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Spammer Fined $2,000 Plus Costs in Washington
berniecase writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that Jason Heckel, of Salem, OR, has been ordered (on summary judgment, no less) by King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North to pay $98,000 for sending spam to Washington state residents. Heckel's lawyers say they'll appeal on the basis that Washington's law violates the constitutional protection of interstate commerce."
It's about time one of these aholes got fined.
Hopefully this will set a precedent that can be applied against all of the other spam companies.
"The rest of the penalty is for state's attorneys' fees and court costs."
Which adds a nice cool $96,197.74 on to it.
Of course, there's always relays.osirusoft - a cross-referenced database of nearly all DNS blacklists.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
Spam isn't interstate commerce, it's interstate harassment...
Spam has never helped me in a monetairy way, and for me has nothing to do with products whatsoever...
Saturday, October 19, 2002
Spammer must pay $98,000
Oregon man violated state law on unsolicited e-mails
By CANDACE HECKMAN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
A prolific e-mailer was ordered yesterday to pay more than $98,000 for flooding Washington computers several years ago with dubious offers to make money through the Internet.
A King County Superior Court judge last month found that Jason Heckel of Salem, Ore., violated the state's law against sending misleading and unsolicited commercial e-mail that could not be traced.
Yesterday, Judge Douglass North fined the 28-year-old Heckel the maximum penalty, $2,000, for one violation of the rule. The rest of the penalty is for state's attorneys' fees and court costs. The total is $98,197.74.
The case, originally filed in 1998 after the state's anti-spam law took effect, was the first of its kind in the country. Similarly, yesterday's fine, the first of its kind, may set a standard for other cases pending against senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail.
Heckel was found liable last month through a summary judgment, which meant that the state's evidence was so overwhelming that the case didn't have to go to trial.
But because state attorneys did not have the opportunity to present their entire case to a jury, the judge ruled that Heckel violated the law based on one e-mail. The $2,000 penalty was for that one e-mail.
Regardless, Heckel lawyer Dale Crandall said he plans to appeal. He argued that individual state laws against Internet spam violate the U.S. Constitution's protection of interstate commerce.
"It would create a patchwork of laws that would be impossible to keep up with," Crandall said.
Since Washington passed its anti-spam law four years ago, 26 states have followed suit.
Washington's law does not make all spam illegal. Only e-mails that use a deceptive subject line, misrepresent the e-mail's origin or use someone else's domain name without permission are prohibited.
Heckel's messages began with the subject lines, "Did I get the right e-mail address?" and "For your review-HANDS OFF!" And when consumers tried to reply to the e-mail, the message came back as undeliverable.
The Heckel case developed a national profile as states and federal government tried to regulate activities over the Internet without restricting constitutional rights, such as free speech.
In 2000, another King County Superior Court judge found the law unconstitutional, but the next year the Washington State Supreme Court upheld the law. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Heckel's case on appeal.
The protracted legal battle has increased costs on both sides of the issue. The state yesterday was awarded two-thirds of the fees it asked for.
It's unclear whether Heckel made enough from his Internet enterprise to pay the fees and fine. His business involved selling pamphlets on making money through the Internet.
His attorneys will not comment on whether he can pay the court judgment. But the Washington Attorney General's Office maintained in its lawsuit that Heckel sold an average of 30 to 50 pamphlets a month at $39.95. State lawyers say Heckel sent 100,000 to 1 million e-mails a week for about a year.
Attorneys argued that Heckel sent as many as 20,000 e-mails to Washington residents in 1998. The state asked for $20,000 in fines for multiple violations.
Still, the state is not expecting someone to cut a check soon, said Cheryl Reid, spokeswoman for the Attorney General's Office.
"The most significant victory is that the law has been upheld," Reid said. "The law allows people themselves to take spam cases to court."
This report includes information from The Associated Press. P-I reporter Candace Heckman can be reached at 206-448-8348 or candaceheckman@seattlepi.com
"The most significant victory is that the law has been upheld," Reid said. "The law allows people themselves to take spam cases to court."
lets hope more people take advantage of this...
$98000 - $2000 = $96000
That means the lawyers cost $96000.... $96000.... 96000 M.F. Dollars!
Ok, that does it, I'm sending in my application to Yale right now!!!
Hopefully this will deter future spammers.
... Then lost it :)
The guy only made like 600 bucks.
http://www.angryburrito.com/ The best, completely unfinished software review site ever.
UCE is bad enough alone, but this jerk was sending spam with bad return addresses and deceptive subject lines. I mean, commercial email with subjects "Did I get the right email address?" to trick the user into opening it? That's just scummy.
Obviously, this guy got the _wrong_ email address. Go Washington!
He shouldn't have any problem paying the fine.
After all, he got rich on the Internet and you can too.
Hmm, let's see, world government with unprecedented powers or wasting a couple minutes a day deleting email out of my box.
Hard choice.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The basic problem with the decision is that it's simply not punitive enough.
Let's face it: The amount of people that can see a message when sent via e-mail is a hell of a lot more than any advertiser could hope for via any other medium. And a $100K judgement, I believe, isn't enough incentive to stop anyone from spamming.
Besides, the real problem with spam tends to lie overseas, out of the reach of the US justice system. Most of the spam I receive day in, day out seems to originate from the Orient--China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, etc.
While I applaud the decision here at home, I wonder what sort of effect it will ultimately have on curbing the spam problem. Sadly, I don't think it's going to make even the smallest of dents.
My $.02, anyway...
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
mandated by the WTO, to prevent spammers from breeding.
Yeah, we need an unaccountable, basically secret organisation of corrupt career beurecrats to have the power to fine people for sending messages out that someone doesn't want to recieve. What a wonderful plan! I'm sure their abuses of authority will be central to any calls to overthrow all world government via armed struggle over the course of the next century - since peaceful progress is for pussies, I support this plan wholeheartedly. Also, we should give the WTO the authority to try and execute journalists and peace corps volunteers.
How's about this - everyone sign an anti-spam treaty, and then make it enforceable in the courts with local jurisdiction over the spammer, regardless of were the spam went. The WTO would be guaranteed to clamp down on any spammer that wasn't part of their clique, so you miss something in enforcement, but at the very least you have a direct guarantee (which ought to be explicit in the treaty) that this power won't be used to stifle public participation or the like.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
They were right after all - you can make money from spam!
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
So I wonder how much Bernard Shifman Would have to cough up.....
Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow...
Henkel's lawyers say they'll appeal on the basis that Washington's law violates the constitutional protection of interstate commerce."
Nobody is stopping him from interstate commerce in Washington state, he just cant be deceptive. Oh the horror.
I hope some of the spam went to Bill Gates... His net worth has been hurting lately, after all.
Didn't you know? Bill Gates sends tons of spam. It's how he recruits beta testers for Windows.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Joel Hodgell brought a spammer to court under Washington state's anti-spam law. Did he collect? No, his case was dismissed (the reasons aren't clear), and then the judge "imposed a $6,925 judgment against Hodgell to compensate ... the spammers' lawyer". The state law is facing inconsistent application; some judges don't think a state law can be used on out-of-state residents, others refuse to hear it in small-claims court, despite a published opinion by the state's attorney general. News.com has a story on this and other cases.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I know it bothers a lot of people...but I mean come on..
MIMEDefang + MCaffee (enter favorite virus scanner here) + Spamassassin makes the spam and viruses pretty much go away.
And here is a great HOWto by Mickey Hill on making it all work together.
Legislation is not going to solve this problem, and only ties up our courts/government with drivel. As many people have mentioned, how is this going to work with international spammers? It's not. Just kill the spam.
Well Mr. Spelling Genius, I'm sure with your extensive background in law that you know these things better than me, but it really looks like this guy can't afford the lawyers necessary to appeal.
It's been a long day -- I read this and had a mental picture of a law that required all spammers to use condoms.... ;)
On a more serious note, international law isn't up to dealing with spam and spammers yet, and I don't think it will be any time soon. It can't even deal with terrorism and terrorists effectively. :/
Osirusoft is an excellent resource, but it doesn't contain anything even close to all of the available anti-spam blacklists. MAPS is pretty irrelevant these days, but don't forget the DSBL , Five-Ten-Sg , Monkeys.com , RFC-Ignorant , and Wirehub , all of which are publicly queryable and none of which are mirrored by Osirusoft.
There are a whole bunch of other blacklists out there, as well. Not all are well maintained and not all have consistent policies about which IP ranges or domains get listed and how a domain can be removed, though, so I stick to the established ones.
Catherine
Everyone gets upset about e-mail spam, but there is one thing that you have to take into account. Every day thousands of companies are sending americans unrequested commercial solicitations via the USPS.
Now, here becomes the question... are spammers protected by the same laws that enable companies to send you junk mail? If they are then it's something you just have to delete every day, like throwing out junk mail. If not, can those companies that send junk-mail be fined on similar grounds?
Something slightly thought-provoking if you think about it.
----- I want my LART.
This comment is not a troll. You may disagree with his point, but it is valid. Perhaps you need to re-read the moderator guidlines.
Won't someone think of the Nigerians!
| - | - |
You may think it's silly, but it's the law. All law is location-based... think about it! By your logic, you couldn't prosecute someone for transmitting child porn because he can't be sure of the location of the recipient (whether that should be prosecuted or not is another question, and one that I won't debate here; it's clear that it can be prosecuted, which is what counts).
If there's a risk of breaking the law, the onus is on the perpetrator to ensure that he's sending his stuff only to places that he's allowed to send it. The fact that it's hard to do that isn't the law's problem... maybe that'll give the spammers a little less incentive to spam in the first place.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
Since when is SPAM "commerce"?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I've had a bunch of spammers faking their headers so that it looks like the spam is coming from my website. This pissed me off, so I tracked them down until I found that one of the losers lived in Ohio. Since I live in Washington, I looked up the law to see how much money I could make off the guy. Unfortunately, an individual can only sue for $500. Considering the amount of effort I was going to have to put into the case, I decided not to sue (just sent a letter telling him that I could) because I could easily make over $500 in the time I would spend on the case. If I were an ISP or served my own mail, I would have gone after him because ISPs/hardware-types can sue for around $1000.
:(
So yeah, you can make money, but the only way to actually make good money would be if you were an ISP (because you could sue every US spammer that sent email to a user). Individuals like me are better off getting a job
There are good ways to slow them down considerably right now -- spam filters, blacklists, etc. These have made it significantly harder for spammers to get their email to their targets/victims, and reduced abysmally low response rates even further.
However, stopping spammers or any other kind of criminal entirely isn't possible. Despite the clear laws and effective enforcement, people still kill other people, steal their property, etc. What the laws and enforcement do is make it dangerous to commit crimes, and deter most people who might otherwise do so.
Before you can deter a spammer in, say, China, you've got to think of a way to make him/her think that spamming is too dangerous and not worth the trouble. That depends on, not just new laws, but a very different international legal environment. (That, or convincing the Chinese government that all spammers are members of Falun Gong.) <wry grin>
Catherine
There is also no way to know if a resident is from washington or not.
Yes there is. Washington State has a registry of e-mail addresses that residents can sign up for.
Registration of your Washington E-mail address on this site makes sure would-be senders have some way of finding out you own a Washington E-mail address. Your rights to take individual action under the law and the state's right to jurisdiction are protected when you register your E-mail address.
You've got a good point. Only when we have FEDERAL laws with tough penalties (why so few advocate torture and death is a mystery to me) the flow of spam might slow down somewhat.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
One of the ways to combat spam is to educate businesses who become interested in using spam. One of our clients came to us with a proposal to increase traffic to their website. They discovered that you could "send thousand's of emails for just pennies" (yes, that's a quote from a spammer's ad they read back to us).
We tried to explain how this doesn't really help generate traffic, and how it generates bad will, and how some states now have laws against unsolicited email.
The final kicker was to have the following conversation with the company founder.
Me: "How often do you get spam email?"
Him: "All the time."
Me: "Do you read any of it?"
Him: "No."
[awkward 15 second silence]
Him: "I get it.".
Most people end up making this a free speech thing, all spammers do is a little e-mailing, that granted we don't want, but that's it. This is not the case, many spammers are involved in hacking. Using this to anonymize themselves and harvest more victims. Check out the Honeynet Project's SOTM 22 here. The attacker was a spammer who was using a compromised system to run an e-mail harvester that targeted ICQ users.
Great! I can now track down spammers, and e-mail them the link to that story. Then blackmail them to paypall me $100.00 or get sued :)
mcgrof
Comment removed based on user account deletion
yet another comment section full of "i hope this will serve as an example" posts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Too bad he cannot pay the fine.
The only guys who actually increased their male package size by 300% are the dudes who are going to [beep] him in jail.
Table-ized A.I.
The law has always upheld the notion that I cannot do business, international, interstate or otherwise through misrepresenting myself.
If I am misrepresenting myself through name, address or other contact information, there are many who say this would amount to fraud and deception.
The anit-spam law does nothing more than spell out the forms of fraud and deception that are not permissible and identifies the consequences of those acts. Fraud and deception in business has always been immoral and almost always been unlawful. Like so many other laws written in the past 8 years, there isn't anything really new about them -- they merely attempt to clear up the "grey areas" associated with using newer technologies to perpetrate old crime.
That said, I hate the DMCA and all it stands for -- they go too far. But just as I have said, this is nothing new -- Copyright violation is really nothing new -- it was illegal before and it's illegal now.
Now maybe my support of anti-spam and my position against the DMCA might seem contradictory except for my view on what law is for. Law should protect the rights of all the people. When it starts to protect or create the rights of a minority at the expense of the rights of the whole population, there is a serious problem with the philosophy of law. Anti-spam law protects the rights of the whole population. The DMCA creates new rights [powers?] for a minority at the expense of our rights to fair use and criminalizes the whole nation for trivial and common acts of the public.
If your state doesn't currently have anti-spam law, write a letter to your law makers about it. It takes about as much time and effort as writing an email... in many cases, it's the same effort -- send them an email!! Anti-spam is something the whole city, state and country can get behind and might be a really cool [modern] 'issue' to talk about while campaigning for re-election. Use your voter's leverage to get things done. That's ultimately what "campaign contributions" are allegedly for anyway... money to use to get you to vote for them. Just tell them you won't vote for them unless you get the kind of law you are interested in. After that, no amount of campaign contributions would help them get re-elected... then the gravy train is over for them.
You're reading this... you're taking lots of time you could be spending writing to your law makers... are you still here? You're still reading this aren't you. You lazy-ass! Complacant cow. Say something! Do something and quit complaining that there's nothing you can do when you can. If you've already done it, do it again... are you still reading? Why? Crap...
When some people discover the truth, they just can't understand why everybody isn't eager to hear it.
Let's say he sends 100k spam e-mails a week, every week, for one year. He gets .004% of the people he mails to pay $40 for a pamphlet.
So he gets 40 people, a week to buy a pamphlet. That is $1,600 a week.
That is $89,600 a year
If he woulda just paid the $2,000 he would have made a dandy profit.
Found here...
hmm, should we send UN Troops to occupy Nigeria?
Twenties Retirement
But that's just it.. they are putting the responsibility for knowing where those you are advertising to are located.
SPEWS.
...
"SPEWS is a list of areas on the Internet which several system administrators, ISP postmasters, and other service providers have assembled and use to deny email and in some cases, all network traffic from.
Most spam advisory and blocking systems work after the fact. There is a time lag between the spammer setting up shop, spamming millions, and getting netblocks listed by these systems. SPEWS identifies known spammers and spam operations, listing them as soon as they start, sometimes even before they start spamming."
I'm working on setting up my own mail server just so I can implement SPEWS (and other spam-fighting tools).
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
1. Spam hundreds of thousands of people. 2. Pay $100,000 3. Profit????
Here in the USA, I suffer with both.
.4% of the people, sorry
I agree that the WTO is problematic, but it was approved by duly elected governments. It is, in effect, the treaty you wish each country to sign. As much as I hate to admit, the purpose of the WTO is probably sound. Instead of trying to develop a process or treaty to negotiate each international problem, a general process is set up that can handle most problems. On the balance, it is likely a good thing.
If there is really a problem of the WTO, it is the fault of or duly elected officials, who negotiate the deals, and not the WTO, which is just a bureaucracy following the rules they are given.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Has anyone else got a lot of spam for rape sites lately?
Can ANYONE make the case that people who send such spam shouldn't be fined for every cent they're worth, then hung upside down in a cool damp dark cell, being fed only breadcrusts and water, and being flogged morning and evening for the rest of their lives???
(Posted anonymously so some sicko won't sign me up for more rape spam, and to protect my precious karma.)
Two small factual corrections.
One: the world government with unprecedented powers is an oxymoron, because such powers already have a precedent (and to add insult to injury, it's been the same bunch of self-proclaimed free market lobbyists that got the WTO to shut up as the US penalized the only country that wouldn't give in to pressure to stop making untraceable blank CD-R's).
Two: those "couple of minutes" move on two orders of magnitude if you are the lucky dork to maintain the e-mail gateways for a Fortune 500 company and thus get to deal with the fallout of the spam.
I'm not in favor of anti-spam legislation, because it doesn't have a fighting chance of doing something against spam. But anyone who believes in the Just Hit Delete approach, be a man and give your e-mail address to Alan Ralsky or to a Korean spammer, and then come back here and tell us that deleting it takes just a few minutes.
The big problem is not that spamming is not illegal. The problem is that lying is not illegal, unless under oath (and even then, spammers are a class on their own).
There's a French saying that translates to "the extremes touch each other". Just about the only credit I give the libertarians is that, unlike spammers, they usually realize that "free speech" is spelled with four "e"s, rather than three and a spurious "a" thrown in.
And no, I'm not French. I use the blinking lights on my car to indicate that I'm going to turn.
Well, you're right about the WTO being a world government. Fortunately for spammers, it's completely controlled by global corporations, so I don't think there's any danger of them doing anything for victims of spam.
--Hi. I'm in Portland and it's raining. This appears to be a permanent condition.
What I tend to do now is just use Mail.app in Jag and the junk mail feature really WORKS!
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
Am I the only one that thought of the movie, Orgazmo, on this? Um boss, there are some guys from, Jesus, to see you
...goes to door...
Cut off their balls
I've got to cut your balls off now
huh? why?
That whole spam thing was getting out of hand. Good thing it's finally over!
Madhouse: Satirized for your protection
*Splort*
Above: Self Explanatory?
Anti-spam cases with large amounts of spam and good $/spam could prove to be the mother-load for lawyers working on a percentage basis.
As much as I hate spam, I don't think laws against it will help. Most spam is already illegal because it is fraudulent or because it was sent by illegally(?) breaking into a private mail server to do the mail relaying. I think the real solutions are technical and social:
As a side note (rant), I personally believe that it is wrong to for companies that we do business with to send marketing materials via email unless you specifically ask. Sometimes I want product announcements from a company, so I will sign up for such lists. But such lists should be opt-in (not opt-out). Web forms that require you to register and have a "add to mailing list" checkbox should have that option *disabled* by default.
As for why email spam is worse than snail mail spam, there are two simple answers: 1. Email is (almost) free to send, and therefore the bulk if junk email is much greater. 2. The way email is used is very different. If you have your email client alert you while you are working to tell you that you have a message, and that message is spam, your work was interrupted for nothing. This does not apply to snail mail. [This is also why I think telemarketers are even worse than spammers -- they are more intrusive.)
www.sneakemail.com
Been using it for over a year and it works great.
<G>
Anyone who has lived in a cave for the last two years and isn't aware of the Advance Fee Fraud scheme, which is run out of Nigeria, most other west African countries south of the Sahara, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and the Netherlands as of the last time I checked my spamtrap, should check out the following URLs:
Believe it or not, there have been billions lost to this scam, from people who should have been smarter. (And less greedy.)
Catherine
Doesn't this situation parallel intrusive marketing when fax machines were first inroduced? I believe federal legislation was passed to deal with fax machines that constantly spit out ads. Perhaps the same is need now, although it would be tough to enforce.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The defense claims they will appeal arguing that the state spam law restricts interstate trade. The Washington State supreme court already ruled in another case that the law does no such thing. Their reasoning was that requiring proper contact information and subject lines actually had a positive effect on interstate trade.
... Which is why I never send snail mail if I can avoid it. =)
Alari
- Karma: Bad (The story of my life:)
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
I learned unix doing admin work for a couple bottom feeder ISPs in Salem. Pretty decent odds that I registered the guys first domain.
Vitalife salesman, pederasts, mlm, usenet kooks, and other lowlife were among the many interesting customers I dealt with.
Might be that a city of ~114k has 5 prisons and the state mental hospital but Salem is a really rotten place to live.
Why is Triangle Man so MEAN?
I'm glad to see a spammer get fined, but will a mere $2000 stop him/her?
Short of bringing back keel-hauling perhaps what we need is some help from those free email services? The majority of the spam I receive has forged headers and forged email addresses, usually bearing the domain of a free email service.
So you set these services up so you can register for free, but you need a real email address. When you register, the free email service sends you a password with a link you have to click to confirm and enter that password. The mail address and the HTTP_REFERRER address are all logged.
Couple these procedures with relays and/or email programs that won't handle free email domains, such as @hotmail unless they originate from a hotmail.com SMTP server. Of course, you also want to toss any message that uses a bogus domain name as well.
This wouldn't end all the spam, but it might slow it down a bit as it would preclude the abuses of free email accounts.
--- have you healed your church website?
So maybe he IS only making $9,600.... in 3 years ;)
Still woulda done him better to pay the fee...
It was free to get the auto mailing script.
Who else could mail me at randomstring14294763729@hotmail.com ?
Take a look on comp.net.abuse.email and read about the many admins who are complaining about SPEWS. The problem with SPEWS is that they often block large ranges of IP addresses as a punitive measure against ISPs they don't like - willfully blocking legitimate mail in this way seems awfully ironic. I realize that anyone can choose whether or not they want to filter with SPEWS, but the problem is that they don't tell you about this policy. Every once in a while I'll get an email from someone and my reply will bounce back because they're blocking me. I'll contact them from another account and explain the situation, and these people are unanimously surprised and pissed that SPEWS is doing this.
They recently blacklisted a huge swath of IP addresses - hundreds of class Cs, deliberately blocking not just spammers but thousands of IP addresses on neighboring subnets. Sadly, my little block of 64 IPs was included. So I went on the mailing list (SPEWS will not respond to inquiries) and suggested than an error had been made. My IP was coming up as a "confirmed source of spam" in spamasassin and other tools. I was immediately bombarded by a bunch of leet little fucks telling me it was my fault for choosing the wrong ISP, and I need to switch.
Fuck SPEWS. I like my ISP, and I could find no evidence of them being spam-friendly. In fact, SPEWS keeps almost zero documentation. The just block whatever the hell they want, and they're accountable to no one.
Please don't filter with SPEWS unless you want to lose contact with a good chunk of legit mail servers which have deliberately been blacklisted!!!
Sorry about that. "Hurricane" pushed a button :-)
I haven't had the time to run a proper check, but you may have trouble because certain blocks of Sprintlink IP space are blocklisted for spam support. Not by SPEWS (yet), but there are other lists out there.
In any case, if you find that your e-mail is rejected anywhere by a block list user, take it up with your ISP. Then contact your correspondent by other means and ask for a whitelisting.
...protect misleading and deceitful postage-due marketing?
>they'll appeal on the basis that Washington's law violates the
>constitutional protection of interstate commerce."
>
>
There is *NO* constitutional protection of interstate commerce when *FRAUD* or *Attemped FRAUD* is involved as everybody damn well knows. And make no mistake 99.999% of the spam assholes like this guy sends out falls under attemped fraud or fraud itself.
MIMEDefang is the most annoying useless piece of crap that has ever been forced on end users. I don't use outlook, and I don't need to be protected from windows viruses. I *DO* want MIME to work as intended. When my system administrator imposed MIMEDefiang on us at work I promptly wrote a procmail filter and perl script to UNDefang the mime headers. It's just an inconvienience, and it doesn't accomplish anything. The people who are smart enough to figure out how to turn it off are smart enough to avoid getting viruses. Everybody else is going to save the file and rename it and get the virus anyway. You're going to have to teach them how to do this so they can still read word documents that are sent to them as attachments.
Education is the answer. Breaking MIME should be a criminal offense.
No sane interpretation of the First Amendment says that I am obligated to pay for a computer, Internet connectivity and electricity for the express purpose of some dwad who wants to sell me penis pumps.
The logic that says I can limit the "free speech" of a Jehovah's Witness on my porch at 9 am applies here. Same goes for the "free speech" of a shady store advertising a sale price, but using the wrong picture and running out of the advertised item in order to sell pricier model.
Spam is not remotely comparable to protected speech. As long as it is commercial in nature and forces the cost burden onto the transit providers and the recipient, it merits no protection whatsoever and instead invites stringent regulation. Laws like this are a good first step.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
We at the International Mime Union support you one hundred percent. No mime should have to walk the streets in fear of being set upon and broken. We would thank you personally, but that would involve speaking.
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
If you don't like spam consider downloading that. So far it only works on POP accounts. Works like a charm to filter spam.
I haven't seen the word's "Client" and "T-Shirt" in the same sentence since the dot-com bust!
I work in an internet call center, and I listen to many and many people conplaining about spam and how to get rid of it. I usually tell to either live with it, but there are the rare occassions that people are getting thousands a day. Now to just delete them would take up most of their time, so I would have to say, stop them all together, or figure a way to control it...
Heh, a world trade law... I'm sure the US will find some way of ensuring that foreign-origin spam can't enter the country, but they'll force other countries to accept domestic-origin spam.
Hanlon's Razor aside... I've been wondering if these open relays are intentional. Are they there to provide some sort of anonymous communications within a repressed society? Surely the geek mentality exists even within China. Would an open proxy provide a temporarily untracable communications conduit and plausible deniability? And are spammers taking advantage of such?
Sure. I'm ignoring the simpler possibilities such as ignorance, incompetance, and hard-currency hosting deals. And that seems to scream that I shouldn't discount the whole "Hanlon's Razor" bit at all.
But I still wonder.
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