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AOL Sues Five Spam Companies
sugapablo writes "AOL has filed lawsuits against five spamming companies, seeking damages in the millions for unwanted email. As the AP reports, AOL hasn't actually figured out who all the defendants are though, filing the lawuits against some "John Does" and attempting to "subpoena service providers and others to try to track down the spammers"."
Haven't you ever put an AOL CD in the microwave? I get as many of those CDs as I can just for that purpose.
It wasn't locked down. It was running a stock NT4 (just like some of our customers). However there as a another box sitting between it and the wire that wasn't so eager to send packets off to port 25 on remote servers. The network looked like a connection with something funny going on. The result is that when the box came back on the net (it looks like a typical office machine behind a nated router), it would phone home and then a remote server would connect to the proxy that hte hackers insalled and try to send out messages. The 1st set of addresses go to a specifc set of addresses and then after a short time (if and only if the right address does get sent), then the box would get hit with hundreds of socket connections to its proxy. Once it did that it attempted to deliver a million or so messages in a very samll time. Once I had figured out their game, I could let their test messages through while blocking spam to most of the net. Most of the leaks involved @aol addresses because thats where the test accounts are. I faked accepance of about 5 million messages and flat out rejected millions more. I figure if this system had been up for more than about an hour (and truly open), it could have easly send a billion messages in a week.
In the local sage mailing list, someone mentioned that he hadn't gotten any spam that day. His email address was in the list list of stuff I rejected several times.
According to this article, he now runs a non-spam autoresponder service. But there are a good 150 hardcore spammers who took his place.
Huh? From my reading of this article, it sounds like the person whose information the RIAA was after had either shared or downloaded songs in violation of their copyright. Verizon's argument seems to revolve around the fact that the songs weren't being hosted on their servers, meaning that the DMCA should be inapplicable as a means of legally requiring the release of subscriber information.
I just don't see anything in the article that implies the RIAA was claiming "P2P always equals Piracy!" They were going after a specific person, and the article quantifies (although does not identify) the songs being shared. That's a far cry from the RIAA suing to find out the identities of anyone who runs KaZaA regardless of how they use it.
I personally like the tin cases they have been sending the CD's in lately. The AOL CD goes directly into the trash, and I fill the tin up with CD-R's.
--Drunk as in Beer
http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
What if AOL were to go to the Tier-1 ISPs that fail to enforce their terms of service against spammers, and say,
<voice character="ED-209">Your customers are in violation of your terms of service. You will terminate them. You have 15 hours to comply.</voice>
And should they fail to comply, null-route those Tier-1's at AOL's border routers.
What do you think Exodus, Verio, and UUNet would do when they faced the very real possiblity of being blocked from AOL?
www.eFax.com are spammers