and patent-pending methods.

Send your important, helpful information to sales@monsterhut.com

Should go to trial about now

[Animats]

Reading the hearing transcript from April, the judge laid out a schedule leading to a trial date of August 31. That's today. So this should be going to trial about now.

The big problem in this case is that the ISP, or at least one of its sales reps, agreed to knowingly host a bulk mailing operation. In addition to the regular terms of service, there was a "pink contract" side deal. (PSInet used to do that, and it cost them.) All spam complaints to the ISP were to be referred to the spammer, and the ISP was not to take action against the spammer unless the percentage of complaints exceeded 2%. The spammer sent out about 65 million E-mails, and only a few thousand complaints came in. So the 2% threshold wasn't reached.

But the ISP decided to terminate the spammer, despite a 3 to 5 year contract term.

The judge made an interesting point in the preliminary injunction. Because the ISP's standard terms put a very low cap on the money damages its customers can claim, a "terminate now and sort out the money issues later" litigation wasn't possible. Therefore, the judge granted the preliminary injunction against disconnection until the matter is resolved at trial. So this is a case of a damage-limiting clause backfiring.

What about spam that is sent with..

[josepha48]

your own email as the reply to?

I started recieving spam this week, that has me as the sender even though I did not send the spam. How do you 'filter out' that? Also isn't that a form of impersonation / identity theft?

I am wondering if anyone has thought about implementing a new SMTP protocol that will prevent spam. I wonder if it is possible to do....

In what way is this targeted???

[McFly777]

On page 33 of the transcript Monsterhut's lawyer admits that if one opts-in for "more information on sports" that one's address becomes part of the "common source of addresses that people can barter by exchange". So, asking for targeted information gets you put in a general opt-in for everything under the sun. I am surprised that nobody asked Mosterhut for the database that says that the people looking for "marrage enhancers" opted-in for that target!

Sports mail, in the example given, might be ok, but last time I checked marrage isn't a recognized sport (I could be wrong ;-)

One idea that I have for a spam law would be that the opt-in source and date must be included in the header of commercial bulk mail, and that the spammer must have on file auditable opt-in records that expire after one year. This way if you opted-in and forgot, or are no longer interested, the record would time-out and be removed. If it wasn't, you could then have recouse to sue/prosecute etc. Set some small number of identical/similar messages without this info to allow for legitimate sales contacts, but if the info wasn't included in the headers, organizations such as SpamCop could seek procecution upon collecting some similarly small number of complaints.

This would permit limited, targeted, legitimate mailings while outlawing the ones that comprise the majority of what winds up in my mailbox.

How I blocked 90% of my spam using qmail

[embo]

Disclaimer: I admin a qmail box, so unless you have qmail as your mail server, this probably won't work. (But you really should get it, because it rocks big time, even if you can't stand DJB)

You will need to have DJB's mess822 package installed as well. That said, I put these lines in my .qmail file (which directs how mail is delivered):

|condredirect username-safe@mydomain.com /usr/local/bin/iftocc
|condredirect username-safe@mydomain.net sh -c 'echo $SENDER | grep -f bccexempt > /dev/null'
|/var/qmail/bin/preline -df /bin/sed "s/^S[Uu][Bb][Jj][Ee][Cc][Tt]:/Subject: THISISSPAM ($SENDER) /" | qmail-inject -a username-safe@mydomain.com

Line 1: Delivers any email where my address is in the To: or Cc: lines, and exits. Otherwise, it falls through to...
Line 2: Delivers any email where my address is in the Bcc: line, PROVIDED that the FROM address is listed in a special file in my home directory, called bccexempt. This way, it denies ANY bcc delivery to my address, unless I explicitly list the from address in my bccexempt file. It will then exit if it passes this test. Otherwise, it falls through to...
Line 3: Injects the phrase "THISISSPAM" into the subject line. This way, I can filter on the subject line in virtually ANY email reader on the planet. Another option would be to simply throw it into /dev/null, but this way I can adjust my bccexempt filter if I need to, because it also lists the FROM address in the subject if it's marked as spam. I just have my email reader filter for THISISSPAM in the subject line, and if it finds it, it marks it as read and dumps it into a separate folder away from my Inbox where I don't have to look at it, or even know it's there. Once every 2 or 3 weeks, I quickly browse through the list of spam addresses, and if I find any legitimate emails, I add the sender to my bccexempt list so the mail will be delivered into my Inbox.

Then I created a .qmail-safe file to handle the forwards where the legit email really gets sent to, and I have that dump into ./Maildir/ to deliver normally.

The first month I had this in place, I received nearly 200 spams, and approximately 12 of those actually made it into my Inbox. This works so well because most spammers use BCC to send out their spam. This filter gives you control over who can BCC you. I know this doesn't stop spam at the source. I know it doesn't cut down on bandwidth usage. I know they can bypass it by mailing me directly. But I also know that there were 200 spams the first month that never entered my inbox.

-D

Little Spamcop dig...

[kindbud]

From http://litigation.paetec.net/instructions.html :

Moreover, in informal communications, MonsterHut has advised our attorneys that, at this time, MonsterHut will be unable to prove on an individual basis that most of you solicited the e-mail because most of the complaints went through Spam-Cop, which masks the identity of the complainants,.

Yeah. See. I ended up blocking Spamcop complaints at my incoming relays, because they redact the address of the complainant. This makes it impossible for me to act on the complaint, or to remove the complainant from the mailing list in question. Spamcop is therefore, nothing more than a service to make people feel good, to get it off their chest, so to speak, and annoy the person who operates the network block from which the mailing originated (or the operator of any domain mentioned in the mailing).

Spamcop does little or nothing to actually get people off of mailing lists they don't want to be on. I see it as an automated revenge mechanism, whereby a person who feels they have been spammed, can launch a tit-for-tat barrage of useless mail at whoever Spamcop believes was the perp. I can do without that sort of thing, thanks.

New SMTP protocol

[kindbud]

Yeah, DJ Bernstein, author of qmail and djbdns, has put in a lot of thought into overhauling SMTP. Check it out.

Could have been avoided . . .

[Prong]

After reading through all of the material posted on Paetec's site (yes, I was bored), it seems to me that Paetec's mistake was two-fold: failure to exempt violations of its AUP from the 30 day cure clause, and negotiating that remarkably clueless addendum 1A. I'm still wondering what they really thought when Monsterhut wanted language specifying a 2% complaint threshold.

Hopefully, Paetec will be more careful (read: less greedy) in future contract negotiations.

Re:Could have been avoided . . .

[Prong]

Could someone tell me why this was modded down? I'm really curious.

of course the penalty fits the crime

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was 16, I got my first (and only) speeding ticket. I don't remember how much it cost exactly, but it was way more than I could reasonably afford for something as stupid as driving home. I bit the bullet, paid the fine, learned my lesson and haven't gotten a ticket since.

If I had millions of dollars, the fine would have seemed like no big deal, and I'd probably continue speeding like a stupid jerk.

traffic tickets should be a detterent. an $80 ticket doesn't deter a millionaire, so Finland got this one right.

This is ancient news!

[jtownatpunk.net]

I sent in this story months ago.

simple solution

[Anonymous Coward]

spammiing should be punishable by death.

NO!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be a terrible mistake. The last thing any of us want is more government involvement. Look, not to get political here, but I see that many computer geeks are liberals, so I don't think all of us understand this, so let me explain:

Government intervention BAD

They want power my man, it's what they live for, repub, demo, and yes, even naderites.. actually ESPECIALLY naderites. These people are incredibly horny for power .. give them an "in" and they will keep on going and never stop.

-ron

blackhole monsterhut.com's IP address range

[chongo]

Monsterhut's IP address range is:

64.80.216.0/22 and 64.80.220.0/23

That is: 64.80.216.0 - 64.80.221.255

Why not just blackhole any packet with a source IP address from that address range?

Re:NEWS FOR RIGHT WING LOONIES, MODERATORS ON CRAC

[Bohemoth2]

What's wrong with that?

Oh, I guess not - was Re:One solution

[BattyMan]

oOps. I guess you're not.
I see - you _told_ Hertz, and that's their reply.

Nevermind.

Though it _would_ be nice to see Hertz sue these guys.....

Does anyone think this will work?

[SPeW]

A valiant effort none the less ... i see more spammers using this all the time now ... i think it's a good idea for a central remove list ... I just hope it takes off.
http://www.removeyou.com
MoRe...
LaTeR...
-=PJ Kix=-

Re:Does anyone think this will work?

[sik puppy]

I've been filing abuse complaints against this group. Even if they are on the level, the spammers can just sell the list of removed addresses. Their service is an attempt to legitimtize spam. In my book they are no better than the companies that sell header forging spamware.

P.O. Box != no bulk mail

[Old Man Kensey]

Speaking as someone who's rented two P.O. and one Mailboxes Etc. box, you'll still get junk mail.

The little-known difference between junk mail and first-class personal is that bulk mail rates actually subsidize the first-class rate. Translation: if the post office abolished junk mail, everybody else would end up paying more postage.

The rules for bulk mail dictate things like how it's sorted and bundled. Ever notice the "CAR-RT SORT" notation on a bulk-mail label? That refers to the "carrier route". Basically when the post office gets a mailing from a bulk-mail operation, it's pre-sorted, pre-packaged, pre-everything and the carrier just picks up the bundle for his route. All this means the post office has no processing cost (which is where most of the postage you pay actually goes). Spam, on the other hand, is analogous to ad circulars coming "postage due".

I look at it like property rights. Generally if the neighbor's kid cuts through my yard on the way to school, I'm going to hassle him just enough to make my point -- maybe grab him by the ear and escort him off the property in front of his buddies. I have the right to bodily throw him over the fence if I want (and if he pisses me off enough, I just might). But generally I'll use a minimum of force, even though I have the right to use much more. Likewise I think we have to accept the fact that an innocent unsolicited e-mail (commercial or not) from someone you happen not to like can be turned into a major pissing contest if unsolicited bulk e-mail is outlawed, but just trust that the vast majority of people aren't going to unnecessarily be an asshole about it and deal sensibly with the ones that are.

or to uu.net

[sik puppy]

That seems to work for uu.net

Just forward all your spam to their sales@ and info@. A belated thanks to whoever it was here who gave me that advice. I went from 10-15 spams per day to 0.

I just got a complaint back from one of their sales people. Told them I'd stop forwarding their spam back to them when they stopped sending it/canceled their pink contracts. Their was an implied admission in their response that they do have pink contracts (I hear the gasps of stunned disbelief...NOT). The messages etc will go to my attorney, and hopefully I'll have enough to go after the sales staff at uu.net.

The Butler Did It!

[_Sprocket_]

Wow. I finally finished the whole story. And I have to admit, I was surprised at the ending. Its like a good murder mystery. Sure, we no at the end murder was done. But there?s a great twist in this story as to who the guilty party was. And just how a disreputable spammer manages to keep their fat pipe running with the help of a court injunction.

(spoiler warning)

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

OK. So throughout the hearing, the judge is pretty hot on the trail of the Plaintiff. Sure, the Defendant?s notice of termination letter brought up some questions (a sub-plot I expect to see played out in detail during the sequel). But the Plaintiff is unable to prove that their email list is, in fact, opt-in and even admits to abusing the Network Solutions whois database for unsolicited commercial email (SPAM).

And then the Judge plunges us in to the plot twist. The butler did it; its the ISP?s fault.

We should have known it all along. First the Defendant should have known better than to do a deal with the Devil - a disreputable spammer. And they even agreed to the Devil?s own terms - a 2% worm hole. Plenty of room to wiggle through the threat of service termination.

But the final blow... the act of injustice itself... is failing to show damage caused by Monsterhut. The judge at one point admits to having a grandson who knew more about computers than he did. And in the end, he describes home computers as sometimes frustrating and that he could understand how interruptions in personal and professional email would be annoying. But he failed to see the damage Monsterhut could do, while Monsterhut was able to demonstrate the damage that they would suffer from termination of service. And so we?re left with the final, grisly scene - the stammer gets their injunction and the status quo is maintained until the actual court case.

And so, this leads me to wonder... IS there damage that will / can be done to the ISP? Can the upstream provider cut off (or filter outgoing SMTP traffic from) the ISP since they are unable to control a spammer THEY had decided to do business with?

Paetec is full of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Paetec has been claiming that they'd like to axe Monsterhut for a long time, but they aren't actually doing anything about it. They've "collected" more affidavits than you could shake a fist at; more than enough to demonstrate to a court that Monsterhut is flat-out lying, but Monsterhut is still connected and is still spamming.

Paetec is happy to harbor the spammers as long as they're getting paid. The lawsuit stuff is a ruse to buy lots of time, during which both Monsterhut and Paetec make money.

It's old folks

[kimihia]

This thing is old. It's gone. It's over.

The restraining order was dated the 23rd March 2001 with a hearing on 3 April 2001.

They even have a transcript for the hearing. I'm just downloading it now, so I can't tell you what the outcome of the case was.