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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."
...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.
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
Well i dont know the particulars but it may be that the ISP desicded not to kick them off just so they limit their potential damages, in case they lost.
All the good stuff is being banned. Our British freedoms are going away! Vote for socialists and communists!
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"
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
Oh my god. This is sad. That someone would mod this up as funny... I never intended it that way. I know I post alot of goofy shit, but I was 110% deadly serious this time.
:(
And I don't find it funny at all.
I just accused our judicial system of being morally bankrupt and functionally impotent. Flamebait would have been more appropriate. Even troll. I think I'll go cry now.
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.
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.
1) That court reporters outright own the copyright to transcripts -- this is one case where work-for-hire makes sense, and one where I'd be glad to have speech-to-text take their jobs.
2) That they got paid-per-page which was an incentive to churn out crap.
That kind of shit really pisses me off. I had no idea.
I didn't solicite your fucking webhosting offer!
Get off my lawn!!!!!!
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.''
You overlook those of us with e-mail addresses old enough to pre-date spam. There was no reason to hide or mangle our addresses back then because there were no spam bots, and no spammers. Usenet was actually useful, and open relays were the norm, not the bane of proper netiquette. Hell, you gave your address out and expected people to contact you, not mass-mail ads. When you give your phone out to people, do you expect them to inundate you with telemarketing pitches? Of course not!
The point? Don't class those of us who get lots of spam because we choose to keep the addresses that we have had for the last 8 years with clueless newbies who don't know how to hide their addresses. We're aware we could use new addresses, but we've chosen to fight for the ones that we've got. All of my addresses are garbled, but goddamn fucking spammers in China, Argentina, and the US are still selling those "million-address" cds, with entries dating back for years, and some of them happen to contain my e-mails, culled from newsgroup postings, documentation, etc. As quickly as I whack-a-mole spammers, others pop us (most are now located in China, either for hosting, or originating - I'd solve 80% of my spam problem if I could just nuke China's connection to the outside world.
I fight hard to rid the 'net of these parasitic scum, and I resent the idea that it's MY fault that I'm getting spammed! Lay the blame where it lies - with the spammers!!!
Finally, regarding your comments regarding telemarketers, do you realize that there is a law against calling someone if they don't want to be called? Yet, under your logic, telemarketers should have the right to "market their product." And being irresponsible with one's address (or number.) You ignore random-dialing, which penalizes me for having a phone, and random-address discovery, where dictionaries of likely usernames are matched against domain names to generate addresses, without even having to run a spambot, or collect someone's data from a form.
Do you use your e-mail for business? Cause if you do, it's got to be a pain to notify all of your clients of your new address...
Don't forget the problem of inter-country spamming. The amount of spam I get which is sourced from within the UK is next to nil. Chasing the spammers who've forged my domain in the past will require international legal action and very deep pockets.
-- The Flying Hamster