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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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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