Slashdot Mirror
Web Site Sues Annoying Pest Troll
kongjie writes "Cleveland's The Plain Dealer has a story in the business section about a pest-control web site that is suing someone who obviously has a particular bone to pick with exterminators: he is accused of being a "troll" who "constantly leaving obnoxious and offensive messages" on their pest-control bulletin board. The suit is for $5,000 and is for "violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.""
I can see Slashdot's new business model...
(just kidding...)
I think sterner measures need to be taken. Such as having spammers and trolls fight to the death in a pit for our amusement.
That you've resorted to trolling a pest-control web site?
To make your analogy more accurate. The homeless man was going into the restraunt, goosing the waitresses, yelling and throwing stuff until the customers left.
Once you visit someone elses site you abide by THIER rules. You want free speach? Make your own site then you can say whatever you want.
Actually, by signing up for that forum he accepted an agreement that he could be banned for hateful speech, etc. When he did so, he then (This is what I'm getting from the story) ban evaded and did it some more.
You can scream 'FARK THE USA' on the street all you want... just don't go into corner store and start doing it.
I am a filthy pirate.
Being a jerk shouldn't be illegal / a suable thing.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
And if he kept sneaking into my business to do his musical number, I have the right to have him charged for tresspassing.
Freedom of speech does not mean you get to use other people's property (in this case, a website) to practice it.
But then again, I could be wrong.
"It sounds in part that this [lawsuit] highlights the lack of public spaces on the Internet," Seltzer said. "I would be more comfortable saying they could kick off whoever they wanted if there was someplace else they could tell him to go."
:)
He doesn't get out much, does he?
When you open your site up to anyone, and make the process of getting an account public and easily accessable, you've just created a public space. The vast majority of web-based message boards are this way. No identity verification, no scrutinized application process, no requirements (except possibly vowing that you're over 18). The act of getting an account on these boards is almost totally geared toward providing a constant on-line identity in the forums, but it has nothing to do with who you are in meatspace.
That being said, I'm fine with this lawsuit. It takes money and resources to create such a forum, even if it's free to use. I'm posting on Slashdot's dime right now, in fact.
There are plenty of places for boneheads to go. Selzer's particular place has been targetted for asshole bombardment, and that sucks.
Maybe he should implement a Karma scheme?
GMFTatsujin
However, if this hypothetical homeless man were in your living room with his drum, he would be trespassing on your property and you could request that he beats his drum elsewhere.
If he were to continually sneak in to your house every time you kicked him out, would you not take action against him?
I've run message boards in the past - there are always a few bad apples, and I inevitably got/get others saying
"I'm on board X (running software Y) and they just ban someone - you're stupid cause you can't ban someone."
I try to stress to people you CAN NOT ban someone technically in forums on the internet. Well, not easily. Certainly without putting up roadblocks which just annoy the rest of the people.
What can you do?
1. Require username/password - unless these are paid for, it's hard to stop people from registering
2. Require a reply to email (or click on a link) to verify an email address. Big deal - so I know you know how to open a hotmail account.
3. Track IPs and ban on that - great, except for people on dialups, or shared systems, or mobile people.
4. Require moderators to review and approve all posts before they go out. Most reliable, but requires increasing staff time/cost as traffic grows.
There is NO foolproof way to stop this sort of stuff. I hope this suit sends a message to those trolls who waste/abuse resources and do not heed polite requests to play by the rules the rest of us follow.
I'm normally not in favor of legal tactics, and generally favor technical answers to technical problems, but this isn't a technical problem. It's a behavioural one, and we have a legal system in place to deal with bad/wrong/illegal behaviour.
creation science book
Jon Katz, a freelance writer and dog enthusiast, was arrested and jailed with no bail for attempting to delete an old work of his that falls under the new anti-troll act.
If found guilty, his punishment could range anywhere from a fine of $500 to a sentence of 2 years of jail time during which he would be forced to read his old Slashdot articles 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday, until released.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
But Free Speech doesn't apply when you're on private property. On my "land" I CAN tell you what you are and are not allowed to do and say. And on the net, it's ALL private property, so I CAN tell you to go piss up a rope. I agree it's extreme, so does their lawyer, but it seems to me that as time goes on, trolls are getting WORSE. They're not just leaving nasty and annoying messages by the ton, they're resorting to DDoS attacks, IRC flooding, attempting domain "theft", spam attacks, and a host of other extreme measures. I'm somewhat torn over this too, but from the story, I'm leaning towards their side, to sue. He's cut traffic, thus potentially threatening their revenue stream. That's real damage, not just a poor response to name calling.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
That you've resorted to trolling a geek news web site?
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Freedom of speech is not freedom of action. You cant be prosecuted for anything you believe, or expressing those beliefs. But you can be for harassment, trespassing, indecent behaviour, public drunkeness, etc.
Too many people act like shitbags then try and hide behind 'freedom of speech'.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
1. build popular website, attracting many thousands of trolls
2. sue trolls, total=$5k*(number of trolls)
3. profit!!!
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
As others have already pointed out, free speech is not absolute. When you access a web page or web board, you are agreeing to adhere to the rules of that forum because the website (contrary to many people's beleifs) is not public property.
Second, though the drummer may not be arrested for merely drumming and chanting, he can be arrested under charges of Disorderly Conduct and Disturbing the Peace if:
enough people complain about him
he causes interference with the normal course of business on that street
he degrades the business occuring in the shops on that street
You have the right to free speech, but not to be destructive.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I don't think the people behind this suit are particularly adept. Block the IP. If that doesn't do it contact their provider. If that doesn't work start blocking the whole IP range owned by that person's ISP.
If the guy has to find a whole new ISP just to post a message that will be killed by a moderator in a few hours he's not going to be doing it for long.
The only way I can see this not being a good idea is if the ISP in question is sufficiently large AND sufficiently unresponsive to your complaints, but I don't see that as being the case here. I think they're spending a whole lotta money on something they're going to lose anyway.
My
Limekiller
In a truly public space, yes.
This case is more like a troublemaker walking into a bar, shouting at everyone in the room at the top of his lungs, and demanding his right to pee on their shoes as a speech action. I don't have any problem with bouncers (in the employ of the guy who pays the rent on the building) showing guys like this the door.
This guy wasn't walking down a public street. He was abusing a privately controlled, open space. He was repeatedly making a disturbance that violated the agreement as to his conduct he made when he walked in the door. He was warned, bounced, but kept coming back. Effectively, he was tresspassing, and thus, legal action can and should be taken.
Open forum on the Internet !== non-regulated open space.
GMFTatsujin
That's close, but it's more like the troll did the same thing with 50 robots and whores so that no one could even get in the door, much less carry on a conversation or enjoy being there.
I like this and hope all the Steve Barktos and their company sponsors are ruined. That's right, whores, I'd like to see you lose your jobs, houses and reputations for such activity.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think this is a cut and dry case of a company prematurely jumping into a matter whole, hog.
Any system or forum administrator worth his salt could easily block a range of IP addresses as well as some of the more popular proxy servers that allow deviant trolls to sneak through and continue posting.
Just look at Slashdot and Kuro5hin. Rob and Rusty both, respectfully, understand the dynamics of Web communities and know that court isn't how to solve trivial little troll problems. All you do is give a person a very friendly time out period during which they can't post and you're home free.
The problem here is not trolls or Internet arguers. The problem here is talent, and this pest control company doesn't have anyone in their IT department with half a brain.
K5 and Slash are still running strong through years of low budgets, high troll/contributor ratios, and Dot Com busts. It's not rocket scientry, folks, it's just simple, kind administration on the part of Rusty and Rob Malda.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
When you sue someone, you are generally not limited to recovering actual damages. You can sue for punitive damages as well, to deter the defendant (and others like him) from repeating his actions in the future -- which would require further intervention of the legal system.
Depending on how much time and effort (and legal bills) GIE has invested to keep him off their forums, and how much damage their reputation has lost because of the trolls on their forums, I can believe $5000 is the actual damages. An organization I work with has persistent trolls, and we spend a huge amount of time to remove them when they act up.
I wonder, though, if GIE has talked to the guy's ISP(s) and reported him for abuse. In my experience, that is much more effective than trying to unmask and sue someone over the Internet.
Miss Selzer is a lawyer for the EFF. She also created the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. As far as I know, she has no relation to the pest-control website. She was simply interviewed for the story.
She was commenting that most web forums are privately owned, so if this ruling stands, trolls can be kicked off virtually any website. Note, she didn't actually take a stance on the case, she simply suggested she was uncomfortable with it.
The idea that a commercial entity can incur an actionable loss because of the freedom of speech is a new and dangerous trend in our society
No it isn't. It's called private property and the principle has been around just as long as the first amendment. If you make noise on my property, I can kick you off. No questions. If you make noise in the street, I can't do anything about it. The web site could easily be considered private property and posting to the site would require the visitors abide by the terms of use. If they don't fine, they have to go do their own website.
This has nothing to do with corporate entities imposing censorship. It has everything to do with private property and the user thereof.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Is it possible that the website owners are not as much interested in winning a lawsuit as they are getting this guy to stop interfering with their business? I'd bet they're hoping to settle out of court. Apologize and leave us alone, and we'll drop the case against you.
<:
Certainly you're right. But it's not the fact that they're suing "for money" that bothers me, what else can you sue for? What bothers me is that they're suing at all.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
They've simply refused to put themselves in a constantly reactive state. They are taking some action to establish a precedent that you must abide by their TOS, or face REAL consequences, not simply 'you can't post for 2 hours' or some other slap on the wrist.
PCT seems to be an association or industry portal of some sort - they're servicing a number of pest control companies. Their forum users aren't there to get into popularity contests with 'friends/foes' and moderation totals and all that crap - they're there to exchange business information. Other 'social engineering' answers simply burden the rest of the users who are abiding by the rules.
Block by IP and you potentially block other members. Require moderator approvals and you lose the 'real time' aspect of the forum.
IT people want to look for technical solutions to this because it keeps them in a position of power. If this lawsuit is successful, you won't have to rely on your IT people as much to keep a lid on technical problems. There will hopefully be one more precedent which establishes that 'stop' means 'stop', and there will be a financial penalty for failing to comply.
creation science book
for every 200 trolls on slashdot. thats a million bucks!
Nice try, mathboy. That's only 100k.
-72
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
That someone started taking these irresponsible cretins to task. I applaud this action. For anyone who wants to cry "free speach", it should be noted that the server, bulletin board, and services involved were totally private in nature. That, and this twonk had to get through some kind of agreement prohibitig such behavior in order to gain access. I'm constantly amazed that people seem to think that because a forum is on the Internet that it somehow enjoys some additional protections covering anything you want to say. If you own the equipment, you get to decide what gets done with it, and who can use it.
"first psot!"
/. 5000 clams. Best pay up before they exterminate you.
For your failure, and your troll, you now owe
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
What "rules"? You want rules now on the Internet? Are you insane?
/. does to ACs (oh, you didn't know? You can't post more than 10 posts a day; they log your IP; they don't respond to emails even though they throw a form up; in the chances that you do, they are clueless with their own error IDs; so if you "catch up" on /. for a week, you're screwed even if all you post are URLs for others to find additional info).
If the government and corporations had their way, they'd slam down every irate customer or voter out there.
Look, site manager's know this--you moderate or you don't. You require logins or you don't. If it's private site, then they can restrict him by the moderation or login requirements and a site usage agreement. If it's a public forum, then it's a public forum. He has the right to express himself on their site; they have the right to restrict him through blocking, etc., just as
It's amazing the number of sites that get by without using federal law to help them, and yet you somehow find validity in this absolutely frivolous BS argument of "play by the rules." It's their forum. It's theirs to manage. If they can't, that's their stinkin problem. You EASILY have more solutions, strategies, and recourse than real life physical moderation, and in the latter case, most of us would not stand our free speech rights being slammed shut (of course, there are numerous limits you could site, but the general scenario of a fellow on the street corner with a sign in front of a business is legal expression, despite the many laws, usually local, regarding conduct, profanity, slander, libel, disorderly conduct, etc.).
Play by the rules. Gee whiz. Down the page, you have network associates stifling reviews of their own product, which they release for sale to the public. Pathetic that the legality of such conduct is even in play, and you want now to "play by the rules." Yeah, you and what other obstinate whiners?
Which chin? I'm sure he's got several
While you are generally correct, if the bum said "fuck" while expressing political speech, most good judges would be less inclined to punish him than if he were merely using the word to harass women.
What we really need to know, is how the ammendment does apply to this. For instance, if the bum goes into the corner grocery, does the same thing... he could be prosecuted for trespassing. But what if someone had a business with the primary purpose of allowing someone to speak their opinion? In the real world, there is no such thing that I'm aware of. But on the internet, slashdot certainly comes to mind, and possibly kuro5hin is an even better example. Would it be wrong to ban only some of those that want to express their opinion, while allowing others?
And if so, to what degree does this bulletin board accomplish the same purpose? Their primary business isn't providing a forum like slash or kuro5hin, but it does somehow seem deceptive of them to only want to allow "good speech". Would there be any difference if the guy were telling nasty truths about the company, instead of outright trolling?
I'd be much more comfortable if they were suing for slander/libel, to be honest. Then it could be decided solely on what he said, and how true it was. They'd still nail him, without reinforcing the power to silence anyone they didn't like.
Mind you, they already have that power technically, but it doesn't mean they have the moral right to use it capriciously.
"the rules" of their website - not 'the rules' of the internet. No one said about 'rules of the internet'.
Quit being so damned whiney about this. It's pct's forum, they can do what they want.
creation science book
I think it's a bad thing, and they could've taken more measures (even as
Why? Why in the world should they have to hire moderators or anything else to get rid of some a$$hole who has nothing better to do with his time?
If he came into their physical place of business and did that, they'd be expected to ask him to leave and not come back (like they did on the web). Failing that, they'd be well within their rights to have him arrested for tresspass and thrown in jail. On the web, they just sued him.
Personally, I think the troll should get paddled in public until blisters form, but that's not a legal option in the U.S.
A troll of this nature is no better than someone who sits down at other partie's tables in a restarant and starts spewing obscenities for no apparent reason night after night.
I do have a problem with ISPs limiting what users can say on their personal website, but that doesn't mean other people's websites should be used instead.
but the general scenario of a fellow on the street corner with a sign in front of a business is legal expression
That would be like making your own website complaining about the company. 'Entering" their website and using their boards is more akin to walking into the store, taking their paper, using their markers, making a sign, and protesting inside the store.
--Kevin
Actually it's more like this: the homeless man walks into the restaurant, one which advertises itself as a place specifically friendly to women in technology, carrying stinkbombs, very nasty gay pr0n and spouting obscenities. The homeless man also beat up on the proprietor.
The proprietor of the restaurant doesn't call the police or sue the homeless man, she calls the director of the homeless man's shelter and tells them of the incident. The homeless man is then told by the shelter he is not welcome there anymore and to find one of the other many shelters in or out of the town. She is then forced to hire bouncers to protect the restaurant from future molestation.
The homeless man finds a new shelter, then contacts his buddy trolls-under-the bridges and tells them "Open Season on Ms. Geek's!" They then start attacking the building the restaurant rents, vandalizing it, even to the point of setting up wiretaps in the building's trunk phone line.
The owner of the building suggests that maybe Ms. Geek's should find a new location. The proprietor of the restaurant decides that rents are too high, the frustration factor is way too much, and most people who were visiting the restaurant were checking out the menu, admiring what other people were eating, then deciding "oh no, I mustn't sit down and eat, it's too fattening."
So Ms. Geek's goes out of business thanks to that homeless troll and his buddies. Next week, a Starbuck's opens up in its place. Thanks a lot, WIPO, Vladinator and the rest of you.
Ms. Geek
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
There's good trolls and there's bad trolls. As a slashdot reader I find some funny. As a messageboard administrator, I hope they make an example out of this guy, would save me a shitload of hassle. One troll I've dealt with repeatedly posted personal attacks against various members of several forums I admin at, did everything he could to piss off as many people as possible (it's a site about a game series so basically he posted spoilers absolutely everywhere), then after being banned registered a slew of accounts and flooded the general discussion forum with crap. Having cleared that up and banned the source IPs he then used about fifty different open proxies to slip around -- got to the point where I just customized the forums to send me a message over Jabber every time someone registered and let me watch their first steps then decide whether or not it's a troll; I'm sure I roasted more than one account as a false positive. That's not counting the personal attacks on me and my AIM getting flooded with crap, as well as impersonations of me and various others on AIM and IRC or whatever; social-engineered an admin password off another site I go to this way and then deleted the entire database.
I dunno what's worse; the trolls or the fact that there's an ever growing number of people at the site who find him hilarious and egg him on. Though they're a minority, most people quite publicly think he's a twat. He's stopped attacking forums but continues to infest IRC.
To cut a long story short then, there are some sad, sad individuals like this, and someone or other always has to deal with them. The more people like this get publicly and painfully burned, the better. It's all fun and games until you really make it your mission to just piss everyone off.
This guy is an idiot who deserves to lose in court. If someone wants to run a message board purely for exterminators to discuss their occupational issues, that's their right. If some idiot won't adhere to their use policy and repeatedly tries to interfere with their site, it's their right to boot him. Technical and legal means are both valid ways of doing this. The latter is valid, IMHO, because it's a much more powerful deterrent, and detracts less from the webmaster's daily work. Even /. can't keep the trolls away through technical means w/o crippling the site in unpleasant ways.
/. folks have cause a horde of infantile nerdlings to bombard the pest control message board with goatse photos and the like. I feel sorry for them - both the message board people and the idiot trolls (or crapflooders, rather) bombarding the site, though for different reasons.
Of course, having posted this story here, the
A photography message board I once frequented was eventually killed due the the actions of one - ONE - extremely persistent, incredibly prolific and mindblowingly obnoxious, teenage troll.
When reason inevitably failed (and since when have zit-faced virgin trolls ever been capable of reason...?), the board ops appealed to their ISP, their local police, then finally -- in desperation -- the FBI, but were told by almost everybody in a position to help to essentially f*ck off and stop wasting everybody's time with such nonsense. The fact that the troll was probably breaking numerous laws didn't seem to matter.
When they invoked the specter of legal action, their ISP's so-called security team laughed and suggested they get "Mulder and Scully" onto the case.
Only if they are giving away paper and markers to everybody who comes in to allow us to post on the wall testemonials about how good their product is. Once they do that, they really should not be allowed to sue for somebody writing that they suck.
Especially if they do, in fact, suck.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
...since this got posted on /., this board is going to get attacked by a whole army of crapflooders. Maybe this story should have not gotten through the submission process...if the poor devils who run the board think they had troubles with this one guy, just wait.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The very act of requiring registration ends up cutting down the number of posts a web site receives. I know that I hardly ever post on a web site that requires registration, Slashdot is pretty much the exception for me. I wouldn't have even registered on Slashdot if it required me to put down easily identifiable personal information.
Even if the website in question did have people register, it would have needed a sure way to identify registrants, such as by credit card number. It said in the article that the troll's username was banned but the guy snuck back under other names. Unless they could find a sure way to identify the guy (such as Microsoft's Passport **shudder**), they couldn't stop the guy from posting.
It comes down to this: require people to totally identify themselves (thus causing them to ignore the site), or take the chance that you won't get trolled and leave the site open to all. Trolls are the ones that are driving stuff like Passport and national ID numbers, if people didn't abuse the privacy that certain forums provide then there wouldn't be a need to pin people down with big brother tactics.
Sapere aude!
Make trolls foes, and No More Trolls (544787) a friend; then in Comment Options set foe and foes of friends to -6.
The existence of public space doesn't mean that anybody's obligated to show up at your web site and listen to you, or that anybody's SMTP server is obligated to accept your requests to connect to their Port 25*, any more than the existence of public parks and legality of soapboxes means that anybody's obligated to stick around and listen to you rant about space aliens' plots to destroy us all with volcanoes, but if you've gotten thrown out of the pub because you were rudely yelling at everybody about why they should buy canned meat from you, the commons and the high seas are still public space. The internet works through cooperation, and if nobody wants to cooperate with you because you won't cooperate with them, well, perhaps their lives are drearier for it, or perhaps not.
There are ways in which private groups are trying to take over public space. Various proposals for "internet drivers' licenses" and various governments' restrictions on their citizens' free speech and freedom to read are obvious examples. Australia's attempts to extend local defamation law around the world are especially disturbing, given the number of regimes that make "defaming the state" illegal. ICANN's main objective seems to be to assert trademark-owners' control over the namespace, and secondarily to make sure that some service providers always make money on namespace, rather than to provide technical management and high-quality implementations. You can see this especially in their insistence that registrars get your True Name and True Subpoena-Delivery Address for whois records and publish them, rather than insisting that your Technical and Administrative email addresses go somewhere that doesn't bounce and maybe even get a human to respond. Some big ISPs periodically try to attract customers to a Walled Garden that doesn't really access the full Internet, and the market gradually tells them that people want more than that - that's why AOL now lets you fetch real web pages as well as AOL-provided content, and cellphone WAP systems aren't getting the respect their purveyors expected, so they're trying to find better ways to get real Internet content and not just newswires. The cable modem companies are the big exceptions right now, by trying to prevent their users from running "servers" from home (there were initially some technical reasons for this, but it was always basically the fear that they might not be in control.) That hasn't killed them all yet, though @Home's really dead, and their quasi-monopoly status and TV-content-pusher background has made it take longer for them to realize that they need active users to generate interesting content and develop the Killer Apps that will make everybody else buy cable modem, but they'll get there. The kinds of people who want to tell Google how to rank their pages because everybody uses Google to search the web are another example, not realizing that the reason that everybody uses Google is *because* of the way they rank their pages, and if they want to have a "politically correct web search ranking" system, which is really just an outlet for their own speech and ideas, they should use the Internet's public-space capability, set out their own soapbox with a big "politically correct searches here" sign over it, and hope the public shows up.
* There's a corrolary to Godwin's Law which says that all discussions that don't trigger the primary form of it will eventually devolve into discussions about spam.... But then Godwin also used to be an EFF lawyer...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Trolls sue YOU!
Why bother.
IANALBMFUTDO (I am not a lawyer but my father used to date one), and she said that the reason that people will sue for an amount less than $10,000 is that they're counting on the defendant to settle. According to her, it costs more than that to defend yourself, so it's cheaper to settle.
Why don't they just use moderation, like slashdot and kuro5hin do?