Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Im surprised they didnt work MS into the article. It seems like Slashdot could be talking about Cracker Jack, and the fact that they didnt get a good prize is somehow because "Oh, Microsoft is a MONOPOLY"
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
If a company pays a spammer and but can risk being sued then they will think twice before paying them to spam. They will look for more ethical ways to advertise their products. This will kill spam dead more then any laws or regulations because it will hit the spammers at their wallets. If they have no customers then they are out of bussiness.
Even if the spammers get away and forge like hell the FBI or the ISP can just go after the company paying the spammer instead. Nice.
http://saveie6.com/
A court summons is an order to apear in court on a specific date.
When the spammers log in, instead of the classic "You've got mail!", it says "You've got a summons!" This implies that the spammers use AOL in the first place. Either that or it's just a general parody of the AOL "Welcome!", "You've got mail!", etc. guy.
Quite a good parody, if I do say so myself. Too bad that parody isn't protected under copyright law anymore.
in case it hasn't sunk in, and I think that is the case with some people, outside slashdot especially,
The spammers do not have the inalienable right to "send you every piece of garbage they want to", they have the right to voice their opinions or beliefs. In other words anyone out there can feel free to post, publish and advertise all the male enhancement and university diploma ads they would like to on their own website, but they have no right in the least to send those my way to waste my time and resources.
This is clearly analogous to the fax laws that were posted here a while ago that, in short, state you will be financially held responsible for the time and resources consumed from sending unsolicited faxes. Spam is in no way different whatsoever.
Read my journal - the most recent entry as of this writing is about my writing to Linux Journal and raising the point that Rackspace (who has been taking out full page ads in LJ) are very spam friendly.
In my journal, one person responded about her experiences as a Rackspace customer.
One thing we can do is to make it VERY public that places like Rackspace, Verio, UUNET etc. are unwilling to do anything to enforce their own Terms Of Service against spam. Granted, if you follow the various anti-spamming news groups you will know this, but most PHBs don't follow the anti-spamming newsgroups.
But if LJ gets flooded with people calling RackedWaste to task, then it is possible that it might catch the eye of potential SpamSpace customers. Who knows? It might even catch the eye of the marketing group at SpamWaste and they might, just might, start pushing to enforce their TOS.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I was noodling around this spam problem and was thinking that maybe somebody who isn't me might write a little program, something that looks like SETI, but isn't...this little sucker allows you to participate in a voluntary DDOS attack on a spammer(s). Said program might verify that the "to be attacked" address was in a known spam database, or something like that. Problems:
:)
1. How do we know the target of the attack is genuinely a dick?
2. How do we know we have the _right_ target addresses?
3. Who initiates the attack? Who terminates it?
I think those are solvable problems. This doesn't have to be a single mechanism, either.
We are many. They are few. No spammer/complicitor could withstand a deliberate DDOS that didn't end, and was voluntary.
A DDOS arms race out there on the internet is something that will happen sooner or later.
Is this illegal? Hey, we are just sending them a few bytes of information. They can just hit the delete key if they don't want it.
Please beat up this idea. I'm sure it's been posted before.
Would there be some good way to have people identify dupes? Maybe a link on every article [Report Dupe], and then maybe based on some sort of calculation of their karma + quality of their past moderation + the number of those who click on 'Report Dupe', that the story gets a 'Dupe Rating' and can then be filtered automatically for those who have 'ignore dupes past this threshold' selected in what stories they see?
How difficult might that be to implement?
Any discussion on something like that?
I dunno, just a thought..
I'm charged for trash pick-up which is where it goes.
Visit www.seriouslythough.com
One of the defendants would appear to be one of the myriad pirated Norton/Symantec spammers (George Moore, Maryland Internet Marketing of Maryland, and 14 of their advertising affiliates. Spam Content: software products (www.getnortonhere.net))
Question: could/would Symantec join in this suit, or better still bring copyright violation and (ahem)piracy charges against this fool?
I have long held the belief that Symantec does not more aggressively crack down on all the Norton spammers because once somebody has purchased an unauthorized copy of Norton, they will have to pay Symantec for updates. Thus, Symantec makes money on the subscription fees and doesn't have to mess around with actually making a disk, printing a manual, etc.
www.eFax.com are spammers
A recent Slashdot article, "Super-DMCA" Outlaws Ph.D. Thesis, references a change to Michigan law which outlaws any effort to "... Conceal the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service." Since (a) SMTP is a telecommunications service and (b) a large proportion of Spam/UCE headers are forged in an effort to hide their source, (c) let's route all the world's SMTP mail through servers located in Michigan.
Instead, the next generation (or their children) will get to deal with the huge piles of plastic waste AOL is generating. At least electronic spam ultimately falls into the bit bucket.
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.
Nor are you charged by the byte of spam delivered to your email account. On the other hand, there is a cost for landfill - both dollars and environmental. Somebody is paying those costs. Part of it is reflected in my trash collection fee - for that pound of my junk mail and my neighbors. Day after day after day. And those trash bags aren't free either.
But my main concern with junk mail is the same as it is with spam. It wastes my time.
I run a company that has about 100,000 users and sends out (generally monthly) emails to large groups of those users. Unfortunately, many of these members must forget that they opted into our service when they signed up, or decide they don't want to receive mail... but instead on clicking on the unsubscribe link, they flag it as "SPAM" in their spam filter (or as bulk mail in yahoo, etc). So our ISP ends up getting these automatically generated and sent reports that say we are sending out spam to all these addresses.
Now we are on the defensive to show that users must opt-in to receive mail from us AND they have a valid unsubscribe link/reply to get off the list... Luckily we have a good relationship with our ISP, however, it still doesn't stop the fact that we continue to get reported as 'spamming' these people (1 or 2 with each email to 10's of thousands of users) automatically by these systems because the end user flags the mail as spam or is too lazy to click on the unsubscribe link.
The bad thing is, that many of these reports we get will not divulge the end user email address, only the domain. So we have no way of know who the person is and thus no way of removing the user from our lists based on the spam reports...
We're at a loss of what to do... 99.9% of our users enjoy receiving our mail or choose to unsubscribe upon receipt. This small portion that opts-in turns around and says were spamming, which creates big headaches on our side...
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?
Has anyone realy seriously claimed that SPAM was a freedom of speech issue ?
That's rediculeus...
With Spam, nobody gives his concent except the Spammer.. Claiming that Spam is a "Freedom of speech" issue is like claiming that Rape is a "Freedom of Sex" issue ..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Just how effective is spamming from the point of view of the spammer? If I advertise a silly product to 10 million email addresses, how likely am I to get an order?
I live on a relatively small island (30 miles long and 15 miles wide). Trash is a problem, because we have nowhere to really put it, and it's expensive to export it.
We will shortly be paying the equivalent of US $160/tonne of trash we throw out. A couple of lbs of junk mail a week _is_ costing us directly as our local town council is thinking of weighing our bins when they collect the trash. Maybe all the physical junk mail I get costs only 16 cents per week to get rid of, but that's more than my current spam-load of 60-odd spams a day costs to get rid of.
I wish all junk mailers would move to email. I can delete them much more cheaply and easily with automatic filters than physical junk mail. AOL CDs cause a much bigger environmental problem than spam.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Can someone familiar with legal matters explain the strategy of filing three of the five suits against unknown people at unknown locations? Is it a matter of discovery?
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
Worse than chopping down trees? Not to mention the side-effects of the CD production and disposal process. Your priorities worry me
There are more trees in the US now than there was 200 years ago. Trees are renewable. There is no shortage of tree. I said one problem was worse than the other, not that one was not a problem.
Do you now realize how incredibly stupid you are by saying this? Take your FUD elsewhere, I have enough education not to buy your bullshit.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!