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AOL Sues Spammers
mabu writes "Prompted by what they're reporting as over eight million complaints and the result of over a billion inbound junk e-mails, according to this press release, America Online is now stepping up its battle against spam by initiating five lawsuits against over a dozen companies and individuals. Let's hope this is the beginning of a more aggressive effort on the part of ISPs to prove to their users that they are seriously interested in addressing this issue, and at its source. I've maintained that this has never been a freedom of speech issue. It's more an issue of mail relay hijacking, forging header information, and exploiting third-party networks and resources. Perhaps if more ISPs took action, we might see the backbone providers doing so as well?"
So they sue spammers (that's good) but spam my postal mail box with CD's and they think it's ok? I'm a little bit confused.
Visit www.seriouslythough.com
Mabey the editors could use some AOL...
"You've got dupes!!"
The people who run /. are STUPID IDIOTS who are rolling in what's left of their dirty dot-com dollars and don't give a shit.
Best Buy can have you arrested
This has been discussed before. You aren't charged for the cost of AOL cd delivery, so it's not the same as spam.
--matt
Online spam can't be opted out of, nor is there a cost to the spammer for sending it.
/.ers hate spam, but when AOL fights spam (by blocking netblocks and sueing spammers), most /.ers who are moderated up are against it.
I think the greater weirdness is how
So which is it? Do we support the largest ISP's action against spam, or do we suck up the spam?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
AOL is actually doing something that may result in the 'net becoming a better place? Talk about Shock and Awe! Alas, I seriously doubt it's out of the kindness of their corporate heart...more likely, it's because they're desperate to do something to improve the appearance of their customer service and corporate image.
My guess is that with 20 something million customers complaining and over a billion spam emails at your gate every day, composing 1/3 of the total email traffic, their reason is good business. Spam is raising their mail related IT expenses to be 1/3 more than they should be. It is costing them millions. If I owned AOL stock, I would want them to do this, to decrease costs, improve customer relations and lend more credibility to their own OPT in programs, thus make my stock worth more money. IMHO, AOL is conducting good business practices with this, and we are likely to see more of it.
Then again, I never thought AOL was evil. Lame, maybe. Laughable, sometimes. Self distructive, often. But not evil, naw. Big companies screw themselves without any help from us. But AOL is right on the money this time.
Its kinda like worrying about a cat being stuck in a tree. I mean, how many cat skeletons do you see stuck in trees?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
8 million complaints, huh? Well now...I have a problem with that number. As many of you may know, AOL counts ANY type of signup to their service as an official member. (This is how they have 10 billion members...or whatever it is.) They even keep cancelled accounts! ...so...based on that logic...
;-)
8 Million Complaints (as reported by AOL)
- 1 Million Complaints being submitted twice (because AOLers barely know what they are doing)
- 1 Million E-mails sent 'cause 13 year old males like to see if they can ruin some poor bastard's life who has to sift through this mail
- 2 million E-mails that were sent 10 years ago, but AOL didn't bother to read them then because they didn't care about spam (but they have decided to count them now)
- 3.7 million e-mails that were sent to AOL's complaint account by spammers trying to spam said account
= 300,000 valid complaint e-mails
Yes, that sounds better.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
But you'd pay the same for trash pick up regardless of whether or not you got the AOL CD in the mail.
You might could argue that if AOL didn't send the CDs to everyone, that then garbage costs might go down a penny or something, but I think that's incredibly farfetched.
I'm charged for trash pick-up which is where it goes.
I can't believe this was modded up to 5. Give me a break, people. You aren't paying extra for trash pickup to deal with the pound or two of junkmail that you get each week.
On the other hand, AOL is receiving a billion spams per day. They have had to install filtering software to get it down to that level. On top of that, they can honestly come up with a dollar figure of what spam costs them in terms of extra mail servers to handle the load. Think about it: if half their traffic is spam, then the cost of half their mail servers plus the cost of the spam filtering is a real number for them, likely many millions per year.
The worst part is that while AOL has to pay, the spammers don't. AOL CD's, on the other hand, cost money to create and money to mail. There is no comparison between that and spam.
You might think AOL sucks, but I applaud their efforts to fight spam.
And one other thing: fighting spam has nothing to do with "free speech" for two reasons. First, the first amendment of the constitution does not enumerate your rights; it instead is a list of restrictions on the government, specifically Congress although case law has made it clear that those restrictions apply to all branches of government at all levels. AOL isn't the government, nor is any other ISP. Free speech arguments, therefore, cannot apply to AOL.
Second, it's a property rights issue. While I may have "freedom of speech", I don't have the right to spray paint my message of freedom on the side of your house. You can sue someone who does that; it has nothing to do with free speech. Spam is similar to that message. Although each spam is a very small dot of paint, they add up when you're getting, oh, say 1 billion each day.
Michael
Do you have ESP?
Okay, so Slashdot seems to get duplicate stories very often... some of their stuff may not always be newsworthy to everyone and so on... but doesn't it get old to repeatedly criticize them for it?
Personally, I'm tired of seeing jokes about how fast servers went down after a slashdotting, and how often dupes are posted, and I don't see why people keep modding them up. They're getting almost as old as the stupid Yakov Smirnov jokes.
Mod me down if you will, but please stop modding these up.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
Well, there is also the problem that a lot of us receive email from companies that CLAIM exactly what you are claiming - that we somehow signed on for their crap when we did not ever do that at all. So if you want to see a real difference in legitimate business email - then by God, poilce your own. I don't know of one of those "Unsubscribe" email links I would ever hit, because then the spam meisters would simply tag that as a legitimate e-mail address. SO you see, it's your own industry's damn fault for causing us all the unnecessary bandwidth hogging, lost productivity and other garbafge we don't want. I am so friggin' tired of the SPAM promoters eating up bandwidth and ISP's saying - "it ain't my fault" - that I would rather see a few SPAMMERS be strung up than have to deal with it everyday. Maybe then they might stop sending me the stupid pr0n, drugs, and mortgage emails. I don't need their stinking cable descramblers or stupid SystemWorks either and I sure as hell don't need no damn DRM enabled e-books either. SPAMMERS deserve to be sent up into space in the first "sun refueling rockets". It is their moral duty to burn. Sorry, I just don't see any legitimate way you can expect anyone to want to hit an unsubscribe link - people know that those lists are then sold to SPAMMERS. Get a new business maybe?
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
Sure you are. Junk mail is not just close to 100% of my total mail, it's a significant part of my total trash from all sources. Garbage trucks have a finite size, so as the amount of trash each household throws out increases, the only choice is to shrink existing routes and add new ones to compensate.
When that happens, do you suppose the company:
- a) allows their bottom line to decrease, or
- b) raises your rates
?Huh? It certainly doesn't cost less to send a billion messages than it does to receive a billion messages. I'm sure it costs more.
If AOL has something to defend against, it's people who sign up, start getting 100 spams for every actual message immediately, and cancel. I happen to believe this is the single largest problem facing Internet penetration in comsumer markets today.
--- anti-spam and anti-BS.My goodness, I hate to say it but you've got a rather slippery slope going here.
...and by the time enough evidence has been gathered for a provider to order one of their downstreamers "Stop that twit or ELSE", the spammer has usually gotten a contract with another facility. ...plus, in case you haven't noticed, a whole fsckton of spam is now coming through overseas servers for companies operating domestically. When was the last time you tried to get a spammer run out of anything operating in China or Korea? Peering points between nations aren't so easily severed, nor would it be useful to do something so coarsely grained.
...has already occurred. The FBI has been monitoring NNTP, SMTP, IRC, and HTTP activity at major peering points across the nation for over a year now.
...the political "unacceptability" has been the case for quite some time. The only reason the terrorism boojum hasn't caused it to be made explicitly illegal is that there are definite free speech issues preventing such from happening. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard the "kidnappers use crypto" argument, I don't think I'd need a job.
Most backbone providers DO currently take action against spammers, although some more than others. Typically this does not involve anything so delicate as filtering for spam traffic, but outright cutting the wankers off the network which is far more likely to be effective. I've actually been party to one incident where a phone call to a backbone provider at an opportune moment made a spammer, his ISP, and their ISP disappear off the face of the net with the perfectly reasonable assumption that a complete lack of packets makes news about neglected portions of an AUP travel fastest. The major problem with whacking spammers is the same with killing cockroaches with a shoe. Smash 10 and there's 100 more hiding under the cupboards waiting for the lights to go out.
The approach AOL is taking is actually rather likely to be effective. Most of these spammers are sketchy little fly-by-nights and LLCs that even suing into oblivion wouldn't stop. The day after filing bankruptcy for their previous name, they'll just reincorporate in a different office with a different name for a cost less than the money they'd make for one spamming job. The majority of the small businesses paying for advertising on the other hand need a little more fiscal momentum than a 3U rack rental to survive. Make it clear to them that there's a good chance some mega-corp is liable to sue them crosseyed if they make use of a spammer for advertising, and suddenly they'll get a lot more choosy about who they do business with.
However, in case you haven't noticed...
"(b) The legislature, judicary, and executive branches of government coupled with industry and useful idiot consumers will require that traffic also be screened for other "bad data" - terrorist materials, copyrighted works, anti-American speech, evidence of criminal activity, financial data, medical data, and much more, and..."
and:
"(c) the banning of encryption as we know it, since the conscentious masses will turn to it for day-to-day traffic, which will be politically unacceptable to those in power."
However, give it another ten years by which time failing to reduce the spam problem through civil measures will be likely to have actually encouraged people to call for government intervention, and then you'll see non-escrowed strong cryptography start to become explicitly illegal for domestic use--in the interests of preventing terrorism, of course.
AC> Nor are you charged by the byte of spam delivered to your email account.
How do you know? A lot of people are charged either for bandwidth, bytes transferred, telco connect time, ISP connect time, or some combination of those. It depends on where you live and/or what kind of service you have. Where I live, I pay per minute for both the ISP and telco connection. Any spam I get costs me money from my pocket. Want another example? How about a company with a co-lo or virtually hosted server in a data center? They may well be paying for both bandwidth and transfer volume. The more megabytes of spam they get per month, the higher their IT costs are.
Spam also costs money to the people whose relays are hijacked to send it. Some might argue that they deserve it, although I wouldn't agree. Their incompetence does not give anyone the right to violate their systems. Even if you think they deserve it, however, *I* don't deserve the end result - spam.
My mail is forwarded through a very aggressively anti-spam ISP where I used to live, so I don't see nearly as much as my wife does (her local ISP does nothing at all about spam), but one spam is one too many.
Suing spammers will help, but to really get to them, spamming will have to become a crime. Use a relay, go to jail.
Worse than chopping down trees? Not to mention the side-effects of the CD production and disposal process. Your priorities worry me...
Most people who want the backbone providers to "do something" about spam don't want the backbone providers to filter.
They want the backbone providers to pull the plug on the mainsleaze spammers directly connected to them.
They want the backbone providers to insist that the Tier-(N+1:N>=1) providers to enforce their TOS. Failing that, they want the backbone providers to pull the plug on those who support spamming.
www.eFax.com are spammers