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Class Action Lawsuit Against Spammer
sfjoe writes "California-based spammer eTracks is being sued by the law firm, Morrison and Foerster (who have a very cool homepage). M & F's press release says they are "...seeking other relief, including attorneys' fees and statutorily authorized damages of $50 for each email delivered in violation of the law, up to $25,000 per day".
California's anti-spam law has already held up under appeals court scrutiny so this may very well be a major setback to the spam industry."
I think spammers should be forced to pay by donating an organ for each
forged header.
How cool of a name is that?
..... um, i mean, arrested.
Judge: And the defendent is MoFo and associates.
I'll have to hire them if I ever get caught
Unfortunatley, odds are that as soon as they win the case, the spammer will disappear and resurface somewhere else, only to repeat the process.
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
who have a very cool homepage).
Not anymore in say... 30 minutes ?
Mr. Turd, this is MoFo.Prepare for some heavy slashdotting
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The big problem is how can we get at all of the garbage that originates overseas? Half of my spam comes from ".tw"
While it would be nice to get rid of spam, I will miss the daily opportunity to have my penis enlarged.
sales@etracks.comc ks.com
staffhelp@etracks.com
busdev@etracks.com
email_removal@response.etra
isp@etracks.com
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Not to be confused with Mark A. Fry & Associates.
Since when is commerical speech protected to the degree that individual speech is?
There is a right to free speech. There is not a right to force that speech on others.
I know when I e-mail my lawyer they charge me for about 15 minutes in most cases at an hourly rate of 250 an hour so it makes sense that if this spammer is mailing them all day long they should get charged as well.
--MD--
Because they cost us money. Bandwidth, CPU, and disk space are NOT free and you, your provider, and the backbone providers are all spending money to handle SPAM. Just because you don't see it on a bill doesn't mean you're not paying for it.
There are specific laws in most states against sending spam with forged headers.
These people are not legitimate marketers. They collect names, that much is probably legal, but the illegal part comes when they commit computer trespass, exploiting poorly configured servers, and signing the mail with fraudulent return addresses.
If these crimes take place in other countries, it may be legal, but it is illegal in most of the united states. VA has a personal juristiction clause in the law. If you spam here, then you do business here, you come to court here.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
A large proportion of spam IS illegal -- Ponzi schemes, "miracle" drugs that don't work, Nigerian bank scams, attempts at stock pump-n-dump, off-shore internet gambling, copyright infringement, importing pharmaceuticals, and other miscellaneous fraudulent activities. That's because most of these can't be advertised legitimately.
Commerce *is* subjected to regulation, you know...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Aaaah! but you aren't a lawyer, so you don't bill your time in 1000$/hr increments. I imagine they do. So if they spend an hour each day deleting spam, and there are 5 of them then that's $5K a day in their time wasted, well, in lawyer speak of course.>:)
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
[snip]Morrison & Foerster employs approximately 1,000 attorneys and 1,350 non-attorney staff in 18 offices worldwide. [/snip]
/. read slashdot. I know I get a kick when the company I work for or related subjects are news posts.
[snip] Morrison & Foerster was named by Fortune Magazine in its first list of 100 Best Companies to Work for in America. [/snip]
Thats alot of desktop computers and servers for a company, Always wondered how many people from the companies in articles on
Come on MoFo IT/IS guys, post some replys!
Ok, I can understand slashdot reposting a story that was reported, say, two months ago. But this story was posted _yesterday_. You can tell they're the same story just from the three line blurb on the front page.
Sigh.
Okay, let's start by going back to mail-bombing the service the spammer is using to dump his mail. Hey, it brings down the ISP and inconveniences the customers, but damn me if it isn't effective at getting a spam account closed down right quick. I did this a number of times in the 'old days' when an ISP proved unresponsive to reason.
Oh, wait - mailbombing is *illegal*, even if it's in retaliation for spam from a stupid or amoral ISP. But spamming, which is a mail-bomb en masse, *isn't*.
So I'm a terrorist; the spammer is a savvy capitalist.
Go figure.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
The main problem is that were policing ourselves and losing the war.
I use a blacklist and I risk blocking potential customers.
I use content based filters and I risk blocking legit email.
Faked headdres, open relays, isp hopping. I've even had reports of spammers paying people to root boxes and install their own software.
They won't stop until it gets expensive, and until then there are just enough stupid people online to make spam a profitable buisness.
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How about because spammers take up network resources and user time without being asked to, without being authorized to, and without yielding benefit? It costs a spammer essentially nothing to send an email that will consume perhaps thousands of dollars in lost bandwidth, CPU cycles, and user effort. The cost is not borne by the instigator, but by the unwilling recipient.
Let's say I decided to drop by your house every day and scrawl an ad (or an offensive message) in chalk on the sidewalk. It's easy enough to erase -- just a little water spilled over it. Is it OK, then? What if I decided to do this every day to every house in your neighborhood? What if I got the chalk by, say, dropping by the local public school and absconding with it?
And I don't know what a good anti-spam law would be, but I wish to death that people would stop acting as if it were a priori impossible to write one without somehow opening up all imaginable governmental ills. Good laws do exist, though it's fashionable on slashdot to pretend they don't. A targetted law helping to assign some economic cost to sending spam would help restore the operation of normal market forces. Not all slopes are slippery.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
This story seems oddly familar
-Henry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
They're just trying to make money
Sure, by using up resources that they did not pay for. 1) I pay for internet access so that I can communicate with those I want to 2) resources are being wasted to store and forward the spam emails 3) resources are being wasted to delete the email
It's really not hard to do a lot of stuff. Like protecting yourself against criminals isn't that hard, perhaps we don't need police? Seriously though, it doesn't matter that it is not difficult. It is the sheer volume. I have some email accounts that I use as "fake" email accounts when I think I'll be spammed by the people I'm giving out my email to. One of these accounts gets at least 50 spams a day. Now if I were some poor newbie, tell me how much effort it would take to filter out the one email a day I get that I did intend to receive. If you don't get enough spam to think it is a problem, just change your email address from samsa@@@anitisocial...com to your real address.
Why in the world should it be illegal? Because in California it is.
Yeah, and so are drug dealers and kiddie porn peddlers.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
If it works as supposed (by law) to, email_removal@response.etracks.com will add spammers address to the list of removing, effectively removing this address and spammer's kissmeplenty20022@hotmail.com from the list.
But if works as it usually works, you effectevely created a cycled list of selfsubcribing spam lists!
Awesome!
Here's the quick and dirty as to why many of the slashdot community have a violent hatred toward spammers: We run mail servers.
:)
I run vectorstar.net, a free hosting service. I would easily wager that greater than 90% of the mail that wriggles through to our users is spam. Thus, 90% of my mail-related disk space and 90% of my mail server processing goes to handling unwanted, unnecessary spam. That's the difference between being able to run a Pentium 100 server or a PIII-1ghz server. Thus, it costs me a LOT of money to deal with spam mail.
The same situation falls true for the majority of businesses. Their mail servers handle far more spam than they do valid email. It leads to serious expenditures on mail server hardware, (in some companies) software, and staff to maintain the servers.
So that's why we hate spam with a passion.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
Why is spam such a big deal? Why do Slashdotters go hog-wild and advocate violence against spammers, whose profession's name cannot be typed without heaps of disdain?
They're just trying to make money, and it's really not that hard to delete the stuff.
I know you're trolling, but this is an argument I've heard from many people who are not trolls (such as legislators). Generally people confuse spam with a First Amendment issue, or view attacks on it as if laissez faire capitalism were at stake. Spam is a big deal because we are starting to drown in it. Spam traffic has been increasing exponentially. It doubles every X months (although I don't know offhand what X is). After 10X months, when you are receiving 1024 times as much of it as you are now, your ideological blinders might fall off.
Also, they're not "just trying to make money" if they're scamming people.
As soon as we start allowing the government to regulate commercial email, other, less welcome regulations are sure to follow, in the ostensible interest of national security, or justice, or any of the other stock government facades.
Unlike other "problems" the government is looking into (SSSCA, etc.), this is one that really does need fixing.
there site is still up and serving pages with decent speed, either is a really slow day on slashdot or the MOFO's have a decent sysadmin/setup
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
"Even after receiving formal notice of Morrison & Foerster's policy against spam, Etracks has sent at least 6,500 unsolicited email advertisements to Morrison & Foerster's California users."
So, my mail server I pay by the byte. Why should I pay for any spam, even the headers? If I'm forced to stop because of that, aren't they inhibiting my First Amendment rights?
Read the law. The mail:
Must be labeled advertisement
Must have valid contact information
Must not have forged headers
Must cease mailing upon request How is any of that against the First Amendment?
The reason people spam is that the cost is low, even in the worst case.
Spammer's worst case just got much worse.
If spamming becomes a risky, possibly very expensive proposition, the big spamhauses could be in trouble. They've got deep enough pockets to be hurt badly by such a suit. Bad news for them; good news for the rest of the Net.
Sadly, it's probably not much of a threat to spammers in China, Russia, etc.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Well in general we have the right to chose whom we communicate with, if I don't want to listen to someone I can just go away, hang up the phone or tell them not to contact me.
In this case the law firm, this is NOT a class action case, claims they received spam from the company without a valid return adress or a toll free phone number as required by CA law so people can remove themselves; it is also claimed that Etracks did not identify thier comercial messages as required by CA law. The firm then suposedly tracked them down and told them not to send any more messages to them, they did not comply.So the law firm sued.
While one might complain about the need to identify messages in the subject, it seems to go a bit far to say that one should not be able to make someone stop sending you stuff. The supreme court has ruled that the rights to free expresion and free speech do not allow one to annoy others on thier property. A round of messages could be defended as free speech, but to continue mailing after you have been asked not to is to make a nuissance of oneself.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
Exactly, someone mod this up.
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
Geez, don't people read the linked material before posting? Or don't the editors make corrections before sending the thing to the main page? This is not a class action suit. It's Morrison and Foerster suing on their own behalf because of spam sent to users on their own network.
And the brethren went away edified.
Spam has rendered my hotmail address absolutely useless. I've had that address for around 4.5 years, now. It was a nice address. It was easy to remember, because it was my name@hotmail.com. No numbers, no funky underscoring, banging, etc. It was simple, elegant, and nobody ever forgot it. (My name@biggest free e-mail provider.com).
Now, however, I receive about 20 spam a day to that address. I miss messages that I should be receiving. After going two months while travelling without internet access, I returned to discover nothing *but* spam in my inbox -- hotmail had automatically deleted the older messages on the assumption that I would want to keep the newer ones.
Now, my hotmail block-list is full, and I have about another 200 addresses I would like to add to it. I cannot use that account, because it is now fundamentally useless. And spammers don't cost me money?
Spammers cost money everytime they send an ad that a distracted person clicks on, and gets shipped off to a porn site. That red-flags the corporate internet policy manager or whoever, who has to then go TALK to that employee about their going to a porn site. Sure, they just show the spam and say "Oops". It costs both of those people at least half an hour, though, and at $100 an hour, that's an expensive piece of e-mail.
The bandwidth used is not inconsiderable, either, particularly for people who are using dial-up accounts in regions where they pay-by-minute.
Spam is hardly a victimless crime, it's just a stupid one, and it's all opportunity or possible cost, so it's hard to really say "oh, that cost us money". It definitely costs money. It cost me my fucking hotmail account, and discarded my lengthy correspondence with folk hero Donovan, for Chrissakes.
Bah.
l
my grandma loves reading about tight teen anal sex... misspent youth i guess.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I'm not?
Let's see, I have a domain where I pay by the byte (well, megabyte).
In the EU, people pay by the minute for net time.
How is this spam free again?
So MoFo.com is going for the amx the law will allow, they might even get attorney's fees out of it (Section 5, sub f, sub 2).
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Its running windows 2000 and IIS and we can't take it down? You call yourself zealots get out the oc-48s and keep hitting it.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Your myopic perspective demonstrates that you know not of what you speak. My ISP (I'm friends with the owner) handles 16,000 pieces of spam every day, in total. Each one eats up 1-3Kb of bandwidth for the message. The total dollar value of that bandwith to the ISP is US$27,000.00 per year. That cost gets passed on to the customers, and because of that I get charged extra to pay for that bandwidth. Also, I had an address that I stopped posting to public forums in 1997, but until I changed my address I got somewhere around 100 messages a DAY. After about a year of not getting messages because there was too much garbage to crawl through, and having to "just click delete" 85 times a day, it got to be too much.
So, next time you decide to talk about how it's no big deal, could you send me a few hundred dollars to make up for the insignificant impact it's had on me?
Virg
The lawsuit is being filed on behalf of Morrison & Foster by itself and is not a class action. Nobody else is entitled to restitution. Sorry. I'm waiting for better tech to sort out this sort of "editorial" oversight in the future.
I hope Bernard Shifman is making enough money to be able to cover his advertising expenses at $50 per e-mail. I don't think he is because last reports had him still spamming message boards and a few other addresses.
Couldn't Californians bring suit against Shifman if they have recieved one of his silly resumes?
The hole in this theory is that most of these people are actually based in the US and spamming because they have squat for money and need to con people to get any. Now, assume they relocate to Mexico they might get away with it for a while, but I wouldn't count on that either. Effectively they'd have to pick up and move themselves to a country without extradition, etc. If they have the wherewithall to do that, most probably wouldn't need to spam.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Some broadband may be unmetered, but much dial-up is. More than half of the UK uses metered access.
You might feel differently about ads in the mail if you were being forced to pay the postage for all of it when you received it.
Which is what happens with e-mail spam.
There are two big differences between spam and junk mail. First, if you ask the Post Office who owns the postal permit on which the junk mail is sent, they'll tell you, and if the company gives them the wrong contact information they'll go to prison (or at least face severe fines and possible loss of corporate charter). Second, you would indeed have grounds for a lawsuit if all of those pieces of junk mail arrived at your box postage due and you weren't allowed to turn them away.
Virg
I noticed this on Etracks' page:
.
Response rates:
E-messaging 5%-15%
Traditional direct 0.5%-5.0%
Source: Jupiter Communications
Anybody know how accurate this is? I always though spam was less effective than junk mail . .
There's a subtle difference here, if I remember the bizarre laws in the US concerning the US Postal Service...
When a spammer abuses the network and your email account, he/she/it is NOT paying for the distribution, and is, in a way, "tresspassing" on your "property"...
If I recall correctly (I may not), in some bizarre, technical, legal way, "your" mailbox (the physical one that the USPS delivers to) is ACTUALLY the property of the USPS (not sure how this works exactly, but I THINK this is law so as to put the Big Guns of the Federal Government behind dealing with illegal abuses of the Postal Service, rather than having to rely on individuals to report and accuse abusers). If this is true, then when a junkmailer pays the post office to deliver a bunch of crap to your address, it's only (again, in a technical, legal sort of way) the USPS' resources that are being used, not "yours".
I may be totally off base here - if somebody with a better understanding of USPS-related law is reading this, I'd love a clarification...
At any rate, the summary is that with junkmail, the junkmailer is covering the bulk of the cost to deliver, while with spam, the ISP's and recipients are covering the bulk of the costs. (Looked at another way - you don't pay the USPS to RECEIVE mail, so you're not really losing anything. You DO pay your ISP to recieve E-mail [as part of the cost of the rest of the ISP service] so receiving email does actually cost you something, even if it's a tiny amount.)
Besides, paper is recyclable (though I suppose electrons are, too, come to think of it...)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
LOL..like any of these bozo's ever reads their own email ?? The got some staffer to delete things as they come in.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Regarding "I think spammers should be forced to pay by donating an organ for each forged header."
Who would want an organ from a spammer in them? I'd sooner trust an organ from a pig, at least it's a mammal.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
If my ISP had a service that would simply drop all mail except that from a white list I provide, that would be worth an extra buck or two a month to me. This would take some database lookups to see whether to forward or drop, but push those lists out as far to the edge as possible and nothing else inside has to deal with it.
I've never configured a mail system, so I'll admit I don't know how much processing power this would save them, but the storage would drop dramatically.
Give me a good interface to manage my white list, give me a daily/weekly/monthly list of all return addresses that have tried to send to me (so I can add new ones to my list) and I'm a happy camper.
Nope, no sig
Hey! Stop posting on slashdot and get back to work, like the rest of us! Uh, oh, wait....
(mr edrugtrader is my employee :)
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
A previous slash dot story reported how this candidate for a california state position sent a bunch of spam to canadians,,becuase someone thought that the .ca their emails ended on stood for california.
They are cool, not clueless. Vince Flanders of webpagesthatsuck.com related how he (or an acquaintance) emailed them, in essence,
"Um, Mr. Morrison & Foerster, are you aware your URL, mofo.com, is, well, kindof obscene?"
Their PR person replied, basically, "Yes, we're aware of that. We're cultivating an image of a firm you don't want to mess with."
Given that, I will heed their advice and not mess with them. :)
Fight for your right to read books!
-J
As they say, "Freedom of speech is great... right up there with the freedom not to listen"
Never confuse your right to write with the lack-of-right to spraypaint that message on your neigbours' walls.
As the karma-burners say, mod this up. It's a valuable well-thought opinion against the flock of slashdotters' group-opinions.
I have no problem with outdoor advertisements. I have no problem with
billboards, or bus placards, or fancy lighted neon marquees. I can
avert my eyes as I drive by them in my car.
I do have a problem with graffiti. When you sneak up in the night and
spray-paint "Eat at Joe's" on the side of my building, you are using MY
PROPERTY without my permission. And I want to see you tarred, feathered
and drowned in your own paint.
Spam is grafitti. My computer, my disk space, and my bandwidth are
things that I pay for; they are my property. When you use them, without
my permission, to transmit your Nigerian Bank Scams, your porno ads,
your Ponzi schemes, your stock-market pump-and-dumps, and your offshore
casinos, you are spray-painting on my property.
And I want to see you tarred, feathered and drowned in your own flith.
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
Geez, who do you you root for in that war?
Take a look at this firm of mostly female lawyers: bitches from hell.
I just sent those guys at MoFo an email saying thanks, and win one for the good guys, etc. I think it would be cool to show them how much support they will get for doing this sort of litigation. Perhaps it will persuade them (or other law firms) to go after lots of other spammers. I never thought I'd be so openly rooting for a law firm to win a case. But spam is THAT evil.
Anyway, contact them at info@mofo.com
Try looking at TMDA... I'm running it on my mail server and I am down from 10 spams a day to one a month. That one is through a mailing list that I would rather not unsubscribe from.
Basically it adds a whitelist of people that you will accept mail from, a blacklist that you will reject mail from, and will allow people to automatically add themselves to your whitelist.
You can also have time limited addresses, keyword addresses that you can revoke, and so on...
It is working for me, if it's not working for you, why not. :-)
Z.
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
Can you check your hotmail account with a POP-client?
Not directly, but you can use gotmail to fetch it in a similar fashion to fetchmail.
Opposite what?
Edith Keeler Must Die
I think spammers should be forced to pay by donating an organ for each forged header.
I'm not sure I'd ask anything from a spammer, short of their immediate death.
TO: Jace of Fuse!
FROM: Body Organs Galore
Hello! I am e-mailing you about this great opprotunity to get ahold of a high quality kidney! Let me tell you the story! Once not too long ago, a college boy woke up in a bath tub full of ice...
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
This lawsuit made it onto NPR tonight... I was rather amused by one spam executive saying the mail was not "unsolicited" because many users give their names to mailing lists when registering for products... "without knowing it" (exact quote... forgive the lack of attribution, but I'm sure someone can dig up an NPR transcript for around 6:45 PM EST on 15 March 2002).
My question then is this: how is the mail not unsolicited if the user doesn't know he's soliciting?
Plato's Socrates might argue, of course, following the Meno, that the user's psyche solicited e-mail advertisements before birth and merely forgot about his solicitation upon entering the world. Perhaps he would demonstrate this by having an uneducated slave register software and sign up to be notified of special offers that might be of interest to him... but then the Athenians forced Socrates to drink hemlock precisely because they didn't want to put up with that kind of nonsense.
Make spammers pay by being forced to donate $5 per email to each of the following:
:)
Electronic Freedom Foundation
Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
Free Software Foundation
DigitalConsumer.org
Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
Privacy International
We'll have enough lobbying power to stomp the NSA, telemarketers, spammers, AND the RIAA
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Try the anagram: "Morrison & Foerster LLP" == PORN AD TROLLER IN FOR MESS
Spammers cost money everytime they send an ad that a distracted person clicks on, and gets shipped off to a porn site. That red-flags the corporate internet policy manager or whoever, who has to then go TALK to that employee about their going to a porn site. Sure, they just show the spam and say "Oops". It costs both of those people at least half an hour, though, and at $100 an hour, that's an expensive piece of e-mail.
I know the feeling. Nowdays it's an automatic trip to the power switch if something redirects me. It's easy enough to show HR the bad link. (after a reboot, I forward the mail to HR and request they and legal work on a reply for me) They have been quite effective. I very rarely get ADLT mail at work anymore. They also check the source and purge the mailserver for the entire company. It's also kept me out of HR hot water. I think I've had more bad (goat) links on slashdot than I ever got by e-mail. There were a couple times it took me about 5 minutes to open my inbox due to a purge in progress.
The truth shall set you free!
If a spammer paid you a 1/10 of a cent for each spam, would that make it ok?
Didn't think so.
Spam is bad for a number of reasons, but the relative costs to the
spammer/spamee isn't one of them.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
I really like the idea of launching class action law suits against spammers...that way every time I receive a spam, it will be followed immediately by emails from lawyers asking if I want to sue the person who spammed me.
It's like trying to fit a round cat through a square hole
Or how about because it pisses me off!
It's like a guy constantly tapping you on the shoulder... after a while, you want to turn around a deck him.
$0.02 (CDN)
Spammers often cite first ammendment rites. In addition to what you posted a key, key point in all of this is:
The internet is a private domain
Wasn't built buy gov't, not owned by gov't, etc, so doesn't enjoy the same First ammendment rights. It is 'owned' by business and individuals.
There have been a couple of court cases that have reaffirmed this but not quite sure what they are.
And how about when spammers lie, and say "this email was not sent unsolicited, you opted-in". I know for a fact that I never opted in to any of the spam places that send me this stuff.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Your laziness has resulted in the curtailing of free speech in this country (up until now it had been a constitutional right.)
If that's you, spamford, go fuck yourself.
Spamming is NOT, and NEVER WAS, a freedom-of-speech issue, it's a PROPERTY RIGHTS issue.
Saying what you want to say is a right. Using anyone else's property to publish or broadcast it is a PRIVILEGE. Learn the difference, god damn it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Well, for the ones that say that spammers has never hurt anyone, I can only say that they haven't tried to have their own email adr as the sender of some spam mail. If the undeliverable error mails doesn't kill you, the 1000s of mad people thinking that you sent it will sure get to you.
The spammers. At least there's a technical solution to that problem.
I wonder how Spammer^H^H^H^H^H Governor-hopeful Bill Simon feels about this?
I wonder if we could bring class action against his campaign?
Well, etracks IS stupid as hell. They continue to try and spam me even though I reject all connections from them with a "550 Fuck off and die" SMTP error. You would THINK that they would understand that I don't want email from them...
(If the name doesn't ring a bell, that's the crazy US national that was captured fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan.)
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Getcher targets straight, man! There may be good reasons for harassing Bill Simon, and there certainly are for harassing the economically clueless non-defender of our civil liberties and precious bodily fluids Gray Davis, but the spammer we all loved to hate was Bill Jones See Slashdot Story.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Just wait until 50% of the business start spamming and you get a few million spams a day. Will it STILL be "not a big deal?"
Really, this "just hit delete" ignorant attitude is getting old.
Compare that to the average spamhaus or spammer page you've seen that tells how you can !Annoy! People!! Fast!!! or get !!!Bullet-Proof !!!Bulk!!!! Email!! Accounts!!! and !!!Address !!!Harvesting !Software!!!!!!!.
That doesn't mean that these guys *aren't* just spammers with college educations trying to attract a better-paying class of spammer or trying not to discourage the occasional legitimate customer, but at least on the surface they look respectable. But perhaps Mofo Knows
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You know, looking at your pro-spam postings, it's clear that you are a spammer, work for a spammer, are supported by a spammer, have sexual relations with a spammer, or something to that effect. Either that or you are a pathetic troll.
law firms offering e-mail aliasing to avoid the spammers? :) actualy the impression I got was that mofo has multiple offices in multiple countries and actual uses the internet and Email to conduct real business that actualy generate a profit, and all of the spam was interfereing with there ability to conduct real commerce. It could be that Etract's was just hitting randomly generated user names at the mofo domain. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if the spammers didn't even know that mofo.com was a law firm
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
When is spam no longer spam? Most people that I see complaining about spam is people that get e-mail with fack headers. But what about people who are really just using it to advertise, and do not fake the headers? Also, why is that people complain so much about getting spam in their e-mail box, when you get just about the same thing in your snail mail box every day... with e-mail spam all it is a signal click that deletes it, with snail mail it never really stops, and all the paper just takes up space in the land fills. And what about the companies that send out the spam e-mails for people, and do keep the remove list, the way that they should, but most people just get mad, and voice out against e-mail spam, but never do ask to get removed, because to many people have all ready abused the system. e-mail spam will not stop, and there are a few companies out there that do keep the remove list and such, but there are more people out there just using our e-mail more because they no that your is a person on the other end. and just about any one that can get on-line can send out all the spam that they want to. with a simple look on the net you can find tons of programs to send out 200,000+ e-mails an hour. and it will come with a 1,000,000 e-mails. I guess the thing is, it is a no win situation that we have.
Since when is commerical speech protected to the degree that individual speech is?
There is a right to free speech. There is not a right to force that speech on others.
Uhm, how long have you been actually living in the U.S.? The legal process has guaranteed that personal speech can be inhibited over commercial interests in countless lawsuits both ongoing and in the past. This is especially true in cases where preliminary injunctions against various web site owners/operators were shut down based on the lack of apparant injury against the defendant.
Clearly, the interests of commercial entities are held in higher regard than individual rights to free speech when judges favor the potential harm of a commercial interest over that of individual free speech.
So, if the right to free speech is not being enforced or backed up in any way, there is no right to free speech at all.
Let us know his name and address. Is he really your friend if he's doing that crap?
Let us know the client companies name and address.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin