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 ;)
Either AOL wins a lot of anti-spam cases in Virginia or the editors at ./ post a lot of duplicate stories.
I'm not sure I heard you the second time.
Be fair, the other story is right at the bottom, and maybe their mouse wheel is broken.
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. :)
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?
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.
Is this some sort of performance-art piece? A spam about spam?
Next, I'll expect 1,024 identical stories about a Beowulf cluster.
AOL to get fined for sending out spam CDs and the world will be a better place.
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?
Uh, doesn't the fact that hotmail accounts that are unused get tons of spam suggest that they're not listening to their customers as much as they are selling their customer lists to spammers?
That's, to me, decidedly not a Good Thing.
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
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"
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.
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.
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
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'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.