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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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
Accept that I could be wrong, this is just my interpretation...
From what I read, Monsterhut established a contract with the ISP, then when the ISP provided them notification that the contract had been broken by Monsterhut, and the service was going to be terminated, Monsterhut turned around and got a lower court judge to establish an injunction against the termination of the service by the ISP.
Monsterhut's arguments were that they were not spaming, and that they had otherwise lived up to the contract.
The ISP's arguments were that the thresholds established for determining that Monsterhut had been spaming had been crossed, and that the contract was "At Will" meaning that either party could terminate the contract for any reason, or no reason at all.
The decision by the ISP to terminate the service was based upon the fact that the ISP had received more than 2% email complaining that Monsterhut was a spam source. I do not know what that 2% was of, (network trafic, number of complaints about customer spamming, total volume of e-mail to the ISP) but in my opinion that is a valid threshold. If they set the threshold lower, it is possible that anyone could get kicked off, without having sent any spam, simply because they upset some wanabe hacker who complained to the ISP. 2% of one of these levels means that more money is being spent handling this customer, than the customer is paying.
Personally I think that Monsterhut should be further delt with by making them pay for the ISP's legal bills.
-Rusty
You never know...
...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.
In particular, look at the Advice for those they spam
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
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].
I submitted this story this time last night, and got rejected.
Damn! So close to fame, fortune, and the good life and then life deals you this horrid blow!
Seriously, there could be any number of reasons. The person who decided against running your story might be a different person than the one that ran the story today. Maybe the way that you wrote yours up was less in keeping with the Slashdot style (e.g., perhaps you did not include enough typos and misspellings). Don't sweat it. It's not like any of us remember who submitted the various stories we read here.
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 .
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
They may find another provider, but whoever it is, that unfortunate company will quickly find itself on so many blacklists that its employees won't even be able to sneeze without hitting an unfriendly router somewhere.
It'll be interesting to see if anyone is dumb enough or suicidal enough to give these spammers connectivity. If that should happen, I'll make every effort to submit the details to Slashdot so the relevant IP space can be erased from the Internet.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
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?"
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.
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.
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.''
What they SHOULD have done was cut them off, and when the judge asks them why they proceded with teh cut off, despote the court order, simply retort, "We did NOT cut them off. We cut off a spammer. Since they have already admited to NOT being a spammer, logic dictates that we did not cut them off."
Tada!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
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.
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...
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.
What they SHOULD have done was cut them off, and when the judge asks them why they proceded with teh cut off, despote the court order, simply retort, "We did NOT cut them off. We cut off a spammer. Since they have already admited to NOT being a spammer, logic dictates that we did not cut them off."
That is SOOO cool! That should work with ANY judge built on ANY silicon-based microprocessor.
Oh, but wait.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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
Most of the Chinese/Korean spam you can get rid of by filtering on character codes. I find that almost all the Korean stuff is sent from .kr addresses. Simple enough to filter. Anything that's got 'opt-in' or 'opt-out' in it is likely spam, although you might want to 'and' that with something else. (Funny thing, I had one that got through last week, with what looked like 'opt-out' at the bottom. It didn't get filtered, so I looked closer. They used a zero for the second 'o'. Smart. But it only works once. And I have no recollection of what they were trying to sell, so they failed to grab my attention.)
The thing to do with each spam is to try to determine what this will have in common with all the other ones that will follow. I always try to come up with two unique filters for each spam that gets through. Like 'any gamble-anything in the headers' or 'guaranteed to win' in the body.
I found that I was much happier once I accepted that spam was going to enter my inbox and that I would just have to deal with it, instead of railing against each and every one of them. I send my congress-critters a report at the first of every month that tells them how much spam I get and how I feel about it. I think, long term, that's going to be the only solution. We only stopped getting reams of fax-spams (remember them?) once congress passed a law. Gotta keep the pressure on.
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.
Thanks for sharing the tips - due to the sheer volume of spam, I'm moving to filtering as a first line of defense. Most spammers who can be canned by reporting have been, and I've felt that it's time to start writing adaptive heuristic algorithms to identify and waste the rest. Sending monthly totals to my congresscritter is a great idea - thanks!
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