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Megaspammer Monsterhut Loses On Appeal
Werehatrack writes "Much jubilation was expressed in news.admin.net-abuse.email when it was learned that the long-running court battle between PaeTec and Monsterhut had reached a definitive conclusion on Friday with a New York appeals court finding in favor of PaeTec which finally allowed PaeTec to pull the plug on their least-loved customer's connectivity. PaeTec was actually somewhat restrained in its news announcement on its own website, simply noting that they had won and that they had disconnected Monsterhut."
I'm sure that they won't be able to find a new provider. Riiiiiight.
...so they'll move somewhere else and waste someone else's legal budget trying to get them gone.
Until there are real laws with teeth that take these guys down for good, victories will be short lived.
Not to mention the fact that, since they seem to be able to afford the legal fees of a losing battle, they're obviously making some serious coin from a gullible public, which simply means more and more of these bozos as time goes on.
Sigh....between spam and virii this last week, I don't think I really wanted to see 10% of my email.
What I would like to see is a class action suit against these spammers. AOL lost a class action suit a while ago after it claimed unlimited connectivity but there were many business signals, and they simply gave several free hours as a settlement (which is odd since they offered me 1000 free hours in the mail over 45 days, which would be nice if I didn't have a cable modem, wanted a slow net connection with software that corrupts your dlls, and I wanted to be online just over 22 hours per day).
Why aren't there class action suits against spammers? What they are doing is actually against the law in many states, or at least when they forge the headers. They also cause infrastructure damages to ISPs and violate licenses. If they are charged $500 per email in suits against those who complain, and they sent millions of emails, shouldn't they be liable to everyone in a class action suit? Why no one has taken up class action suits against the spammers astounds me, it would be almost certain to win, and it would win large amounts of money.
Hey, maybe I should send an email to millions of people from the Internet about this great idea in which they can make thousands a day!
Just so everyone knows, this case has been dragging on since 3/01. Over a year, in which Monsterhut had unlimitied spamming rights on an ISP's network, actually against their will.
It's so odd. The US is the most litigious nation, worldwide, and yet we STILL suck at it.
This decision will hopefully create a legal presedent, that anyone, even from Large companies to single users, cannot abuse the internet and its services.
With this decision in hand hopefully the government can make some sort of new law that says that if you send out a large number of e-mails (spam), that your account is disabled immedatly, pending a full review. A law like this could reduce the internet bandwith signifigantly, and allow legitiment users to gain faster access to the services they desire.
Lets see what this does in the ongoing war against internet abusers
Medevo
I can't stand those morons who have to requote entire pages because they think they'll be Slashdotted. However, this is different. They linked to a RTF file, and I didn't notice, forcing IE and Word to load. Erk!
So, for all of the people who can't/don't want to read a RTF file.. here is the text of the first link:
(WARNING: It's really boring)
-- starts here --
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
Appellate Division, Fourth Judicial Department
PRESENT: PIGOTT, JR., P. J., GREEN, WISNER, SCUDDER, AND KEHOE, J. MonsterHut, INC., PLAINTIFF-RESPONDENT, MEMORANDUM AND ORDER
PaeTec COMMUNICATIONS, INC., DEFENDANT-APPELLANT.
BOND, SCHOENECK & KING, LLP, SYRACUSE (ROBERT KIRCHNER OF COUNSEL), FOR DEFENDANT-APPELLANT. ALFONSO MARRA BAX, LEWISTON, FOR PLAINTIFF-RESPONDENT.
Appeal from an order of Supreme Court, Niagara County (Lane, J.), entered August 27, 2001, which, inter alia, denied defendant's cross motion for summary judgment.
It is hereby ORDERED that the order so appealed from be and the same hereby is unanimously modified on the law by denying plaintiff's motion, granting defendant's cross motion and granting judgment in favor of defendant as follows:
It is ADJUDGED and DECLARED that defendant is not in violation of the agreement and may terminate the agreement in response to plaintiff's sending of unsolicited, mass, commercial e-mail in breach of the agreement and as modified the order is affirmed without costs.
Memorandum: Plaintiff, a marketing company that uses the Internet for advertising, entered into an agreement with defendant, an Internet service provider, to obtain Internet access services. The agreement incorporates defendant's Acceptable Use Policy, which provides that a subscriber, here, plaintiff, is in violation of the agreement if it engages in "spamming," defined as "[u]nsolicited, commercial mass e-mailing." Shortly after defendant began providing Internet access services to plaintiff, it notified plaintiff of its intention to terminate the agreement based upon plaintiff's spamming. Plaintiff commenced the instant action seeking declaratory relief and an injunction preventing defendant from terminating the agreement.
Supreme Court erred in granting plaintiff's motion for a preliminary injunction. Plaintiff failed to establish a likelihood of success on the merits (see Technology for Measurement v Briggs, ___ AD2d ___ [decided Feb. 1, 2002]; Talley v Baker, 207 AD2d 967), irreparable harm if the preliminary injunction is not granted (see Technology for Measurement, ___ AD2d ___) or lack of an adequate remedy at law (see Matter of Camp Scatico v Columbia County Dept. of Health, 277 AD2d 689, 690). Contrary to defendant's contention, however, the court did not improvidently exercise its discretion in fixing the amount of the undertaking. The amount of the undertaking is reasonably related to the amount of damages defendant established that it might suffer "by reason of the injunction" (CPLR 6312 [b]; see Blueberries Gourmet v Aris Realty Corp., 255 AD2d 348, 350).
We further conclude that the court erred in denying defendant's cross motion for summary judgment seeking declaratory relief. Defendant established as a matter of law that the agreement prohibits spamming and that neither the two percent complaint limit contained in Addendum 1A, paragraphs 1.4 and 1.5 nor the 30-day notice and cure provision of paragraph 3 applies to spamming. Defendant further established as a matter of law that plaintiff had breached the agreement by engaging in spamming. Plaintiff failed to raise a triable issue of fact. Its submissions in opposition to the cross motion amount to nothing more than "mere conclusions, expressions of hope or unsubstantiated allegations or assertions" that it will be able to prove that it did not engage in spamming (Zuckerman v City of New York, 49 NY2d 557, 562).
We therefore modify the order by denying plaintiff's motion, granting defendant's cross motion and granting judgment in favor of defendant declaring that defendant is not in violation of the agreement and may terminate the agreement in response to plaintiff's sending of unsolicited, mass, commercial e-mail in breach of the agreement.
Entered: May 3, 2002 CARL M. DARNALL Clerk of the Court
mogorific carpentry experiments
I submitted this story this time last night, and got rejected.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
All the good stuff is being banned. Our British freedoms are going away! Vote for socialists and communists!
Considering they sued the last one. I mean, would you hook these people up, knowing that you'd be lining yourself up for a good round of lawyering?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
It's so simple. Don't include GPL'd source code in your source code and the GPL doesn't affect you. Or is it so unjust that you can't get something for nothing and claim it as your own?
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
They'll probably hook up with an ISP in Asia someplace, where people haven't figured out the details about spam yet.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I don t know the specifics of the contract, but it seems to me from other ISP's contracts, they have the right to terminate service at any time. They might have to give back the balance of the contract or the entire amount of the contract, but wouldn't that be better than dragging this out.
does anyone know the specifics of the contract?
read the case documents
the first complaint filed March 22, 2001
items 8 and 9
paetec allowed monsterhut to spam as long as the complaints where below 2%
they both should be put in jail.
this isnt a hurray for the isp and boo for the spammer. Its a spammer geting screwed by a spammer
I wish I could have been the one the one who pulled that plug...
Man, that must have felt good...
It probably went down something like this:
Lucky employee> "Bite my shiny metal ass, spammers!"
*sound of cat5 cable violently ripped out of a router*
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
34723984723 to go...
:), When I saw the net going commercial, I knew this would be bad, I said "well one day everybody will have a net connection and I'll have higher speed" and this is the good side, but some days I'd rather go back to my unix dialup account and have the feeling I had without the aggression of abusive emails, script kiddies and all that crap we have these days... ok this is a bit extreme but I'm sure you all get the idea.
There's one thing I don't get. We are tax payers, the people we elect are law-makers, they are paid to find solutions to common problems. They love passing laws. But WHY do they always have to go against the population and not work with them?
Get this: name me 10 subject that would get 99% approval among the population? heck even TAX CUT wouldn't get 99% because some people would be affraid of the system collapsing, etc etc... but SPAM? come on... if it's not 99% it's going to be 99.9%.
My question is: Why is the system so slow about it? why am I being spammed at a rate of 80 messages a day (including 20 that passes the "HIGH" setting in my hotmail account) I mean if I get spammed, I am sure senate representatives are getting spammed like hell too, I am sure it costs microsoft a LOT in bandwidth and storage and all to keep up with spam on their service (if they have a million of users that are like me receiving 20 spam for 1 valid email (and I am not joking) their system is totally wasted for nothing.
Why so much tolerance? why not blocking every higher class where the biggest spam machines comes from? the hell with the valid users; if they are cutted out, they will do something other than reading about it and sitting there, switch ISP or if it's another country with only one wire well they will do pressure to the higher instances to get their connection back. My way might be drastic, but I am FED UP with it, I've been waiting for 3 years for this problem to get solved and it's just getting worse.
It's like... remember like 5-10 years ago when you could post on usenet without getting any trouble? the worst thing that could happen to you was someone using flash.c against you?
We are barely starting to see something happening, but it's not by destroying the spam of ONE guy that you will scare the others off, this is going to get out of hands even worse, they will see how the legal system is bloated and exploit every single holes in it if they have to.
The system seems to protect the megacorporation more than little guys like you and me, but in this case, it would help BOTH sides, so why is it taking so long? cut asia off for a day, heck, DO SOMETHING. Ideas? heck , these guys are payed over twice my salary to come up with creative ideas, why don't they do their jobs and save me from taking the laws in my own hands?
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
going to make my penis bigger for the web's youngest teen babes?
Evil is the money of root.
Here is the original /. story
Essentially, here's the lowdown: PaeTec entered an ISP agreement with Monsterhut. PaeTec was informed that Monsterhut was a marketing service that used opt-in service only.
PaeTec soon found out how wrong they were represented. But, before PaeTec could pull the plug, Monsterhut went out and got a restraining order under the basis that their business would be "irrepreably harmed" if their ISP service was shut off.
Monsterhut judge shopped. Found a judge that would grant their injunction.
The problem in court lied over ambiguous language of what the actual acceptable use policy would be. THe terms read something like complaints by 2% of the mails... but, since MonsterHut claims it sends out millions of mails, there certainly wouldn't be any way that PaeTec could get complaints in that number.
Thankfully, the judge saw through the bullshit in this case.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Don't forget to convert the Microsoft quotes and double-quotes into their standard 7-bit ASCII equivalents next time.
The problem with the whole Monsterhut situation was that they basically had a completely free hand at spamming the shit out of everyone's mailboxes, while this whole thing slowly made its way through courts. Monsterhut obtained a TRO against being shut down by Paetec for any reason, while this whole thing was playing out.
Nice, eh? A license to spam.
Well, it's all water under the bridge now. The consensus in various forums where this whole issue was discussed to death was that Paetec was making a good-faith effort to get the whole mess resolved and Monsterhut shut down. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I always had the impression that Paetec was always too eager to trot out the excuse that they are prohibited by court order from shutting down this spamming parasite, in response to every spam complaint (with a generous side-order of crocodile tears).
Anyway, I firmly believe that Monsterhut had a pink contract here, but when the complaints began to roll in, and Paetec's IP address space began to get blocklisted, Paetec began backtracking, trying to invoke their standard AUP close, and Monsterhut responded by taking them to court.
*sound of cat5 cable violently ripped out of a router*
Yep, I am sure they were so happy, the fucked up one of their routers.
It's in Message-ID w%_A8.19724$2G1.6250654@typhoon.nyroc.rr.com but unfortunately Google hasn't picked it up yet.
SP? Suppressive Person? You lost me...
Anyway, I don't see a problem here. I would be rather curious as to how this whole thing started, as NANAE is not on my list of regular Usenet reading. But it is good that a spammer can't force an ISP to waste bandwidth on them.
/Brian
Oh, man, I hope nobody's grandmother clicked on that link.
Mega, mega, puppies-in-a-blender, Stile Project - class sick.
But sadly, on topic.
IMHO.
dorc
Today I got a porn spam entitled 'Illegal in the USA!' and inside it had a list of what 'illegal' stuff they had on their site. The list went like this:
;-)
Animal sex!
Lolitas sucking
Extreme facials
12 inch+ cocks
I know American men aren't very well endowed, but are cocks over 12 inches long actually illegal in the US?
mogorific carpentry experiments
On news.spamcop.net there was MUCH rejoicing when the news was breached on the decision.. Monsterhut deserved what they had coming at them, and then some... We NEED the current spam legislation thats in the House and Senate houses right now.. Lets take the battle to these soulless bastards once and for all!
The bottom line is that marketing sucks, i know we need marketing to sell our product but for christ's sake, let us yank on the spammer's leash HARD to let them know that all they are doing is pissing off ALOT of people.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
...because the Monsterhut spammers are still alive. I don't mean connected, I mean that the people behind the outfit haven't been executed. The spam problems will not stop until it is legal to kill confirmed spammers.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
The CEO of MonsterHut (Todd P. Pelow, if anyone wants to drop an unsolicated flaming bag of shit at his door) responded in a deposition: "MonsterHut has never agreed that what they have done is spam. Spam is mail without accurate headers, with no opt-out mechanism and without an honest subject line." and furthermore "They send targeted e-mail to those who have opted in to the world of the Internet and said 'Yes I would accept offers that may interest me'."
This guy is whacked. Opted in to the world of the Internet? So when I signed up with my ISP it was the green light for MonsterHut? He seemed to think that their Addendum to the PaeTec contract would protect them; the pertinent bits are
By arguing that MonsterHut doesn't send spam, he thinks it would be almost impossible for PaeTec to prove that their victims hadn't opted in at some point in their Internet lives. And if it's not spam, what's the big deal? They were under the 2% complaint rate. What an ass.
I read enough to find them guilty as charged.
For those who want to double-check this, I was reading from here and here.
Is there any point in going to Verisign and Whois-ing the spam source? I do.
In particular, look at the Advice for those they spam
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Hmmm...
Wanted: Hosting ISP with lots of connectivity. Perfer a company with small legal team and not very deep pockets. We Promise [TM] not to Spam [TM].
At least some of the reason is due to court reporters. Long long ago in a job far far away, I wrote court reporting software. They charged by the page, and it used to be (still is?), at least in California, copyright by the reporter, not the court, and ALL rights of reproduction were with the reporter. They charged outrageously for copies, like $5 a page, much more for "immediate" turnaround. Lawyers could not legally photocopy the transcripts for their own use, they had to ask the reporter for more copies. They were constantly fussing with ways to get more pages out of the same transcript, such as 8 pitch, fewer lines per inch, wider margins, and so on. What a racket. Of course, that was when computers were just starting in, and indeed just beginning to be usable, so things may have calmed down since.
Infuriate left and right
There's a decent, if outdated, summary of the case here .
spam has never been a problem for me. sure, i know of plenty of people, friends, that are plagued by it. (seems a lot of them have a hotmail addy, that is surely a mistake.)
spam has just never been an issue for me. maybe that is due to the fact that i have been careful all these years and not given my email to many websites. maybe it is because i have always had decent ISP's. i used "mom 'n pop" ISP's for years until a few years ago when i went with earthlink and i have never looked back. they have a spam buster thing named spaminator, and i use it and it works perfectly, but damned if it gets more than one or two spam emails a month. some months it (spaminator) doesn't even get one spammy.
i just *don't* receive spam. not even my yahoo.com email addy gets spammed. i've never used any filtering (other than earthlink's spaminator) or any anti-spamware. my experience leads me to believe that people that do get spam are somewhat stupid or have been less than cautious with their email addy's.
My only question:
/. community to ponder. I think the answer would be obvious to some.
n Spammer.html
What would Bernard Shifman do if his ISP pulled the plug on him? Just an interesting thought for the
Oh, and in case you need a refresher: http://www.petemoss.com/spamflames/ShifmanIsAMoro
that's all very well and good, but you don't suggest a method of killing.
i say hog-tie them and allow people to hammer rusty nails into their bodies. slow and painful.
yes?
that DeLorean should sell you some coke.
that's c o c a i n e, not coca-cola.
They probably just disabled their VLAN. Not as satisfying, but, generally, people who go ripping CAT-5 cable out of patch panels like a wild monkey don't last too long as network administrators.
There are some exceptions to this rule, however.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
all your furit juice are belong to us.
but you knew that...
of course.
I didn't solicite your fucking webhosting offer!
Get off my lawn!!!!!!
You know what would be a great way to deal with spammers?
Tie them up, and flog them, Inquisition-style. Every 10th hit or so, you'd stop, and tell them that this flogging isn't really torture, because they specifically asked for the flogging by sending out spam. Then you'd ask them if they'd like to "opt-out" of the flogging. When they said "yes," you could take it to mean "Yes, please flog me some more." Then you could get 5 more guys to come over and flog them too.
As a matter of fact, we could have an army of "Flog-bots" which would seek them out, and bring them to us.
Now that's poetic justice.
Just remember what happened to Keith Henson when $cientology took some "Tom Cruise missle" remarks out of context in court.
Of course, except in the worst cases, I'd settle for a permanent tattoo of "Spammer" on their foreheads.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
You forgot about the First Amendment. The First amendment prevents the government from banning spam, but it does not affect commercial entities. They can restrict all the speech you can have them facilitate if their contract allows them to do so if the reason is not unconscionable. Preventing spam that can harm an ISP's relationships with other ISPs is a valid reason because spam can ruin their business if the other ISPs decide to sever theri connections with it. Banning product reviews without the distributor's permission serves no good purpose and therefore is unconscionable. (The example I am citing is the McAfee VirusScan EULA case.)
Despite the fact that I love to see a spammer take a good legal hit. It saddens me that none of you have seen the REAL legal implications from this judgement.
This allows any ISP to claim a violation under there "Acceptible use policy".
"Memorandum: Plaintiff, a marketing company that uses the Internet for advertising, entered into an agreement with defendant, an Internet service provider, to obtain Internet access services. The agreement incorporates defendant's Acceptable Use Policy, which provides that a subscriber, here, plaintiff, is in violation of the agreement if it engages in "spamming," defined as "[u]nsolicited, commercial mass e-mailing." Shortly after defendant began providing Internet access services to plaintiff, it notified plaintiff of its intention to terminate the agreement based upon plaintiff's spamming. Plaintiff commenced the instant action seeking declaratory relief and an injunction preventing defendant from terminating the agreement."
Note that this judgement does specificaly target "spamming ie mass unsolicited email" but you must think beyond just that small detail and take into consideration the larger implications of agudgeing the legality of the "Acceptible use policy"
This friends is trouble with a capitol T.
For instants... Say a mega large software company *cough* Microsoft *cough* with far reaching clout can convince an ISP to include a rule whereby using blah blah blah free-software is not considered acceptible use. Now suppose it convinces 100's of ISP's to include this.
The legal ramifications are ENOURMOUS.
Pray to god none of Billy's legal staff thinks of this.
Read the court transcript from Paetec's site. The 2% is not allowable spam. In the court transcript, they argue, and the judge agrees, that spam #1 is grounds for termination. As a defense, and what actually happens in a limited number of circumstances, is that someone who doesn't opt out, forgets that they agreed to be placed on the mailing list by using some service. They then complain. But if found out later that they did give permission to be on the list, the company is not considered to have sent spam, but the original complaint by the recepient of the correctly sent email is counted as part of the 2%. Monster Hut seems to dispute this, but reading the contract, and the transcript of the court testimony, this seems to be a fair representation. Paetec documents and court transcripts support the position of Paetec that spam #1 is grounds for termination, and spam will not be tolerated at all.
Accuracy counts.
You'd think that the lawyer's inability to spell Delaware in the initial filing (found burried on PaeTec's website) would have been an indication of the merits of the case. It was apparently more than just a typo -- it's spelled that way in points 1 and 2. I mean really, if you're going to be writing legal documents you can at least run a spell check first.
Heh.. What a chance that I just got involved with a similar discussion on NANOG.. About the real costs of Spam. (So far, only one person has given me anything approaching a number. Paul Vixie himself dodged the question for how much Spam costs.)
The number, BTW, looks to be about $.00001 to $.0005 per email, and perhaps less for spam.
But, anyways.. Keep in mind that the cure may be worse than the disease.. Spam sucks, spam is annoying. But finding the *WRONG* cure for it can be worse than the existance of Spam in the first place!
Fascism in germany got its inital support because ``It made the trains run on time.'' We must be careful to not support fascists ``because they stop spam.''
SP = second post
is a self perpetulating haven for ambulance chasers. It encourages speculative legal actions irregardless of their merit. The litigant never has to worry about the total cost of the case.
This will not change until its reformed to follow practice of other countries based on common law.
If this was the UK/Ireland/Australia/wherever the losing c*nting spammer in this case would be left with nothing only the shirt on his back after having to pay ALL the expenses the ISP incurred w.r.t this case over the past 12 months as WELL as his own legal expenses.
In fact its doubtful it would have come to trial at all. The barrister acting on behalf of the plaintiff would have made it plain b4 hand that the action was shaky and would have painted a less than rosy picture of the likely financial outcome.
Curmudgeon
The more people and ISPs who start using software like Pyzor the more pointless spam becomes. It routes directly to a spam mailbox completely bypassing potential customers.
http://pyzor.sourceforge.net/
The more users it has, the more effective it becomes. Pyzor uses a central database of spam hashes to compare incoming mail against. If the hash of the body of the incoming mail matches an entry in the database then it's a spam. Discard it.
Sure someone will followup to say that they'll include random characters in each individual mail to change the hash values or they'll change parts of the message on each mail. Yes the authors are aware of this and the software already takes this into account.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Hey, it works on Usenet, why not /. ?
Godwin's Law
Sorry spam-boy, no fascist/nazi rants wanted here.
Well I am not sure I could see Microsoft managing to get 'free software' to be against the acceptible use policy. Bear in mind that pretty much every ISP is going to have at least one Linux box on their network doing somthing vital - I'd be pretty surprised if anything like that came to pass.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
You know, we all get tons of snail mail spam per day. Whether it because of advertising from the local grocery store or offering to move you for free to a new apartment. It's all spam. I don't see how email spam is any different. Albeit, I cannot stand it, it doesn't make it illegal. Someone commented that setting up a filter is the best thing to do, I agree.
I've heard some argue that the actual spam is not illegal, it's the fact that they are using someone's resources to send it (hence abuse). And I say, well, when you receieve snail mail, doesn't it take up your time to weed through (_filter_ out) what is and is not valid mail? Since time is money, where's the law suit? After all, you just used a filter to weed out the email (except it wasn't electronic).
Here's the catch about why snail mail spam is less bothersome than email:
Someone sat down and put that together. Then, they -paid- someone to send it out. We receive it, and chunk it. (Sometimes it's worthwhile and I check it out.) Snail mail spam does more marketing research and has a greater chance of hitting home. (I don't receive penis enlargement offers in snail mail.)
Email is different. First, people pay money to receive email. Whether that money is $20.00/month for your ISP or a per email charge (anywhere now?) - I PAY THAT CHARGE. And then some fucknut company wants to come and use what -I- paid for to advertise to me? Fuck you.
It's the same principle as faxes. Since there is, directly or indirectly, an end user cost, it's not allowed. (Yes, spamming by fax is illegal in most states of the U. S. because it incurs cost on the receiver, not the sender.)
.:|Talonius|:.
My reality check bounced.
How about adding this to all your outgoing mails: DISCLAIMER: By replying to THIS email address you consent to being charged the sum of $x if you are unable to prove that the account holder specifically asked for email from you. Would this be legal?
---
Spam, Spam, no good for you,
Cut me off and I will sue.
If and when I lose my case
I'll just find another place for
Spam, Spam, no good for you,
...
Please...
Female Prison Rape in NY
So it's been established that PaeTec must obey the court order. But, how about their peers ? PaeTec would have links to various other ISPs and backbone types. What if someone informed those ISPs of Monsterhut's static IP address, and they dropped all packets coming from there ?
What would happen then ? That's not PaeTec's fault. And, those ISPs could cite their own AUPs.
Well, at least you can try accessing them and for the first time enjoy seeing your little mozilla / earth / N spinning indefinitelly.
If PacTec won the lawsuit against Monsterhut, why is it they're still in Spamhaus' "realtime" statistics as being up and being on PacTec's servers?
All this case does is confirm the bloody obvious, namely that a signed contract carries legal force.
...read the subject of this article as "megaspammer monsterhunt?
hello freud
I often respond to spam. If there's a link to a website, be it the spammer's customer or a "remove" form I make it a point to pay the site a visit. In fact I don't just visit once, nope. I've set up a couple of javascript form-filling scripts to post garbage into their forms and reload their pages constantly!
I submitted 1.5 million "remove" requests to the last spam site I visited, and the current favourite "jdsdiagnostics" has send me over a gig of their bandwidth so far as I have 15 scripts loading their front page constantly into minimised windows.
If everyone did this it would drive them offline - how could they pay for a site serving 1000GB or more per week?! Many people on here have DSL or greater, just suck their bandwidth dry!!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
This is different from the typical spammer who just lies to the recipient about "you must have opted in so we're sending you this junk offer" or "we'll remove you from the list we used today if you email us", because it's about specific facts, and it's also in court. It's still lying, of course, but sometimes lying becomes fraud and perjury as opposed to merely an attempt to gain attention or deflect complaints.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The real problem is that it's a bunch of obvious crap demanding your attention, and it's the attention that you and most of the other spam recipients care about (plus the bad taste of many of the advertised products, and the people who are offended by porn, especially porn spam sent to their kids.) ISPs, of course, are in a different situation, since they're dealing with it in volume.
The big advantage of snail mail spam is that, because there's a non-trivial cost associated with it, they don't send as much to people who don't want it, so you don't receive as much, and you don't waste much of your time trashing it. At some point I should tell the supermarkets to stop spamming my mailbox (it fills up the space, as well as wasting paper), but the only spam that really demands my attention is all the "pre-approved credit card offers" that might let somebody else get a credit card in my name if I simply throw them out instead of shredding them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The "he'll make the trains run on time" wasn't about Germany, it was Mussolini in Italy. And just because everybody thought he'd be tough enough to force the Italian railroad system to run on a schedule doesn't mean he was actually successful - violence doesn't force people to work better, it just makes them frightened while they're working and encourages them to falsify the results.
Spamming by fax is illegal under the TCPA, which is federal not state.
If they're sending it out directly, without abusing relays, it's easy for ISPs to block their IP address space to avoid receiving spam from them.
Also, while Paetec was enjoined from cutting them off, Paetec's upstream providers, who also have AUPs that ban spamming, could still have done so - either by filtering the packets at the routers where they connect to it, or by advertising blackhole routes (or both - BGP is your friend...) That would cut off abuse of relays as well as direct-delivery spam.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How do you figure? I have limited email space. On several occasions, the SPAM mail has eaten through all of it -- especially those messages with a payload on them. Therefore, some potentially important messages have bounced. Also, I would suspect that the ISP is passing the extra cost of network and disk usage on to us in some indirect fashion. No matter how you look at it, the only one not paying for spam is the spammer.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Hate to break it to you, but judge's orders
are things with which you must comply
not just to the letter, but to the spirit.
Otherwise, it would indeed be beautiful to do
that.
Before claiming that, call them and accuse THEM of vandalising your network and when they argue that they same apply to them and they think its your fault deny everything for a while before using your excu##planation, after further fault diagnostic research, billed to them of course.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Wow, can I have one of the free computers you're using? With free disk space, and free unlimited bandwidth?
Sure, the cost of each individual spam is trivial, but when sent by the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions they can have a considerable aggregate impact. If it costs my ISP, it ultimately costs *me*, and that is unacceptable.
Plus, I like the irony of a pro-spam posting coming from someone with a munged email address.
You're probably all too right. UU.net or Sprintpink will sign them up, no questions asked. Frankly I'd prefer they pick the most spam-friendly provider known to man. Broadwing.net. If they did sign with Broadwing, it would save me a lot of trouble. I block every single one of Broadwing's netblocks with a vengenance. Many Tier-1 providers have a bad habit of signing up spammers. Speculation runs rampant but many believe that the top tier providers don't have the abuse desk resources to deal with their non-threatening customers. When I say non-threatening I mean everyone that isn't DoSing people.
Untill there are laws against spam legal action won't do much. I mean read some posts about how effective this really is. Here is a question, why not fight dirty with the spammers. I'm sure alot of people here know how to DoS a site. I'm asking TWO things, one is it ok to screw with these guys. second how to do it, someone want to organize an anti spam crack team. Setup to take down spamming servers.
I have to admit I have done this. I was tricked into reading some spam. (subject that was something that didn't look like spam) And it was porn or something dumb...So I ssh'd into a few boxes, work and home and a third broad band site and flood ping the site for a while. It didn't take the server down but did fill up there pipe for a while. But is doing so ethical? Isn't it like taking a gun away from a killer, or am I on Crack(TM) ?
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
We use opt-in only. We only sent 3-phase up your line because you requested it.
Click here if you wish to be removed from future three-phase announments, offers, and special electrocutions.
:)
hawk
Can't we set traps for spammers? For example, set up a server with some dummy pages, one of which has some fake and one or two real email addresses. Also write a robots.txt file. Then watch the logs for telltale signs. When the spam starts coming in trace it back to the source using your logs and sue that entity for trespassing or hacking. Would that work?
The First Amendment does no such thing, any more than it prevents the government from banning grafitti or late-night operation of sound trucks. Freedom of speech does not include the "right" to a captive audience or the "right" to compel others to provide you with a forum.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Ah, thank you.
:)
I had genuinely wondered what statute spamming by fax was covered under. Now I know.
.:|T
My reality check bounced.
This 500KB of spam will take about 2-4 minutes of modem time to download it, which is annoying but won't break anybody's bank, and you'll be spending far more time on your modem reading slashdot - and this Slashdot page has a 9KB banner ad on it that you're downloading, which is probably typical for most web pages your read.
That's about 200MB of spam a year, which would cost $1 for disk drive if you actually stored it (20GB disk at $100) (and might mean that your ISP is paying $1/year extra for storing your share of their spam - they're not keeping it for long, unless they're keeping full backups on disk for long times, but they may have multiple copies in several tiers of backup and higher-performance disks that you have.)
The real cost to the average internet user isn't the resources consumed - it's how much of their attention span gets consumed shoveling the stuff out the door and into the bit bucket, and if you're a Responsible Netizen and occasionally hunt down spammers or at elast spamcop them, that takes time also.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks