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Rep. Bill Jones Thinks Spam is "Innovative"
GMontag writes "Wired is running this story:Candidate: Spam in Every Pot about candidate-for-governor Bill Jones' spam campaigning. The most telling quote: "Jones spokesman Darrel Ng said the e-mail wasn't spam, commonly defined as unsolicited commercial e-mail. Ng instead classified Jones' non-commercial mass-mailing as an "innovative way to use the Internet.'" Another interesting item: "An examination of the e-mail sent out by the Jones campaign revealed forged headers. The e-mail, purportedly sent from an MSN.com address, was actually routed through the server of an elementary school in Chonnam, Korea.""
I submitted my page on Bill Jones's spams a couple days ago, and it was rejected:
2002-02-28 00:58:56 California Gubernatorial Canidate Resorts to Spam (articles,spam) (rejected)
Anyway, I'm not bitter. Check out my page on it anyway: http://polpo.org/jonesspam/. Basically, I pick apart the mail and the "click here to remove yourself from our list" page (which involves some novel Javascript-based HTML obfuscation) and find out who one of the spammers might be.
After talking with some people about this and doing a simple Google search I found that he's been doing this for a couple months now, with MSNBC doing this story on it in December. They have a followup story here.
By the way, don't count on Bill Jones's office writing you back when you complain to them about the spam. I haven't recieved a response yet.
Ian
+2 Funny????
In English it's generally pronounced "ing".
The sound in Cantonese is vowel-less like "tongue" minus the "to." There is no direct transliteration using English phonetics.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Does California still have the death penalty?
Yes, but carried out at a much lower rate than in Texas or Oklahoma. He could be elected, serve, and retire before they got around to him. I'm against the death penalty, but I might be willing to make an exception in this case :-)
In any event, I'm pretty sure this counts as 'three strikes' so he can be locked up for good. Ironically, it's a bill he authored. Seems fitting to me...
916-349-2002
they tried to support their actions, citing 1st amendment and an unsubscribe.
I told them to go to hell.
Forging an email address is a criminal activity in California, regardless of whether or not it's commercial. It is a crime to:
"Knowingly and without permission uses the Internet domain name of another individual, corporation, or entity in connection with the sending of one or more electronic mail messages, and thereby damages or causes damage to a computer, computer system, or computer network."
Whoever forged the MSN address while really going through a Korean relay would seem to be a criminal.