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AOL Wins Anti-Spam Case
saikou writes "CNet writes in this story: 'A Virginia federal court awarded America Online nearly $7 million in damages as part of the Internet service providers' legal victory over a junk e-mail operation, AOL said Monday.'
Now, given tough times we should see more and more ISPs sue (and, hopefully win) the evildoers if not for their users mailboxes sake, then for their own budget. How long until there will be a major ISP whose plans include discounts for spam-fighters? (Help us to sue every spammer than sent mail to you and get $9.95 disount on your next bill :) )"
is it a good thing that i'm rooting for AOL?
I should sue AOL for that 7 million!
I'm a paying subscriber and I *still* get pop-up ads from them!
Stage one was to flood him with real junk mail. Now Stage 2 is to sue his arse off :)
AOL sponsored spam?
I don't want to SUE them.
:P
:)
I want to SHOOT them.
Seriously, I think if the Mafia went after spammers, we'd be seeing a whole heckofa lot less spam.
The drawback to that is there probably isn't enough ocean to hold all of the spammers they'll give concrete shoes to.
Can we colonize Mars with spammers that lost a lawsuit?
I am confused....Aol is for Anti-Span? Does this mean we like or dislike AOL now?
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
I mean, come on. Now spam is "Evil?" Annoying, yes. Illegal, maybe. Evil? Not a chance. This kind of rhetoric cheapens what real "evil" is.
Is the money going to distributed for the affected customers.? Do u think they will get their share of the "goodies" ?? when they are the ones who were most affected!!!!
AOL, one of the biggest abusers of unsolicited e-mail, has won a case against someone else. As we know, AOL REALLY needs the 7 million dollars too, being one of the biggest media enterprises and all.
I don't know about you guys, but this is not good news at all. I'm still hoping AOL goes down.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
25% ?!?!?! Holy dilly bars (tasty Dairy Queen treats).
Sex - Find It
Put advertisements on CD's and mail them everywhere.
What if AOL decides to sue that guy who made a fortune thru spamming?
I'd pay to see that...
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
What about the big providers that knowingly and willings host spam gangs? Surely the next target of a suit should be UU.Net. See my Boycott MCI rant for why we should go after UUNet.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
nice troll. i think it has quite good chances, great potential. good luck for the future!
;-)
Go AOL! The key here was not just "unsolicited" but also "deceptive." As if we didn't already know that at LEAST 99.99% of all product offer spams are scams...
Postmen should sue AOL for injuries incurred hauling all those CDs around.
1,000,000,000 hours free! Because no one really wants dial-up.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Try reading the article. They are not being sued over free speech issues. They were sued because of deceptive advertising and misleading people into thinking the advertisements were coming from AOL itself -- things like that.... not simply for sending advertisements.
As I see it, this is good for two things.
1. The spammer stops spamming.
2. Starts a trend of spam not being profitable
1. Attract as much spam as possible
2. Sue spammers
3. PROFIT!!!!!!
Dear friend,
Are you having trouble paying your bills and affording subscriptions to all those porn sites?
Well our unique money making system will ensure that you can claim squillions of dollars in just a few short weeks.
Yes, based on the recent spamming decision in favor of AOL, we've produced a set of reports that you can use to earn a fortune!
By following the simple instructions contained in these reports, you can set up your own tiny ISP operation and your own spamhaus.
Then, after you've sent *yourself* several million spam messages, we show you how to get the courts to award you $7 million in damages against yourself
It's so easy anyone can do it.
But hurry, supplies of these important reports are strictly limited so don't miss out.
Do not reply to this email, we made a small typo when entering the address - it's not Ajj389782@yahoo.com it's actually zw99qwX@hotmail.com.
Or you can ring our toll-free 19-00 number and speak to one of our friendly Romanian operators who are waiting to take your order.
NOTE: this email is not spam, it has been sent because you (or someone with your hair-color) filled out a contact form on our website.
If you wish to be unsubscribed from our special offers mailing list then simply send an email to signmeup@spamhaus.spam.spam
38enmdu3nmd3i393je
Free Speech? Is it free speech if I walk up to your front yard with a Megahorn and start ranting to you about Hot Sluts 4 You or Dirty Cheap Viagra? How about discount diplomas in your subject of chioce? Would you like to share my 10 million dollars? Refill your expensive printer cartridges. Lose weight fast. Attract women now. Refinance. Here's your free pass. You've won. Hot Date. Cheap insurance for you. Business Forcast! Improve your penis size!
You wouldn't like it very much. You'd hate it in fact if it were a regular thing. While SPAM may no be trespassing, it is often fraud and that is against the law. When it's not fraud, it's often done through the use of stolen resources (in terms of server space, bandwidth, or personal information). Those too are crimes.
The few bits of spam you actually do get from legit businesses with interesting products or services are so drown out by the pure flood of crap that those who are trying to do real business without breaking any laws are harmed by the rest of the spammers.
Thus, spam isn't free speech. It's dishonest, it's annoying, it's unethical, and it's harmful to legit internet-based business.
I'm not saying spam should be outlawed altogether. I am saying that current laws should be enforced strictly against current spammers. Most of them are guilty of at least one serious crime even if it's simply an invasion of privacy.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
As I see it, this is good for two things.
1. The spammer stops spamming.
2. Starts a trend of spam not being profitable
Not really, they'll probably continue business, just under a different name. That's the problem with modern corporate structure. When individuals become shielded from liability, there's little to no accountability.
And you can thank the Bush administration (which one? both!) for helping that process along.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
This is great. But for every legal victory there is over spam or p2p software doesn't this setup for another legal loophole to be found?
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
We have your settlement money ready to deliver. Seven million dollars! Unfortunately, we're having trouble getting it out of Nigeria because the current government is corrupt and has frozen our assets. If you could give us your bank account number, we could wire the money to you directly. Congratulations on your win!
Mumar Zibutu
Former King of Nigeria
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
My usual suggestion would be taxing spam, licensing it at non-viable rates, etc. The results would be used to help defray the cost of the infrastructure, and to compensate spam victims.
and of course, you would need bounty hunters to track down the ones who are using fraudulent information.
Licensing is to verify correct legal data on spammers.
Personally, I think spammers should wear their spam licenses out in the open in public, so everyone knows who they are. Extra bonus brownie points if the spam licenses are large bright orange tags attached to the ears.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
99% of the SPAM I recieve is undesirable and expensive noise. Forged headers of commercial email certainly has nothing to do with "free speech".
And sending commercial email under the guise of someone else (ie - using my email address in the FROM: header) ) should result in very heavy fines (may I suggest to the legislators a punitive fine of US$25000 per email destination)
Some free speech advocates will complain about a loss of their freedom to send commercial information to deserving customers. Happily, there are still countless avenues to communicate to these deserving souls: telephone, personal visits, snail mail, newspaper ads, TV ads, radio ads, pre-movie ads, magazines, movie product placements, tv show product placements, yellow pages, airplane banners, billboards, etc.
When someone declares bankruptcy, you can still seize their assets. Individual assets valued under something like $1000 are exempt. Things like automobiles and houses, along with cash and investments are likely to be liquidated to cover the payment. So they're in good shape to get the spammer's house and life savings, provided that they haven't spent all their savings and equity on legal bills.
(I'm expecting a lot of Catholic church buildings around Boston will be sold soon; likely to the Vatican with a lease-back contract, but providing plenty of cash for settlements. Just my guess.)
Here's a thought provoking question for you. Lets say for instance that AOL got really good at getting rid of spam to the point that you rarely recieved junk mail to an AOL account. Would you pay AOL to get a spam free email account?
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
You're dead right -- spammers will simply run their businesses like the movie industry does.
Set up numerous little companies so that those which run into problems (such as being a box-office bust or having the snot sued out of them) can be bankrupted at no real cost to the people behind them.
I would expect that these spamhaus companies would rent their computers and other "assets" from a parent company at a rate equal to the revenues the spamming generated. That parent company would (of course) be a legally separate entity. This means that when the sued company is bankrupted for failure to pay the fines, it has neither assets nor cash in the bank and the spammers don't lose a penny.
It's a strategy that's been used countless times before in many different industries. The only losers are the *real* creditors who are unfortunate to lose their money -- but in this case that serves them right for dealing with a spammer anyway.
Here's an Idea for AOL:
Instead of mailing out AOL CD's with AOL install softare, how about just blank-CDr's with a huge AOL advert on the label? They'll give out something everyone can use, as well as expanding their exposure (if that is possible). In addition, when we share our photos and other files with family and friends, they'll see the AOL ad too...unless of course you slap on your own label on top of it.
$cat
IMHO, this is a victory for AOL users, spammers are going to scramble now to delete %@aol.com from their databases, but that's about the extent of it.
Once a backbone provider (like Level3 or %Bell%) gets up the gusto to throw this kind of lawsuit at spammers (and offshore spammers), we may actually see some reprieve.
Until then... "So easy to avoid spam, no wonder it's number one!"
Hammer of Truth
In the last 34 hours or so, since the logs last rotated, my server has received almost 1000 spams and blocked the delivery of over 8000 more. I'll call that 6000 spams in 24 hours. This is just one mail server on a large campus with many different mail servers.
At $60,000 a day (dreaming) per machine a cluster of honeypots could wipe out the university's $11 million budget defecit in a week or two.
http://legal.web.aol.com/decisions/dljunk/cnprod.h tml
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
As others have said, that's a huge leap.
It certainly is protected (albeit, commercial) speech to put a note in your mailbox alluding to "Dirty Cheap Viagra."
It's little more than an annoyance.
- James
I cannot believe that you are seriously suggesting that we encourage criminal organizations to dump spammers into the ocean and drown them.
Think of the marine life who would be poisoned!
Better to just shoot them into a distant star. Not our sun, beacuse all of the hot gasses inside of spammers might cause it to go nova a bit early.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
...by suing all of their members who send all those damn spams to me. Not only would they get the person's membership fees, but would get a court settlement too!
Who knows, maybe they could make a business model out of this by allowing those people to sign up again and repeat the process...
Yes, this was a joke, don't take it too seriously.
Help us to sue every spammer than sent mail to you and get $9.95 disount on your next bill :) )"
With the amount of spam I get, it would take a full time legal staff to do this. That would kind of cancel the benefit of the $9.95 discount.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Lots of speech, or free expression, is dishonest, annoying, and unethical depending on your perspective. It doesn't mean that it isn't protected.
Commercial speech does not get the same level of protection as non-commercial speech. Look up "Central Hudson test" on Google to get more information on this.
They are a media conglomerate, but they are about as non-evil as they get.
Time Warner was one of the biggest backers of the DMCA.
Will I retire or break 10K?
99% of the SPAM I recieve is undesirable and expensive noise.
What's the other 1%? Desirable or cheap?
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Although this was said in semi-jest, I think it is a good idea.
Imagine if they had some sort of centralized spam-reporting system. Everytime you got spam, you registered it (much like CloudMark's model). Come lawsuit time, you (depending on how much spam you registered) get a chance to cash in on all the spam they sent you.
While SPAM may no be trespassing
It normally is, especially when the ISP has made their policies against it clearly known.
I'm not saying spam should be outlawed altogether.
I am. Businesses and individuals should not have to invest money in servers, bandwidth, and storage so that spammers can flood them with unwanted advertisements.
The advertisements are being delivered at the recipients' expense. That's theft, pure and simple. It's no different than someone using your credit card to pay for the postage on junk-snail-mail that they send to you.
AOL is evil.
You ever try to cancel an account with them? Good three monhts before you get any results. Plus the asshole who gets rude on the phone with when you try to cancel.
There was a time when AOL was the only National ISP and most techs kept an AOL account for travel to hit email and keep in touch.
And AOL sells its own customers to spam lists. Plus the advertisements they inundate you with.
AOL bought all those companies to further there share in the marketplace. They bought Netscape(where is it now) they bought Winamp, and ICQ, which totally sucks now and gives its own nice little pop ups.
Time Warner inventing phone telemarketing as we know it. I worked in a call center running dialing systems in the early 90's.
We called people whos subsciptions were about to end, had ended, and even vaguely looked at a magazine in the airport.
Entertainment Weekly, People, Time, NewSweek, and we were hired outsourced to other magazines. And this is a Time Warner org. Still operational today. All sanctioned by time warner. BUT NOOOOOOOOO they are not evil.
AOL hates Microsoft cause they took a big part of their business. Because AOL is all about the content they want you to see. And with IE and other Browsers, it is about what you want. Sour grapes all over the place.
GEEZ
PUTO
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Advertising is Free Speech.
Then please post your credit card number here. I want to send advertisements to you by conventional mail but I do not want to pay the postage myself. This way, it will be like spam. You will pay for the delivery of the ad to you and I, being the advertiser, will only shoulder a fraction of the true cost.
I guess that you are in favor of collect calls from telemarketers, too...
Does anyone see these kinds of suits scary, and threatening to our free speech that we try ever so hard to protect? When you limit peoples communications methods - and spam can be very broad, it limits our speech. I find spam an annoyance, but I'd rather AOL spend the money they spent on that lawsuit to figure out a p2p filtering system like cloudmark's most excellent product for AOL users. (cloudmark filters out 98% of my spam, 0 false positive.. works off of checksums of emails)
Yes, spam costs you money - but so does looking through all the junk mail you get at home - that filtering can take a minute or too - the same amount of time as clicking delete on your computer.
I just don't know if this is something that you truely want to support if you get to the root of the issue.
I won a judgment against Printpal.com (owned by Piggyback.com, Inc) in Oregon from VA for $580 plus court costs ($43)! I am in the process of collecting it. Check it out:
http://purplecow.com/vaspam/
I hope to offer a service soon that will help VA residents (and other states which have anti-spam laws) sue spammers. If we can all do our part, thousands of lawsuits against spammers will get them to stop!
TossableDigits.com: Temporary Phone Numb
They could offer a small bounty for every spam header you recieve on their network that you forward to their legal department. A small percentage of any legal reward from spam you recieved could be awarded.
Like the lottery.
Maybe not such a good idea.
Can anyone come up with a community-centric constructive idea? Something that will combat spam and encourage good ettiquite. Like recycling, getting five cents back for every bottle. I used to do that, when I could get that bounty back. I was a kid, so I'd go around picking up bottles and asking neighbors for their bottles.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
Nothing of the sort can be attributed to spam.
If you think that spam causes no "substantial harm", then you pay AOL's costs for servers, bandwidth, and storage to handle over ten million spam e-mail messages per day. And while you are at it, write checks to every ISP to cover those costs. Then go back and write checks to every Internet user that has paid higher monthly fees because of spam. Respected estimates put the total cost of spam into the billions of dollars every year.
Since there is no substantial harm to users
According to industry estimates, spam increases each subscriber's monthly costs by several dollars. Just how much would it have to cost consumers before you considered it to be "substantial harm"?
There is no constitutional right to send my 5 year old nephew viagra and my 6 year old niece breast enlargement cream.
SPAMMING is stealing! You do not have a constitutional right to use my servers and my computers for advertising. I am not allowed to force you to take collect calls so I can sell you my crap.
Fight Spammers!
Everyone complains about cancelling AOL memberships, but I have a hard time beleiveing them. When I called up to cancel my free subcription on the 29th day of a 30 day trial, as soon as I said I wanted to cancel the medium-friendly person transfered me to an extra-friendly person who asked why i wanted to cancel, told me I could still use AOL's wonderfull services over my DSL line for only x dollars a month, then cancelled my account, and gave me a confirmation number.
Now, the evil media conglomerate conspiracies I'm all for, but I'd say AOL provides a friendly and easy method of getting online for people who don't know the difference between "the internet" and Internet Explorer.
Spam is evil. It may not annoy any one individual much at one time, but each day millions (probably hundreds of millions) of spam mailings are received by people who then have to deal with them. Over time if they have angered and irritated that many people, who is to say that is not worse that affecting a much smaller group to a greater extent?
Then of course, there are side effects like getting porn at work in email all because I'm on some list I can't rid my name from. What if I get fired for that? (Unlikley, but still).
If you had the abiility to put a nail in the tire of a million people a day, I would call that evil as well. Spam is the ability to annoy people brought to the level where it does, in my mind, become worthy of being labeled evil.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The interesting part of the article was how AOL managed to reduce, by 20% the amount of spam that ended up in their users mail boxes. They have implemented some system that allows users to "vote" on the quality of the e-mail. Once a critical mass of "trusted" voters agree that a given piece of mail is spam, that piece of mail is removed from every other members inboxen.
Critical mass total number of AOL users. And if one person consistantly "votes" against the norm, then their vote is weighted less, preventing spamers from voting that their own spam is !spam. Pretty cool system. I hope some OSS mail client can incorporate such a feature soon....
AOL spams everyone via the mail with Cd's and also increasingly in peoples inboxes, ive had two emails from AOL this week to an address i have never supplied them, netscape, or any of their child companies with. i should sure them for spamming my mail server and taking up bandwidth etc.
I'd love to see AOL dump all that cash (minus legal fees, of course) into Mozilla to help further develop the bayesian filters that they're adding to moz mail.
do not read this line twice.
is it a good thing that i'm rooting for AOL?
Well, isn't it possible for an evil company to make people happy?
-- Sir Gary Coleman
Does this
OK, we all hate spam. It is prolific, and abused.
But what kind of precedent is this setting? Could this be abused too?
Let's analyze what is happening here. One person has the right to sue another because they sent a mass email. How else can that be twisted?
What about internal email? Can a person be sued because they informed everyone in the company about a bake sale for their church? After all, they ARE promoting their religion with an unsolicited email. What if somebody used a quote from Carl Marx as their sig line? Is that offensive enough to be sued over?
I am sure that everyone here can think of other examples. The point is, one particular freedom has been abused by the few, therefore, it is being taken away from the many. What else can this lead to?
Just a thot.
"Logic merely enables one to be wrong with authority." - Dr. Who
The worst spam, the spam that should be prosecuted, and the spam that should be destroyed, lies to the reader. The spam likely has forged headers. A lie. The spam likely has a misleading subject line. A line. The spam most likely has claims that goes beyond the traditional advertising hyperbole. A lie. The spam may fraudulently indicate that I signed up on a list. A lie. The spam may indicate a fraudult removal claim. A lie.
There is no way that fraudulent advertising speech is covered my the first amendment. Hyperbolic speech, probably, but not outright lies.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Same thing, different application. Unauthorized use of their bandwidth. I can't wait till all forms of corporate advertising is illegal on the net, thats going to rock.
I do not believe that and I challenge you to cite your sources. Every other complaint that they have posted from previous lawsuits has claimed harm. I attended a meeting regarding the spam problem and AOL had an attorney that was a featured speaker. They very much consider spam to be a terrible problem.
In AOL v. Over the Air Equipment, Inc., AOL's attorney, Everett C. Johnson, Jr. testified:
So we can see right on the face that one of the largest internet companies, one that faces mountains of spam every day, doesn't see spam as a substantial problem much less their primary problem.
No go back and reread their testimony from the prior case and then try to keep a straight face while saying that AOL does not consider spam a substantial problem.
If you are going to make stuff up, at least try to make something up that is more difficult to prove wrong.
they made a nice open-source webserver
No kidding? AOLServer is open-source? I always figured it was some closed, propriatary thing, but it's free and Free, according to sourceforge. Son of a gun.
AOL's products kind of suck, but unlike MS they can't (or don't) force you to interact with them. So, yeah, I suppose I like AOL more than MS.
May we never see th
What we need is for the backbone providers to start charging for the bandwidth that gets used. For example: Spammer A on Backbone X sends out a billion messages a day. Backbones Y and Z charge Backbone X for taking up so much of their bandwidth. Backbone X sees it's not economically feasible to allow Spammer A to send out the spam.
This is, admittedly, simplistic. But, for once, I'd like to see economics work in an open market without having the lawyers get rich.
Your mind looks a little cramped. Why don't you stretch it a little?
I've never heard of this Jay Nelson or CN productions. Can anyone fill me in? Does he have a rap sheet like Ralsky?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In most areas sleeping in the park is not legal. Even so, your analogy fails. They are using your servers for advertising. You are not permitted to put up commercial advertising in the park without permission from the city/state/county. You are not permitted to sell things in the public park without some permit from the city/state/county. We pay taxes for the public benefit.
It also fails because my server, my bandwidth, and my client computer is NOT PUBLIC PROPERTY!
If spamming is legal and ethical, why don't spammers include full and legal contact information in each spam?
Fight Spammers!
Is this for real?
Let me get this straight, AOL used to sell email addresses of its subscribers to 'similar-industries' as part of its EULA. The business model used to be based on advertising as of a few months ago when the backlash against all the pop-ups came. They then realized that most of their customers were leaving because of all these ads. Now that AOL has decided to kill its advertising based revenue stream, they are TAKING TO COURT the same companies that they used to sell email addresses to?
You think its a joke, start your own email server under your own domain. I havent recieved ONE piece of SPAM since I started doing that
I guess thats an interesting way to replace the revenue stream
They charged us for FOUR YEARS after we cancelled!
Maybe I should get part of those millions!
Can I sue on behalf of the five email accounts on my box?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I know, and I'm pissed! I've heard those CD cans are great for carrying a couple of blank CD-R's around in your laptop bag, but they haven't sent me even one yet!!! Not one! I'm stuck carrying a bunch of wrapped CD-Rs in the super-thin jewel cases. I need an AOL CD can!
Intelligent Life on Earth
You ever try to cancel an account with them? Good three monhts before you get any results. Plus the asshole who gets rude on the phone with when you try to cancel
:)
Yes, in 1994 when I actually used the service.
It was cancelled immediately.
Why is it that whenever a person speaks to a rude customer service representative, that they assume the entire company is a collection of assholes? Perhaps it was just my limited experience in tech support, but believe it or not, it is possible that out of hundreds or thousands of good representatives, there are a few bad ones.
And AOL sells its own customers to spam lists. Plus the advertisements they inundate you with. I was unaware of this, but one of my clients has used AOL for about 8 months and has recieved a grand total of two spams, likely because of her fairly common name. (common name + email list generator).
Again, I am not saying AOL is not evil, I mean, they are a media conglomerate, and I wouldn't really be all that surprised of they shot your dog. I was saying that, as far as huge companies (which are traditionally utterly ruthless), AOL/TW isn't half bad. Please read my post again.
AOL bought all those companies to further there share in the marketplace. They bought Netscape(where is it now) they bought Winamp, and ICQ, which totally sucks now and gives its own nice little pop ups.
Yes, how evil, they purchased a web browser company whose core is open source software, they purchased Nullsoft so they could get -- gasp -- a large share of the free MP3 player market!
And regarding ICQ, if you'd use Linux clients, or even many Windows clients, there are simply no advertisements to be seen. Of course, even if there are and you use the Windows ICQ client, big deal! Running international servers for millions of people does cost money. AOL/TW is a public company. How do they justify running such a good service to their stock holders if they don't even attempt to offset some of the costs?
What was that about smoking crack? (and what a clever comment it was...) I haven't ever taken a business class and know this.
We called people whos subsciptions were about to end, had ended, and even vaguely looked at a magazine in the airport.
My parents were recieving calls from subscription services (magazines) regarding expiring accounts long before 1990. Regardless, that doesn't sound like telemarketing--telemarketing is, at least by my definition, more like, "I'd like to interest you in life insurance. We have snipers stations around your home. I do not recommend hanging up."
I do find it interesting, though, that AOL/TW invented magazines that can deduce your phone number simply by being looked at in airports.
BUT NOOOOOOOOO they are not evil.
I didn't say they were not. How many times do I need to point this out? Perhaps I should type it in multiple languages? In hex? Backwards?
Of course, even then "evil" is a somewhat ambiguous term, but let's not go there.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-218360.html
"Not much, just more crap was added to them to make AOL money."
Yep nothing but crap added to Mozilla since then.
*rollseyes*
Nothing but the ongoing funding of Mozilla development. Oh right I forgot those Netscape employees who work on Mozilla do it for free. Netscape on their own would be bankrupt and gone today if AOL hadn't bought them. Thus Mozilla would NOT be where it is today without AOL. Yep sucks to hear, deal with it. I also noticed that ICQ and Winamp continue to be fully funded as well.
AOL may be a big bag of crap when it comes to their client software, but they served as Internet training wheels for a huge part of the Internet surfers today. They have their place.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Can I get $19.95 off my next bill if I present the spammer's head to the ISP (pre mounted and ready to hand on the wall, of course)?
The actions of a few should not dictate the reputation of many. Christianity does not approve of the molestation of little children, or of anybody for that manner.
Dude, seriously now.
If I don't approve of molesting people and still do it am I cool with you?
The fact is that the power structure that is the catholic church actively worked to hide the sickening inhuman actions of its leaders.
Why do you think they will fight tooth and nail and use every manipulative legal trick at their disposal to defend their worldly assets yet will fight with the same tenacity to *not* protect the innocent and the meek that their power structure raped?
Why not turn the other cheek?
What would Jesus do?
Apparently you think that if he didn't rape children he would do anything he could to protect the reputation of those who did. Or, of course, his own reputation by covering up those actions.
Do the sickening actions of the church make Joe Catholic of Any City, Earth a child molestor?
No.
But if any person can even attempt to defend any major church (or other power structure which is so evidently corrupt), then that action does make them a fool.
People who have done bad things in the name of Christianity do not [decapolis.com] represent Jesus Christ or his true followers.
When the people doing bad things are the majority (of the power if not the population) then your argument disintegrates.
Such statements prejudicing Christians and Christianity are every bit as offensive as saying
Please compare and contrast the good and evil done in the name of Christianity over the years.
No bullshit, "well...that isn't a Christian thing to do" cop outs allowed. "In the name of" is the key here.
While it's true that a single asshole rep shouldn't be taken as a smear on the entire company, they do have a big problem here, not just one rep. It's a structural thing. They have taken it upon themselves to make cancelling very difficult, on the apparently accurate assumption that their subscribers are rather easy to manipulate. They have a cancellation department, and those people are the only ones that can cancel your account. If you ask someone in another department, they can't transfer you, they can't even give you the number normally (unless you tell them you can't get online at all) rather they are to send you to 'keyword cancel'. There you find the number to call. There are one or two other choices, I think you can snail mail them (certified mail!), and maybe send a fax. Most people will call on the tollfree number, and it's set up to encourage that. When you call the tollfree number, you wait on hold for a fairly long period of time normally. If you hold on long enough, you eventually get a 'cancellation representative.' Now these guys are trained and expected, not to cancel your account as asked, but to find some way, any way, to talk you out of cancelling! In fact, their job performance is rated by the percentage of calls they 'save' from cancellation, and if that percentage dips below the goal, they are out looking for a job again. This can be turned to your advantage if you really didn't want to cancel, as they can and will give you free service for a month or sometimes more in order to get you off the phone without cancelling, but it's annoying as all hell if you really don't want the service. And given the pressure these kids are under to 'save' you whether you want to be saved or not, and the training they receive (adapted from the training developed for hard sell telemarketing) it's not surprising at all when one gets rude. She may, in fact, be fired for cancelling your account, so why wouldn't she be stressed out?
Your experience is somewhat dated btw, AOL in 1994 was a very different company. I don't know exactly when the system I described was put in place, but I know it's been this way since '99, and almost certainly a bit earlier, but probably not in '94 - there was a huge cultural shift at AOL after the huge expansions of the mid to late 90s.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
A distributed system could, in theory, hedge against that. By submitting your name, you agree that it was unsolicited. If you mistakenly say it was unsolicited, all the spammer has to do is say, "Look, our log says that Mr(s) So-and-So requested this e-mail" (at which point the "spammer" turns into a not-spammer).
In my ideal world, the burden of proof would be on the spammer to show that the bulk e-mail was solicited in the first place. I refuse to believe that gazillions of people willingly sign up for penis enlargement e-mails each day.
Interesting. DirecTV has a cancellation department as well, called "CRG" or, "customer retention group", which probably operates very similarly, except they are perfectly willing to cancel your account if you aren't interested in a month of free service or whatever the offer of the day is.
:)
Also, the reason I cancelled AOL was that they did not support OS/2 Warp. The representative probably realized that OS/2 support simply wasn't going to happen, but I ran my BBS with OS/2, and running the Windows version absolutely killed my system performance (with only 8MB of RAM). Those were the days...
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
that I have this thing in my "Inbox" about "TRY AOL 8.0 FREE"? I've never done any business with them, and do they have to shout in their ads too?
C|N>K
well... aol owns mapquest.. not too surprising. aol.com runs on it, though.. and that's no small amount of load.
They did however invent AIM in-house (it was originally the AOL messaging service, and then they created a stand-alone client for non-AOL users). It's not perfect, but it's definitely sufficient, and it's by far the most reliable messaging network I've used (I think there's only been a single instance of greater-than-8-hour downtime in the past 6 years I've been using it, and I can't recall a single instance of downtime greater than 1 minute in the past 2-3 years).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Not really, they'll probably continue business, just under a different name. That's the problem with modern corporate structure. When individuals become shielded from liability, there's little to no accountability.
Fsck that.YOU can start a business, get sued for an ungodly sum, and lose all your personal assets if you want to, but I'm going to stay incorporated.
I'm not about shirking your accountability, but jesus... Losing your house, your car, and anything the creditors can sell to get cash is not the way to go.
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
but I'd say AOL provides a friendly and easy method of getting online for people who don't know the difference between "the internet" and Internet Explorer
It's interesting that you seem to see this as a good thing. Many, including me, wouldn't. I don't think it's that vital that EVERYONE is rushed onto the internet as quickly as possible. It would be very nice if they had to learn a little bit about it before they went online. If they did, I guarentee that we wouldnt have many of the problems we do today!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I was unaware of this, but one of my clients has used AOL for about 8 months and has recieved a grand total of two spams, likely because of her fairly common name. (common name + email list generator).
The e-mail may not get much spam (I don't know as I don't personally own an AOL e-mail account) but, as AOL's e-mail is propietary, you must use their client to access your e-mail. And guess what? Their client is *CRAMMED* with advertisements. I know this because of the few times I have had to use my dad's computer to connect to the internet. You connect, you get several popup dialogs with adverts. The client has inbuilt advertisements. 'Keyword' anything will have an inbuilt advertisement. Viewing e-mail will give you an advertisement. I couldn't believe this one, it looked like a goddamn parody but it was in fact the actual AOL client, but even the SIGN OFF dialog had 3 (THREE) adverts on it!!! I mean, how much bandwidth is this wasting, especially on a 56k modem???
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I apologise in advance if this point has already been made, but I can't see it anywhere.
Will AOL sue themselves now, for the horrendus amount of spam they inflict on everybody? Let's see, they've got TV ads, internet ads, billboard ads, CDs in the mail, radio ads.... they seem to have stopped just short of e-mail spam. That doesn't mean that all their other endless advertisements aren't annoying, though.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
1) Create product/service
2) Sue customors
3) $$$!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Anyway, ring up 3 and you're put through to the consultant who'll do the usual tricks to keep you subscribed. In my case I said I wanted to cancel because my box was broken and the 'consultant' persuaded me to stay on the promise of a cheap engineer call-out and a replacement box.
Fortunately that is what I wanted them to offer me this and I had no intention of cancelling, so it went pretty well in the end. Still, it annoys me that they can't play straight.
Heck, why not meet them halfway? They can send out CD-Rs that already have the AOL software loaded, but still has room to add other stuff... That way, people can use them to load up AOL, or use them to save important documents or whatever.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
If I simply didn't want to see the spam, I could arrange list-washing on my own and use a combination of filters. But that, of course, just makes life easier for the spammers. Instead, I wish to have spammers actually pay a fair price for their advertising instead of shifting the cost onto the recipient systems.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
I hate to ask for more laws, but I'd like to see a law passed that requires any company providing a recurring-charge based service to:
(a) have a cancellations department
(b) make that department's contact information readily and easily available through all means which the company can be contacted (eg, no "online-only" phone list)
(c) the cancellations department's sole job is to cancel accounts. They may only ask once for a reason for cancellation and then process the cancellation. No offers, no lying, no bullshit, immediate cancellation.
Making you jump through sales hoops to cancel your account is dishonest, there's no two ways about it.
Come on guys, it's a classic in-group out-group thing. Most people on /. don't do spam (or, if they do, they are not dumb enough to admit it), so spam is evil. Some /.ers like looking inside other people's computers, so crackers are not evil.
It's simple human nature, we pick the definition of evil that puts us and our friends in a good light and the people we dislike or don't care about in a bad light, and then we can feel good about ourselves. The reason the govt is passing so many laws against allegedly evil crackers is that the politicians don't know any crackers, and, anyway, I bet most /.ers don't bother to vote. Politicians do know corrupt businessmen, so they have to be more careful with them.
Sure, some 8 year-olds end up looking at nasty pictures because of spam. But then they could find whatever sort of image they want in 20 seconds with Google. The solution here would be to ban ISPs from carrying pornographic images. But, judging from quite a lot of sigs, Porn is Good on /. You see, it is very important to draw the arbitrary lines in just the right places.
Virtually serving coffee
...damn few people use MSN Messenger or Yahoo
;) ICQ was the leading worldwide messenger, perhaps, as you can see in their wide range of localization options.
I am not very sure if that's true outside the US. Remember that AOL has strongholds in Australia, England and the US. In all other places you have to rely on either local programs to communicate, or word of mouth and product loyalty from the internet giants back in early nineties. There come yahoo and hotmail and their respective IM services... but hold that thought
I think that most of the success of AOL IM here is that it was just forced onto the AOL system and there was nothing else to do to get messaging to work. So any newbie in the 90s with AOL could get the power of messaging in the US. As someone said here, AOL was probably "the training wheels" of a majority of us when the internet was still pretty young.
Well, anyway, I have friends in the Caribbean that have never heard the name of AOL. Their service there is MSN IM, or even Yahoo IM. In fact, I have been really annoyed at having to get Messenger on my system just because they don't know AIM. International students other than me, from Africa and Europe who I met in college were more likely to have an ICQ account and give it out. The American college system spoiled them into using AIM, though. First jointly, and then, uniquely.
Those students all know yahoo and microsoft's hotmail and therefore it's natural to have adopted their messengers. But I believe AOL didn't have a hold of the world in messaging, though I may be pulling this out of my butt
just my 2 cents. i hope someone has a link to factual data so that i can see if this, is true after all these years of pondering about it.
"Wireless : LAN
You seem to confuse the Church with the people who run it. I agree, there are people at the head of the church who are child molestors, rapists, heathens, in it only for the power trip, etc. etc. However, that is not the Church, per say.
Then you are merely redefining the term I was using in one specific way. I am refering to the power structure that is the Catholic Church (or any other large church). When you redefing the words being used you can demonstrate anything you want to.
The real Christian Church is all of God's people and what they stand for under God, and the real Catholic church is all the Catholics and what they stand for Under God, and they are part of the entire Christian Church
Without getting into the whole debate of which is more "real", the one that actually has any affect in this lifetime on this planet is the "people at the head of the church who are child molestors, rapists, heathens, in it only for the power trip, etc. etc. "
Those are real people doing real evil.
They are doing it all in the name of your god.
You can deny that they are "real" Christians all you want, but if you would stop long enough to have actually read my previous comment you would have seen me say just that.
That is, however, irrelevant.
Critize the actions of the people in the church who did wrong, not the Church itself.
Again using your new definition of "Church", it can by definition do no wrong.
Nobody in any power happens to belong to this church which you conveniently ignore.
Using the definition I was using, the Church is made up of these people who are utter scum, so since the church has more power than these people alone and that power is used almost exclusively to further their earthly goals of money power and domination, it is absolutely correct to criticize the church.
Again, this says nothing about Christians in general, except that if they happen to belong to one of these major churches then they are fools.