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?"

Comments

They are not just going after the spammers

[Billly Gates]

They going after the people who paid the spammers and not just the spammers themselves.

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.

Hold those who host spammers responsible

[wowbagger]

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.

Some Way?

[aspjunkie]

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..

AOL is suing a Norton spammer

[wowbagger]

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.

Re:May as well be the first to say it

[Alioth]

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.