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 $7 million in damages as part of the Internet service providers' legal victory over a junk e-mail operation, AOL said Monday."
The company said the legal decision should send a warning to junk e-mailers.
"This is an important legal victory in the fight against spam," Randall Boe, AOL general counsel, said in a statement. "It sends a clear, distinct message to spammers: AOL is prepared to use all of the legal and technological tools available to shut down spammers."
" 145 pieces of spam so far today. Can I have a piece of the 7 million? (oops, duplicate. Oh well. It's still good ;)
But I'm soooo happy with AOL!
Either AOL wins a lot of anti-spam cases in Virginia or the editors at ./ post a lot of duplicate stories.
Hey, this article looks familiar.
This has to be the first the AOL has done that made me think well of them.
dupe
I'm not sure I heard you the second time.
/. spam: duplicated articles?
I have received... about 100 spams from AOL throw-away accounts since September 1st, 2002.
Does that mean I can sue them for... er... US$ 3.5m?
This being said, I am glad they won. Did I just say that? OMG... What is the world coming to if the Slashdot crowd is actually cheering AOL?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Be fair, the other story is right at the bottom, and maybe their mouse wheel is broken.
How, for instance, will it protect me from the trolls, flames, and abuses of Anonymous Cowards?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
In related news, CmdrTaco recently had to pay $0.25 to every /. reader for spamming their news pages with repeatative articles.
"Let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average." - A. W. Tozer
In other news, the USPS has sued AOL for hurting bandwidth.
First one who guesses which one gets posted three times (has *that* happened yet?) in a row wins the right to resubmit, and get published, and given story from this site. :)
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
Either your front page settings are different than mine, or your counting the YRO box on the righthand side of the screen. If it is the latter, the box was not on MY front page when I went looking for the article.
Besides, they did something good. Just make believe that this is for the people that missed it the first time (like I did).
-- derby
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?
So AOL gets 7 million for this... can I sue of at least 1 million for the AOL disks I get in snail mail once a week? They would save that much money by just not sending them to me.
No offence, but this is becoming a joke. How many dupes a week/day/hour are we up to nowadays? If the 'powers that be' don't even bother reading their own site, then why the hell don't they pass their mod status to someone who cares.
-- 7 string electric violin + live loop samplers
Couldn't posting the same stories over & over again be construed as spam?
Spamming us by saying the won a spam case.
Would you guys at least pay _some_ attention ?
CmdrTaco has been so busy with his new wife that he hasn't had time to read his own website. Kudos to Rob, living it up in conjugal bliss! In the meantime, maybe you should ask your coworkers when you come back from a night of playing "hide the potato sack" what they have posted over the last couple of days. Just an idea.
This story says that AOL got over $7 Million in a court case yesterday!
Wow, these guys might become profitable through worthwhile, even noble, court actions!
BRAVO AOL! BRAVO FEDERAL COURTS! (this time)
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Is this some sort of performance-art piece? A spam about spam?
Next, I'll expect 1,024 identical stories about a Beowulf cluster.
I'd never think AOL would do anything to further the progress of the world of the internet... what next, high speed, stable connections, great service, reliability? Hold on, I can supposedly grow 4 inches with this pill...
I thought we had maybe seen the last of the dupes, now king dupe himself dupes a damn post! Ack, its not even some obscure post either, it's AOL Vs. Spam!
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
Hopefully with a few more cases like this people may think twice before starting to spam. You don't make that much money from spamming and $7 million is a fairly hefty fine.
But if they sent about a billion emails it is still a fine of 0.7 cents per spam. Does someone know what the average profit is per spam?
(see this as well)
you can do better than that....I just read this yesterday, guess their trying to spam us with articles about spam
And the /. crowd is always crowing about their convoluted AI spam killers? Geez, Taco, you're letting us down. Wait, didn't Spamassassin come on that free TiBook bribe^H^H^H^H^Hdemo that you got from Apple?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
this will prolong their filing of chapter 11 a lil longer :P
Runnin' On Empty
Nah, they have their IE cache settings at "Check for new version = never", that's why there's dupes every other day.
Be fair, the other story is right at the bottom,
LOL.
Here's a link to the previous story. It will only be there for another day or two though.
There's a lot of people out of a job this Christmas-maybe it's time to change your priorities and lose (not loose) the smug demeanor at least for a few weeks.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
This is a duplicate reply to the one directly above it.
Granted, it probably wasn't there when you strarted typing, but even if you hadn't read the replies, you should have expected at least 4 out of the to 5 to be replies pointing out a duplicate post, so there is no excuse.
AOL to get fined for sending out spam CDs and the world will be a better place.
This is a troll. He makes a valid point. It is anoying that dupes are showing up. A DUPE mod would be usefull.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
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?
Maybe, when VA Whatever finally goes bust, Slashdot will be taken over by Google News and totally automated. That might be an improvement.
It wouldn't be hard. Google News can pick stories and can tell which articles go together. Just provide a set of selection criteria that match previous Slashdot history, and let it feed the Slashdot story engine.
When this machine learns your job, what are you going to do? - bus poster, 1970s
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Yes, the exact same story was posted yesterday, but obviously there is method in their madness. Since the first story came out at 5 PM (CST), I'm assuming that the East Coast had already gone home for the day.
/. reposts a story, realize that there are those that are less fortunate... :)
That same story of course would still be "fresh" for the Westies. So, in getting around this whole we-live-left-to-right instead of north-to-south issue, we need to repost some stories from time to time. Naturally, a good, fresh story that has gone "stale", may be, reposted to let those Easties catch up with the rest of us.
I'm sure there is an algorith that could take in the time it was posted, time left to view in the normal working hours, etc.
So the next time
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
This was the last story I read on /. this evening, and when I log in this morning, it's the first story I see. /., but everything else seemed to work, so I stormed into my sysadmin's office asking him why he was being so arbitrarily mean.
I thought I was stuck with a cached copy of
Had to walk out with a sheepish expression when I realized that I was complaining about something that was probably a dupe.
Or does it seems that "DUPE!" is rapidly replacing "FIRST POST" around here????
Inquiring minds want to know.
He just got back from his honeymoon and was probably distracted with.... umm.......
Divying up the souvenirs he bought us! Thats right.
I look forward to getting my dr_dank keychain from Vegas.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
If this case were the precedent for a multi million dollar, class action suit against those people that send out all those CDs in the mail.
Ah,sweet irony
The AOL users are the ones who were injured by all this spam, why is the money going to AOL and not distributed to all of it's user base in the past 4 years.
answer 1: Because the users did not press a lawsuit.
answer 2: The spam injured AOL by increasing their operating costs while driving away users.
answer 3: AOL has approximately 35 million users. The $7 million equals about 20 cents per user. After subtracting the legal expenses, postage, and costs to print and process 35 million checks, how much would be left? (hint: it's a negative number). Do the math before you post next time.
Whale
Going on SNL is a great way to make the people
think you are "hip" and "cool" and not as bad
as everybody thought you were. It totally worked
for Al Gore. AOL should hire Al Gore's agent.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Rob should remember what Robin Williams once said; "God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time."
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
Why is /. the only news site in the world that posts duplicates?? name me one other that has this problem... I dare ya.
I seriously want to know... WHY?
Should I be happy about spammers losing millions or sad about AOL winning court cases? It's difficult. :)
Do I hear an echo, or is there any new news here?
- passion
If you're looking for Old News for bored Nerds. Stuff that's been said already.
Point your browsers to Slashdupe.com All dupes all the time.
First story up at Slashdupe: Amelia Earhart Missing
Sigs are bad for your health.
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?
AOL/TW may be a huge media conglomerate, and their internet service may suck for geeks, but they are responsible at least in part for Mozilla, ICQ, Winamp (which is being ported to Linux), and send free coasters as a courtesy in the mail.
They are a media conglomerate, but they are about as non-evil as they get.
They are also Microsoft's second biggest problem, and anything that annoys them is fine by me.
An enemy of an enemy...
Back on topic, money seems to be the only thing spammers care about. $7 million is bound to be an eye opener.
Enough is enough. Time to check out osnews and ditch slashdot. I know I'm not the first to get tired of the repetition, but it's time someone starts calling for the mass exodus.
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
and be done with it.
I dunno Taco, are you an AOL user?
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
So who wants to take on the task of creating a site for what slashdot used to be?
I could have never fathomed a world where a news site had duplicate articles still on the main page!
How can we think this is anything but a ploy to reduce server load?
How can a site with such popularity have editors that don't even read the site?
There is a more important question to be asked first: will the defendant ever pay the $7M ? I yet have to hear of a major spam case where the defendants didn't get away with it afterwards, one way or another.
If you've got the much spam already today, you've got problems. Either you're giving out your email address to too many p0rn sites, or you haven't figured out to mask your email in newsgroups. Most spammers get email addresses from newgroup post headres. I used to get at least 20 spams a day, or more. Now I changed my email a few years ago, and used -NOSPAM@domain.net in my email address for newsgroups, and I only get about 3 per day (hardly noticeable). And if I'm not sure of a website's credibility, I give them my hotmail address. (which incidentally, now gets tons of SPAM. most likely due to the fact that I give it out all the time).
so I don't mind seeing a story that I might've missed. The people that complain about duplicate stories need to read the stories that interest them instead of worrying about repeat posts. Especially stories that are newsworthy or have 'legs', they can run them all week for all I care.
Duplicate stories seem to appear about every other day these days. Is this supposed to make me want to read the site, click on the ads, and post anything but trolls? Crapflooding is for ACs, not editors.
duh! - but it doesn't mean that it didn't hurt(annoy) them too.
I never said that the users were not annoyed. I simply said that their failure to file the lawsuit is why they have will not get money from the lawsuit.
I think AOL should also sue Amazon for all those extra emails its sending out to its users (again being cynical here)
Amazon does e-mail marketing right. It's an opt-in system. They send e-mails to people with whom they have an existing business relationship. The e-mails are sent from Amazon's servers, not some open relay in Korea. The e-mails include "unsubscribe" instructions that actually work. Amazon, to the best of my knowledge (and tracking) does not sell the e-mail addresses.
The whole idea of the original comment was a rant that although this may be a victory against spam it does not help all those people who were hurt by spam.
The spammer in question is unlikely to continue spamming AOL's users after that crippling loss. It is also likely that potential spammers, having seen news of the $7 million award, will reconsider their "business plan" and that will further reduce the amount of spam that pollutes the Internet in general. I see this as a big help to users.
I don't use AOL, but I know several ISPs who employ these and other forms of active, invasive, in-your-face advertising. Spam email is evil, don't get me wrong, but it's more of a passive evil.
Good victory for AOL, I just hope the money goes into getting their users better content on their pages, rather than going into R&D to find new ways of promoting their service.
I'm going to take advantage of a duplicate article, shamelessly grab a place near the top of the replies, and tell y'all how to fight back against spam.
1. Get a cheap discarded PC and install Linux on it. Get one of those 'always-on' net connections to your home, like DSL or a cable modem. You'll need a service plan that gives you a static IP address. Register a domain name of your very own, and use dyndns.org to point your domain name at your PC. This has the added benefit of letting you host your own web site on your own domain name if you want to.
2. Download the Exim mail server and install it on your PC, and set it up to accept email for you. You'll also want to set up an IMAP server so that you can fetch your email from the PC. Now you can make up any address you want on your new domain, and have mail sent to it reach you. This is great for when you need a one-time throwaway address for something.
3. Install SpamAssassin, and also install SA-Exim to link SpamAssassin with the Exim mail server. This will let the mail server identify and reject spam instead of only dealing with it after it's been accepted.
Once you run this for a while to make sure it's doing a good job of identifying spam, turn on Sa-Exim's teergrube ('tarpit') feature. Now, when someone tries to send you spam, your mail server will hold the spammer's connection open indefinitely by sending it occasional 'keepalive' messages without ever sending an accept or a reject. Once the spammer stumbles across enough teergrubes, the mail relay he's using will hit a process limit and be unable to continue sending spam until the spammer notices and resets it or moves on to another relay.
Teergrubing is a passive way of tying up a spammer's resources, or the resources of an open relay that's being abused by spammers. It has a negligible hit on your own resources. The more teergrubes (and honeypot web pages which feed spamtrap addresses to address harvesters) pop up out there, the harder it will be for a spammer to simply spam millions of people with the touch of a button.
It is possible to MOD the comments but not the stories themselves. We need an ability to MOD the story.
I tired of seeing dupe stories. It is happending to often.
Sorry, I wasn't clear the first time.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, Slashdot gave to me:
...
12 links to goatse.cx
11 Rants about DMCA
10 All your bases
9 "In soviet Russia's..."
8 Posts a duplicated
7 Grits a'hotting
6 BEOWULF CLUSTERS!
5 Cowards a'nnonymising (...)
4 Business plans
3
2 Profit!!
And a CowboyNeal in a pear tree.
Hey, tripe! Now I can train my Nethack puppy /. to steal articles!
Here is the BBC's slant on things.
I never apologise, I'm sorry but that's just the way I am - Homer
Now they have to be more careful, and spend more money to cover there tracks up, which will indicates that the cost of every piece of spam will increase. Making their customers find alternate means of advertising.
so these 7 million dollars is an indication that there will be a shift in power. Because this hits them (the spammers) where it hurts.. in the wallet...
so kudos AOL for doing something good!!!
Let us moderate stories, but leave the default threshold at -1. That way, only the power users who really care about that sort of thing will turn it on, and the more casual users who aren't really bothered won't have to see it.
What do you think?
Could an automated dupe checker be created? When posting an article it could check if it has the same links as a previous article, has similar words in the title and text, etc.
Slashdot has plenty of material to test it with and fine-tune it.
This actually sounds like an interesting project. Maybe something like this ?
Hey, it's uninformed platform zealot man!
If Alt-130 is too hard, try AltGr-E.
Tim
"145 pieces of spam so far today. Can I have a piece of the 7 million? (oops, duplicate. Oh well. It's still good ;)"
That clever bit of wittiness... "can I have a piece of the 7 mil", yeah, that's too good a joke to waste so we don't mind the duplication.
If you think of yet another joke on the same topic, by all means post away!
the Lord sometimes uses even the most evil people/organizations for good :o)
(not my idea, but..) why not just have links within the story compared to previous stories? Seems like this would be pretty accurate and cut down on 80% of the dupes.
You wankers!
This showed up in my e-mail inbox today, sent from a friend. It's a little less DIY than the parent poster's solution, but it's all right too:
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 13:18:16 -0500
I declare December 2, 2004 to be "the end of spam" day.
As of December 2nd, everyone has to use a new e-mail protocol which fixes the fundamental problem of SMTP: untrusted sources.
The new protocol isn't "new". It's just that on Dec 2, 2004, everyone should stop accepting SMTP connection that don't use the STARTTLS extension to SMTP as described in RFC2487.
STARTTLS has the benefit of creating Received: headers that are cryptographically signed, and therefore meaningful. Internet email is sent like a bucket-brigade... you send your email to your ISP, which passes it on to another ISP, which passes it to another mail server, which sends it to final receiver's mail "Inbox". With STARTTLS, there is an audit path of who passed the email alone each "hop". There is still a possibility that you won't know who the original sender is, but you know the first ISP that let that message into the system. That's good enough.
After Dec 2, 2004: when you receive email that is spam, you will be able to identify which server let the spam into the Internet. That site can be punished, by starting a DoS attack against it, or by declaring the site to be "terrorist" at which point the Bush Administration, which will have just won re-election (and being in its last term will have no need to follow any laws) will bomb the email server. They will be given 24 hours notice, 48 if it is a 3-day weekend. Bombing will not happen if the owner of the mail system can demonstrate which user sent the spam, and that they have been removed from the system. With the threat of being bombed, mail system administrators will be under extreme pressure to make sure that all email that leaves their systems is certifiably marked by the actual creator. (Thus fixing the "but who was the original sender?" issue). Then we can arrest the user that sent the spam.
I encourage all countries to make it illegal to send email that is unreplyable. Thus making it possible to use "active filtering" systems, which accept email from "known good parties" and everyone else receives an automated reply saying, "If you want to get on my 'known good' list, here's how...". With STARTTLS in use, we can track down who is permitting unreplyable email into the Internet, and bomb them.
Before Dec 2, 2004 all mail systems should begin deploying STARTTLS. It is backwards compatible with older mail systems. It doesn't require the risky and dangerous "throw the switch day" conversions like some new computer systems. While I'm at it, Wietse Venema should be gagged and bound to his computer until he merges in the "STARTTLS" patch to Postfix.
Before Dec 2, 2004, email client authors should add features that let users see which email they would have missed if the post-Dec 2, 2004 policies had been in place. (Simply mark the message a special color if any of the Received: lines are from non-TLS systems.) This will encourage users to apply pressure to their friends to move to STARTTLS-enabled ISPs.
Finally, you might be asking, "How did you pick December 2nd?" The answer is quite simple. It's my birthday and I can't think of a better birthday present I could receive than the end of spam.
Can you?
Sincerely,
Tom Limoncelli
Of course, read with tongue in appropriate position, ie. in cheek.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
The company will declare bankrupcy, sell all the assets to a brand new company which just happens to have the same president as the old one, and be back sending spam out within a month.
At least it's a moral victory I suppose... But you're naive if you think it'll make a dent in the spam that's going out, or in the spammer's bank account for that matter.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
...is that the $7 million will just be used to spam the rest of us with about 700 million more free AOL CDs....
--Ariston
"I'm never wrong--sometimes reality just disagrees with me."
You're happy with AOL? Well I'm happy with Spam Interceptor. I don't need 7 million dollars to stop spammers.
ender-iii
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
Just a little reminder here. AOL has all sorts of snail mail spam going out to people. Has anyone ever tried to get this shut off? Good luck. Is there an opt in for this stuff? No. Is there any sort of opt out for it? Not that I have ever seen. I bet if there was an opt out phone number on the back AOL would take this information and sell it to partners. I find all the AOL CD displays at retail stores annoying as well. www.nomoreaolcds.com (as seen on slashdot) talks about this just a bit. I really think it would be great to start up some sort of class action law suit against them for mailing this crap out to pepole. Or hell any of the 30 different places that send me crap in the mail on a weekly basis.
The most interesting part of this story was the link at the bottom, IE has a flaw where you can be owned by viewing a PNG. Curious that this wasn't reported on slashdot so far, I sense a 'Submit Story' link calling my name...
story dupes YOU!
I can't believe nobody's mentioned this, or if they have, I must've missed it... but: How come AOL can fight email spammers yet can flood every physical home address in the western world with those shitty AOL trial floppies and CD's? They must've produced millions of that landfill candy.
Confucious says: Man who runs behind car gets exhausted.
// jeku.com
Maybe the spammer should be forced to personally write a check for 40 cents to each and every person he spammed?
(Better not have an account with per check fees)
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
"Multiply in your head" (ordered the compassionate Dr. Adams) "365,365,365,
365,365,365 by 365,365,365,365,365,365". He [ten-year-old Truman Henry
Safford] flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the
tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes
smiling and talking, and then seeming to be in an agony, until, in not more
than one minute, said he, 133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,225!"
An electronic computer might do the job a little faster but it wouldn't be
as much fun to watch.
-- James R. Newman, "The World of Mathematics"
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