Slashdot Mirror
When Spammers Try To Sue You
An Anonymous Coward writes: "I was looking for information about what recourse there is against spammers when I came across this site. It appears that Bernard Shifman sent email to several people trying to solcit employment via spam, and when they replied to him, asking him to stop, and reporting the spam to his ISP he threatend them with a lawsuit. It's a very entertaining read."
Your a troll but not a good one :)
... I think in any given day I recieve between 15 and 25 spams either via email or messenger, this is between quite a few accounts (10 email accounts, maybe 6 messenger accounts). Where do my rights not to be bothered with this bullshit start, and "free speech" begin ... Im sure I spend (just) 5 mins a day deleting spams or closing AOL/ICQ spam windows ... Thats 12 seconds per spam if I recieve 25 a day. Do the math, thats 30 *hours* a year dealing with spam.
The problem isn't of course any individual spammer but the problem as a whole
Im sure you'll have lots of trollish responses, but one had best not be "then don't use email."
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Spam is not really an issue of free speech. It's a matter of freedom to listen. When a spammer sends me email, then it costs my ISP (and hence me) money. If the net were truely a free resource then we still have issue that spam wastes my time. Not being immortal, I only have a limited amount of time available, and I don't want to use it reading spam.
Hence the point: Although I strongly believe in freedom of speech, I believe more strongly in the right to control what I listen to. I have no right to force people listen to what I have to say, and I expect the same in return.
Colin Scott If you build it, they will be dumb...
Your troll would be so much more convincing if you didn't hide your email adress.
Think: In which world is speach most free:
1) A world where you can send single personal messages to anyone, but can't send multiple copies of the same message to people who haven't authorized you spending their ressources that way.
2) A world where you only can send messages to people who have explicitly authorized you to do so.
If we win the fight against spammers, we get world 1. If we lose, we get world 2.
Some people believe free speach, and thus world 1, is worth fighting for. Some feel the battle is already lost. Personally, my email filtering is now based on a whitelist, i.e. I have already joined world 2. Just like you have, by hiding your email adress.
French Slashdotters may have heard about David Hirschmann. In short (if you don't like Fish) David Hirschmann was supposed to have some misconception of the corporate world which he shared with one of his female co-workers an inapropriate way. She then would have forwarded it around the Internet and at the end DH may have comitted suicide.
This got covered quite a lot by the French Press but finally appeared to be a hoax as no one of these protagonists actualy existed.
Now in this case I'd also tend to think that it may not be real...
I don't know people as stupid as this b.shifman that would have an internet connection.
There's something extreme here. it smells like comedy...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
From the read it seems readily appearant that their only "provocative" actions were to forward a complaint to the postmaster addresses of whatever ISP Bernie was using at the time. From there this little shithead goes ballistic, threatens legal action, calls people names and generally harasses them. The guy is a moron and deserves every bit of it. Okay, so they don't let up when it becomes obvious that Bernie's full of shit, but big deal..
;-)
I personally think the only appropriate response left is just to have him whacked and be done with it (hey, I know some people in Chicago, you know?)...
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Has anybody gone through his resume and attempted to contact his (supposed) former employers to hear what they have to say about him, if anything? Did he really work for who he said he did? Is he committing fraud?
I recall an online altercation that I had a few years back. A post appeared in one of the UK ISP groups advertising a "too good to be true" service. This was at the time when narrowband access was going nuts in the UK, with companies taking a year's money off of people, then going bust the next day.
As a warning to the terminally gullible, I posted the whois info for the domain, and noted that it didn't match the trading address on the website.
A few hours later I received a vicious email from the poster threatening legal action because I had posted his home address on the group, when he was only the admin for the site, and threatening to post my home details all over the place.
Well, fuck me sideways, I thought, and let loose with a tirade about how anyone could possibly call themselves an admin when they didn't even understand that whois records are public - which mine were, and so I couldn't give a damn about what he did with them.
Two minutes after I sent it, I thought... wait a minute. There's a real human being receiving this.
And so I hammered out an apology, a genuine and heartfelt and sincere apology. Oh, I didn't mean a word of it, of course. The guy had screwed up, and was too stubborn to admit it. But I screw up every day, and don't like having it pointed out, and it was simply cruel to heap any further misery on this poster.
So I apologised for posting his address, and he replied in a calmer manner, and we had a chat, and he turned out to be a decent (if slightly clueless) bloke. He declined my offer to post a public apology on the group. I would have had no qualms about doing so, because knowing that I was absolutely in the right meant that I really didn't have anything to prove, and that my priority was to reduce the amount of human suffering in the world (in a small way, but every little helps, right?).
It's a shame that Bill didn't take the opportunity to defuse this situation. It's so obvious that Shifman is in the wrong that it really doesn't need to be laboured. He's clearly not very bright, and so it's rather cruel (funny, yes, but cruel) to taunt him so. I'm sure that Bill could just send a without-prejudice apology and walk away from this, and we'd understand that he's doing it from kindness and generosity, to dig Shifman out of the hole that he's dug for himself.
The fact that Bill doesn't do this, and that he's taking care to avoid actionable statements even though he claims that Shifman has no case rather implies that Bill isn't entirely confident that he's in the right here. And that's a shame, because he could end this with one brave and courteous gesture, for pity's sake, and out of strength, not weakness.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.