Slashdot Mirror
AOL Awarded Millions in Spam Case
c.derby writes "MSNBC.com is running a story that says: " 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."
The company said the legal decision should send a warning to junk e-mailers.
"This is an important legal victory in the fight against spam," Randall Boe, AOL general counsel, said in a statement. "It sends a clear, distinct message to spammers: AOL is prepared to use all of the legal and technological tools available to shut down spammers."
" 145 pieces of spam so far today. Can I have a piece of the 7 million? (oops, duplicate. Oh well. It's still good ;)
If Microsoft did this (MSN actually), would you be proud of them? Just curious. :-)
Can all fish swim?
And how much will the customers be awarded off of AOLs spam? Oh yeah, that's the "good" spam. Right. Forgot.
In Soviet Russia, the stories dupe Slashdot... or something. Damn, this never gets old! Ayahahaha! Um... Nevermind.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Also, (-1 Troll) and (-1 Flamebait) would be nice, too.
Is AOL keeping all the money and doing nothing for it's users? Or is it going to do something to redistribute it's winnings, like refunds or discounts on on-line fees for a few months?
The exact same thing happens with magazine editors, who generally burn out and leave within three years of taking the top job. There's just something in the nature of publishing new stuff all the time that, for most people (Lewis Lapham and the top-shelf magazine editors excepted), seems to create all kinds of problems.
Well, enough griping--a solution would be easy. Either:
1) Taco and the other burnouts concentrate on creating a viable business model, and allow some enthusiastic fresh blood in to post stories. This would be harder than it sounds, as finding smart people you can trust to post relevant stuff isn't easy.
or
2) A small group of daily readers is assembled, whose job is to check stories for possible dupes before they get posted on the main page.
A solution to Slashdot's increasing lack of professionalism would be easy. And it's well past time.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Come on Taco, you guys can code. Simply write a routine to do some sort of word comparison between the story you're publishing, and say the last week's worth of stories. Any stories with a number of matches above a certain threshold would show you the list of "similar" articles. You could then probably tell from the headline alone if the story you're posting is a duplicate or not. How tough would that be?
Duplicate story, duplicate post:
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
I did almost exactly this approach. It worked well for me until I discovered I wasn't allowed to use a mail server! The two broadband providers I have available are Charter Pipeline and SBC-Yahoo DSL, and they both ban mail servers in their AUP. So now I'm scrambling to migrate my mail off of my dyndns.org address.
It doesn't help either that various ISPs block outgoing and/or incoming port 25 or prevent you from using a "From" address other than the address they give you. All of my anti-spam techniques keep getting killed by the ISP anti-spam measures.
You're happy with AOL? Well I'm happy with Spam Interceptor. I don't need 7 million dollars to stop spammers.
ender-iii