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.
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 this some sort of performance-art piece? A spam about spam?
Next, I'll expect 1,024 identical stories about a Beowulf cluster.
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
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.
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?
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.