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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"."
A major spamer just hit one of my test boxes and in the millions of messages that went to my logging server, there are clues into who is behind some of this.
I know its not a unique thought, and it's not quite the same thing, but
I find this such utter hypocrisy as their "Free CDs" are spammed to everyone
Not that they should stop going after the spammers, they just need to let up on the CDs
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
How do they know it's five spammers and not, say, ten? Nice to see George Moore in the list of known defendants though :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Surely they could also sue for "wire fraud", sue to the ridiculous and blatently untrue claims in most of the spam. Then there's the pyramid schemes, 419 scams etc. I'd think in those cases, it would be more lucrative to lodge complaints about the contents of the spam the scumbags are sending rather than the spam itself. "73 million counts of wire fraud" sound good to me!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
They're just fighting it because it isn't AOL advertising. I had to use AOL to check my e-mail when I was over a friend's house once and holy sheep shit batman. Right when you log on you get assaulted with tons of banner ad spam. AOL just wants an exclusive market for their spam instead of sharing it.
Ok here is the disclaimer right off, I do not advocate spamming, and i think there needs to be a gulag that spammers are thrown into. That much said, from the article, "filing the lawsuits gives AOL additional authority to subpoena service providers and others to try to track down the spammers" I recall much derision when the RIAA sued Verizon for customer info of alleged music traders. Now AOL is suing to get spammer customer information. I think we need to seriously consider the possibility of situational ethics. The track record of scumminess of the RIAA is widely hated, so most don't like anything they do. Likewise spammers, also so widely hated so no one cares what happens to them (even me). When is getting a customer's info right, when is it wrong? I think this is a tough question we, as a community, have to think about and perhaps ultimately face in the future.
Why don't they sue the individuals paying the spammers to send the emails?
Well the most obvious reason would be that a company's rivals could pay a scumbag to send out spam just to ruin their reputation and see them taken to court. I'm sure most of the pr0n/scam companies advertised in the spam have a pretty cavalier attitude toward keeping track of their finances, so it'll be difficult to follow an audit trail to prove guilt.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Great Christmas tree decorations. mmm shiny...
(Yes, I DO use a few CD sandwiches on the tree each year, they compliment the old family silicon wafers... Which are actually a lot nicer than you'd expect. They were rejects from a testing facility that had a tendency to oxidize the wafers in really colorful patterns. My family started using them just after my parents got married and they were both working in IC process development and didn't have anything else to put on the tree.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
What if they chose medium sized spammers and left out the big ones on purpose? As many have pointed out, AOL themselves are spammers... recently MS argued AGAINST (!!) tough penalties for spammers; makes you wonder if AOL would sue MS.
This whole spam thing seems to me a long drawn process of killing the medium sized gorillas and forming an unholy association of the larger ones. To top it all, there's a big spin on spam originating outside the US!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Suing the right 5 spamers might make more of a difference than you think.
.gov and .mil machines. Maybe someone from .gov wants to look at the logs.
I had an NT box cracked and a proxy put on it. (read about the filters in another post) The people who did that were out to spam in a big way. Had my server worked they way they had planned, it could have sent out a billion messages in less than a week. My own email address was in the junk they were attempting to deliver spam to and that consited of 10 messages or so. Considering I'm only getting 50 spams a day, if one spamer can generate 20% of that, I'll be happy with nailing 5 spamers if they are big spamers.
Of course the person who rooted the NT box can get caught, I've alos go logs where they tried to hack other boxes includeing
I agree with the idea that the CDs cost the receiver money. In fact, all junk mail and advertisements do. The end result of anything that gets shipped to my house is wasted money in garbage collection. Certainly one CD doesn't have a significant effect on my garbage. However, when you add up all the groups that send something for which I in no way asked or implied I might want, you have a cost that is incurred by the receiver to get rid of the material that was never requested. I do believe that is the most basic definition of SPAM.
While currently there would be no cause of action, I feel buying from spammers should be "Contributory Spamming" and, just like contributory infrigement, should be punishable, at least on the civil side. It's the people who say "ooh herbal penis strengthening pills! Send me a dozen bottles" who are the real problem, even moreso, in my opinion, than the spammers. They should be held just as liable as those who send out 10,000,000 emails, because their one purchase is what makes it profitable and provides the incentive.
1. Buy from unsolicited email;
2. Become liable for millions of dollars;
3. No more spam.
Notice that there's no step "???" between 2 and 3....
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Recall that I never said that junk mail was good; just that it's different enough that AOL can fight spam and send CDs without being hypocrites.
Another key difference: although you shouldn't have to opt-out of junk mail, you can, and it mostly works. I contact the Direct Marketing Association every few years to tell their members to cut it out, and the only junk mail I get for the most part is crap my family actually requests. I haven't seen an AOL CD in years, to be honest.
Junk mail sucks, and I'd love to see it abolished, but it follows some rules we can work with, if we bother to. Spam is an uncontrolled mess, and needs to be slapped down hard. AOL isn't being hypocritical by doing that.
As much as we love to bash AOL, they *do* have the resources to put something of a dent into spam. If they wanted the goodwill of the community (btw, thanks for mozilla and winamp) they could easily buy it--just start sending out flocks and flocks of lawyers to sue as many spammers as possible under the spam laws of every state that has them. Kinda like doing pro-bono work for the Internet community. Not sure if it'd be enough to stop all the open relays in Europe and Asia, but I imagine that most of the spam I get for mortgages and herbal viagra originate in the US, even if they come via overseeas servers.
If they wanted to, of course. I doubt they will. Oh well. A boy can dream.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
As if that's a bad reason! Or do you need reasons of a higher ethical caliber to go after a burglar who breaks into your house, costing you valuable time and resources?
The whole point about spam is that it's theft of service. AOL is taking some steps towards treating the spammers like the thieving crooks that they are, and that can only be considered a Good Thing[tm] for everyone.
AOL gets a bad rap, and I've been trying to figure out why.
They are the reason Netscape is still around, and just about all the money that went into developing Mozilla came from AOL.
They pay for the development of Winamp, and distribute it free of charge.
They created and maintain the single largest FREE Instant messaging client out there. AIM cost them money.
They have a simplified system that lets people new to computers and the Internet get online with little fuss. They are a decent entry level ISP.
They are one of the few competitors Microsoft has to take seriously.
They sue Spammers, or at least try to.
So why are they so hated?
Customer service sucks, is even predatory.
All those damn coasters they send out.
They're possibly the biggest ISP out there.
Lighten up. Someone out there started hating AOL and it's snowballed since then. If AOL dies Mozilla goes with it, as does AIM, Winamp and Netscape.
Mozilla might survive as a sourceforge project, but most of the developers will be gone. For all intents and purposes, it will be dead.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Indeed - I sold an AOL 1.0 diskette and signup kit for $105 on eBay a couple years ago. The trick is hanging onto the crap long enough for it to become rare.
Congress recently approved a deal that will help keep postal rates from rising until 2006; this involves some fancy accounting which increases the Federal deficit and insures that we underfund the Postal pension plan (read: taxpayer bailout in a few years). So in a sense, you (the taxpayer) are helping to pay for AOL's advertising (and believe you me, the bandwidth cost of 100 spams is much less than the postage on a single CD.)
So I'd say that there is a valid complaint to be made here.
I know it's useless, but I'm gonna do it anyway, just to make myself feel better.
You can easily turn off all the AOL banner ads and most of the other offending material, just go to preferences\marketing and set everything to off.
Also, I'd like to point out that AOL is one of the very few ISP's that offer dialup from almost anywhere, with no extra charges for out of towners. Back when I travelled all over the country this was of great importance to me.
Recently, since the spam blocking feature was implemented in 8.0 I've noticed much less spam going to my open aol account. Sure, I still get a good bit, but I can tell it's dropping, I used to get hundreds of spams/day, now I only get about 25 or so. Also, I have another screenname where I use the built in blocking tools, sure they aren't great, but I NEVER get spam to that email address, if only because it blocks everyone I don't accept.
My AOL account is used by 4 people in 3 different states. AOL has never even questioned this, please tell me of another ISP that wouldn't freak when different users logged in from different states. My parents use it and a couple of my friends use it for email and some web browsing. Oh, and even though they likely don't know it, you can minimize the aol window and use whatever browser you choose. I will also point out here that AOL does not kick you off for inactivity anymore, or even pop up a msg telling you you've been idle (ok, the buddy list msg pops up, but that's it). That hasn't been part of AOL since about version 4.0.
And about all those cd's they send out, there are tons of uses for them. I've always got plenty of coasters, even though I rarely get an AOL cd in the mail anymore. I really like the cases they use now too, toss the cd and I have a new cd case to use with cd's of my choice.
I proudly admit to having an aol account for at least 10 years. The only problem I have ever had with AOL was back when they had the huge surge of users and I kept getting busy signals, but hey, sometimes business is better than you expect. It only took them a few months to get enough lines up in my area and I haven't seen that problem since then.
As to your point about AOL advertising to it's users, well, yeah, duh, they are in the business of making money. I see nothing wrong with this. They offer a channel for their users to buy things, if a particular user doesn't want to use those channels they can turn them off, easily.
Sorry for the rant, but I just don't get why so many people just bash AOL because 'AOL users suck'. Maybe it's the same thing with Wal-Mart, they are hated because they are successful, both started out as small, individually owned companies and have grown into enormous intergalactic corporations.
\sigh\ If I didn't know that this post isn't going to get read I'd feel like I were committing karma suicide by admitting that I actually like AOL.
you're all figments of my deranged imagination