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"."

Comments

AOL should sue themselves

[wiggys]

So can I sue AOL for spamming me with all those frigging CDs?

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[Andy Tanenbaum]

No joke. At least those damn AOL floppies could be overwritten and put to use. AOL could have the decency to spam with CD-RW discs.

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[inaeldi]

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.

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[island_earth]

So can I sue AOL for spamming me with all those frigging CDs?

That depends. Does AOL make you pay shipping and handling for those CDs? No? Then it's not spam.

Direct marketing (i.e., junk mail, paid by the sender) may be odious, but it's a different issue from spam (essentially free to the sender, burden to pay on the rest of us, including AOL). AOL is not really being hypocritical by fighting one and using the other, no matter how funny it may seem to claim otherwise.

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[DrPepper]

It takes time for me to read through my mail, and time is money - especially if you get paid on results and not on hours spent. Of course it doesn't take me long to sift through mail discarding all the AOL CD's, but there is still a cost. It also costs to have them carted away once they are in the trash.

I'll stick with the more accepted definition of spam - direct mailings which you have not asked to receive. There are plenty of other more acceptable ways to advertise a product. Marketing droids just need to be a bit more innovative about the methods they use.

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[EasyTarget]

And don't forget that your trash disposal is paid for by taxes, and just like spam the individual cost of disposal per item is tiny, but given the overall amount of trash that unsolicited mail generates, this adds up to a significant amount in the long term. The costs of this are spread across the whole community, even those who are lucky enough not to be targeted by advertisers very much still have to pay a share of this disposal 'stealth cost'.

And since the CD's at least probably end up in a land-fill your great-great grandchildren may still be paying a price (of sorts) in a hundred years.

Is it just me who thinks this is all screwed up?

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[liam193]

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.

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[island_earth]

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.

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[drunk_as_in_beer]

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.

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[perljon]

Junk mail sucks, and I'd love to see it abolished

Junk mail subsidizes the post office. Without it, there probably wouldn't be a post office, or stamps would cost a whole lot more than they do. A post office is only cost effective with a certain threshold of volume. If junk mail didn't exists, it would cost more money to send the same non-junk mail.

With electronic spam, the more they send, the more it costs the receiver and the casual users of the system.

The more volume in physical mail, the cheaper it is to send and receive for the casual user.

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[jlower]

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.

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[gbjbaanb]

not funny at all, think from an AOL marketing person's point of view - if they sent out CD-RWs, people wouldn't just bin them, they'd keep them and every tme they reused them, they see the AOL logo. Over and over again, instead of the current system where they see it once - on its way to the bin.

Someone should point this out to AOL's marketing dept. (just don't tell them you can slap a blank label over the top, ok).

And it'd be more environmentally friendly.

I love it when a plan comes together!

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[Mikeytsi]

Did I step in to "Martha Stewart: Living" or something? This IS slashdot, right?

Go AOL!

[1337_h4x0r]

I hate AOL and all their users, but damn, this sounds great! Best of luck, AOL!

Re:Go AOL!

[Cutriss]

I hate AOL and all their users, but damn, this sounds great! Best of luck, AOL!

That's a rather broad brush that you're painting with. Some people here may be using AOL out of necessity. There are a lot of rural and small-town places I know of around here where no ISPs have POPs other than AOL.

Re:Go AOL!

[ryanvm]

I hate AOL and all their users

That's okay - I'm sure they still respect you, 1337 h4x0r.

Re:Go AOL!

[sootman]

Nope, not me. I personally hate each and every one of their 22M subscribers. ;-)

King spammer

[Eric Ass Raymond]

hasn't actually figured out who all the defendants are though

Quickly, mail them the name and the physical location of that one king spammer who recently found himself subscribed on several bulk mailing lists and didn't like it at all.

Maybe their lawyers should ask me

[thogard]

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.

Re:Maybe their lawyers should ask me

[Ironstud]

So why was your box not locked down? Aren't you as liable for allow relay to happen on your SMTP server? I had it happen to me right after I installed a new server on my SDSL line -- so I can feel your pain -- I was configuring it when it happen. They really hit fast the smtp server was up for only 5 minutes when a spammer discovered it.

Re:Maybe their lawyers should ask me

[thogard]

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.

Re:Maybe their lawyers should ask me

[Latent IT]

So... in theory, all I need is an "open" relay, use firewall rules to prevent it from actually sending mail out, and then... I can harvest a list of millions of e-mail addresses that's as good as what the spamming pros use, since it's their list?

Holy crow.

Now, if only I hated humanity enough to actually put this plan into action...

Overseas spammers?

[theLOUDroom]

Wouldn't it be kinda funny if all the John Does turned out to be in foreign countries?

Back to the drawing board huh guys?

Re:Overseas spammers?

[azzy]

Wouldn't it be funny if they all turned out to be AOL customers...

Hate em all you want

[Jesus IS the Devil]

I know we all like to bash Aohell, but at least they're one ISP that seems to be doing something right these days... fighting spam to its death... unlike 99% of all other ISPs.

So where is Sanford Wallace these days?

Re:Hate em all you want

[wiggys]

Exactly. Suing 5 spammers won't wipe out spam overnight but it should send a strong message to the other spamming bastards out there.

Re:Hate em all you want

[AKnightCowboy]

I know we all like to bash Aohell, but at least they're one ISP that seems to be doing something right these days... fighting spam to its death... unlike 99% of all other ISPs.

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.

Re:Hate em all you want

[kleinux]

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.

Maybe, but you can turn all that off with one checkbox in the preferences dialog box. If I could turn off spam with one click I know that I would be happy.

Re:Hate em all you want

[jkrise]

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!

Re:Hate em all you want

[McDutchie]

So where is Sanford Wallace these days?

According to this article, he now runs a non-spam autoresponder service. But there are a good 150 hardcore spammers who took his place.

Re:Hate em all you want

[thogard]

Suing the right 5 spamers might make more of a difference than you think.

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 .gov and .mil machines. Maybe someone from .gov wants to look at the logs.

Re:Hate em all you want

[McDutchie]

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.

Please keep your terminology straight. Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail sent postage due. Annoying as they are, banner ads are not spam any more than commercial breaks on television. Not only are they not e-mail but they are actually paid for by the advertisers and you are soliciting them by logging on to the AOL service that includes these ads, i.e. you have the option not to do so, just as you can turn off your TV.

Comparing spam to banner ads confuses the issue by making spam seem more legitimate than it really is. It cannot be repeated enough: spam is theft of service, parasitic traffic living off of bandwidth and manhours paid for by others. This is the message that needs to be hammered into those that matter in the grand scheme of things, so that the appropriate laws get passed to throw the perpetrators in jail where they belong.

Re:Hate em all you want

[McDutchie]

The only reason they are doing this is because it costs them time, bandwidth, server resources, and most importantly, customers who will go to other service providers who can provide a better defense against spam. All of these things translate into a loss of revenue for them - which is the only reason why they are trying to go after the spammers.

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.

Re:Hate em all you want

[hetairoi]

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.

eh

[machine of god]

On one hand, suing spammers; on the other, forcing providers to disclose customer activity. It's dancing with the devil. (I'm assuming, since I've never actually done it to my knowledge. But I think that's what it would be like.)

This defines irony...

[somethingwicked]

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

Re:This defines irony...

[Ed Avis]

The day you get 100 'free CDs' every day and have to foot the postage charge yourself, you might have a valid complaint.

Re:This defines irony...

[TCaM]

While I have no interest in the many free aol/earthlink/other isp cds I get in the mail, they have never reached the point where my mailbox has been overcome in a single day thus forcing my mail to be bounced. Aol pays postage and production costs for this crap, most spammers pay very little and generally do cause damage and increased costs to their victims.

Re:This defines irony...

[Cutriss]

The day you get 100 'free CDs' every day and have to foot the postage charge yourself, you might have a valid complaint.

And this comment within itself outlines how one can deal with the problem.

Simply put, you're not paying the postage...AOL is doing so pre-emptively. That means that you can mark all of your AOL CDs as "Return to Sender", and cost AOL even more money.

Keep it up. They'll stop. They did for me. :) The last straw for me was when I had a PO Box, and I had to wait in line at the Post Office for 20 minutes for an unexpected pickup notice, only to find the new AOL CD in a DVD case...too big to actually fit in my PO Box...

Re:This defines irony...

[Flabby Boohoo]

"...foot the postage charge yourself"

Not really the point is it? At $20/month for dialup, cost of each piece of spam is rather insignificant. Cost is not the issue, annoyance is.

I get at least 3-4 cd's a week at work. A couple at home. Annoying. Just like spam.

How do they know it's five?

[Shoten]

How do they know it's five spammers and not, say, ten? Nice to see George Moore in the list of known defendants though :)

This did not happen

[Mohammed Al-Sahaf]

This is yet another lie. These companies did not send any spam. Today we slaughtered them in the airport. They are out of Saddam International Airport. The force that was in the airport, this force was destroyed. The American press is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!

Re:This did not happen

[TheGreek]

Nah. He already got one right:

"I speak better English than this villain Bush"

Not just spam.

[FyRE666]

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!

Re:Not just spam.

[alkali]

The animal known as "wire fraud" is a criminal violation of federal law. It's not a thing Joe Citizen can sue for. (Similarly "mail fraud.")

You can sue for garden-variety fraud under state law, but you have to have been actually defrauded (i.e., you actually believed some false statement and were damaged by relying on it). If you know you're being lied to, you haven't been defrauded.

I'm Confused

[Col. Panic]

The enemy of my enemy is my friend? Lesser of two evils? I'm not sure how to feel about this. I think I'll hate them both.

One who isn't a John Doe

[AndroidCat]

AOL hasn't actually figured out who all the defendants are

They do know who at least one is: George Moore aka "Dr. Fatburn". Who is also being dragged into court by Symantec as well.

I wonder if his own actions to try to gag a web site turned him into a lawsuit magnet?

Who should be sued?

[ASPirant]

I find it interesting that they always go for the outlet doing the spamming. Why don't they sue the individuals paying the spammers to send the emails? Instead of trying to kill the spammers, starve them by making companies think twice about using this method.

You'd think that this means of advertising would actually destroy the "goodwill" of the product being advertised. I know I have less respect for companies that use this means.

Re:Who should be sued?

[FyRE666]

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.

Re:Who should be sued?

[Exedore]

Oh, come on, that has to be the weakest argument I've read on /. in quite some time.

For the most part we're talking about companies that sell (among other things) "herbal viagra", penis enlargment, and cures for balding, using claims that are tenuous at best... for the most part, their own businesses are themselves cheap scams. You're expecting us to believe that they're legitimate businessmen being conned by what they assume are legitimate "internet marketing consultants"? Don't be absurd.

Even so, if a business hires a spammer to market their products, the spammer becomes a de facto agent and representative of the company and the company can be held liable for the actions of the spammer. Any business owner who doesn't understand this simple concept deserves what he or she gets.

the always needed simpson's quote

[sweeney37]

AOL the source of, and now solution to, all of our spam problems....

Mike

Double standard of community opinon?

[MrLint]

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.

Re:Double standard of community opinon?

[rearden]

I may be off my mark here as IANAL but there is a big difference. AOL has proven that a) there has been a tangible violation of the law b) they have tracked the violater back to a particular system(s) c) they are suing the violator and not the company the violator is using to send email.

In the RIAA vs. Verizon case RIAA was suing to get the subscriber information without ever proving that there were specific incidences of copyright violation (instead charging that P2P is ONLY used to steal music). In addition they did not sue copyright violators (as a "Jane or John Doe") and then use supoenas to get the personons name. Instead they sued Verizon to get the information directly. Verizon's argument from the begining was that that RIAA was skipping step one- 1) Show evidence of a crime and step two- 2) Seek to take action against said anonymous criminal (this may seem odd, but our legal system allows us to sue an unknown person/ group and fill in their name later). Instead RIAA sued the people who "facilitated" the crime and stated that all of Verizons customer records should be on display to the RIAA Nazi SS forces without proof or ponderance in court.

AOL, as stated, is instead going directly after the offenders and using the power of the courts to get specific information about specific crimes, not all customer information at will and on demand.

Just my $0.02

Re:Double standard of community opinon?

[Erasmus Darwin]

"In the RIAA vs. Verizon case RIAA was suing to get the subscriber information without ever proving that there were specific incidences of copyright violation (instead charging that P2P is ONLY used to steal music)."

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.

Re:Double standard of community opinon?

[nolife]

Not quite:

RIAA wanted Verizon to turn over the the records without getting the courts involved. Verizon does not want to give this information out without a court order. AOL is going directly for the court order. Very different scenario..

What the RIAA really wants is to avoid the courts and use the DMCA for the inital step of information gathering so they can act faster and more efficiently for shutting people down. The disadvantage of this is that they are no checks and balances present without the courts involvment, the ability to request this information on a whim could very easily be abused and nothing in terms of real proof required that a copyright violation is truely occuring. What Verizon does not want is a precedent set where any company that feels a copyright violation has occured can request this information at will. This would be a great strain for Verizon to support this. They want a court order steps followed to limit these requests, kind of like a security deposit to prevent a flood of requests for user information.

The court battle they are in now is mainly to determine if organizations like the RIAA can request this information via the DMCA and without specific court approval. This is a much larger issue then RIAA vs. Verizon.

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-982809.html
http: //www.eff.org/Cases/RIAA_v_Verizon/

Hmm, maybe somebody else should sue spammers..

[xXunderdogXx]

Can't the people who make SPAM (the pseudomeat product) sue spammers for defamation of a brandname?

OH THE HUMANITY

[jvbunte]

I am ashamed to call AOL my 800lbs Gorilla.

At least AOL has lawyers and money and might actually be able to do something here. It DOES cost them money not to mention the negative stigma of knowing if you ever sign up for an AOL account, your email will be prefilled with 1000 spams before you even log on the first time.

Its not that other ISP's don't do anything, they are just more concerned about shielding their customers from it rather than eliminating the source of it. My "Earthlink Spaminator" cuts my incoming spam flow by about half. Sure this doesn't solve the problem of spam, but for Earthlink, it shows the customer that they are at least trying to shield them from it.

Superglue + AOL CDs =

[Andy Dodd]

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.)

Re:Great!!

[falsified]

(I only use my AOL account for dialup for when I'm not home so the email goes unchecked for quite some time).

Suuuuure.

You know what's funny?

[sootman]

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.

Here's their disclaimer....

[StringBlade]

http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm

Why I stopped hating AOL.

[doublem]

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.

Re:Why I stopped hating AOL.

[Todd Knarr]

Because AOL gave millions of people who had no clue about the Internet access to the Internet. This is much akin to taking several million people who have no clue how to drive, giving them shiny new high-performance cars and dumping them on the freeways.

the power of public opinion

[branchstudios]

On one hand, suing spammers; on the other, forcing providers to disclose customer activity. It's dancing with the devil

I wonder what the impact would be, in the cases where AOL cannot track down the spammer without violating individual rights, if they were to simply contact, or if needed, publicly identify the ISP that knowingly hosted the spammer, and then let the flood of complaints begin.
If somebody told me that stack of spam was coming from *ISP-name-here*, and that *ISP-name-here* had been informed, but wasn't doing anything about it, I'd certainly be rerouting all my "male enhancement offers" in their direction..

And of course, if that occurs to them, I wonder what the chances are they'll abuse that idea to make other ISPs look bad...

What AOL could REALLY do

[wowbagger]

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?

You hate aol users?

[SteveXE]

I dont know why you would hate AOL users, i got AOL back in 97, and i still have an account, i also have DSL but not through aol, while i agree for the most part aol sucks it does have it uses in areas other then community. Its also the worlds only free ISP, call and say you wanna quit and you get 2-3 months free, when thats up call again...and again...and again

There's certainly a complaint here

[dachshund]

The day you get 100 'free CDs' every day and have to foot the postage charge yourself, you might have a valid complaint.

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.

Wait....

[Rev Saxon]

So they are sueing people for spam, yet the majority of spam I get is from an AOL account. So does this mean that they are going to sue themselves out of existance. The world can only hope.