Slashdot Mirror
Australian Anti-Spammer Wins Court Case
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian court system upheld the right of internet activists to campaign against junk email in a landmark decision today. Story from The Australian." Sounds like the spammers (T3 Direct, of Perth) were justly told off.
Apparently, as a result of Mr McNicol's actions, 153 penis enlargers and 23 fake degrees never managed to get sold. The bastard.
1. "How to Lose a Lawsuit" (Oct. 17th)
:)
2. "Sending Commercial Email for Fun and Disprofit" (Oct. 19th)
3. "Abusing Educational Institutions' APNIC Records" (Oct. 24th)
4. "How to be a TOTALLY ANNOYING SELF-RIGHTEOUS ASSHOLE SPAMMER" (Every day at 2PM)
Let's see people attend these T3Direct seminars
I heard of someone who's intent on raising several million dollars to finance the hardware, software, connectivity and legal expenses of a new generation international spam-fighting network.
Seems he'll meet his funding targets, after being promised a substantial sum from a former government dignitary from Nigeria...
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
I hope the spammer was forced to pay the defendant's legal costs. The article doesn't say. Especially since the plaitiff was suing for the cost of "replacing" the computer system (according to the original article IIRC), and that is plainly ridiculous.
Also, an important point is that the court found that the plaintiff did not show that contacting SPEWS was illegal. This is good news (in Australia at least), as if the case had hinged on whether he contacted a blacklister or not, it would have a chilling effect on free speech and also anti-spam efforts - you wouldn't even be allowed to tell a third party that you received some email that might, possibly, be spam.
And news.admin.net-abuse.email is always an entertaining and informative Usenet newsgroup to read.
Just fire up your newsreader and...
Oh, look. New porn in the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica groups...
Never mind!
You know, every story I read about the Australian laws/trials on here, the more respect I have for their country. Not so the US - I'd expect this case to drag on far longer, and the spammer to win, based on past articles. Corporation/company vs little guy = little guy gets screwed...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
...and I know someone who works for T3 Direct.
Here's a juicy little tidbit: The company actually uses an application running on a Linux box to send out all that spam. It's called SpamIt, and uses MySQL as its backend.
(posting anonymously for obvious reasons)
By dismissing the case by saying that there was not enough evidence, the judge has avoided making a ruling into whether these types of claims are merited.
A greater victory would be if a judge ruled that spammers were a public nuisance with no legitimate business interests.
Future anti-spammers may still be faced with the prospect of legal action, if their is sufficient evidence to demonstrate their involvement in blocking spam.
I found SPEWS.org to be a great spam fighting tool but what the T3 media group failed to notice that it is just an opinion. How can someone be wrong from sharing their opinion and then other people agree with it, in this case by using spews's blocklist. I'm glad this case has fallen the way it has as it sets a good precedent for any further actions spammers try to take
Cheap UK and US VPS
ok, first off, i am not some ACLU nut. i am not here brandishing my first ammendment rights (i keep that safely in my pocket, out of sight)
i applaud efforts to keep kiddie porn (virtual too... though i realize that virtual porn technically is probly legal... but let us not open *that* can of worms today)
i think the library should carry banned books (like those heinous atrocities, Bridge to Terabitia and Hamlet and others
and i think spammers should rot in that circle of hell that Cerberus pukes all over. (ok, my Dante is rusty, i can't remember which circle, or if i got the puker right.. someone help me here)
but something seems fishy here. the company sued that one guy cos he "black-listed" their firm. the article didn't go into much detail, but it sounds as if that one guy, Joey McNicol, has quite a bit of power. i mean, what if i am a competitor of some company and i can convince Joey McNicol that their IP needs to be banned. as long as Joey McNicol is a true-blue swell guy, there is no way that can happen, but what if he isn't? i am in no way saying we need SPEWS regulated, but i wonder what some rather yucky worst case scenario - long term possible problems could arise from its misuse.
-John
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
Note that this was a case where the company brought the initial action and the court was correct in ruling that there was insufficient evidence. The day when you are not allowed to legitimately complain about inappropriate netiquette (note that Washington state has some statutes on how not to spam people on an opt-out list) is the day when we might as well log off and retreat to the desert.
What is a much harder process is for the individual to bring a suit against a spammer. Various tort actions (based on trespass to chattel) have succeeded but the prohibitive cost for individuals to assemble and argue their case makes this course viable only for deep-pocketed ISPs (who tend to bear a disproportionate share of the cost of wasted bandwidth).
To solve the problem requires much more than legal maneouvers. Fundamentally the internet mail architecture has structural weaknesses and until schemes such as IM2000 (http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html) are implemented, spammers will always have an economic incentive in socialising the costs and privatising the benefits.
LL
I'm not aware of any vaguely popular blacklists that would add an IP/range on the strength of one random unknown person presenting what appeared to be a spam from that IP. That would obviously be ridiculous. Do you really think they would become as popular as they are if they were that stupid?
Either you have to be a known person with a known reputation, or you have to be one of many people presenting mutually corroborating evidence (some popular blacklists work on a voting or threshold system), or the blacklist operators have to have received the spam themselves.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
The court found that T3 offered neither proof that Mr McNicol had contacted SPEWS nor that doing so was illegal
So in theory nobody exactly won...for had the T3 posted and/or obtained the information that linked Mr McNicol to the blacklisting, the outcome may have been different. Though they have raised an interesting question as well, personally I'm interested why did T3 say that contacting spews would be illegal?
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
Firstly: the decision in this case occurred in an Australian court, so there are no first amendment rights to be brandished anyway (and of course the ACLU has no presence). The merits or otherwise of the US Constitution/Bill of Rights are an unrelated issue - it is a simple fact that they do not apply outside the US.
I would say though, that censorship is usually a Bad Thing - it is just that a blacklisting organisation like SPEWS is not realing censoring - they simply provide a list of spammers to people who want to be able to avoid spam. No one is taking away T3's right to send email, or especially their right to say what they like in that email - but some people would like to be able to choose not to get it.
If a company was unfairly added to a blacklist, they are free to negotiate with the organisation concerned to get their addresses removed. In this case of T3, they are indeed spam merchants, so their chances are happily slim.
First, Joey has no known relationship to SPEWS. T3 deliberately or accidentally confused them because SPEWS does not publish contact info while Joey was visibly complaining about them. SPEWS almost certainly blacklisted T3 on their own without being told by anyone - they monitor spamtrap addresses.
Could SPEWS abuse their power? Well, MAPS and ORBS both abused their power at one point by adding 'spite listings'. This led to the downfall of ORBS and contributed to the irrelevance of MAPS. SPEWS is under a microscope - every one of their listings can be challenged on nanae. On the very rare occasions where they're wrong, the listings are quickly changed. If SPEWS ever has a single known persistent listing that is not justified in the eyes of the anti-spam community, there will be substantial protest and a serious loss of confidence in SPEWS. So far there has never been any mystery - every listed address is linked in some obvious way to persistent mail abusers.
I'm not aware of any vaguely popular blacklists that would add an IP/range on the strength of one random unknown person presenting what appeared to be a spam from that IP. That would obviously be ridiculous. Do you really think they would become as popular as they are if they were that stupid?
:)
yea, i agree. but that australian news article didn't really go into detail of how SPEWS decides who stays and who gets banned. after a quick read of the the SPEWS faq it sounds like they have an automated system overseen by several admins. (news flash) and they only target known spammers and spammer friendly sites. and they stress that anyone who uses SPEWS does so willingly and knowing that some legitimate email could be bounced.
so i suppose in this case, i am sure it's probly a pretty benign system. however, like any banning list, there are people that must make the decisions what to ban and what not to ban. yea, overt spammers get banned, but what about the grey area? also, what about the ones who get banned for no reason? (SPEWS admits it happens and even has a full page dedicated to it.
what i was alluding to in my first post was that having any list like this is a form of censure-ship. though SPEWS says it is not:
from the faq:
Q10: Isn't SPEWS censorship?
A10: No, SPEWS is a list of areas of the Internet that some people do not wish to communicate with. Think of it as one group's Consumer Reports review of portions of the billions of Internet addresses. These are the ones SPEWS members have a poor opinion of. SPEWS is not anti-commerce and fully supports the USA's First Amendment and other nation's free speech protections. In fact, the USA's Supreme Court agrees with the SPEWS view. The creators of SPEWS are its main users and who it was designed for, if others decide to also use its data, they are exercising their own rights. No one is forced to use SPEWS.
no one is forced to abide to banned book lists either. in fact the caveat in the above faq answer closely mirrors the caveat in the pabbis banned book site at the link above that says essentially, that pabbis doesn't think books are bad, that is up to parents to decide. they just provide a list. SPEWS doesn't decide that they are bad, they just provide a list of spammers and companies do what they wish.
but like i said, upon further reading of the SPEWS site, i think they are probly a good thing in the end, but i still think that if used incorrectly (just like every single tool and technology ever created... yea, even sporks) it could become a bothersome hassle or even, in some wacko Brave New World scenario, a way to silence the voice of the people. we could have lists to ban IP's from known dissidant factions or unpopular opinions.
but those days are a few decades away still
-John
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
I hope no one will sue me about the aproximately 42 million spam mails that got lost in my honeypot. (I honestly didn't think anybody would miss them.)
Oh well, if they try something, I sue them for trying to abuse my computer as open relay and win the case.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
...see, I told you there were people outside of the United States that bring stupid lawsuits to court!
Hmm.. I beg to differ.
1. Send Spam
2. Profit
3. Attend Court
4. Hear "you naughty boy" lecture.
5. Pay small % of item no.2 in charges
6. Rinse
7. Repeat
The website that has been following this issue from the start, http://t3-v-mcnicol.ilaw.com.au, has finally published the decision in pdf format (see it here). On pages 6 & 7, Deputy Registrar Hewitt, in paragraphs 15 & 16, says the following:
"15 Counsel for the plaintiff suggests that it would be unfair to end this action at this stage without giving the plaintiff the opportunity to further explore this case using the interlocutory processes now available to it in these proceedings.
16 I do not agree. The plaintiff has commenced an action which appears to me to be speculative and based on propositions which it knew to be incorrect (see my earlier discussion regarding unfounded). If not an abuse, the action is akin to one."
In other words, the Deputy Registrar feels that T3 and Mansfield's bringing this suit forward was as close to abuse as they could get without the action being prosecuted as being frivolous and without just cause! What a maroon!
I read NANAE regularly; this whole T3 Direct saga has been nothing but the highest entertainment to me. It's even better than watching circus clowns!
Rich
Why are we happy when something that should be handled by new technology gets taken care of by the legal system? To me all it this says is that nobody is serious enough about SPAM to come up with a smart solution.
If it was your job to come up with a technological solution to SPAM, what would it be? Come on people, we don't have to sit around and wait for government action to "fix" this.
Maybe part of the solution could be a service where mail servers could freely send timestamp, IP address, and maybe checksum on the last 10 lines of incoming emails. If there is a high percentage of matches that are milliseconds apart, it's probably spam, and the service could send out "probable spam" warnings to the servers that sent the checksums. The servers could then act on the info as they please. The mail servers could delay delivery for maybe 7 minutes to see if they get a "probable spam" warning (remember, email was not designed to be an 'immediate delivery' service).
This was off the top of my head, and yes, I see numerous holes in it (legitimate mailing lists not withstanding), but this could be part of a solution in conjunction with other ideas.
So, what would you suggest?
On the other hand - what's it costing them?
1:"Shall we pay for advertising?"
2:"Fsck no! Just click this big button here marked 'Spam'."
1:" . . . . "
2:"It's free."
1:"Hot damn!"
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
There are a couple of recent articles over at The Truth Laid Bear regarding various techno-approaches to spam and telemarketing. And this is good. However we see that regardless of the technology, spammers seem to wiggle around it.
Similarly, in the past few years, at least in the States, we've begun to see legislation on a state-by-state basis. Mostly to no avail.
So if technology isn't working, and legislation isn't working then does this imply that us resorting litigation indicates we are beaten? Is taking these scum-buckets to court a last desperate attempt by those of us frustrated by this flood-o-crap we call spam?
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
1) The court concluded that Suing Spammer had not shown that the defendant had contacted SPEWS, and
2) The court concluded that the Suing Spammer had not shown that reporting Spammer to SPEWS would have entitled Spammer to damages.
Now, for bonus points and to complete the in-session asskick of Suing Spammer,
3) The court notes that Suing Spammer has been sending unsolicited bulk e-mail, and so blacklisting Spammer on SPEWS was appropriate by whomever did it.
What a complete kickass! I just love it when people actually have common sense!