Habeas Seeks Poetic Justice for Trademarked Spam

Remember the company who started using haiku to fight spam? According to a news.com article, it will now be tested in court. Habeas is suing two internet marketers, saying that they've included Habeas' haiku in their mail, thereby lowering their SpamAssassin score by 6 points, but allegedly violating the trademark. It's interesting because the end effect of this will be more or less spam, but it's based on trademark law. It'll also be interesting to see how well this holds up across national boundaries.

Comments

Tagging

[rf0]

Well I hope that the spammers get whats coming to them. Keeping stats of my email recently there has been a dramatic rise in the amount of spam I've been getting I've thankful for spamassasin to filter off all the crap.As a slight aside I found out today that debian charges $1000 for each advert (spam) posted to the list. Now that is a cool policy :)

Rus

$100 reward for information about a spammer

[Animats]

I, John Nagle, owner of the US registered trademark "Downside", will pay $100 to the first person who can provide to me the identity of the actual person or persons behind any of the following sites:

• girlswhocry.net
• contipay.com
• profitabill.com

Why? I've received over 16,000 mail bounces from spam advertising these sites. They, or some person associated with them, has been spamming with "downside.com" return addresses.

Rules and comments:

• I already know what Whois and traceroute will tell me, and I know who hosts those sites. That's not helpful. I do have information that indicates that the operation is inside the United States. So I will only pay for a US name and address at which a process server can deliver a summons.
• The sites for "contipay.com" and "profitabill.com" look like sites of businesses that do billing for third parties. They're not real companies; they're false fronts.
• These sites have changed hosting providers and billing arrangements since I started looking for them and talking to their hosting providers. But they tend to stay up, although they move around.

I can be reached at "spammersearch@downside.com". Thank you.

How to beat the spam detectors

[tramm]

If I were to ever become a spammer, I would:

• send my mail with gnus (-6.4 points)
• add an 'X-Cron-Env' header (another -6.4 points)
• add a fake 'In-reply-to' (-3.3 points)
• include the sendmail X-Auth warning (-1.008 points)
• have a sig dash with dense sig (another -6.4 points)
• include some diff -u output (-6.027)
• Have 'foo@bar wrote:' attribution (-6.6)
• Have quote text (-3.3)
• Fake a good Exchange ID (-5.8)

At this point, the message has a -45.135 bonus and would have to be super spam to be scored as spam. Let's hope none of those scum read the comments on Slashdot...

We need a new protocol for mail

[infernalC]

Internet springtime
the academics messaged
amongst their boxen

the diverse systems
without the scourge of commerce
by s m t p

cooperated
microsoft and sun and dec
unisys, hp

then came eye candy
if you build it they will come
e-commerce flourished

summertime came soon
venture capital dodo
the money dried up

quick buck was desired
send lots of mail to granny
she is rich and dumb

in greed's bosom born
marketing technique evil
electronic mail

spam spam spam spam spam
filtering is most futile
protocol not good

header forging easy
there must be a better way
new rfc please

even with new way
migration would be a bitch
forget about it